The Iced Coffee Hour - Meet The $200,000,000 Man Who QUIT EVERYTHING | Noah Kagan

Episode Date: June 22, 2022

Noah Kagan, owner of App Sumo, Facebook's 30th ever employee, Mint's 4th ever employee, has a net worth valuation of over 9 figures. Today Noah explains the secrets to his entrepreneurial success and what motivated him to lead such a successful path.  Check out the Patreon! https://www.patreon.com/icedcoffeehour SUBSCRIBE TO NOAH KAGAN: https://www.youtube.com/c/OkDork Add us on Instagram:  https://www.instagram.com/jlsselby https://www.instagram.com/gpstephan https://www.instagram.com/alex_nava_p... Official Clips Channel: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCeBQ... For sponsorships or business inquiries reach out to: [e-mail] GET YOUR FREE STOCK WORTH UP TO $1000 ON PUBLIC & SEE MY STOCK TRADES - USE CODE GRAHAM: http://www.public.com/graham  MY NEW COFFEE IS NOW FOR SALE: http://www.bankrollcoffee.com/ The Equipment used: https://tinyurl.com/y78py5g2 Audio Equipment Used In Podcast: Rode NT1, Rodecaster Pro The YouTube Creator Academy:   Learn EXACTLY how to get your first 1000 subscribers on YouTube, rank videos on the front page of searches, grow your following, and turn that into another income source: https://bit.ly/2STxofv $100 OFF WITH CODE 100OFF  For Podcast Inquiries, please contact [e-mail] *Some of the links and other products that appear on this video are from companies which Graham Stephan will earn an affiliate commission or referral bonus. Graham Stephan is part of an affiliate network and receives compensation for sending traffic to partner sites. The content in this video is accurate as of the posting date. Some of the offers mentioned may no longer be available. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

I'm Noah Kagan, and welcome back to the Ice Coffee Hour with Jack and Graham. And I think your show in the past 100 episodes have done about a quarter million dollars. That's really good. That's a fantastic guess. $214,535. That was pretty good. Yeah, not the closest, but reasonable. So, well, thank you so much for coming on.

Jack has actually prepared his own intro for this. Yeah, we're going to start this off. Guns of blazing, okay? Iddlenetworth.com says you're worth $190 billion. Oh, yeah. With a billion dollars. Okay. Techie gamer says you're worth 45 million with an M.

And digital net worth says you're worth three million. Ouch. Yeah. Can you clear up all of this confusion? Because we have these websites that say people are worth these amounts. They have no idea what they're talking about. Or do they? Yeah.

I think what's interesting about net worth is there's different types of entrepreneurs. So there's cash worth entrepreneurs. Like how much cash you actually have in the bank? How much liquid money? And so I think my personal bank has like 1.5. million cash right now. I can show you guys that I'm a problem. But the net worth is challenging on the other side of that is if you have a company, you have equity. So we have absumo.com. This year we'll do about 100 to 120 million. So how much is that company worth? Quarter billion,

billion, and then I own about 60%. Ballpark net worth. I look at it mostly from cash. I actually don't look at the equity. Probably somewhere around 25 million. 25 million. Not bad. Not bad at all. Not too shabby. Yeah, not including the equity of absumo. Got it. Not including the equity of Absolutely. And not including mortgages. So I, when I do my net worth, it's like, how much is my house worth? How much is my mortgage? And then that's what my net worth is. And you just assume the company could be worth nothing and anything extra as a bonus, I take it?

It's a smart way to think about it. Yeah. Yeah. You can't pay bills with effort. Well, you're clearly doing extremely well. Let's go through your story and figure out how you got to this point. And then we can talk about that $25 million net worth, what that's comprised of and everything. Yeah.

And a bit. Sure. Where do you want to start? Well, first of all, I love. Love your videos where you go up to people's houses, just random people knock on their door and say, how did you make a million dollars? And it seems like from those videos,

you've always been an entrepreneur. Is that always been the case since the very beginning? Yeah, I was always trying to like finagle. You know, in the Yiddish and finagle. It's a great word. Yeah. I don't know, like go to Costco and buy the candy bars and then take them to school and try to arbitrage on them.

You did that. Yeah. You're one of those kids. It's kind of done that. Like, it's just like intrinsically in me. Like, I've loved money. And now I'm just trying to enjoy it, which is actually kind of a hard.

thing. Because when you make it, it's fun to make, but then actually spend it and enjoy it as a, it's a process. Yeah. That's interesting. How much were you making selling candy? Because kids in my school were getting trouble for doing that. I never understood that. They'd come and like, you'd buy a Snickers bar for $2 that they bought for like a dollar. I thought it was a good business. They were helping everyone out. Like they took initiative and they were the ones like getting their candy taken away or like, you know, call their parents and be like, now they're selling candy illegally at school. Like, what's the, well, it's kind of interesting to think about what's the best way to parent. Like, I don't have any kids yet or anything like that. But like, how do you

encourage people on your team or kids to actually go and like push the boundaries and like break rules? Yeah. Because a lot of what we're taught is like how to follow. So it's like how do you untrain or unlearn those things. So how much I make selling candy? I don't know. Not a lot. Okay. The first I started making was in college. So when I started first just like starting as many businesses I could. What type of business did you start in college? Um, I started to say called come get used. What? Uh, is a book exchange for used books? Come get used. Yeah. Some get used. I'm thinking like. Okay, could have gone different ways.

Okay, sure. I was just like starting a lot of things and it was so cheap to start. So I started a site called Everspeed.com. I still have it. It's an import car model website. Okay. So like I just like import cars

and then like these hot models. I did a site called college up.org, which was Craigslist for college students. Did ninja card.com, discount card for students. So I basically was just like starting as many different businesses that I thought was like interesting.

Were you good student? Yeah. Yeah. You were. I went to Berkeley. I don't know how I got in. Yeah. I think I'm like, I've always thought of myself as like a B plus or A minus.

Like I'm doing just enough to get the good grade, but I don't have to do all the work. You finagled. Finagle. Yeah, you got your way in there. But yeah, actually, until my senior year, I didn't realize I could like not go to class and still get good grades. Interesting. And what about after college? Didn't you finagle your way into a pretty big company now?

Yeah. So the interesting thing was in college, I didn't know how people figured out what to do for a living. Like, how did you guys figure out your careers? I just kind of fell out. For me, it was real estate. But I just knew I want to. I wanted to do something for myself. Yeah?

Yeah. I was just in love with YouTube growing up. I watched it a ton. So my whole generation did. And that was like the dream. I didn't think I would ever be in the space, but it was the dream and somehow it just kind of it happened. Jack sent me seven emails in a row.

Yeah. Without a response, just hey, I want to come work for you. It was over like the course of like four months. Yeah. Four to five months is just like, I really should. Yeah. They worked though, right? What made you keep going?

I just wanted it. I don't know. Like I was at this point where I tried so many different careers, right? Careers. I was doing like drop shipping. I created all these different ideas, these plans with my friends, all these businesses. Nothing was working now. Stock trading too. Stock trading. I did penny stock trade. Like everything. Nothing worked. And this, I haven't tried it yet. And I continually wanted it. And I persisted. And I just kept going. And I just kept going. And then he gave me some tasks and I worked as hard as I could at it. I think it's fascinating to find the things we don't quit on. Like what are the things you're just like, I'm going to keep going forever. It's a different kind of want, right? Like you can want things like, oh, I want to make money doing penny stock trading or whatever, but maybe you don't really want it. You're attracted to something else, like the money you could get from it.

But with this, it's like it's a dream to not necessarily make money from YouTube, but to do YouTube and to like be in production and stuff like that. So I guess I want it for different reasons and I wanted it more. Good for you, man. So thank you. Yeah, I wonder what's the difference between you and most other people that like have a dream of being a YouTuber or a dream of being a real estate or dream of being in tech or whatever it is. And then like the reality of like, oh, this is actually kind of hard.

Yeah. So that's something that I didn't think people think about it. Like what I was encouraged people is like, what are you waking up and doing for free? And then how do you make that your career? Yeah. So for me, it's like I've been blogging. And I feel like a dinosaur sitting. I've been blogging.

I've been like, okay dork.com. My blog, it's like been there since the beginning of the internet. But like it's been there for a while. I love creating content. And like what I do at absuma.com, I promote. We promote products. Like I just go and find cool products. We get a deal.

And we like deals. And then we just promote them. And then somehow we make money doing that. Yeah. So yeah, just all along. I think it's really interesting to find the persistence.

Like our domain name, sumo.com, it was seven years to get that name. Seven years to get your domain name. Yeah. We're taking an app sumo. We own sumo. com as well.

Wow. Yeah, a million and a half dollars. How'd you get that? One of a million dollars. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah. It was pretty crazy. Well, first I found out who it was. It was like one of the, not the wealthiest, but a wealthy person in India. He owns a Hindustin Times.

The third largest newspaper in India. Okay. And then I basically called, emailed, message, slacked, they didn't select, Skyped for seven years. And then finally it was like, all right, well, how do I make an amount where they're just going to be like, okay, we have to take this offer? And so at a million and a half a half a million up front. And then the other million was over five years. So we're still paying it off. $16,000.

How important was that to get sumo.com? Because I feel like now for domain names, it's not that important. I regret it. Really? Yeah. I'd rather have a million and a half dollars. Yeah. But you can't live in a domain name.

You can live in a house for a number. That's true. So yeah, but I think it's interesting what do we persist on? What do you like continually like, you're like, all right, I'm just going to go forward. That's some good advice. Find what you do for every day.

Well, that's why I feel like people need work experience. You're talking about like how do people in college know what they want to do? I think that's fucking tough. But it's difficult going from high school where you're told what to do and what order and like get this task done into college where it's like more of the same

but kind of like on your own a little bit more without that work experience in between. I think people should have mandatory two years. You've got to get a job. Anything. Yeah, I would love that. What kind of job? Anything.

But just like, hey, you got to work. You gotta get two years work experience. You could figure out whatever you want to do. I think within those two years, you'll find out very quickly what sort of career you want to go into or like what you maybe gravitate more towards than something else. Yeah, I think this kids like, not kids, but if you're in like your 20, I'm 40. Like, so I'm like a dinosaur at this internet, right? I've been doing it for a while. But I think when you're young, it's like start a podcast.

