My First Million - SPECIAL: The Tools in the Solo Creator Toolbox

Episode Date: August 31, 2021

This special episode is a crosspost from the Indie Hackers Podcast with Courtland Allen. Sam and Shaan were interviewed by Courtland a few months ago and they gave a behind-the-scenes look at how they think about building out different income streams as a solo creator. --------- * Follow Indie Hackers: https://www.indiehackers.com/podcasts * Want to be featured in a future episode? Drop your question/comment/criticism/love here: https://www.mfmpod.com/p/hotline/ * Support the pod by spreading the word, become a referrer here: https://refer.fm/million * Have you joined our private Facebook group yet? Go to https://www.facebook.com/groups/ourfirstmillion and join thousands of other entrepreneurs and founders scheming up ideas. --------- Show notes: * (1:05) On Courtland selling to Stripe * (4:30) What makes My First Million special * (12:05) How a founder can succeed after being acquired * (17:49) Shaan's path to solopreneur * (26:19) How you make money with a rolling fund * (32:52) Ideas around astrology and horoscopes * (41:14) The tools in the solo creator toolbox * (43:14) Who is having the most fun doing what they do * (53:35) What are Sam & Shaan's end game? * (1:01:41) How to have it all

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are actually significantly likelier to make you wealthy and perhaps be more fun along the way. I feel like I can rule the world. I know I could be what I want to. I put my all in it like no days off on. Let's travel never looking back. What's happening podcast listeners? This is Sam Parr. I'm currently walking around Soho in New York.

It's Friday after work. And I'm doing something I never do. I'm listening to a podcast that I was on. You see, a couple weeks ago, Sean and I appeared on the Indie Hacker's podcast with Cortland. And it was awesome. It was really good. And I'm listening to this right now. And I was like, I think our audience are you people, MFM.

I think you guys would love this. And so I'm sitting here. on my phone walking from Soho up on the water up to my apartment. And I said, you know what the hell we're going to air this. So I'm doing it right now. We're launching it. I hope you enjoy it. Let us know what you think about this.

My Twitter handles the Sampar. Sean is Sean VP. And on your Spotify, there's this new feature. They got this little bell. Click that bell for me. That way you'll get notified when new features and new episodes come out and let me know if it works. We'll talk to you soon. Have a good day.

I'm going to enjoy the rest of my walk. Listen how loud that is. Can you hear that? This freaking city, it's so loud. Oh my gosh. Well, enjoy the podcast. See you. What's up, everybody?

This is Cortland from NDHackers.com, and you're listening to the NDHackers podcast. More people than ever are building cool stuff online and making a lot of money in the process. And on this show, I sit down with these indie hackers to discuss the ideas, the opportunities, and the strategies they're taking advantage of so the rest of us can do the same.

All right, I'm here with Sean Puri and Sam Parr to my favorite podcast host. You guys host, The Excellent Show, My First Million. Welcome to the Andy Hackers podcast. All right, let me ask you a question. What was the valuation of Stripe when you sold to them? I think it was like $9 billion in like April 2017. Three part question that results at Sam knowing your current bank balance. That was part one.

Okay, I'm not going to answer the third question. I know what the third question is. I'm not going to answer. What's the valuation now? $9.90? It's $95 billion now, I think. Damn, dude. And by the way, it wasn't even risky back then.

Did it feel risky when you... No, no, no, no. It didn't feel risky at all at the time because Stripe was obviously a good company already. But also, that wasn't even on my mind. I wasn't thinking, like, what's the valuation of Stripe? I was more just thinking, like, hey, I'm running this really tiny, scrappy website.

Like, how do I make enough money to pay my rent? And so I was just trying to get sponsors. And I had this giant list of, like, the perfect sponsors for Andy Hackers. And Stripe was number one on that list. Like, after I built up enough sales skills, I was going to reach out to them. But before I got to that point, Patrick, the CEO emailed me and was like, hey, can we buy indie hackers? So I was like, yeah, of course.

It's much better than getting a sponsor. Sean, Cortland, do you know Cortland has a brother? Yeah, I found this out the other day that you have a twin brother. Yeah, but they don't look identical. But yeah, they look similar. But he came to Austin like a month ago or three weeks ago. And he came over on like a Tuesday or a Wednesday and we had a good time. And then he ended up coming over on Friday and we ate dinner.

and he was like, you guys want to go out? And I'm like, no, I don't really go out. But Sarah, my wife was like, yeah, I'll go out with you. And they went out until like three or four a.m. like partying. I can't even get my brother to go out with me. I'm like, hey, dude, come visit me in Seattle. And he's like, now I got better things to do. Like, I just saw him last week for the very first time since the pandemic started.

Oh, my gosh. But yeah, he's like my right-hand man at Andy Hackers. Kind of in the same way that you two work together on your show, my first million. Why don't you tell listeners what your show is about? in case they haven't heard it yet. It's basically two dudes who started startups and have been doing it for like 10 years, just getting together and shooting the shit about what other startups either are cool that we've seen or we think would be cool if somebody started.

And so it's basically a brainstorm. And what happens is if you listen to it, you know, most people who listen to it, they get entertainment because it's kind of fun and it's off the cuff and it's, you know, me and Sam go back and forth a little bit. But the big thing is it gets the wheels turning. Like once you start listening to this, you'll just start seeing business ideas and opportunities all over the place, almost to an extent that's kind of annoying. It's a switch you can't turn off. And that's how we're wired.

That's how we are. And so we are kind of infecting other people with the same disease. And a lot of people think that like we're just showing up. And in some like in some regards it's true and that we can totally go off the cuff. But we also research way more than people probably think. So throughout the week we'll see stuff. And like I don't actually know how Sean does it. I think, well, he probably does the same thing.

But I'll like get on the phone with someone and I'll say, tell me everything. And I'm like taking notes. And I'm like, thanks. So I mean, it's almost like, it's very like traditional journalism. And I'm like, by the way, everything you say I'm going to talk about. So don't talk to me about anything you don't want everyone to know. And it's pretty cool. Well, I think the difference is a lot of people will be like, oh, that makes sense.

You have the show. So you do research for the show. The reality is that I think for the last 10 years, this is all we did in general. We're just like curious cats who like can't stop. So in the same way, Sam's like, what was Stripes valuation when you got acquired? Okay, cool. Then Sam will be like, you know, what is the typical aqua hire worth?

And then he'll like, you know, you'll do all this research just for your own, you know, shits and giggles. And then that just gets stored in your memory bank somewhere. So what happened was we just do that naturally as like a part of our daily work. You know, like we're lucky that our work, our job kind of lets us just go down these rabbit holes. You see a business like, today I was going for a run. And this, uh, this truck was driving.

And it had like a piece of heavy machinery behind it called, and it was, they said Van Meir. And our good buddy's last name is Van Meir. And so I was like, I was like, well, I'm just on this run where I'm supposed to be focused on running. And instead I'm like, I literally like pause for a second. I Google Van Mear. I'm like, is this like his great grandfather? What is this brand?

I bet you do these tractor companies crush it. How much does this Van Mear company make? And like what's their business model? And like how long have they been around? Are there any new companies doing this? And so that's like a addiction that I have basically. That's my process. My process is constantly go around the world, observing things, and then go down the rabbit

hole to figure out what's the backstory behind all that? So I did that the other day. Have you ever seen these semi trucks? And on the back, they have what looks like a tail. It's like a two foot. How do I describe it? Imagine the back of a truck. And it has these like wings, but they kind of curve in.

So it's like the end of a cube. I'm not explaining it well, but the end of a cube, but it's got these wings that point in. So I saw one on these trucks the other day. And I was like, what the hell is this? and I looked this service up. It's like a spoiler for a truck. It's like a spoiler for a truck, but it doesn't look like a traditional spoiler,

but yeah, that's exactly what it is. And I looked it up and I'm like, what the hell is this thing? And there was a company based out of Redwood City making these, and I just saw them on the road. I'm like, what the hell? And they promised that it's going to make you like 0.5% more efficient. And it's only like $500 or whatever it is.