Put yourself out there. Go find interesting people to be around. Like when I was in my 20s, I worked at Intel. I had no advantage. I didn't have a network. I didn't have like any. audience or any sorts, but I just started hosting things. I have a thing called Community Next, Entrepreneur 27. It was just like events. It was just like bringing people together. And like that is

how I built up a network where like Tim Ferriss and I are talking or Rameet Sethi who is famous and like Peter Tiel, like Peters from Facebook, but like Max Levchin, James Hong from Hot So all these people was just like, all right, how do I be around people to see like what's the buffet of business that I like? Who can I be around? And then how can I use that to figure out my career? Yeah. Because I was like, I don't know, I think my 20s, it was just like a lot of different like trying to find out who I am. Didn't you get a, what job did he get right outside of, uh, college? My first job out of college was at Intel.

Okay. And so that sucked. That's horrible. How long were you making? Yeah. Uh, my first paying job was $50,000 a year with health benefits. And how long ago was that? 2004.

So it was a pretty solid, like, salary. That was pretty good. I lived in my mom's house. So it's not bad. Now it's like a cool thing. Now, like your guys generation loves living in your parents' house. It's frugal. Yeah.

You're saving money. I didn't really start renting until I was 30. Right. So I lived on floors for a year. Okay. Uh, when I was making $100,000. I just like lived in my aunt's basement like I was just trying to live as cheap as possible so I could do what I really wanted nice But yeah so as Intel not doing shit but running all these companies trying to do events and try to network and blog and

That and I just cold emailed Facebook My resume yeah, I was like this if there if I'm gonna go start a company, but if there's one company to go work at This is the one I'm really excited about and so I always think that for especially people earlier in the career It's like what are you already doing all day like what are you working on like are you on TikTok all day? Like you're watching YouTube I don't try to find a job doing anything you already. So for me, it was like, at that time, Facebook was so cool. I was like, oh, maybe I can try to get a job here, or I'm just going to start my own company. What year was that?

2005. Wow, the very beginning. Yeah, super early. So, like, Dustin's there. Mark's obviously there. Peter Teal's around, Sean Parker. Yeah. Oh, my gosh.

It was insane. So, yeah, I submitted in my resume. I think one of things when you're applying for jobs is that the bar is so low. Everyone sucks so much. Like, the bar is just so low to be excellent nowadays. You really don't have to do anything. You can do so little. So for me, like, I brought mockups of Facebook.

I'm like, okay, here's your site. Here's what I think you should do. I brought all these examples of work I was doing. And even today, like, when people are planning jobs at Absumo, I'm like, did you make a website? Did you do anything creative? Did you follow? Like, no one follows up. Just do a follow up even.

What did you study at Berkeley? So I did see us for two years and then I dropped out because I wasn't smart enough. I was like in these classes and I was like, I could probably do a better job in managing these people, right? So let me go and like figure out just understand it enough. Then I ended up majoring in like business economics. But a lot of the companies that you were running while in college, like you said, You had like seven or so of them.

That would require to create those companies because they're all digital, like some CS knowledge. You did that all yourself? Yeah, I would just hack. It was just super hacky. I mean, I would hack like WordPress or hack PHP. Also, did any of those businesses that you ran in college, did they go anywhere or were they profitable at the time? So one of the ones that I think it's trying to look for like what's the like what's

the market inefficiency. So if you're doing like advertising, like where is the market that no one else is advertising on? Like TikTok ads. It's pretty early. Yeah. And people are starting to do it. So I think that's an advantage.

For me, I was a C. and there's all these freshmen there. I was like, huh, there's all these freshmen that want internships and jobs. So maybe I could actually just like hire them for cheap and then go to local stores and be like, hey, we'll do your marketing to the college. And I use these like, you know, freshmen. So that actually made a few thousand. But when I think about in businesses, like, you just got to be in the ocean. You got to be in the game, right? You got to be on the surfboard in the ocean. And so for me, by doing that, that led to us creating Ninja card. And ninja card was just like, one of the guys named Kenny was like, hey, why don't we do a discount card? Instead of like going and

pitching these businesses, we have a discount card. And so because, we were already active doing that, we led to the discount card, and that ended up doing $50,000 the first year. What was the process like for interviewing at Facebook? Submitter resume cold. Yeah. So I just saw, like, on the job description, sent in the resume, uh, had one recruiter phone call, second recruiter phone call, and then I came into the office. Uh, the interview there was with Dustin Moskowitz, founder of Asana, co-founder of Facebook. Uh, my boss, Doug Hirsch, cook, founder of good RX. Um, and then one or two other people. And it was just showing mockups, talking about Facebook. Like, what do you want to work on? It was just like, hey, you're going

be a product manager. I still don't know what that means. We have a few at App Sumo. Yeah. I'm like, what do you guys do here? But they're great. And then they're like, you want to come build products at Facebook. There wasn't much more to that. It was just like chat with them, showed it what I already did? I think one of the things when you're hiring someone, it's, what is what is your confidence level of how likely they're going to be able to do the job? So by showing mockups, by showing I've already built a lot of college businesses, by showing like I'm very active doing this stuff. The confidence for them is like, all right, well, you can come and build stuff at the website. The ride that steals the spotlight every time it hits the road. That's the

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Because I take it then they didn't have that much money. No. Yeah. No, it wasn't profitable. I think they were just closing the series A with Excel. Two things were really interesting about that. They offered me, they're like, do you want $60,000 and more equity or $65,000 and less equity?

I don't even want pay. I just want equity. Like, I would have worked for free and just more equity. Because I was like, this is going to be gigantic. What was their evaluation? At that time is about, they raised $20 on $100, so around $100 million, give or take. Wow. Holy cow.

So it was pretty. And then what was really crazy, there's a lot of crazy moments about working there. First crazy moment was like my first day. the job. I walk in and Doug Hirsch, who is my boss, is walking out. And I'm like, hey, is there orientation? Like, what happens? Like, I was just at Intel where it's like, sexual harassment training and like this training and like this training. I walk in and Doug walks out. And then Mark comes up to me. He's like, I just fired your boss today. Grab a laptop, get a desk. I'll see you in a bit. Now is day one. So that was pretty well. Why do you get fired?

He wanted to sell. So the other part of those are interesting. And Mark, and think about you guys are, how old are you guys? 32. 32. 32. Yeah. 23. Looking good. Thank you. Good. Good 23. Try. And moisturize. You got a moisture. Okay.

If there's one thing people take away from this episode, you know, dude, you know I talk about sunblock and moisturizer and collagen pills.

I might want to start what's collagen? Collagen is supposedly, it's debatable if it really works, but it's a pill that supposedly helps with the skin restoration. Dude, by the way.

And every day's moisture. I'm getting wrinkles. Are you getting facials? Honor, are you getting facials? No. No. Every quarter.

Every quarter, dude. What even is that? It's like girls are doing this stuff and guys now, it's not to not be manly or not, it's like if I can look good and not have to do that much work to get there, then I'm going to do it for something.

What is a facial? So, facial, they come in and they just put all this crap on your face, they massage your face, and then, like, they peel. Feels incredible, by the way. Okay. Oh, it was that day that you missed out on where I took everyone for massages and facials. And that was, I've never had that done before. It was incredible.

Once a quarter? Yeah. It's expensive. Yeah, it was expensive. How much is it worth to look good? Priceless. It was great. Yeah.

So, but anyways, what I, the point I was making. I can earlier, what I give Mark credit for, and he is very gifted. And I've worked, like, I've got to meet Bill Gates. I've got to meet Steve Jobs. I've got to meet some of these, like, Titans. He came that, I think it was that day or a few days later. And he was like, I could sell the company right now for a billion dollars. Now imagine for you, 24 and you have an offer to, you have an opportunity to make like,

600, $700 million cash. And he's like, I'm not selling. He was 24? Yeah. And I was just like, dude, that is some big balls. That's some real big conviction. And I think in business a lot, it's like, where's your conviction? And I admired his conviction.

And I think as an employee there, I was just like, this guy's serious. And that was inspiring. And he's like, I want to take over the world. I want to connect the world. I think what we're doing is like, like, it's money. Let's see how far we can go. That was amazing. How long did you work there for?

I worked there for about a pregnancy, so nine months. And then I got fired. What happened? And what happened to your equity? Man. I definitely, I would have liked it. I didn't invest. So how it works in Silicon Valley is that, and this happens.

This is how we do it at appasumo.com as well is you get equity, let's say some percent. And you get your. percent over four years, but you don't get the first quarter of it until after a year. It's called a cliff. So this is like very standard like tech company terms. Now some of them are doing like five or six year terms, which is interesting. So I had to stay there for a year to actually get the first quarter of it. And at the time, I had 0.1% of the company. So whatever the company's worth now, I'd have 0.1%. So that's where I think the 190 million, it's not billion, uh, comes from. Wow. So I got fired nine months and then I tried to fight for it. I went to, um, a few of the

different people and I was like, I didn't fight aggressively because part of me also thought, like, I didn't really earn it because I wasn't there for a year. Yeah. But I worked like, that's all, I didn't do anything else. It's probably how you are with Graham and this stuff. Like I didn't do anything but Facebook. I lived with Facebook people. Like that's all we did was work at Facebook. How'd you get fired?

Numerous different reasons. And it's interesting now being on the other side of the table where I've, you know, unfortunately let go of people and I've hired a bunch of people. I think when in the beginning I got promoted. I even got raises because I was excellent in the chaos. And I was excellent when it's like, hey, there's 30 people just figure stuff out. And I wasn't, I didn't want to, nor was I skilled enough to scale with the business. Like they got to, it was about 150 people.

So 5x growth. I was number 30 and 150. And so I, there's people that I'm assuming that are growing with our company from when it was 4 million to now, hopefully this year we'll do 100 million plus. And some people are able to scale really well

and some are not. So I think that was number one. Number two, kind of what you were saying, your dream was to be your own boss. My dream was to be my own boss and you can't fight that reality. And so I think what a lot of people should do is document their moments.

I think Bing Gordon calls it artifacts. Document where you're at in your journey where you're at now and what's your fantasy. And my fantasy, like I've looked at my own. journals. It was like, be your own boss. I can't believe I have to go to meetings. I hate these meetings. And it's like, huh. So as much as I was disappointed, I knew I had a dream of something else. And third, I thought the company could do better press. And so I did, I put out some press early.

I was at Coachella, which I've never gone back. But I was at Coachella, I hit up TechCrunch. And I was like, hey, we're launching this new feature. And I think you should write about it because we weren't doing any press. And I thought I was like doing a good thing for the company. They launched it early. I told the executive team. And then I think that triggered kind of the final goodbye. Wow. Got it. Okay. Working hand in hand with Mark Zuckerberg, what are some good employer fundamentals or principles

that you learned that most people on that level should be implementing or smaller levels? There's a lot. I think number one is have a singular goal you're going towards. And we've implemented that our company over the past 12 years and even my previous company. So it's like, what is your singular one goal in the business? Is it subscribers? Is it revenue?

Is it a number of customers? Whatever that is and just have that singular and have the company be very clear what that is. For our channel. And I don't know for you, but at absentee.com, it's 120 million GMV is our goal for this year. That's it. One goal. And so Mark was very clearly singular focus on one number.

And I just thought that made it very helpful about decisions. It's like, does it help us get there or not? So that was one thing that was just like exceptional. Second thing, his vision was just really big. Sounds like a penis thing. But like he just had like a huge vision. He was like, we're thinking about this, it was like very small. My space was bigger than us at the time.

But from a leadership perspective, he was like, we are going to connect the entire world. And we're going to be a tool booth for the whole internet. I can imagine like some 24 year old telling you like a giant vision like that. That was impressive. You know, versus some of us like, hey, I'm going to try to make hundred bucks a month. Right. And so I thought that was amazing for him to think so much bigger. And I'd say lastly, I've only started doing it more later in my career as a leader at Absumo,

which is how are you really surrounding yourself with great people? And I think we hear this shit. But until you're around excellence, you're like, dude. And he had excellence. Like our support people were PhDs from Harvard. So that level of like impressiveness, like Aaron City, he designed like Napster. Sean Parker. I mean, these guys are like top-notch. The guys who created Quora.

Like, it's a lot of really impressive. And that was like him being able to surround himself with that was really impressive. Why do you think MySpace failed? Because I remember MySpace being so much bigger than Facebook, looking at Facebook and I like MySpace because I can customize it. It took me a while, probably until 2006 or 7 until I really started going on Facebook.

Where do you think MySpace went wrong? Do you think TikTok can fail? They'd have to really screw up. I thought... fault yeah it would they would really have to mess up i think snapchat when they did the redesign i moved over to instagram within 24 hours i just completely abandoned my snapchat when they did that first redesign i think it's 2017 i left yeah it's interesting to think about um why people are finicky or why people move and leave things and then like what can you learn so like at absumo we're starting to study we haven't done a deeper dive

but like why did groupon stop working because like our business it was kind of similar and like we're Groupon for software. And so it's like, well, what happened there? Like now Groupon's like all nail salons and like things like that. At the time with MySpace, I think what the difference was is that they were run by a corporate company. So they got bought by Intermix. Mark was running, he's basically dictator. And he's like, we're going to do whatever it takes to grow. And then I think with MySpace because they're owned by a company was like, how do we make money? And so a lot of their decisions were like, how do we do ads? And remember, MySpace was like had all this shit. Marks was like, how do we get as many people as possible using this site? So it was just a focus.

I missed the poke feature on Facebook. That was a good one on Facebook. That. That's a was so fun. Is it gone? I don't even know what that is. I think I don't know. Yeah, Jack doesn't know what it is. I mean, it's gone. I never used Facebook this. Yeah. So really? You grew up in an error that wasn't allowed to have it. Growing up. What were you allowed to have? Uh, Myspace. Like, like, I'm like, oh, me, a Nintendo. I was able to have that DS, Pokemon. Oh, wow. Yeah. Dude, that's crazy. It's fun. I like it. But Facebook used to have a feature where you could poke each other. Okay.

And it would just be a little nudge, like a little like. And it would show on the side of the screen to just be like, you know, Jack, poked you. And it's just you poke back.

It's like a little acknowledgement of like, hey, thinking about you. So it's like a message like, hey, but there's no text. There's no text.

It's just like an emoji. It just shows that they poked you and then what you do is poke them back. You have to be online to receive the poke? Or can you, no. You can't poke people that are offline? Yeah,

you can poke them. you log back on. The cool thing, though, when you worked there back in the day, you could see everyone who viewed your profile. So you could do poking and all this kind of stuff and then see you actually come and sees that. There's some really interesting things about when you work at TikTok or YouTube. I think now with privacy stuff, it's probably more restricted.

What's something that you learned for the employer-employee relationship from Mark? Was he friends with a lot of his employees? Was he distant? Was he not emotional with them? Like the whole higher, slow, fire, quick thing? Oh, that's interesting. I think one of the things that Mark did that I've really admired in terms of relationship is like, what's your standard? Like, what is the standard your setting of excellence at the company?

And I remember we'd work on things. Like, I help build Facebook mobile. I help build Facebook ads. I help the Facebook status. And we would work on something for like a month and then show it to him. He's like, I don't think it's good enough. Here's what I would think you should change on it. And you're just like when he was right.

Yeah, you spent all that time on it. Yeah. And it was just impressive to have someone around you that's just like expecting a lot more and expecting better. What if he's wrong? What if you disagree with them? And he's like, no, I don't like that. There was a lot of disagreements. I think he would, he trusted an inner circle.

There's a few different people. Aaron Siddig, Saleo became there. Boz. It's crazy now that people who are like, my peers are now, like, see, like, I guess boss's CTO or Chris Cox's chief product officer, Naomi. He had an inner circle that he would listen to. But I think I always felt, I think this is part of my story, my narrative, or maybe that's what I tell myself is like, I was from Berkeley.

They're all Harvard. I always felt like a little bit of an outcast. I wasn't really accepted. What about for you in your business? How do you treat that employee, employer, relationship. Dude, I'll tell you a story two weeks ago. We had a team barbecue. And I heard there was someone we're letting go on Monday and this is on a Friday. And they came up to me and they're like, hey, how's it going? And I haven't met them in person before. And you know, with the whole Zoom stuff.

And so I felt really, I felt conflicted. Yeah. Because like it's a person, I don't want to let, if we don't have let anyone go, that'd be great. But it's also, it's weird. And then on Monday that they did let go for performance reasons. And I was just like, like, did I, I don't know if I even wanted to meet her, right? Because that was unfortunate. So I think it's challenging. I used to have friends at Absumo that aren't my friends anymore. Like they were friends, brought them into the company, and now they don't talk to me because it didn't work out. It's a weird mix. And also there's things where like the loyalty, like if someone else, a lot of times one of the questions I come back to at Absumo is like, if we brought on the world's greatest CEO, what would they be doing?

And I think that's a great question. Like if we were on the world's greatest YouTube or a world's greatest producer or world's greatest like mechanic, how would they behave? And it's tough because there's some people in the company that I think we give the benefit of the doubt. We give a lot more to because of loyalty and friendship, which I guess I'd rather lean, little bit more towards that. Yeah. Yeah, I think our line, at least here, is so blurred that there is, like, almost no differentiation between, like, friendship and work at this point.

For me, it's always been, like, friendship first, work second. Like, you have to be, like, really good friends with someone to work with them. Because for us, it's just, like, us three. And you have to, like, like, like, like, like, like, spend this much time together. 100%. Have you fired him? Have you fired anyone you worked with? No.

But, I mean, it's just, like, you're looking at them. Yeah. We get people on the team a little bit and we've let go of those people. I know I have. And like you've outsourced certain things to other people, but you've never like really worked hand in hand. Yeah. But those people in had to fire them.

The only actual like people on the team really Jack and Alex in terms of like full time. That's it. I have two contractors. But full time people. There's a guy Steve Blank. He's like super old school Silicon Valley. He wrote four steps to the epiphany about how to do product development. He sold multiple companies.

He's worth like hundreds of millions of dollars. And he told me once, he's like, I've met my founder three times. The day we started the company, the day we went public and the day we sold it. And that's the three times I've like actually hung out with them. I was like, I don't know. I don't know if there's a right or wrong way. I do think your point's great, which is like, if you're going to spend a lot of time with people, you should find people you really like.

And I think it's just always a sign in a company. Like, I didn't create a company so I could be around people I hate. So it's tough. It does make work more enjoyable when you do like the people you work with. But sometimes I will say, and I'm sure we're all aware of this, that we let our friendship affect our business decisions. No, that's true. Yeah, we do.

What are something where, yeah. Is there example between you and I? Yeah, yeah, certainly. Like, Graham wanted to be a franchisee for a chicken restaurant. Yes. Fried chicken. Yeah, hot chicken. So good.

Yeah. And this was someone that we had on the podcast. And I told Graham, I'm like, you know, you have like a lot of external benefits. Let's say we bring on a person on the podcast. A lot of the times it will disproportionately benefit Graham for stuff or for the benefit that is realized outside of the monitoring. gain from the podcast and, you know, social growth or whatever. So I brought this up to Graham, right?

Which might be a little bit of a nuanced thing to bring up, but I felt like, you know, I had been thinking about it for a while. And then Graham said that he was considering opening up a franchise with someone that we had on the podcast. And I connected the dots and I'm like, well, we had him on the podcast that like then gave Graham. I thought that it was A cause B. Like we had him on the podcast and then he extended the invitation for Graham to open

up a franchise. And I brought it up to him. And then Graham was like, no, no, no, it's not that. It's not that. you know and he said if you are uncomfortable with me doing this let me know and I won't even do it oh yeah extreme loyalty right like where if I felt like for example I had been taken advantage of and I said it to Graham then Graham said he wouldn't even consider opening up the franchise yeah yeah I explained to Jack that the benefit was really me as the brand of Graham stephen and not so much

the podcast but it but it's the audience that I built on the main channel that's really led to all of this and the podcast happened to be a way that it was a great introduction But in the big picture, I told Jack, there's nothing that would ruin our relationship and our friendship. And so I would lose a lot of money or miss out on that just to keep that friendship intact. Because I think in the bigger picture, that's way more important than anything else. And of course, when I totally understood when we made it clear that like, you know, it doesn't have anything to do with the ice coffee. I was like, no, I respect that. And I see you as a good person, a great friend.