And so I did the exact same thing. I saw this on this truck. I'm like, I got to know what this is. And the company sold for $200 million, like not that long. ATD Dynamics, I believe is what it was called. And so anyway, this is like, yeah, we do the exact same shit. Well, it's addictive to listen to you because even on my show, I'll do like a brainstorming episode every now and then. And if I just call an episode Business Ideas for 2021, it gets like

twice as many downloads as every other episode because people were like, hell yeah, I want some free business ideas. But then I worry that people who are like addicted to these types of shows aren't actually building stuff or doing anything because you just want to hear more and more ideas rather than actually like start working on something. I call that getting addicted to the medicine where you take the medicine, it's supposed to cure the problem, and you're supposed to be able to move on with your life. And some people just love drinking robatess them every day at some point, right? You don't want to get stuck in that pattern where you just want to keep getting more and

more advice, more and more ideas. It's like, well, yeah, if it's for entertainment, which I think is what most people do, they use it for entertainment, not, they want to have friends in their life that want to geek out about business the way they do. And we are like their friends who like to nerd out about business even more than they do. And I also think that like we do have a lot of like legit ballers who are listeners. I mean, if you said you're a listener, so there's not that many people that ever take action on anything. But I do think we've got a really good ratio of that. I think in the future, I think actually

we should consider almost I'm incredibly fascinated with the idea of going daily. We haven't discussed it yet. But it's like something I think about and like because I find myself listening to like Brennan Shob and all these other podcasts. And I love them because they talk about current events and they give their opinion on it. And I think there's a world where we could kind of do that. And the reason I'm saying that is we kind of already do. So like when something happens, like the other day when Bitcoin like dropped, Sean did a thing right away on a Sunday morning. And it was a huge hit. And so like we definitely we don't do like a traditional maybe podcast like a lot of people in our industry do where they're doing like interviews or something that's a little bit more evergreen. And we do evergreen stuff.

But we definitely can react really quickly to things with our angle. And that's kind of intriguing. Yeah, I think evergreen content's overrated. I mean, it's kind of a cliche that that's the type of content you should be putting your time into. But if you're trying to do something that's entertaining and you want people to come back every single day, like nobody's really creative enough to make evergreen content every single day. But if you're just giving your opinions on the news, like shit happens and people want to know about it and they like your personality, then you can just get on the air and just be authentic or just write authentically with your voice. And you can rack up like millions of listeners or subscribers. In fact, this is how most of the

big media companies online operate. Sam, your newsletter The Hustle has a couple million subscribers just giving your opinions and takes on the news. It started. I don't know if you know how it started, but it started off when he was, at the beginning, it was more like evergreen hits, long form, super interesting blogs, like kind of like going for home runs. Like we're going to talk about a topic. Nobody's talking about in a way that nobody's talking about it. It's going to be amazingly manufactured. And then we're going to distribute that and try to get that one blog post to like millions of visits. And it was working, but it was also like, dude, is this thing?

treadmill I want to be on? Or what if we just went lightweight, daily, react to the news, summarize and react to the news, give people what they need to know in five minutes and not try to be a kind of like genius original content creator every week. As my summary, at least, Sam, I don't know if that's accurate. It's very accurate. It was hard. I mean, I could do it probably, but it's a hard-ass life. And it's really hard to hire for. There's a reason why Casey Nicestat did what he did for a year and then quit. He was like, oh my God, this is exhausting. It's challenging. Yeah, it's just too hard. Like, if you're, if you're, if you're, if you're, your goal is to produce content and your strategy is that you're going to come up with new interesting

ideas for every video or every podcast and like that idea is dead on arrival I think you got to index on some other source of novelty whether it's the news or on this show like I don't ever come up with new business ideas you know I just have people on who have their own business ideas and like that is an endless process like I'm never going to run out of people to interview who have cool and interesting new business ideas and so that's just a much better way to go about it and I think you guys on your show, my first million, you have, I don't know, you're kind of the same thing. You're talking about other business ideas that others have come up with. And you also just got bought by a HubSpot. So I'd assume at least you, Sam, probably have some sort of financial

incentive to keep working on the show and making it. No, I mean, so we. The podcast is his job. Yeah, the podcast is my job. So when we, like, we were going to sell, like, they started reaching out to us. And during that time, I had basically already made an offer to someone to be the CEO. so I could do podcast stuff. And they wanted to buy us and I go, okay, well, I'm going to have to rescind my offer to this guy because I was promising him that he's going to run it independently and that's no longer going to be true. So I did that with him.

And I go, but then you also have to promote someone from within or hire someone to be like the boss because I'm not going to be the boss. I would love to be here and continue doing and do content because I love it. But I'm not going to be the CEO. So I, and also there's no, we don't have an earn out. Like there's no, there's like milestones that. that we want to hit, but like I don't have like money on the line in order to hit that milestone. And so it's a little bit different. Like when you're saying like I'm in the trenches, I am, but like if I, I would do it anyway.

I would say, I would say it's more like, there's a period when you get acquired where you're like, all right, give me the Kool-Aid. Like, I'll drink it. You know, like I think for a lot of people. I was this way at least. I'll just speak for myself. There's a period where you're like, ah, they give me the swag. And then I show, well, at least when you're in person, it's, it's, it's. It's a lot easier than when you're a remote.

But it's very easy to just get swept up. It's like, oh, I'm going to add you to this meeting. And, oh, we'd love to pick your brain about X. You know, you start getting pulled into all these strategy things because you're the smart, like, high energy strategy guy who's not like scarred and jaded by all past failures. And so, you know, you start getting pulled into all these things. And you're able to contribute. You meet all these people.

And you're at the cafeteria and you're like, God, my life is no stress now because I sold my startup. Like there's a period where you're like all about it. And then what I've seen, I'll just speak for myself. There's a transition period. where you're like, okay, like working super hard here really doesn't really get me any more or less than if I just do what I enjoy and I work a certain amount of freedom and lack of oversight. I think, Corlin, you're talking about this a little bit earlier. I did this at Twitch, which is the first year, I tried to kill it. I did everything I could.

I wasn't like working 100 hours a week, but the hours I was working, I was like, I'm going to do the most high impact thing I could do for this company at all times. and I'm going to be me on blast. And I was doing it. And then like a year in, I was like, well, I'm leading this team. And at a big company, it's really like you're doing all the jobs of a startup CEO without the upside. It's like hire and fire people, set the strategy, dictate the roadmap, manage a whole, like 30 people or whatever. Pitch for funding basically. And your funding is just headcount and resources.

And so it's like all the jobs of a CEO without the like actual freedom and actual upside of a startup. And so I went to the CEO. And I was like, hey, like, you know, I just hit my one year. I'm thinking about what's next. You know, it's smart to either like sign up now for another full year or like bounce if I want to bounce. And so I said, you know, I have a lot of fun here. But like, if I'm going to do all this work for a startup, I should just go start my own startup. I should own all my upside. You understand.

He's a founder. So he understood. And he said, but, you know, there could be a model here that works. Like, here's what I would like. And so I like sort of laid out a role that I thought would be fun. for me. And it was basically like, you know, something I'm interested in with no direct reports, with no like kind of like, it's not like a mission critical project like the one I was doing before. So it's like more of a creativity, fun, freedom type project. And I was like, you know,

I'm going to work this hard. And I still think I'll make an impact, but I'm going to work like roughly this hard. And I got all these other things I do. The podcast is growing. So like if y'all are cool with all that, then I'd love to stay on. And they gave it to me. And I guess like I've seen that. That's a pretty typical path of a founder. You go from like, I want to crush it, justify it, learn everything from this, learn everything I can from this company and like prove myself. Then you're like, okay, don't need to like prove myself so much anymore. Prove myself. Learned a bunch of stuff. It's kind of repetitive now. Let me transition to either out the door or chill mode, you know, where you're cruising, just the part you enjoy with none of

the stuff you don't enjoy. And then and then it's like gets the, gets the itch to go do the thing again. That's the pattern I see. And they know that. The buyers know that. And they know that. Yeah. at first I was so afraid to be like, hey, but I love, I really love these people. And I connected with them. So I was like, hey, I'm going to level with you. And I was waiting for them to flinch. And they're like, dude, we've seen this rodeo like a hundred times. Like, we get it.

I know who you are. I knew that when I got you. Like, you know, when we bought the company and like, look, I want you to be here forever. But if like literally Emmett, the CEO messes me one day, he just goes, look, I know you're going to want to go start a company someday. I wish we could keep you forever. I know that's not going to be the case. When you do your next thing, I'll be your first check in.

And so that. was like a totally different mindset than this like what I thought would be no like what you're saying is bad and evil and how dare you but there's like you know the people pleaser in me was still like a little bit hesitant exactly just be fully honest but when I did I was like oh great this is no problem they understand they're yeah and this and it's a big show like I think I'm the star and they're like dude there's thousands of people at this company and next year they'll be a new you we've we've seen this turnover five times and there's also this middle ground which is like who cares what the paperwork says?

There's a handshake agreement that says, you got your ethically say, I'm going to provide value to you. You're going to provide value to me. Me personally, I'm still more important. I'm more important to myself than that company is. So I'm not going to die to help you.

But like we have a handcheck agreement. I'm going to give you value. I'm also going to extract value. And hopefully it's a 51, 49. Like, when you get more value, but that's what we're going to do. Well,

there's this path that I see a lot of people taking right now that Sean, you kind of seem to be on. And it's kind of like this individual, successful, investor, rich tech guy path. And it seemingly goes like this. You build an audience for yourself. You've got a podcast or you're on clubhouse or you're on Twitter all the time. You just sort of put out your wisdom and your knowledge into the universe and the people who like you glom onto you and the people who don't, don't follow you. And you keep doing that day after day, week after week. Like you treat that like a full-time job and you build an audience and you start to get to know a lot of people. And through that,

you start getting access to investment opportunities. So overall, you're converting social capital into financial capital. The social capital is all the trusts that you're building with your audience day after day. It's kind of showing up and prove into people that you actually are who you say you are and you know what you're talking about. And then people come to you with deals and you can invest much earlier than the average person gets a look. So for example, someone who's doing this really well is Sahel from Gum Road. He started Gum Road. Gumroad's huge. And that doesn't necessarily mean he's super liquid, right? Like the company stores a lot, but he hasn't sold it. exited, so where is he going to make money? Well, it turns out people really like Sahil.

They like what he has to say. And so he's constantly going on every podcast. He's tweeting like it's his job. He was early to Clubhouse. He's got a huge following on Clubhouse. And then he also set up a rolling fund. And I don't know how often, maybe once every week, once every few days. Somebody just puts like $20,000 and do his rolling fund for him to invest. And now I think he has like $13 million that he's investing on behalf of other people. And he gets to keep a percentage of the profits and also a percentage of the money in total. And that's pretty lucrative if you have a big audience. So, Sean, it kind of seems to me like you're going down the same path.

Yeah, well, I think it's, I actually think it's fairly paved this path. But I think that it's like a path that's been paved. But then all of a sudden they built all these new roadside things. It's like, oh, that restaurant wasn't here before. Oh, there's a gas station. Wow, now we can go way further, right? That's what I see. So I grew up and, like, I, there's a couple major influences on me.

when I was kind of like making a shift into business. And the first was Tim Ferriss. So somehow, somehow, somehow, somehow I got my hands on four-hour work week. And I had what you call the four-hour fever, which is when you finish the book for the next four hours, you're like, fuck everything in my life. I'm changing everything. Like, I'm doing all these things. Why don't I have passive income? Why am I working so hard?

Why don't I have a virtual assistant? Why don't I travel? Why don't I, you know, get fit? Like, you want to change all these things because he makes it seem so desirable and so achievable. right so that was the first big influence on me and a guy like tim ferris you know in in many ways when you know the person who sort of shows you the way you're like well i respect you i like you but also i kind of want to be you it's all i saw okay here's a dude who basically took his own life experiences distilled it down into some kind of operating philosophy and then packaged it up for the world

to consume through books and a blog essentially and then later a podcast later a newsletter other things He translated his fame into access for deals. So he invested in Uber, invested, I think, in Twitter, a couple couple other big ones. And also had like a great kind of like friend group that that emerged from that. It was always hanging with interesting people. That seemed super fun to me. So I really liked this guy's lifestyle. And I thought, I didn't really even like decide at that time.

But I always just thought, oh, that's amazing. But to me at the time, it felt like if I wanted to pursue that, I felt like saying, you know, I want to go be LeBron James or like I want to go into Hollywood and, you know, be George Clooney. It just felt like a, well, that's a lottery game. I can't name 15 Tim Ferriss's at the time, at least. I thought there's only a few people like this. It's probably not a good path to bet on. So that was the first influence.

Second one was Tony Robbins, same sort of thing. I was like, oh, wow, this guy's great. I discovered his content, helped me out a lot. It changed the way I saw the world with his operating philosophy. And I was like, I went to one of his events. And I was like, holy fuck, there's 10,000 people in this arena, paying thousands of dollars to like just attend this guy's show, this performance. I was like, I've never seen anybody like this. Never seen a speaker captivate people like this.

How the fuck does this guy do it? And I was pretty like enamored with that. It was very like intoxicating to see. And I thought, okay, I don't really want this lifestyle. Like just like with Tim Ferriss, I didn't want to write books and, because that seems slow and kind of boring. Just like Tony Robbins, I didn't want to go on tour, but I wanted elements of what they had, which was a cool set of life experiences, which help you, which you then distill into

operating philosophy. You share that. you build a big trusted audience and then you turn that social capital into financial capital so that that funds you doing you full time your job your company is you and so I just thought oh that's pretty fun like I think a guy like Tim Ferriss I think he basically wakes up I don't know him Sam actually knows him but I'm out of him once and it's he seemed like a pretty curious dude what it seemed like his life is is he wakes up he's curious about a thing like it might be because he's having some pain point in his life like I want to lose belly fat or like I just

got diagnosed with this like disorder and this is the traditional medicine but doesn't seem to work so well. What are the alternatives? And then he just goes down that rabbit hole. He learns about it from the best. He self-experiments and then he comes out the other side and he teaches that to everybody else. And I thought, oh, that's dope. This dude just gets to be like a curious student and gets paid millions of dollars for it. That seems like way more fun than what I was doing than a normal job for sure. But even more fun than being a startup CEO, picking a market, raising money from investors, having a team that you've got to go into the office every day and rah-rah, keep everybody happy and keep everybody motivated, come up with your strategy.

So I basically just looked at it. Once I sold my company, I was like, all right, am I going to stop bullshit or what? Like, am I going to try that path even though the odds seem bad? Or am I just put away that idea forever? And so I just decided to be it into it. The odds aren't that bad. At the time, it felt really hard and impossible. Well, to be Tim Fares, it's like you said, he was like one of the only ones doing that.

It wasn't like a very clear path to follow. Whereas now there's just so many different niches to get into. You see that there's levels, right? Yeah. He might be number one in that kind of field. Actually, Tony Robbins and others are kind of a little bit bigger than him. But then you have him. But then you have like, you know, a rung down.

You'll have, I don't know, whoever, pick your favorite, James Clear or, you know, Rameet Santhe or whoever. And then you have, in every niche, you have a thought leader. So you realize, okay, it's not an all or nothing game. Like, at the minimum, I can land in kind of like level three right now. and feel some version of success. And then if I just keep going, maybe I'll get there. And I'm pretty like, I don't know, cocky slash confident.

So I was like, okay, you know, why not me, right? Like, I met Tim. I was like, there's nothing magical about this guy. It seems like a normal person just like me who, like, he just did him on blast for 10, 15 years. I could do that. That seems doable. So that's how I described this path. And it's not always about investments.

Like, sure, Tim Ferriss made a lot of money from investing. But talking about James Clear, just spoke. with him and Mark Manson the other week. They were both prolific bloggers. And James Cleer, for example, he was able to grow his mailing list to like a million subscribers just from blogging consistently and being really good at SEO. And then they both wrote books. And they just going to took their best blog post that they had proven work to the best. And they turned them into bestselling books. Bound it together. Yeah, exactly. And Mark, I think Mark's book, if you read, like, I went and read like an annual report from Fox or news court, whoever owns like

Penguin Books or something. And they're like, what's his book called? It's called like, fuck it. I don't care. The subtle art of not giving a fuck. Subtle art of not giving a fuck. It was, it like, they like positioned it as like the breakout hit that saved the company. I mean, it was like a pretty big smashing success. Right.

It's huge. It's huge. I mean, people severely underestimate how much money you can make from a really good book if you have a huge audience. Like most nonfiction books probably sell a thousand or a few thousand copies if you're lucky. But the subtle art of not giving a fuck is sold something like 14 million copies. And Mark probably makes two or three dollars a copy. No way. At least.