You know, of course, do your own thing. But Jack's brought up other opportunities for him that he's brought like, hey, Graham, you might feel kind of. easy about this. I'd like to do it, but if you're against it, for personal reason, I won't do it. Yeah. And so it's really weird. It's strange. We never, we never like step on each other's toes or anything. Like, we always bring it up to make sure the other person's okay with it on a friendship level. Yeah. And obviously, sometimes we're a little uncomfortable, but we always give the green light. Or I would say like, so far. There's going to be, there's going to be some point. There's going to be one time. And that's when it's all going to, I don't want to jinx it,

but I know there's going to be one point. How is it for you being solo versus now having people that you consider for opinions? I trust Jack and Alex a lot. But a lot of time I'm, I kind of know the direction I want to take it. And if I'm split in the middle, I'll ask Jack and I'll ask Alex. And usually between the two, we come up with what I would consider to be the right decision. Or sometimes I'm so in it that I can't see the clear picture. But Jack can because he spent no time on it.

Same with Alex. I think best friends talk shit. Like real best friends are like, yeah. I mean, we totally. Yeah. Like you're like, hey, I don't think this is good for you. I'm like, you're a real best friend. Like I was hanging out with my buddy, Tyne in yesterday.

And he's like, I was talking about my ex. And he's like, this is really bad. He's like, it's just bad. And I was like, I know, but he's like, no, no, it's bad. I'm just telling you know. And I was like, thank you. Yeah. And it's best friend.

They did not tell you always the nice things, but probably the thing I think is best for you. We get a lot of hate on this podcast because sometimes I can be very critical of Graham and people always say, oh, why is the assistant hating on the CEO of the company or whatever? And I'm like, well, first of all, if I was just a, Yes, man, A, that would be terrible for the brand, and B, that would prove that Graham and I weren't even friends from the start. You know what I mean? Like, friends aren't necessarily yes men of each other, at least true friends.

And also, what type of business is built off of just a bunch of yesmen? Dude, people, at Absumo, no one does what I like. Almost all the time, they're like, I want to do this. I was like, can we do it? I want. They're like, no. I'm like, okay, yeah, a better idea than me. And I agree.

Yeah. But people think that. It's kind of an external perception. But the thing is, what if you did have the better idea? And then they're going and saying, no, it's not. but you have the better, but you have the better direction. This reminds me of Mark. Imagine of Marks, I was like, no, no, I'm not going to do that.

I'm going to do this instead. Mark's just sitting there twiddling something. All right, I guess I have a good idea. I was just thinking, maybe we should have a day where we only hang out with yes people. That'd be kind of nice. It'd be kind of nice. You'd be kind of nice, but I don't think you'd get, at least in business, the best, yeah, the best outcomes.

Yeah. Like we had a, there's this woman alone who I work with VP of Operation. So she's like the day-to-day CEO. She runs it. And we had this meeting. about how many products should be on App Sumo. Should we have like very curated like 10 products, 100 or like 10,000? And it was, I really admired that she fought.

I like to see in business who has conviction. Like who cares? Because sometimes I'm like at Facebook, they'd argue for hours about the topography and which font to use on a page. And I was like, I don't care. I don't care. Whatever the customer and user wants to use, let them use. So it's just nice to see where like how do people fight in productive ways?

Yeah, Jack really wants me to outsource. He is constantly, just outsource out. Like what? Gosh, you want to take this over? Research. Scripting. I did convince him finally to outsource editing, which was a super long thing that we had. It was doing it before.

Me. You enjoyed doing it? Yes, I did. I would say, but it took up a lot of time. So even though I enjoyed it, for me it was a great way to zone out because I'd finish a video and then I just clear my head for five hours or three hours and just edit. And then it's done. And then that reward that you get afterward, then I'm clearheaded afterwards because I can't go from like filming, planning, planning.

I need a break in between. And so editing was a great way to do that. But it took up a lot of time. I think that's the thing that people miss in business scaling. Like scaling to a like we have 140 people, 100 million dollars. It's like find also the thing you also enjoy doing and don't give that up. Because I have a buddy's a health coach, my body tutor.com. And he just likes, he loves coaching people of health.

And he wants to scale, but he's like, I also just like coaching. Yeah. And so I think it is finding that balance of like, if you like editing, stick with it. I think that's it well give you generic advice like scale everything not that it's bad But just don't give up the reason you started doing it or the pieces that you like well I will say when Alex took over he's gotten really good at it and I've had a lot more time So now I'm constantly about a week ahead on the main channel whereas before I'd be like day by day What do you do at that time now? I don't know where the time goes

Honestly I would say spend more time playing no honestly I find myself no more productive than I was when I was doing everything myself I'm being serious there was a point where I was posting six videos a week doing planning, filming, and editing everything myself before Jack came on. That's not quite true, but... Well, no, when I was doing three videos...

I would edit the phone calls. We stopped doing the phone calls. So it was after that? Yeah, it was after that. What made you give him a chance? I was really busy one day, and I saw him send me an email, and it was at the very top of my inbox

during a time where someone dropped out, so I had this Facebook group called the Real Estate Millionaire and Mastermind. and part of the way to get in that group is you have to submit your email address. And I wanted people's emails so eventually I could use that email list to either market to or follow up with or basically have. And we would get thousands of emails. And you would have to go like hand by hand or like, you know, by hand going and copying,

pasting all the email address and put them in a spreadsheet. And it was a lot of work. So I tried hiring so many people like $20 an hour, you know, whatever it might be. just go through, like you could watch a movie and just copy and paste these email addresses. No one would do it. I'd ask people to do it. They'd say, oh yeah, no problem. Oh yeah, no, I didn't have time.

And meanwhile, they're building up. So I would do it myself. And during a time where someone just dropped out, Jack was the top email saying, I'm willing to do anything. And so I call them, I'm like, hey, if you want to do anything, here's this thing. It's really boring. But if you want to do it, just feel free to do it. You don't have to. But like, if you want to, feel free.

And he finished the whole thing. Like overnight. For free? Yeah. And I was like, wow. You offered to pay me. Yeah. I did not accept that.

Yeah. And it was so good that I'm like, wow. And I felt bad he spent like, how long was that? You know? I was way more than eight hours. Maybe 10 hours, whatever it is. So I felt so bad he spent like all this time. I'm like, how about this?

I'll take you out for dinner. And so he drives down. I take him out for a hamburger. I don't even think I ate. You didn't eat. Yeah. I wanted to save the money. This is in my like extreme frugal days.

Like, I'd rather. Just take Jack out and me does not eat. I felt bad because I was like, I'm taking this guy's money. Yeah, that's fine. But we hit it off. And then I was like, we could continue doing this and come up with different ideas. Or I wanted to do an iteration of the Dave Ramsey show. And I called it the Graham Steffen show where I take phone calls.

And I said to Jack, how about this? I'll post on Instagram. You go through these emails and you pick the three calls that you think might be the best. And Jack started doing that. I mean, it's the one percent. It's the one percent. Just like you did the work. I mean, Jeremy on our show.

he didn't hear her Instagram for a few weeks. Mitchell volunteered at a charity ride. But I will say, if Jack didn't send that email at the right time when I needed the help, like if Jack sent me that maybe two weeks prior, even if it was at the top of my inbox, I just wouldn't have needed the help and I probably would have looked at it. That's nice, but you know, you forget. The power of asking is so underutilized. The fact that you just kept asking, but I guess there's also a balance of asking and being creepy.

Oh yeah. Where's the line where it's like, I'm sure you get this all. Like, hey, I want to help. Hey, it's like, but it's interesting which ones make it through the noise. There's more to life than finding the perfect car. But finding the perfect car can help you get the most out of life. Like the SUV that handles everything from drop off to off road. And the car that hauls groceries and hockey teams.

Or the van that's gone from just practical to practically family. Whatever you want, wherever you're going. Start your search at AutoTrader.ca Canada's car marketplace. Yeah, I think some of that is also just lucky timing. And I do think there was an element where he asked

enough to get at the right point where I really needed the help. And you were in the group. You probably saw that he struggled with it. No, I wasn't in the group. No, he just said random emails. Yeah, I just watched the bunch of fans. Like I watched it. Yeah, I watched it. Yeah, it's random emails. Good for you. Thank you.

Thank you. Yeah, we actually went through those emails in one of the episodes. Terribly embarrassing. Oh, really? I was like desperate, pretty much. They were love letters. Yeah, they were love letters.

Like long ones? Kind of. There were a couple of long ones. Yeah. Some of them were short. Some of them were just bumps, you know. Yeah, they varied between like paragraphs and like, just following up to make sure you saw the above email, paragraph.

Just let me know if anything you need, paragraph. Yeah. Be back and forth. A lot of the stuff, though, a driving factor of sending those emails was just like the, the ebb and flow of just like my life at the time because I was working at a restaurant. I hated it and I was a full-time student at the time as well. And I wasn't a huge fan of that either. So with all of this time when I was mindlessly like busing dishes at the restaurant, I was always thinking, what can I be doing? And then I would just like build it up,

build it up, build it up. Okay, I have to do this thing with Graham or whatever. And I just send out another email and then, you know, that would expel it for a little bit. And then I'd build up again because I hated doing all that stuff so much and I'd do it again. Yeah. That's great. Thank you. Yeah. Let's talk more about absumo. Yeah. Okay. Absumo journey. This is how you're worth one point. $190 billion or whatever that website said. I think Absumo's probably worth a few hundred million. So I'm worth like 200, 300, I don't know.

Because it's hard to know. It depends if someone would buy it. I don't ever want to sell it. Let's talk about what does Absumo do for those that don't know. Figuring you out. And we're not sponsored, by the way. We're not sponsored. No.