So you're telling me, you think he made over $30 million off that book? I think he made at least $30 million. No way. I so don't believe that. That's amazing. Yeah, books can be ridiculously lucrative, but it's hard. Like, James Clear, again, he had a million email subscribers. In addition to doing all the work of writing a book and getting all those subscribers,

he also did, like, 400 podcast interviews before the release of Atomic Habits. These are, like, the top books in their categories. But I suspect that if you have a huge audience beforehand, you can kind of play publishers off of each other. I've had multiple publishers email me about doing a book for indie hackers. And you could probably negotiate to get higher than like the industry standard of like 15% royalties on book sales. Right. I don't remember if it's Tim that told me this or if I read it about him, but I think he said in order revenue streams were something like, so highest to lowest was investing, advertising revenue, and then significantly blown number three was books.

Right. And that doesn't shock me. I mean, I think successful tech startups are a lot more lucrative than books. And I think Tim was like early to Uber or something crazy. And Shopify, dude, just those two alone. That's a whole other level. They could be in the $100 billion plus range. I mean, being early to $100 billion showed up is among the best investments that any human has ever made, ever. But even that, that's what I'm saying when there's new stuff built on the road. One of the things that, you know, for me, I used was this idea of a rolling fund. Sam does SPVs and syndicates on Angelist. So like I pretty sure Tim was investing his own money. Maybe there was like some back-end deal where like whatever, Sequoia gave him money as a scout or something. But I think he was

just investing his own money. But like, for example, we're nowhere near Tim size. No, we're not even close. And I tweeted out, hey, I want to raise a rolling fund, you know, if people want to co-invest in deals with me, I've been investing and here's, you know, here's an option, here's a link, basically. And that turned in for me with zero outreach, zero meetings, and zero reaching out to my own personal network. So these are all strangers from the internet who just follow the podcast or follow me on Twitter. And that, became $4 million a year of investable income. Just to put that into terms, that's not a huge number, right?

I think Sam will probably invest even more, maybe five times more this year off his syndicates. And he did the same thing. He just leveraged his own fame to raise money. And so if you just do the math on that, right? So let's say $4 million a year. You know, standard carry is 20%. I don't take any management fees, but like I could take a 2% management fee. So 2% management fee, that's 8K a year.

So that's like, you know, pretty much like a starting salary, you know, for. for yeah i mean that that's like that pays the bills that was my salary you know that was my salary when i started yeah uh so that's the first part then you take the carry so you're basically saying of every four million invested every formula invested it's the equivalent of me getting to write about eight 800 thousand let's just round up to a million uh a million dollars a year of startup investments so and the startup investments take you know let's call it 10 years to mature for that fund to to fully pay out so that's basically 10 million dollars of investable of of money that I get to invest that I didn't have to take out of pocket.

So that's $10 million of equity value without counting in the appreciation of any of those investments, right? And a good fund might 3x in value. And so, you know, a good fund, it could do better, but, but even just like normal solid returns over the 10 year period would be a triple. And so that would mean that my 10 million in equity value, it becomes like 30 million in equity value. And this is for something that I, you know, put that's, I just, I just snap my fingers and

turned audience into cash. But it's a win-win. It's not like I'm charging them something. I'm giving them access into, A, my brain of knowing what startup investments are good and bad, but B, my deal flow of deals they could never get access to in the private market. So you get this win-win with your audience, but it's pretty massive value. And that vehicle, Rolling Fund, that didn't exist for, you know, Tim Ferriss. It didn't exist for Tony Robbins.

They had to find a different way. It's just everything's easier now. Just like Stripe made it easier to take payments. Like, it's easier now to raise money. It's easier to create merch. it's easier to create a course. It's easier to do all the different business model tactics that you can do. Like Pomp is another kind of like solo creator.

He's got like a job board. And so he's big in Bitcoin. That's what he's known for. So he created Pomp's Cryptojobs. Cryptojobs.com or something like that. So he's making, I believe he didn't he didn't confirm this, but, you know, just my own kind of sleuthing here. He's making almost a million dollars a year off his job board.

Right. So he was like a, you know, high level person. at snap, at Facebook, whatever. He's basically replacing that with a passive income stream. Again, just snap his finger, spin up a financial asset. Tim Ferriss could have done that, right? But they didn't have these tools nor awareness to use it. They were following the traditional playbook, which was like write books, give speeches,

like go to go get paid $30,000 to go talk at some company. And the last one was like, he created a TV show. It was like, you know, go for mainstream media. And now we have like way more tools in our tool belt that we can use to, to generate much more income. Right. And despite all these tools that help you make money, I still don't think it's like necessarily

the most accessible path to start with because you got to build an audience first. And that's a dog eat dog world. Like a ton of people are out there hustling trying to make a name for themselves. And most of the people I know who've succeeded are kind of like the two of you where you have these previous business successes

that lend you credence and help your audiences like build trust with you. Yeah, but by the way, we didn't have that audience either like 18 months ago. And neither did Popp didn't have that audience two years. ago, three years ago. So it can be built fairly quickly, but you're right. Not everybody wants to or can. This is not a thing where I'm like, anybody can do it. It's, sorry, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's anybody can do it. So it is open to all, but it is not going to be achievable by all.

All right. Look, most businesses have something that I hate. Siloes. Say it with me. Siloes. What does that mean? It means different people are using different information across your company, and no one ever actually knows what's going on or they're using one source of truth. It's a pain in the butt, and it costs you money, it costs you time, and it hurts.

It hurts. So, with the HubSpot CRM platform, you can bring all your data together in one roof. So this is like, sounds a little fluffy and these big words, but I'm going to put it together in a very simple and easy to understand a way. Look, you have salespeople,

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Now, most of the time, they're going to be prospecting, spending tons of time researching, how does this person know us? How do we know them? What's their background? Yada, yada, yada. That's a pain in the butt. That is called silo information. And wasted time.

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This is music to my ears. So check it out. HubSpot, CRM platform. Just go to HubSpot.com and save about a decade of tears and crying and heartache over not being able to have your data across your business. Check it out. Okay, so let's get into some ideas. Let's talk about ideas that, like, the average person can do or build. You guys have your own sources of ideas. Sam, you've got the hustle.

You've got a team of journalists who are little. working around the clock to find new interesting business stories and ideas to bring to you. For me, I've got Andy Hackers. I'll go to the Andy Hackers product directory. You too. Yeah, I'll just sort by like recently updated and then I'll look at who's making at least $10,000 a month in revenue and just see what pops up. Like see what cool ideas people are working on. You need like a growth rate one. Yeah, I should add that for sure. I built this whole directory a few years ago and there's only like a hundred products on it. And I checked the other

day, now there's like over 14,000 products where people have sort of shared what they're doing and how much money they're making and what they're working on and how they come up with their idea and stuff. So I should definitely have more features to it at this point because it's pretty cool. But one of the trends I've been noticing is just people sort of deconstructing and making really small niche versions

of big venture-funded apps. So a good one is like calm.com. It's a big mindfulness and sort of meditation app. And there's some others in the sector that are making like tens of millions, hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue and they've got like a ton of investment. And then on Andy Hackers,

I've found people who are making like little small versions of them. So one of them is called Mantra. It was built by this guy a few years ago, and you can look at his timeline and see exactly what his thought process was. So he says he was lying in bed watching his girlfriend at the time, you used a daily affirmations app, and he figured he could build something better. And so this is the very first app he's ever made, and it's super simple. Like I downloaded the app, you open it up, and it's just got different categories for affirmations. So it's got like, improve your sex life. These affirmations will help create a more satisfying sexual experience in your life and generate wealth. These

affirmations will help attract wealth, abundance, and prosperity to your life. And just stuff like that. That's hilarious. And so it turns out a few years later, 200,000 people have downloaded this app, and he decided to add subscriptions. So you pay 20 bucks a year to get access to themes and music and whatever. And I think he made $3,500 in his very first month. He's got $10,000 reviews, and the average rating is 4.8. Yeah, he's doing pretty well. So his latest update, he's now at $15,000 a month in revenue. And he writes about how he's completely underestimated how big his app could get. He totally underinvested in it. He hasn't spent a single dime on paid marketing. And instead he spent the last few years just working on other apps. So he kind of regrets it. And I was going back

to work on mantra and give it more of his attention. Sean, you should tell him about horoscopes. That's the exact same thing here. What about horoscopes? Did we interview the guy? His name was Ross. There's this guy who raised money from much of New York media folks. Maybe he raised $15 million. And his app was in the same space as this mantra app. But basically, Cortland, did you know that, like, women love horoscopes? I've yet to date anybody who wasn't into astrology. So, yeah, I'm aware. So, like, even, like, I dismiss horoscopes as, like, some, like, woo-woo nonsense bullshit.

But even, like, smart women, like, my wife and, like, Sean's wife, like, are into it, even if it's at a casual level. And I was, like, thinking, like, oh, I'm also into, like, a ton of, like, bro science as well. So it's just like their version of bro science. And we found, so there was this app that raised maybe 10 or 15 million, and they're probably making millions of dollars a year doing horoscopes. Then we went and found horoscope, was it horoscope or Sudoku? Something like that where it was like the most like old school, not nice looking website

and they were very likely could be making 10 million a year off of these things. And it was just getting crazy amounts of traffic because the amount of people who read or consume horoscope content is like half of America because it's like 80% of women like check it on and it's smart too because it's daily like you don't just check your horoscope once and then never again like you come back and check it every single day it's like what we were talking about earlier with the news and entertainment like this is something where you can collect subscription revenue and people aren't going to stop coming back I was given an example of there's a guy who's building some app that's like it connects you with like kind

of experts so it's sort of like oh if you you're redoing your kitchen, you can actually, like, get a 15-minute video call with this, that person from HGTV, right? So they found all these like, hey, Justin Bieber stylist will like give you style advice for 30 minutes if you want to pay 150 bucks or whatever. And so it's sort of like cameo, but you're booking these like 15, 30-minute calls with the who's who of fashion, beauty, home improvement, all these categories. And I was looking at their number. And I was like, oh, yeah, that's great. You've seen some growth. Like, which vertical is it? Is there one winner? And they're like, yeah, yeah, you know, it's spread out. And I was like, yeah, but like, certainly.

Certainly one has to be doing better than all the others. And they're like, yeah, actually astrology is doing pretty well. And I was like, it's like not even on your site. He's like, yeah, yeah, it's like over there on the far right under this thing. Because even he was kind of like, you know, it's not the thing we want to lead with while we're fundraising. Like he didn't say all that. But like you could tell it wasn't what he thought would win, nor was it what they were promoting the most. But it was the thing that was working the best.

And he showed me. And so I went down the rabbit hole. Again, I'm professionally curious. So I go on Instagram and I start finding all the Instagram astrology. accounts, astrology influencers, basically. And it's like 80,000, 90,000, 200,000, 500,000 followers. And these are like, just like, you know, some chick in Florida or like, you know, some chick in like Huntington Beach who like, you know, dresses the way you would imagine.

And like her, every, every post is like, oh, you know, like the chakras are aligned. And like today, if you experience a good event, it's because I told you this or whatever, right? Like some bullshit. And then in like link in the bio is basically. like an only fans to book a reading with her. And you go, so I'm like, all right, hell yeah, let's book a reading. Let's see, let's go end to end with this professional curiosity. And it's like sold out. Just every session is booked for like weeks. And so what he was doing

was some of those people were using his platform. But even the others were just using a bootleg version of this. It made me think there is an only fan for for palm reading, astrology, horoscopes, you know, like sort of like relationship like voodoo or whatever. And like the same thing happens not just like in America in India this is a huge thing in India when you have a kid you take your kid to like the local guru because of course every village just happens to have like a mystical guru that lives there and he'll like you know he's like Rafiki holding the baby you know Simba and he like looks at him and he'll just like he'll write you on a scroll like your whole life story and like the do's and don't it's like you know don't eat black beans don't get married in the

month of September you know don't date anyone with the letter J and in their name and it's like And people believe this like to their core. They're just like, oh, you know, he's a great guy. But like his name is, you know, you know, Trajan or whatever. He's like he's got a J in there. We can't we can't take trade. We got to break up with Trajan here. And it's like like people believe this in every walk of life.

And I think that's one area that like, A, Silicon Valley doesn't talk about. But B, there's just a lot of simple software solutions you could build that that can get you maybe not to 100 million in revenue, but like you get to 10K a month of profit. You can get to 50K a month of profit. in these businesses. It'll make you rich. Yeah, exactly. We like talk a lot about that on the podcast where like it's pretty like raising money and going big. I think it's sick and I'm happy that the people who do it do it, maybe I'll do

it one day. But if you're like goals to optimize for like wealth creation, some of these apps or relatively smaller ideas are actually significantly likelier to make you wealthy and perhaps be more fun along the way. And a lot of them are just repurposing ideas that have existed in the past in some form or another that used to be doing really well. So you can kind of just look at like what people used to do that worked and then just try it again. So like the horoscope industry, you know, has always had these influencers who people really trust. And I don't know if you guys remember Ms. Cleo. She had this like mystical hotline in the 90s. Yeah. Oh yeah. Yeah. Okay. Like that business was crushing it. Like they made like a billion dollars or something crazy

like that. I mean she was yeah. She was just a hired model or like, I mean, she actually was. Whoa, she wasn't mystical? Or she was like, she was like a professional palm reader, but like the owners of the marketing company, like heard her speak. And they're like, oh my gosh. Like you are our, she's perfect. You're going to be our woman. You know, you're our spokesperson. And they paid her like not, you know, like a hundred grand a year or some like normal salary. And it was pretty wild. And a lot of the stuff seems scamy. But here's other examples. Like there's like sleep is like sleep is like sleep. And like, there's like sleep. Like sleep is like, like, sleep. And we, we know and have met owners of sleep apps. I do everything from, you know, just white noise or like raindrop sound effects or whatever to sleep stories to sleep stories but just in other languages. And they just focus on like, you know, the Spanish speaking market or whatever. And there's just like an infinite number of these niches that exist both in software or, you know, D to C. Like for example, just to tie it back into what we're talking about earlier in the D to C space. Like the fact that Tim Ferriss doesn't have his own like neutropic drink or like kettlebell brand, it left money on the table.

You know what I mean? And the person who actually did this really well was Joe Rogan. And, you know, right? He has like alpha brain or whatever that that supplements company is. And I think Sam, you know the number is better than I do on this. But that's like $100 million a year company, I think. It just sold. Maybe I'm a little off over.

It just was acquired the other day. And friends who know the company told me it sold for $350 million and that Joe owned like 20% of it. Right. And so like he, hey, that's his own passion area. He talked about it in new ways. Why take sponsors? money to talk about somebody else's brand when like you could just be part owner or white label any of these things right so there's a whole suite of those types of ideas and this happens again

like to look in another country look in india all the famous like kind of like gurus in india it's like oh this guy's a saint he only accepts donations and like makes millions of dollars up donations and then as they get famous like miss cleo style like i think the top guy like has like his own ramen noodle company uh and like put right so he just license his face onto ramen noodles and crackers or something like and it's like a billionaire from this ramen noodle company. And yet at the same time, it's supposed to be this religious saint. Just the most basic stuff.

Right, but we can learn from them. Like, if you're trying to learn this, like, what is this solo, like kind of solo creator playbook? Well, you've got to know what are all the tools in the toolbox and then use the ones that you want. But actually, I was going to ask you a different question, which is Joe Rogan remind me of this. Who is having the most fun with what they do for a living?

Somebody had asked me this question, or in our group chat, somebody asked this question and I was like it's a great question right because once you see that you see a model you're like and it's not they're having the most of it's like I think that would be super fun if that was me it's kind of like one question one version of the question because that become that can become a blueprint then like why don't why don't I just going for that and my answer was Joe Rogan and I'll give you kind of my defense for Joe Rogan but I would love if you guys have other answers of somebody who you've seen just having a blast or you they're having a blast and you think it would be a blast for you too I'm curious if there are any other answers like the Joe Rogan reasoning to me is he basically has got the podcast, which clearly he does for fun because he was doing it before it made any money. Before he sold it to, you know, before he sold the rights to Spotify for $100 million a year, he was doing it for free kind of in his bedroom and when there was no promise of money. So he's just meeting badass people, Elon Musk, Neil DeGrasse, and he's just having conversations with interesting people. Through that, he gets a bunch of fans

who love him. That sounds fun. Then he loves the UFC. He's the UFC commentator, but he also does it where he doesn't go to every event, that would be exhausting. That would be like the tradeoff where the job becomes, the hobby becomes a shitty job. And instead he's like, no, I'm only going to do the big paper views in Vegas. So that's an easy flight for me. I'm not going to travel around the world trying to chase this thing around anymore. So that seems fun.