Should we be sponsored? Probably. No. You know what? We believe it or not, we thought about it, but we've never accepted money from any guest. And so, and we don't want to start down that path of like,

Like, you know. Do I have to pay for this? No. Simple is a combination of my career. So I think it's interesting to find all the things you hate, right? All the shit you just like hated doing. Like, I hated working at Intel. I hated corporate.

I didn't like Facebook's like elitism, like these Silicon Valley like douchebags that are like, they think they're so great. We're in Patagonia all the time. I like you don't wear. I mean. I have to Patagon. But it's just like so elite. And they're like, oh, we're so cool.

And like, I don't know. I didn't care for that. Then I worked at Mint.com. Yeah. Yeah, I was one of the first guys there. I thought it was really interesting to find a product that like, okay, I sucked. I did all their marketing, but it was just like they had a great product. This is a great product.

Yeah. I didn't really have to do much. Then I had games, but I was like, I don't play a lot of games. But it was just like a combination of like all the things that didn't work out to finally be like, how do I finally just do the thing I really want to do? And even if it didn't make a lot of money, I'm going to at least be okay because I'll be the customer. And I think that's how people should be thinking about. Like, what's the problem that, like, even our YouTube videos, I watch a lot of them all the time.

I'm like, dude, this is cool. And I'm like, I'm like, proud of myself or I'm like watching it. I'm like disappointed in myself. I'm like, ah, you could have. But it's like, I like, I like doing it. Like what are we going to do on the channel? So I'm assuming what was that? It was like, I love tech.

I love startups. I like this new software that's coming out. Maybe I can just hit these people up and be like, I know you guys need customers. Everyone wants more customers. Can I get a deal on it? And then I'll promote it for you and then we'll split the profit. And that's kind of, and I was able to validate it for about 50 bucks in more or less a weekend. So that's when I'm trying to encourage people.

I have, we've, like, I've helped a lot of people try to start companies. And I think everyone waste too much time and waste too much money. And so I want people to not waste any time, spend just a weekend and see if you can get a few customers, which is what I did with Absumo. Yeah. How does the business work now? How do you acquire customers? How do you make money? And how does the business make money? Yeah. So we have, uh, we have three different revenue streams. We have a, like, Absumo plus membership. 99 bucks a year. You get, uh, we have a community. You get deals on our, you get an extra deal. We have some software you get for free. So it's like Amazon Prime, but for startups and founders.

So that's $99. We have our own original products. So we've created like a MailChimp alternative called SendFox. We created basically, oh, you have SendFox? Yeah, that's us. So all of these products that are mainstream that are expensive, we created alternative one-time payment versions of them. So Tidy Cowell, which is our Cal&Ley alternative. So it's like $20, you get premium version of Cali forever.

So that business unit maybe does like $2 or $3 million this year. And then the bulk of our revenue, we have two sections is our marketplace. So we go out, let's say you create Gramsoft. We go out, and normally you're 20 bucks a month. We go out and negotiate with you. The sales team will find you. Negotiate with you like a $50 for life deal, and then we'll do like a 50-50 rev split.

And then we just share the money in that. Now, why would a company agree to that? Isn't that a lot less money? Or are they making it up with a whole bunch of more volume? So we have that, and then we do have a marketplace listing. So anyone, like if you go to apps human.com slash sell, if you have software, you can go and list it yourself now. And we have to approve it.

And it's software targeted for small business owners. So the question is why would someone do it? This is literally the best deal online for a software creator. So if you think about it, you created software. How would you get customers today? Buy ads. Buy ads. Maybe sponsorships.

Sponsor, the iced coffee hour. Yeah. You know, maybe do your own content, maybe PR, maybe like Google, SEO. Right? All those are cost money, take time and not guaranteed. Absumo, if we do a deal with you, we give you money, guaranteed, because we have an audience. There's free exposure and you get customers now that you can potentially sell things in the future. There is no better way.

way to promote new software than absumo. If there was, then I would stop absumo. So for a creator, it's like there's no money. You get it guaranteed. Plus, we also have, like, we have a group we call Betelings that actually review your product and then help you improve it before we launch it. That's fun. And then we do your marketing. So we have a video team. We have a content team. There's a team that does like the images for you. So we do a lot of times better marketing than the product can do themselves. That's so smart. Yeah. And Mailchimp, I believe, is one of the first ones was it? They were in one of our early bundles. And the thing that's interesting about Sumo from a business model perspective, and this was just totally lucky.

And this is something I try to encourage people is, one, the market for software just grew a lot. Like when I started it 12 years ago, there was like 10. And now there's like hundreds of thousands, maybe not millions, but hundreds of thousands. And then we just got lucky with our business model. So we don't hold inventory. Like we don't have to really have any office. We don't have to anything. And we get the money at front.

And then we pay our partners 30 or 60 days later. So it's a pretty interesting model. Like there's no food cost. There's no anything. We just built up the audience and community that trusts us. How big is your audience in Absumo? It ranges for, month, but a million to three million people will come through apps. So and how we make our money,

there's three channels that are our main drivers. So affiliate marketing is actually a gigantic traffic channel for us, which I wasn't expecting. Facebook ads. So I think we spent about a quarter million to 400,000 a month on ads, Google, Instagram, and then email marketing, which is not really grows the audience, but that's probably about half our revenue comes from our email list. So I love email. Yeah. And then what about for you, do you just pay yourself a salary? Are you, do you take that one dollar so it's really I think how founders pay themselves funded or not funded over the years is really interesting to consider and I was very self-conscious because like my last job um my last company I was made like 150 or so and so when I started up soon I didn't pay I didn't have anything

it was like zero dollars first year 42,000 next year this year my salary is 175,000 that's my base seller and do you like invest it as a normal person uh well so what what's missing though is that If the company has profit, then I get a big chunk of the profit. If there's no profit, then I don't get anything. So for the first like seven years of company, I actually did the analysis. If I would have stayed at Intel, I would have made more money for the first seven years of AppSuma. Interesting. Right?

So I actually plotted my salary. And I did a little bit of like inflation and like a salary adjustment versus my absumo salary got to like 75100. So Intel would have been a great deal. And so I think some people miss out on this. People think entrepreneurship is like how you get rich. Having a good job is actually my stepdad got pretty rich having like a pretty standard engineering job and doing like really safe investing. But the past few years I make seven figures every year. But I don't want to talk about the exact number because I feel bad for the people that work at the company. It's like,

oh, why is he getting rich and I'm not? So I want, and that's actually an interesting question. How do people get rich at companies is that you make more money for the company and the company has to give more money. So we have made many millioners. Not many as relative. We've made millioners that work it up soon. Wow. So it's a, but yeah, I basically, if there's no much. So like this year, my salary got cut in half because we wanted to hire more people. Or that the expected salary the end of the year. Yeah. Got cut in half because I was like,

either I can make a lot of money or I can invest in a team and grow the business. How is the recession or a possible recession going to impact your business? I've seen an email from Y Combinator basically warning all the startups

like, hey, VC funding is probably going to be harder to come by, stockpile cash, make sure you run lean. I mean, they gave a rather, you know, disastrous email to a lot of companies. I've seen that.

I saw the Sequoia one. You see this Sequoia one? No, I didn't see Sequoia. That was pretty good. Yeah. I don't believe in recessions. I just don't believe in them. But don't you believe that there...

But there is a time. People still buy coffee. People still buy food. But don't you think there is a time where funding is going to be more difficult than others? I don't believe in taking funding. But I think for a lot of the companies who need to raise in order to secure capital to grow, those companies are going to have a harder time getting capital.

Yeah, and they should go to business. Yeah, it's just like the... I don't know what's natural... Big picture, yeah. I mean, I think in terms of taking a step back to give them a little more clarity is that recession is about control and planning at the end of day. And so if you were not doing something valuable enough, you go away. If you were doing something valuable enough, you stick around. And I think with Apsumo, specifically, people want to save money.

And it's like if things are getting tough, like I want to save money. And so Apsumo is generally relatively well positioned. And we don't have a lot of upfront cost besides our team, which is, I mean, it's like 60% of our, I think our monthly burner right now is about $2 million just on teammates, just on the team. So the way we start thinking about that is like, what can you control? Are you doing something on a totem pole that's valuable enough for an audience? And then the other two things I would think about for companies is that do you have a phase spending? So what we do is a phase plan approach. So you ask about recession.

If things go bad, we have a plan in place about what we're going to cut exactly. So it's not basically doing it real time. It's something we've already thought about ahead of time. Got it. And then I do think people just need to think about like if I'm not doing something valuable enough, for example, my friend who's a body coach. If recession is happening, do you think people, want to spend a lot of money on like a health coach? No.

They're fucking, I'm just trying to survive. Just like when COVID hit, people are like, they cut everything. And so then I think you have to think about, what else do they want to do? Are they eating food?

Do they want supplements? Can you actually do help? Maybe it's workouts. Can you maybe do coaching certification? And so I think it's finding the things that are going to be invaluable all year round. And I think people are just doing things that are nice to have,

not must have way too often. Yeah. So what's the end goal with Absumo? Because you're not going to sell it, you say. I don't know, man. What if you got an offer at like 500 million bucks? I'd probably sell.

Okay. Yeah. Yeah. People were like, I would never sell forever. If someone came, the thing that is now, the thing I think people miss out on is that you're like,

all right, I can sell and then what I'm going to do then? I'd probably just start absumo. I would keep making YouTube videos. I would like working on a book. And I would promote things, which is what I like to do. So I think people get really excited about how much money.

It's like, why don't you just find the thing that you can sustain on? Like, maybe it's YouTube videos. Maybe it's making coffee. Maybe it's promoting products or promoting people. We've talked about an IPO. Like, we have numbers that are like are compelling.

But I And honestly I don't care It's totally egotistical Like to have a public company Would just be ego because like it'd be cool to say you have a ticker symbol Yeah I need pretty neat But I don't want ticker symbol

Could be sumo It'd be incredible if you secure that If that's not already I think sumo logic might have it But the point being for me is like I don't want to have to have check-ins I don't want to have rules I don't have investors on what to do

Selling I think it'd be interesting If there was a certain amount But then what would I do all day? Like for basically the past three years, I haven't worked. Right? We had another CEO for six years of the company. Yeah.

And he grew a lot of the revenue in the business. And I just kind of like dicked around. And honestly, it was, and this sounds bad because I think this is the dream people think. But it was really unfulfilling. It's really unsatisfying not working and not doing something. You're actually like, fuck, this is hard. And I came back about a year ago. And I was like, yo, this sucks.

And I love it. So to give that up to have money that I can't already spend. Like, I have more than enough right now. And I think people need to figure out how much they actually need, which is much lower than they think. I don't know. If someone did a billion or something, yeah, that'd be cool.

But I don't know what else I would do. So what is your normal day like? Did it? I mean, I saw your video with Leon Hendricks, by the way. Oh, yeah. Fantastic. Dude, he was so good.

That was probably the most realistic day. Can you walk us through that day for those who have to see the video? Yeah. Yeah. So I live in Austin, Texas. I get up around 9 a.m. Let's just take a Monday. So my days are very structured.

I think one of things that if you're a CEO or you, if you want to have high leverage in your, days like I probably spend maybe around five hours a day looking at my calendar, which is like kind of uncommon for people. So what that means is that there's a woman named Anna. So on Fridays we go for about an hour to hour and a half reviewing my calendar. Like we have a survey. Like what happened this week?

What was good this week? Where you consistent this week? What blockch it's week? What do we do differently next week? And then we meet again on Monday. And then I meet, I review my, so it's maybe more about three hours, but then I review it myself on Sunday too. And so I'm just very specific about like what are my main goals that I'm trying to accomplish?

And right now there's three. Right. So as CEO, there's three things that matter. Like where we're going through your vision. What are the rules? So operating principles. We have an operating principal manual. And then who are the people there?

So those are the three things I'm really trying to optimize for. And then in my week, it's really like I color code my calendar. How much of my week really looks like that? Because I think if people say what's important to them and they actually look at how they spend their time, it's very different. It's very different. So I colored my calendar. So Mondays, I basically try to do morning pages. You guys read the artist's way.

No. So good. What's this? It's by Julia Cameron. It's like one of these books that like you hear about in your Like, you read it like, this is fucking epic. How have you not heard about it? Because I think some of the best stuff is the stuff that others don't know about.

So she wrote this book about I never thought I was creative. Like I don't know. I see these people with like cameras. I see these people like, I don't know, doing photos or I guess it's cameras or drawing. And I'm like, dude, I'm just a business guy. I don't know shit. And her book is just like, dude, you're a fucking artist in business. And one of her key things that she encourages everyone is this morning pages were for 15 minutes,

you just write unfiltered. It's called journaling, I guess is what other people call it. But so I just do that every Monday. It's just Mondays I'll basically wake up I do tea I do element It's like these electrolyte packets I have them every morning And so I'll do that I'll write 15 minutes and one of the key things that's actually been really powerful

That I've done the past few years with that Is I just write what am I looking forward to this week On my Monday morning's like what this week? What was it for you that's this week? Like what was it for you that's this week? Oh man Concert Oh yeah which one Rex Orange County I did it two nights ago What is in Vegas?

Is a musician artist is like country? No no no no no Is it EDM? No, it's like a bedroom pop kind of like, I don't know what to call it. But yeah, that's what I was looking forward to. Hell yeah. Yeah. Probably the delivery of a Tesla. Oh, hell yeah. Which one?

Yeah. The roadster. Hold on, it's coming? The old one? No, the old one. Oh, sick. Yeah. I think, so anyways, my Monday morning, I just try to think about it.

Like, what am I looking forward to at work? And if there's nothing, I'm like, oh, cool, let's make some shit up that you're going to look forward to. Like, coming to Vegas. This is sweet. Yeah. What were you looking forward to? Definitely. Well, we went to Bill Burr.

Okay. And then I went to the Warriors playoff game. Like I did it. I flew at night in a private jet, GSX. Oh wow. I've seen JSX by the way. Jazex is sick. 200 bucks for a private jet.

Right. Yeah. Really good deal. So I flew up there, took my friend for his birthday, watched the game and then flew back for work in the morning. That was probably the key thing. That's cool. And then so Monday, yeah, so I'll write out what I'm looking forward to this week.

I try to process just whatever's going on in my head. I've been, you know, emotionally up and down for relationships and travel. so just trying to be like, okay, what's going on with you? Like, let's try to understand. Mondays is a lot of absumo check-in. So I have like an hour and a half meeting with Alona about what's going on in the business. What are KPI's? Then I had a meeting with Anna to do my schedule.

And then sometimes on Monday, like I'm working on a book. So there's a guy named Tall Raz. He wrote Never Eat Alone. Never split the difference. So we had like a two-hour work session going over one of the chapters. Then I'll do like a body workout or weightlifting with my buddy Daniel. Then I have a chef, social. I'll eat dinner at home and then read.

I try not to watch TV or do anything that's like not productive at night during the weekdays. And on weekends, I go crazy. Yeah. And you mentioned relationships. Can we talk about that? Yeah, let's talk about it. This is like the bane of my existence. This is honestly is like probably the worst thing going on in my life.

Oh, no. How is it to date as a man worth over 100 million bucks? Right? Yeah. Easy. No, over 100. It is fish in a barrel. No, I'm kidding.

You are honest? I thought when you got super rich, like, they just come to you. I thought like, you see all these old, like, disgust. people with like really hot babes. I'm like, where... Am I allowed to say this? I can do it every one here.

Yeah, yeah. I'm like, I'm not sure to be rude to men or women, but I was just like, where the fuck are they getting them at? Because like, I thought I got hell of money and I'm like, okay, I'm just still at my house, like, alone.

It doesn't happen. So getting rich does not solve that. But dating has been a, it's been a, it's been a, it's been shitty. Why? Shitty. I think what happened when I turned, I turned 40 in February. Yeah.

And, Like 80% of my friends have marriages and kids and I'm like home. I'm like out hanging out with two guys doing podcasts. I don't know that sounds fun to me. Yeah. I love this stuff. Ouch. Jeez, Jack.

Never, he's never invited back. Kick this old fucking guy off the show. You know, all my friends have kids and marriages. I'm like, oh, what's wrong with me? Like, what did I? I think it's a bad thing to be 40. Yeah. Well, it felt like a bad.

thing. Then I was like, all right, you're going to go on a fucking hardcore wife quest. Because in business, it's very simple for me. It's like, okay, what's my destination? Absolutely. We have a school. What's your plan to get there? Here's my plan. All right, now let's execute towards that. It's very like, I think that's how many subscribers do I want? What's the content? What's the job I want? You're your plan

go execute. And it's not as controllable with females. Right? It's not, it's, there's a lot more like, where do you get your pipeline? Where do you find them from? How do you filter to make sure it's the right one? Yeah. It sounds too analytical to me. Well, the past two months, I put a lot of pressure to find a wife. Why?

That sounds like, let's, yeah. A different type of framework. Yeah, let's go deeper. Why? It's, that to me sounds more like the pressure, the societal pressure of like, oh, I, I'm approaching 40. This is what most people should be doing. I should go in that direction.

But it doesn't seem to me like you've ever done that. So it's surprising to me that like for, for companionship that like that would be the route you went. If I'm honest, I thought it would make me feel more complete. Like, this is a part. missing in my life like my work I love my work it's like it's it sucks a lot of times and it's hard as fuck but I'm like yo I really enjoy this challenges and I feel like my mindset is like these are challenges that are good for me my health is good my friends I literally have 10 out of 10 friends

I have like the best friends like I'm like I feel very lucky and then when the women one it just feels very like why is this not going well like what's wrong with me or what's wrong with the situation for that and I think with my dating over the past 20 years it was very like it wasn't dating with intent it was just dating it was like you're cute and you let you let me sleep you and like we can hang out and like but it wasn't like oh we're going to try to date to see this someone I want to be compatible with for a longer period of time so I think I just put artificial pressure on myself to make it happen was that an age thing where like you felt this compelled at like 35 let's say because like it it sounds like this was more something somewhat recent

than yeah 35 I didn't give a shit is my friend is one of my best friends Adam was just talking about he's like and also like you're on a dating app yeah which is weird because I do get now pretty often like oh I watch your videos which is a little strange and they're like why are you on a dating app? But having that number show 40 on the dating app versus 39 was like a weird mind fuck. Really? Just a weird like, oh, I guess I'm getting older.

It's not forever. If I want to have kids, like I'm only going to get maybe 40 to 60 years with them. So I probably want to start that sooner. Do you think that's, from your perspective, 40 makes a difference for 39? Or do you think it's just generally your response has been different at 40 versus 39?

I'm sure a lot of women would rather put 29 than 30. Yeah. And maybe there is a significant, you know, slow down after the age of 30. I don't know. It was, well, I was engaged.

I mentioned, and I broke off that engagement. And yeah, I think getting 40, it's like, oh, shit, like this is, do,

am I going to find a partner? Is it going to be? Is it actually going to happen? And I don't think it really mattered. I really considered it. And it does feel like these other areas of my life feel pretty dialed in. And this one is not. And this one feels much more uncertain unless,

like, I can't control it or make it happen. Yeah. And so then forcing it, the past, these two months has been like, pretty shitty yeah when were you engaged uh i was engaged uh november 2019 we got engaged at the met in new york and how long did you date prior to we're dating about three years okay do you mind

answering like why we broke off the engagement uh i try to understand it right and you try to like it's interesting with all of our lives like how we try to tell back the story that we have uh and i also don't want to like i'm talking to her again so oh you're you're back talking to her a little bit Which then feels even more confusing because all my friends are like, yo, it's a bad idea. Oh, yeah,

if I'm even saying, I don't even know it or this situation. From what I've seen, well, I shouldn't, you know, go for it. From what I've seen,

it's usually not a good idea once there is a breakoff. Because it's, it's like, it's like, yeah, not only is there a reason, but there's still all of those underlying issues that probably haven't been resolved that,

you know, you could put a bandit over it, but I think, you're right. The cracks are going to, show. I think that the two things there is, uh, one, I've never fired anyone I regret. I've never had fired anyone where I'm like, I really wish it back. And I think there's a parallel here where it's like, you broke up for a reason and it's probably there that probably is not going to go away. The challenge is

that our experience now is very muffin top, you know, from Seinfeld. Like it's just the muffin top. It's like just the good part. So we're having just like highlight reels versus like going when we can get back to relationship. Um, so while we broke up, I think part of it, there's different things my friend said, but I think one of it is like, who you choose is your partner is probably the most important decision of your life. Yeah. Probably your business partner and your romantic partner, female male, whatever. And I was like, damn, that's a fucking important decision.