And then he's a stand-up comedian, which is like a hard challenge, super fun thing to do. And he sells out arenas all around the world. And so like, and then he's got his brand, alpha brain or whatever, and he works out all the time. Like Joe Rogan just seems like he is doing all the things he wants at the highest level. And so it seems like that's a blast. Who do you guys think is having the most fun?

Okay, I'm going to go with the founder CEOs of these humongous, like, $100 billion plus tech companies. And so I'm talking about like the Patrick Collison's of the world, Bill Gates, Larry Ellison and Oracle, Jeff Bais was in Amazon, just these absolute Titans who are controlling a ton of resources. And they're not like just some hired gun CEO who came in later on to like turn the ship around. Like these are people who are working on the projects that they started that used to be tiny. So it's kind of like their life mission. It's kind of like their baby. And once it gets big enough, like it takes a lot of work, a lot of heartache to get to the point where they're at now. But once it gets to that size, like you can kind of delegate most of the important, like urgent work to other people, like your trusted lieutenants. And then you're kind of in control of like a massive amount of resources where you can work on your favorite thing and you can do side projects and all sorts of stuff. So I think that's kind of the most enviable position to be in. We're having, I think next week, we're having the co-founder of HubSpot on, Darmesh. And I'll ask him, but I talk to him regularly. And I'm almost positive he doesn't have any direct reports.

And I'm also, you can look this up, actually. I think he's the largest individual shareholder of HubSpot. And his value of just HubSpot shares is over a billion. And I was like, what did you do this week? He's like, oh, I bought my wife for her 40th or 50th birthday. I bought her this domain called humanist.org. It's like a, it's a, it's this like philosophy we buy into and it's this community. And I was like, is this what you do for fun?

He's like, yeah, it's like, it's like the greatest job on earth. I'll have to ask him. So I'm not insinuating this, but it appears as though he's got a pretty nice life. And I agree with you that having the resources of a huge company is quite amazing. It's almost like you're at the top of a cult where you've got millions of people and like, you know, maybe they're not following you because they believe in you. They're following you because they're getting paid. But they're still.

following you nonetheless, they'll basically do whatever you ask them to do you. You can set up whatever lifestyle you want to do and you have a certain amount of power that I think comes from only having lots of people working in concert with you that you can't get just from having lots of money. You know, you can deploy that money if you're super rich to get people to work in concert with you. But if you have a company, kind of everyone's bought into the Kool-A and they're pushing in the same direction and you can launch any sort of cool, fun side project that you want to, or you could just go take off for a few weeks and like people won't really notice that you're gone because everything's sort of delegated. And when I compare that to like the content

creators of the world, like Tim Ferriss? I'm sure Tim Ferriss has some fun, but it seems kind of stressful to like have to be Tim Ferriss all the time. By the way, it's definitely stressful. My, I mean, he's like blogged about like depression and shit and he suffers, although I would say that's part job, part genetic. But my best friend, Jack Smith, Jack Smith sold his company for $800 million, something like that. He probably walked away with before taxed nearly nine figures, so nearly $100 million. He started the company when he was 23. He quit working there at when he was 26. He's now 33 or 32. He lives in a house in Hawaii. He has no social file. He has a Twitter handle. He has a Facebook profile, but he doesn't like, he probably has

150 followers. He's not trying to impress anyone. He doesn't do any angel investing. What he does in this free time is he's a, he's a pen pal for inmates in prison. And so he's currently pen paling with this guy who's like a math, who like taught himself math. And he like gets joy out of helping, he'll, the guy's like, yeah, I want to get this book. And so Jack just buys him the book, like the math book. And he enjoys conversing about it. He loves testing different supplements and testing different products on Amazon. And he doesn't have that need to create content or be a big shot. He's incredibly comfortable in his own skin. His wife started coffee meets bagel. So she's also a big shot. And so he lives on the beach in Hawaii in a rental unit that he probably pays $10,000 a month for. And I think he is having the most fun. because he doesn't feel the need. I think both Sean and I and probably you, Cortland, because we're like these public-facing things, we definitely have this need to be loved.

Jack doesn't really have that. He only wants to be loved by his close friends, and I think that there's something great to be said about contentment and, like, humbleness, and you are happy with what you have, and you don't really need much or want more. And he's also not, like, on the content treadmill. No, he doesn't need to impress anymore.

He's not on any treadmill. He's not on the money treadmill. He's not on the social climbing treadmill. He's not on the content treadmill. He's not on any trouble. I kind of agree with you, Sam. Which has its downsides. Like not having a mission,

sometimes it seems to get sad. So I'll have to pick a project, but go ahead. I was going to say, so I totally disagree with what you said, Coralyn, and I kind of agree with what you said, Sam. So I'll give you both. So Coralyn, I totally disagree in the sense that what I've seen, at least, is the kind of the CEOs of the unicorns. Here's your day.

Your day is mostly a combination of, people problems. So like, you know, your whole job was to put the right people in the right places, but then all, but people are one of the like bugiest pieces of code out there, right? So you're always debugging that. You're always debugging people. And then the second thing is, um, you're putting out fire. So there's like always a fire at any big company, any sufficiently large company. There's always, you know, some rotating set of crises every month. And, uh, you know, that requires your attention. And so like, you know, I don't think when Zuck creates Facebook, he wants people to be like sharing cool photos of their lives. He doesn't want fake news.

is misinformation and like you know how much of these guys's day has to like go into like solving the gnarly problem of the of the moment and so so I think you know they try to hire away that but like at the end of the they they're accountable for it and so they have to like ultimately deal with with these problems people problems then you have big company problems and the last bit is like you sort of lost the magic and the connection and the fun of like building something yourself hands on which is probably what you like to do if you started one of these companies uh secondly working with a small crew of people because now the place is so large, you don't even recognize people in your own company. And also, like, you lose the,

like, you, in order to make a large company run, you need to recruit certain types of people, right? You need generals of armies and not, like, guerrilla warfare like you're used to at the beginning. So a lot of your good friends from the beginning of the company have moved on to do other things if you're still there. So I've seen there is a big tradeoff in addition to the cool stuff you mentioned. And so that's why I wouldn't say, there's too many tradeoffs for me to say, oh, they're having the most fun. I think they're the busiest. I can see at Stripe, you can see everybody's calendar. And I just like pulled up Patrick Collison's calendar. Like what's this guy doing this week? And I can see like every single event that's on it. It's not it's not screen chair, bro. Let's go.

Well, okay, it's one of two, right? It's either 30 minutes, 30 minutes, 30 minutes, 30 minutes. And there's an executive assistant or two dedicated to like getting this. Like they work, their job is his calendar, basically. And like everybody wants his time and he's got to and he wants his own time. And so, you know, there's 30 minutes back to back everywhere. And then there's the other one which is super sparse where it's sort of like, well, I kind of don't do anything now, which is sort of fun at first, but I could also just quit if I really wanted to do nothing. So instead, I'm kind of like in this like slightly unsatisfying position of like, my job is not to do any of the jobs.

It's, uh, and I'm sort of doing nothing. I'm supposed to think about the vision and shit like that. And so, uh, what do you think about that? Is that true? Which one is he? It's, it's the first one. It's a 30 minutes, 30 minutes. Here the meetings.

Uh, but also like, he does a lot of projects outside of that. And it's like very strictly like eight to five, nine to five. like then done. There's nothing outside of that. There are no obligations. And like he is working on extra projects. So he does, for example, the fast grants during COVID where they're giving out money to scientific researchers. Those are awesome. And this is like a kind of a fun project. And before that, he was working with Tyler Cohen on doing a research project with like why scientific progress has like slowed down. He's also like learned to fly planes. I was talking to him a couple months ago about like a project we might work on together. Just the two of us about like helping to fund like underrepresented minorities and groups to like basically cool

do cool things. And so it's like, I don't know if he's a superhuman who just works 16 hours a day, but he's somehow finding time to work on all these cool pet projects with like small groups of people and to fund it because he's got the resources of an entire organization behind him. So it's probably you're right. It's like not the most fun job. He still has like a crazy amount of responsibilities and he could cut out the stripe part and do all those things also, right? Because if he wants to go to these things. Sam brought up a good point, which is like there's the people who no longer are chasing desire and they're happy because they're sort of at peace. They're not just like at war with some part of their life. And that's like, you know, the monk, but there's like the modern day monk.