There should be very little doubt. And I had a lot of doubt. And I was like, I'm going to spend 40 years with this person. Like, I like another way, it's funny to look at it. I was like, do you want to have like 2,000 more dinners with this person? Like, and I, Amazon presents Jeff versus Taco Truck Salsa. Whether it's Verde, Roja, or the orange one. For Jeff, trying any salsa is like playing Russian roulette with a flamethrower.

Luckily, Jeff saved with Amazon and stocked up on antacids, ginger tea, and milk. Habaniero? More like habanier, yes. Save the everyday with Amazon. Do you think that's just nerves, though, that maybe it's like, that's a lot of pressure to think of, you know, 50 years and summarize it into three and yeah. Well, I think what's interesting is what are the things we don't have doubt about, right?

Like I have a lot of things in my life. I'm like, there is zero doubt. Like I have friends that I'm like, there's nothing. And I'm also not sleeping with them. I'm not having dinner with them. Yeah,

that changes. But I think in terms of your romantic partner, like they should be pretty minimal. There should probably be nervousness. I do think though your point is interesting where like, I think the amount of pressure I put on myself, I think high achievers are actually really negative. We're like really, I think myself as a, I'm not a high achiever, but I'm like always going,

but I have this really negative self-talk. And so I think that level of expectation made it hard for probably her and for our relationship. And even for this recent dating period where after we broke up, like this past two months, I'm like, I meet someone, I'd do basically a wife interview. No. I know. You can't do that. It's not worked that well.

It's not worked that well. Yeah. The way to grow a business I've noticed is so much different than like getting in a relationship. And I felt myself throughout like my mid-20s, very similar. because I was really good at like being a real estate agent and and buying properties. And to me it seemed like so easy to be able to follow this the same patterns. But then I was so stiff and businesslike when I would go on a date. I mean, I was so uptight.

And all I want to talk about is like business and making money and like just investing. And I was so uptight that I think it just it shows. And that's sort of like analytical approach just is not attractive. Well, I guess for, are you guys in relationships? Yeah. Yeah. And then how is your partner like a super type A person or is it more like a house person? Is it both?

Like house care of me? Yeah, they're more like they're taking care of you and they're taking care of the house so that you can house. And I don't mean that negatively. I don't mean that. Yeah, she's very much so. I would say she's 50-50 on that. Really? Yeah.

I would say it's 50-50. I would say just in the way that she treats like Ramsey and Bailey. Oh, gosh. Yeah, for the animals. Gosh, the end. And she does, she does his laundry. You don't hire someone to do your laundry? No, she doesn't.

I should hire someone. Listen, I wouldn't hire you. I would just do it myself. It's so, it's so easy. I'm not going to hire someone. We talk about that. Yeah, that's so easy. And I think you could find a woman that is maybe both those things.

I think basically, I went to New York on a wife quest two weeks ago. And so I just set up like, I've never dated, I've only dated Asian women, so I wanted to date Jewish women. And so I went on the apps and I lined up basically. basically like almost a day to night with a different Jewish one. And it was just like stressful and it was creating a lot of anxiety. I'm Jewish. I'm Jewish. Dude.

Dude. Dude, dude. Dude, dude. But it was just like, it was, well, because I'm a Jew. Yeah. My family's Jewish. My dad's from Israel. Like, I study Hebrew.

Like, I'm not religious whatsoever. But I'm like, yeah, it'd be kind of cool to like continue that lineage. And I've only dated Asians and it was just, it was stressful though. It's just like. That's a lot of pressure to go to. Yeah. You went for the objective of finding a wife? I went for a bike race and then I made it.

with that and then working on my book. Like a three major priorities. Walk me through a night of a wife quest, right? Let's say you just finished. Jack's taking notes here. And it's like 6 p. Are you on a wife quest? Definitely not a wife quest.

Girlfriend quest. I'll just, you know, I'm a, develop a relationship with someone. He's the most eligible bachelor at this point. It's become a running, like, joke. How did you meet Macy? Instagram. She hit you up or you hit her?

She hit me up. What she said? Yeah. She made a really funny comment. I had posted something as a, like a, like a story. and she had commented on it. And basically it was a funny comment, but I didn't even think anything on it.

And I just thought it was a funny comment. And I responded back. And then we just kept the banter going back and forth. Was it easy? Yes. One of my new favorite words in business, and I think in this relationship experience, is organic.

Yeah. Like, how was it organic to make content, organic to interact with them? And so after the New York thing, we wouldn't talk about that. I just came back and I was like, I went to therapy. I actually interviewed a relationship coach,

Stephanie Rigg. She was phenomenal on Instagram. Really, really good. And she's like, how are you feeling with all this stuff? I was like, I'm fucking anxious. She's like, you don't have to do it. I was like, what do I mean? She's like, you seem pretty happy and life's pretty good.

Like, why don't you just chill? Like, and then when you want to go hang out with someone, instead of having to, why don't you get to? So I've been trying to just think more about like, what do I get to do? And then also just notice how I'm feeling with some of these things. Like, if I'm really feeling anxious about going on a date, it's like, okay, what's going on with this anxiety? And like, let's take a step back to check in how we're doing.

So, but past two weeks, I've just chilled on it. And I, like, I, like, cut off a few people that I was like, I don't, let's just not talk. We'll be friends. And honestly, it's just, it's been nice. It's been so relieving. I have a feeling the less pressure you put on it, the more success you'll have on that. I think if you went in just thinking, I'm going to have a great time and just, tonight, it's just about me having fun.

I think if you just went in like that with no expectations, you would be shocked. Just like, like, how quickly you'll make great connections with people. That helps me a lot. What helps me especially is like the abundance mentality towards women because sometimes I'll go on a date with a girl and then I'll have like a four month break and then I'll go on another date with a girl. But because it was such an extended break of doing that, I like hype this up a lot and I get all nervous and everything and I make a bigger deal out of it than it really is. But if I go on a date this week and then next week I go on a date and then this week I go on a date. I'm like, okay, well, there's so many. You know what I mean?

And it makes me more calm than which makes a lot better. But there's also that takes away the expectation of like this is the first one in four months. It has to go well. If it doesn't go well, it's going to be another four months. And when you don't care, because it's like, well, I could just meet another person next week. Yeah. Someone asked me about, like, my 20s, if I could do it all over again. It's kind of an annoying, stupid question.

And one of the things was about, it was dating. It was like, I would have been way more thoughtful in my dating. I think I just dated like, oh, you like me? Sure, let's do this. Versus like, okay, it'd be nice to be intentional for that to anyone out there. If you're dating, just being more clear, like, hey, I want to find someone long term. Like, let me be more intentional on dating versus just like, this is a cool person to have around. Yeah, I've noticed the dating topics actually do quite well.

Oh, really? Yeah, this is what people like. Yeah, they love, especially in finance, because usually, I want to say it's probably 85% male. And if they're into finance, there's a chance they're not that good at dating, too. Disproportionately high chance. And they're probably single. Yeah. So when you have that demographic and you as a finance person talk about dating, I think a lot of people relate to it because we've all been through it.

Yeah. And it's just something that people want to work on and overcome. And I think not a lot of people are talking about it. Or if they do, they take a very, you know, extremist stance on it. And it seems like you either have the people who just say, oh, no, don't worry. Just be yourself. And then you have the other people just like to what to me seems like just trash talking other genders and just like categorizing them.

It's just, it's weird. But I think because there's not a lot, the middle. It's just like that's what people, that's their options. It's either like, I don't be myself, but that's not working or, oh, it's all of these things and it's their fault. And, you know, I need to act. It's, it's so bad. It's really, it's really toxic, in my opinion, that that extreme. And that's interesting. And that's going on, it seems like a lot of it's on TikTok. And based on their algorithms, like you watch one of those videos. It's like, oh, I'm going to keep recommending those videos. And then it drills it in and like, oh, they're bad.

I have a, yeah, I have a best friend, Neville, he runs a copywriting course business online. And I've loved his, the way he approaches life, kind of like Homer Simpson. He's just like, oh, donut. That's nice. He's just so fucking happy all the time. And I think because I'm like a neurotic Jew and I'm like, ah, how does it? You know, what, it's like, and I just like that he's just more at peace with everything. And his dating approach, which I really admired, he's like, by 2023, I want to be at a place where I'm having a kid or with someone to have a kid.

And as he approached his dating, it wasn't so stressful like mine is. And the stress is all internal. No one made me stressful. It's all inside. And I think that's for a lot of us. It's like this inside, these inside voices. And his was like,

I'm just going to go and have fun, meeting interesting people. Yeah. I think now I'm finally recognizing like how nice that is. And then, yeah, just find a person you want to keep interacting with and that'll lead

to having kids and being committed. Yeah. Would you say a lot of the stress is what drives you to accomplish so much? I think, I don't know, I think some of the most successful people are generally the most dissatisfied is what my observation has been.

Because Neville, as an example of it has like a six-figure business it makes like probably 100, 200K which is a lot, I think a lot of money. And you're just happy with that. And it's just very hard for me to do that. I think that one of the most challenging things in business is how do you be happy with what you have

and have a desire for more? Because if you don't have a desire for more, you're going to say where you are, which is okay and you'll be good. But then you're like, well, I also want to evolve and progress. But what is it that's in you that wants to achieve so much? It's just high ambition?

You know it's funny? Is it like values instilled by your parents? You ever hang out with your parents and you're like, oh, I fucking see where I get it from? Yeah. You ever do that? Yeah. Is it the opposite?