And you do meet some people like this who just like they're not like driven by their desire. Because desire is basically saying I lack something. Right. And so you're agreeing to be unhappy with the current thing to go desire more. And then there's like the people who I think me and Sam try to be more like right now, which is I don't think either of us try to be the guy with no desires. I think we try to be, well, I have healthy addiction. The things I want, I think, are positive for me in the world, and the pursuit of them will make me ultimately better, healthier, have more fun, and a happier person. All right. So, like, I got to choose an addiction.

At least I chose a healthy one. And I think those are the people, like, kind of second most fun. What's the end game, though? Because I'm like, I guess in a way, like me and Sam are like following your footsteps. Like, both of our company's got acquired. Both of us are still working at the acquirers. Like, I don't have an end in mind. Sam, I don't know if you have an end in mind.

Sam, like, when do you quit HubSpot? And what do you do after that? I don't have an end in mind. Like, I think that you and I, Cortland, are in different positions maybe. Well, you guys don't have, like, like, I don't have, like, a goal that I have to hit. And if I don't hit it, I don't make money. So, like, truthfully, like, my life is awesome. Like, I thoroughly enjoy what I do.

I spend most of my time doing podcast stuff. I'm happy. I'm happy with my life. I think that I enjoy. being a HubSpot employee. Inevitably, I'm going to quit. And when I do, I probably won't start something. I'll probably chill for three, four, five years and then start something.

But I don't really have an end game. I do think about it a lot and it stresses me out. So I try not to think about it. I'm really trying to enjoy the journey as much as possible. I'm in a position now that like I have no wants out of like I have, I'm happy where I am. I would be happy with significantly less though. And so I'm a little, I'm quite.

in a satisfied area for now. But I, like, like, I do experience envy. Like, Sean, people love when he invest in their company. And I'm like, fuck, that's like easy money. That's a great deal. And he also is really good at spotting them. And so, like, I, I experience, like, envy or I experience, like, oh, I want to do that, too. But it's definitely not like a, I'm willing to dedicate my life to doing that at the moment. Sean, what's your end game? Because you don't have some date, you know, in the future like Sam does where he's going to quit and do something else, you're kind of just like staring ahead at the rest of your life. So what's, what do you do when you don't necessarily have like a specific goal in mind? Yeah. So I'm basically chasing this thing called the perfect Tuesday.

And what I realized was having these like goals or milestones or accomplishments is a false promise you make with yourself where you're like, oh, that's what I want. And then as you get there, you're like, okay, well, you move the goalposts and you want something more. Right. Like already I have more than I would have ever asked for 10 years ago. And now I'm like, oh, I want more, more, more. And there's like this disease of more. And so instead, I basically went the other way. And I was like, okay, instead of thinking about what's this 10 year vision for myself and

what's the end game, it was sort of like, what's the now game? What is the, what is the perfect Tuesday for me right now? The perfect average Tuesday. And so I did this exercise once that kind of changed the way I look at things, which is I said, what's the perfect normal day for me? and and not perfect like everything goes right, but like if I was just to do all the things I love in a normal day, what are all those normal things?

And they're not that hard, right? Like it's like, you know, I love to wake up without the alarm. So like I love to wake up naturally rather than an alarm waking up saying, oh shit, you got to do something and I feel groggy. So now I wake up around 7.30, just going to start going to sleep earlier because I got a kid,

but like I don't wake up with an alarm anymore. And so that already was like one thing. These are going to sound really stupid, but like I'll just give you, I'll just walk you through some of the examples like of how stupid this is, which is like I, like, I love to shower. Like I just love having a shower. I'm like, I get great ideas in the shower. Shower's super relaxing. I just noticed like on a normal day, that's like one of my favorite parts of the day is taking a great shower. And so then two things. I like started to appreciate this thing that seemed really mundane. It seems like stupid to have a goal of taking a great shower every day. But now I have a goal of taking a great shower every day because I know I love showing. Work out. I love to work out. So I want to have a great workout every day. And not just like generically a great workout. It's like, what are the most fun types of workouts for me? I want to do those every day. And so I have this day kind of mapped out where I'm like,

these are the things I love doing on normal days. They don't take an outstanding event or it's not a vacation. It's like if my normal day was like this, I'd be a happy camper right now. And then I so I have like a great day. Then I mapped out in a great, what's a great week? Meaning like, what's a thing I do once a week? I'm not going to do it every day, but I want to do it once a week. What's a great month?

What's a thing I want to do once or twice a month that I'm not going to do every day. day. And then what do I do once or twice a year? And so I wrote those out. And I love this exercise so much. I had my mom do it. I was like, mom, you're getting old. You got to be having great days. All right. Like, you know, you don't think of yourself as an ambitious person, but you should be like, you've, you've did all the hard work. You've raised the kids. You worked your whole life. Like now you should just be maximizing joy. I should also be maximizing joy. So this exercise helps me maximize joy. And so now I'm basically just chasing architecting my life so that I'm having that perfect Tuesday as often as I can and getting as close to it as I can. And I'm

and same thing with the things I want to do every once a week or once a month. So I know it's a little bit convoluted, but that's what I'm after. No, no, I love it. It makes perfect sense. I think out of every group of people on the planet, entrepreneurs have to be the most neglectful of the present moment. Like, we're always obsessed with some huge goal we've set. You know, we're going to build that company. We're going to, you know, launch this app.

And we kind of forget about the days in between now and then. You know, like we just sort of neglect the present for the future, which is done because the present is what life is made out of. It's made of an endless string of present moments. And so if you want to have a good enjoyable life, like you can't, you have to kind of resist to that entrepreneurial urge to only care about the goal. Yeah, like if you just imagine, like draw a line and that's the time of your life, right? And like, let's say it's a year or 10 years that line represents. And then like you have this milestone at the end, this goal at the end you're shooting for.

And you have two options. Either you say, I'll be happy when I get to the end. Okay, cool. Or you say, I'm going to have fun the whole way all along the way, right? Like it's very obvious when you draw that line. And which of these diagrams is better? The one where you have fun just in that dot at the end or the one where you have fun on every single dot along this line. And is this like so obvious.

There's nothing new. It's nothing insightful. Everybody's heard this cliche. I've enjoyed the journey not the destination. Like when I look at that diagram, I'm like, what the fuck? Who cares what that end destination is? I want this like this line to be dope. I want to be, I want to be having fun all the all the way, especially if this line represents 10 years of my life.

Then like I got to make that that happen. And so that becomes the focus. Well, I think the issue is like people hear this and it's almost like a cliche. And that doesn't mean that it's wrong. I think a cliche is something that's smart enough that it became common advice. You know, it's about the journey, not about the destination. But it's still hard enough that people have been repeating this for years and people still don't understand or follow it. You know, I think people hear this from a couple of rich guys like you two. And they're like, okay, yeah, it's easy for you to say. But in their shoes, they often see themselves as having to have this difficult, arduish journey. to get to the point where they have enough money, and then they'll use that money to have a good journey and do something else. So, like, Sean, you are at this point where you can design this cool life for yourself, in part because you have enough money that you don't have to go to a 9 to 5 job ever again. And so when you say this, it's not easy for other people to follow that advice.

Well, so what I'm saying is, what I'm basically saying is I'm not telling people, don't chase the money. I guess what I'm telling people is it's a false choice that you either, You know, you suffer till you have money or you have fun, but you don't have money. There are plenty of examples. And so if there is even one example, that means it is possible. There are plenty of examples of have fun and make a ton of money as a byproduct. So if that's an option on the table, you're crazy for settling for anything less than that if you're a sufficiently talented person, right?

If you're a talented enough person, which most people are who are listening to this, if you're sufficiently privileged and you have your faculties about you, that is an option on the table. have a shit ton of fun and make a shit ton of money, both, then choosing one or the other is a silly option. Okay, so question for both of you. What's your favorite example or story of how somebody can do that? Like, if you're an indie hacker right now, you're just starting out, you've got nothing. How can you do something that works and that makes money? And that's also allows you to have fun in the process. Can I give one? Yeah, give me one. All right. I was at a friend's house yesterday, and he was like thinking about starting a he wanted to help kids start shit and I'm like basically I think that like if you wanted to if you were 18 years old and you had a summer and you wanted to build a business that made $100,000 a year I think it would be shockingly simple not easy it would be hard physically to just dominate Yelp for a local service that would take you only like three to six weeks to like master so maybe trimming trees or something like that I think that you could probably crush it that way and make hundreds of thousands of dollars in a relatively straightforward,

non-intellectually challenging, low-risk way. I think that most people could probably do that. Right. I think it's low risk. I don't think it's super like strategically difficult, but also is that like fun? Like how many people really enjoy going out in the hot weather and like trimming trees? I don't mind. Like I just paid a guy $80 an hour to come to my house off TaskRabbit to Power Wash. and he had like a rinky dink, $250 washer or whatever, and I asked him what his plans were for the day, and he was like, I've got eight of these planned. So, I mean, like, and is power washing that?

Like, no, does anyone love it? I don't know, but it's kind of fun to, like, start a job and finish it, and you can work outside in the sun. Okay, I've got one. This is a company, another company that I found on indie hackers. It's called High Performers. So the guy calls it Masterclass as a Service for Pro Athletes. So I'm looking at him this guy's timeline.

His first post is from November 2020. He says, I spoke to five pro athletes, and I've got one of them to agree to partner with me. And then he helped this guy, this athlete, create a course. It's basically like a PowerPoint presentation he created, and he put it on you to me, and then he helped this athlete sell the course to his own followers on social media. And so now, eight months later, he's got this whole process on repeat. He's hired a salesperson to do all the outreach, so he only has to do the part that he likes, like actually working with the athletes and creating the course.

And he's making $10,000 a month, basically just doing what he loves and just making money in the process. And the idea isn't even that creative. I mean, it's just masterclass for a niche. I did this with, there's this guy named Ben Ascran, who's in the UFC, and he's an Olympic wrestler. And I was a fan of his. I became friends with him on Twitter. He started talking to me about digital stuff because he didn't know anything about it, although he had a huge following. And I was like, why don't you start a course? He's like, I have no idea how. I was like, dude, I'll just call you once a week for like four weeks and we'll get the shit done. And he did it. And he's got a wrestling course.

And so I totally, I didn't charge him anything. I just wanted to become friends with him. But he would have paid. He offered to pay me money. So I agree that that could definitely be a thing. Right. And you literally did that for free. I mean, so that was just because you haven't fun.

Yeah, I mean, I think it's different. People have fun doing different things. So I'll just speak for myself. If I was 21 again or 22 or whatever and I'm like, all right, how do I have a bunch of fun and make a bunch of money at the same time? What I would do is actually very similar to these guys who hooked me and Sam up with our podcast like studios that they set up for us. and they're crushing it right now.

They are 21, by the way. They were basically like, hey, we're big fans of the show, right? Because they are fans of the show. I would be a fan of our show if I was, you know, a kid again. And they basically reached out and they were like, hey, your guys' camera of stuff like looks like shit and your sound kind of sucks sometimes. Like, we're really good at this. Do you want us to come like help you out?

Like I'll set your thing up for free. Just, you know, basically like pick a weekend next weekend, the weekend after that. When can we come and set your thing up? Like, I'm tired to listen to you guys with crappy audio and crappy video. And so we were like, okay. And then they showed us their YouTube channel. They're like, oh, here's my YouTube channel. I don't have a ton of followers, but just look at the quality.

And you'll see like, would you like to look like this? And I'm like, hell yeah. And then he sent me a menu. He sent me three setups. He's like, here's, you could look like this famous guy, this famous guy or this famous guy, which setup looks best to you. And I was like, all right, fine. Come on out here and give me option C.

And he's like, great. We'll be there this Sunday. They flew out here. They hung out. They did the hard work. They didn't ask for anything in return. And I was like, dude, let me pay you guys like something like this. This is, you know, so what would I get to do?

I'd meet somebody who I'm really, like, I'm a big fan of. I would hook them up with something using a skill that's pretty easy to learn, really. Like, you know, they basically found some lights. They drilled into the wall and then they, like, picked the right microphone. They plugged it into the right slot and whatever. They just, they did this setup. And then they followed up and they were just like, you know, already I was like, dude, I want to, I'll help you guys out.

I'll hook you guys up with your, we want another opportunity. What do you want? And they were like, yeah, we're just trying to figure out what to do. And what they figured out was there's a lot of podcasts, like us out there that had really good hour-long content. And what they did was they had, from their own content, they had stumbled into this setup where they find talented video editors basically overseas in the Philippines or wherever else. And they trained them on how to edit clips. And then basically they have a business where they just charge podcastsers like us,

tens of thousands of dollars a month. Yeah. Have you seen ours, Cortland? Yeah, they look super good. I see them on Twitter. Yeah, we pay them 30 grand a month. They look super good. Have you put them on YouTube yet because I've tried to find you on YouTube. We suck at that part right now. Forget that. But I guess my point is these guys are making $30,000 a month just off us as one client, right? And they can make, they probably can't charge everybody that much, but they can have like 20 clients doing this. And basically, they're just doing labor arbitrage, talented people in the Philippines. And then they're getting to meet like yesterday's All In podcast, which is like one of the most famous business podcast.

It was like the whole first half of the thing was all about these guys. They said their names probably 50 times. No way. You're kidding me. They talked all about them. this kid, Henry, Henry Bellcaster, keep sending us clips. And then we're in DMs with them. And Chimaut's like, dude, you're DMing Henry Belcaster?

Why? And he's like, yeah, they do a great job. They were like, it was like a professional infomercial for them. They've become friends with these guys. They're hooking them up with great content. And sure enough, those guys started paying for it. And, you know, the next and the next, these guys will be making one to two million dollars a year of profit if they play their cards right as 22, 23 year olds

just for operating a like, you know, sweatshop of video editors in the Philippines. So that's what they're doing. I can't believe they pulled that off. They told me that they were going to try and do that. And I was like, yeah, I mean, it'll work. And these guys kept at it, kept at it, kept at it. They killed it there. I mean, that's what my podcast editor did for me.

He basically kept sending me clips of my show where he had edited it, edited the episodes better than I was editing them. So I eventually just hired it. So what does that do? That does three things, right? You get good at content creation because you're basically practicing that craft every day. And that's a really valuable skill to start compounding at a young age.

Second thing, you meet a bunch of cool-ass people who are highly-network. They love, they know you and trust. you. And if you ever wanted to do a thing, if you have bigger ambitions, you can hit them up in one call and you're no longer cold, you're warm. And they know you're good. They know you hustle and you do good work. And last thing is they're going to make at least half a million dollars, probably close to $2 million of profit off this business in the next couple years. That's, you know, you're a millionaire. Congratulations, right? You had a bunch of fun doing it. So that's an easy example to me of something I would have done if I was their age.

Okay, so if we distilled this into like a playbook that people could follow, first you find something that you genuinely like and you take the time to get really good at it. And then you look to find somebody who's like famous or cool who's not really doing that good of a job at that thing. And you do it for them for free. And they'll probably take notice because these are like hard workers who really want to get better at whatever it is they're doing. And so they'll hire you or they pay for your thing. And they'll probably mentor you. And you can just repeat this playbook for anyone you like and make a ton of money in the process while also getting to meet your heroes. That's it. That's one path. That's one path that works. There are many. That's one.

Cool. Well, that's a good takeaway to end the show on. Sam, Sean, thanks for coming on. Can you let listeners know where they can go to find your podcast and whatever else you're working on? Yeah, you can find our podcast. If you just Google my first million, they'll come up. You may have to scroll all the way up to the top of the charts because we're pretty high up there now. So just go all the way up to number one and then we're just below that. So my first million in the podcast, app store, whatever. Follow Sam. He's the Sampar on Twitter. I'm Sean VP on Twitter. Sean Puri.com. That's my newsletter. I can rule the world.

I know I could be what I want to. I put my all in it like no days off. On the road, let's travel, never looking back.