I'll be the opposite. I don't want to say the opposite. I don't know. I call my mom and she's like, well, okay, I'm going to the gym now. Okay, I cleaned the oven for three hours. Okay, da-da-da-da. And she's like, no, I don't know how you're, you always are so busy. I'm like, mom, you literally haven't stopped all day.

And I think there's a little bit of like just being around her. That's just kind of like, I don't know, I guess I've always been like I want to progress. But one thing I think it's fascinating about money making. And I'm guessing this is, I'm assuming it's true for you, is that you get to a point where the money just for me doesn't really I don't care like if we sell like we probably I think two days ago we had a 300,000 dollar day today's probably 200,000 dollar day like that's fucking a lot of money. I think that's crazy. But it doesn't do that doesn't like my no chubby no nothing right but if we like do a cool new marketing initiative or do a new product or we like launch something for

the website launch something that excites me. And so it's just interesting about like what the motivators are for me it's just progress. I guess I just like doing cool new things. For the business itself, I know a lot of people through their like entrepreneurial journey, they can make these micro decisions or little tweaks that can then skyrocket the business. Were there any changes that you made with Apsumo in itself? For example, maybe like changing one marketing campaign or hiring on one person or something like that, that really just took the business to another level. Yeah. One thing that's fascinating is that there's been two CEOs, right? So I started the company 12 years ago. We brought this guy on Aman. And Aiman is just like Mr. Consistent. He's not Mr. Shiny

object he didn't do he doesn't like he's just like oh this is working let's just keep doing it and that that went from four million to about 50 million in revenue just from him doing that um and so i think there's something that gets missed out on about boringness like boring is sexy like i read this article about um these guys boating across america i love wall street journal saturdays is phenomenal free i highly recommend it and uh that their trainer said if i want you to train without music i want you to train without any stimulation just get get used to being bored And if you can get good at that, when you're doing the ocean or anything, it's going to be easy for you. I think Aiman has done an excellent job at being boring.

Like, he's like, ads work. Let's keep doing ads. Email marketing. And I do think my nature, even at Apsumo, like I've been back a year. I was like, oh, marketplace, we can let anyone list. Let's get 6,000. So we went from 600 to 6,000. Amen would have gone from 600 to 1,000.

There's different ways of approaching how to execute a business. Maybe we'll get the same destination. But now I think it's just figuring out with that balances of like shiny new shit and also just doing what fucking works and keep doing that. In terms of inflection points in the business, I think there's a few key moments. Number one, we did a giveaway. So I think one of the best ways to get business ideas is look at total fucking random industry. So I was like reading a women's magazine. And it's also cool to read women's magazines.

And in the back of the women's magazine had like a kitchen giveaway. And I was like, oh, that's cool. We should do a giveaway for Apsumo. And then my business partner was like, oh, what if we built software for it? And so we did a Dropbox for life giveaway. Because I was like, that's fucking great. That's crazy. And we're still paying it.

Unlimited storage? I don't know if it's unlimited. But still, that couldn't be that costly. So that's the thing. We got to 250,000 subscribers. Wow. In a week. And that definitely is probably eight figures.

I don't know about profit, but eight figures of revenue over the past seven, eight years. So that was a major. That's a great giveaway. Wow. That will, one of our, we have two business. We have a, and I think every business should get this. This is something, we have a thing called a mat, a mom, master operating manual. And it's basically what are the principles for how we operate as a business.

So one of them is test and invest. And so test invest is we basically launched this giveaway. And we're like, oh shit, this fucking exploded. So then our second operating principle is double down. So we did a giveaway for life for the next like six months. Evernote for life, Photoshop for life, Netflix for life. And we're still paying for them. I'm really hoping these people die.

Do you know what I can say that? I hope they die soon. But no, how much does it cost to give someone something for life? So the thing that's interesting is if most people only live to around 80, right? So they're going to have, it's non-transferable. So they'll have 60 years, $100 a year for Dropbox for life. So it's $6,000. But those giveaways did millions.

So if you just look at your economics, these things. They could live until 150. It still makes sense. Oh, yeah, yeah. They can live until 100, yes. 151, yeah, not 151. No, but then so that was a major inflection point. Taking products that we built internally like the giveaway and then selling them externally.

So we took that and made a King Sumo, Send Fox's emails, tools we were using sold out externally, send Fox, sumo.com is externally. That definitely changed trajectory. in terms of revenue and then new exposure. Going from, I think one of the things that everyone needs to do is like a one-minute business model. Like look at your unit economics. So when we started out of Sumo, when I started it, it was bundles of software. So it would be like MailChimp, Meister Task, Rescue Time, whatever, Evernote.

And it was $25 for all five tools, which is an insane deal. It was such a good deal. And then one day, Andrew Chen, who's my best friends, and he's an advisor of the company, he's like, let's look at the unit economics of like, it's five deals. price. What if you just made it singular, like one deal only, which now is obvious, but he just show the economics of it. And I was like, oh, so we went from five to one a day, five, five bundles to just singular deals, a new, new curve. When we started doing ads, new curve, and new ads when there's no one else doing it. So when we did Facebook newsfeed ads or no one else was doing it,

major curve. Um, there's been some of the other ones, email marketing. I think it's probably the most underutilized thing for every business out there, offline and online businesses. Like, that's something we did very early. I didn't do it for the first few months. Once we started collecting emails, trajectory of the business changed. In the past few years, a lot of the stuff, it's not major like deltas. It hasn't been major like major changes. What are the biggest challenges right now for apps? Are the one biggest challenge that you guys face? Probably how to have consistent growth, right? Like, I don't know if we know our inputs that are actually going to affect the ultimate output of the business. Like is it like, is it more customers? How do we get

more customers? And I don't think we know how to really control our input dials. Hmm. Like, To grow your channel, you probably just put more videos out. To grow our YouTube channel, it's like, we're going to do three videos a month, their videos are going to be this, and it works. And I think with Absumo, we're at a point where how many people want to buy startup software?

How many are agencies or freelancers or contractors? How many are out there that don't know about us? All right. How do we reach them? Is there more of them? And then just really trying to understand that. Do you guys buy ads on like Fiver and stuff like that? Haven't bought on.

Can you buy ads on Fiverr? Probably you could pay enough to get a banner there, but I feel like that would be the perfect place to, you know, get software here at a deal. What, probably a Graham Steffen sponsorship would be a... That was probably going to change a trajectory of our business. It's probably way better than time.

You lose subscribers. I hope not. I mean, there's different things that are... I would say, I'd say right now the two major things that I think we can fix or get better at is number one, like, where we're trying to go in the next few years. So we've only ever had like one year plans. Like, we're going to try to be in this year. Like, Mark, what's our number one target out, X amount of revenue?

And so the team was basically asking me, like, where are we going in the future? Where is this all going? And so then I've spent this quarter basically putting that together. And so I think I think that'll help us. That's definitely been one of the biggest challenges. And then secondly is the leadership team. The people like we talked about Facebook early on, the people that were helping us get to this point are great,

but they've never run a sales team of 30 plus people. They've never run an engineering team of 15 plus people or like, I don't know, a support team of like 20 people. And so you have to start finding people that have taken it past that scale. So that's probably the second biggest challenge, which is like how do you find like a chief revenue officer? I've never heard of this role. But this is like a major role

at like a lot of new tech companies or chief business officer. So they manage the sales and marketing orgs they roll up to them. I never heard of that. So now I think filling out the leadership team on some of these gaps, marketing, we had a people issue.

We had people, chief people officer come in and then finding this chief revenue officer. Let's say the average person right here watching this has just a random idea for a business. Yeah. What are the first steps

just to test it out to see if it's going to work out? They don't already have like anything successful or they're not making money. they just have an idea. Let's do a real one. So like what, how did you like this coffee? You're selling coffee now. Bankroll coffee.

Now for sale at bankroll coffee.com. How is it, by the way? Pretty good. You try the bankroll coffee. Yeah, taste good. Yeah. So let's say you have a coffee business. Right.

What most people do, like what you probably did, did you sell any of it before you made it? Probably not. No. Okay. So what I did? I taste tested it. You taste tested.

And so how long did you go from idea to actually making your for sale? Oh my gosh. Probably about six months. Yeah. So, and then how much. How much did you have to invest in like taste, do you have to invest anything? I think it was, I don't know, I'm hand. It was under $10,000 split between two people, I think.

So like six, six brand for me. Okay. And so the way I like to approach it, basically call it a million dollar weekend. It's the book I'm working on. And it's the formula that I've used at Absumo and other companies is like, how could you have done it in 48 hours? And so you're like, well, I can't make coffee. You have to go taste it.

But what you could have done is seen, is there a demand for what you're trying to sell? So you could have emailed your audience, post on the community tab, post on Instagram, and seen if you could actually get buyers for it. Yeah. See, and then if they get buyers for it, you're like, hey, this coffee is going to taste just like coffee. Like, that's my whole schick. And see if you can actually get people to buy from you.

Yeah. And if you can, now the six months you're spending, you know you have guaranteed customers. And so I think most people do what you do, which is the opposite way, which is not, you can get to the same destination, but I've always been, I don't want to spend any money. I don't want to wasting time. And I want to figure out, is this something people actually want, because I've done the other way.

Yeah. Where I've spent six months building a site called Bettercade.com. It was sports betting. We launched it. No one wanted it. I built a thing for Disney for three months. Finally had it for them. They didn't want it. And I was like, it's got to be another way to do this. So I always try to get people to how do you do a pre-sell? How do you do validation? How do you ask people to actually want to buy it and give you De Niro, cash, Venmo, PayPal, cash app, whatever.

And then from there, then you go build a product out. So this can go literally for any business. Like doing watches, same thing. Can you, because what people do, if you can't get three customers is what my target is within 48 hours, it's only going to get fucking harder. So like if three? Yeah. I think three is the right number. Because one, it's it? Yeah. Okay. But it can't be like your family and friends, right? It can be, it should be family and friends.

Oh. Because what are they going to be biased and say, oh, yes, honey, I'm going to go and buy that. You have, you have a family? Yeah. You have like parents probably? Yeah. Have they bought your coffee? No, I just give it to him for free.

Okay. But then did you ask them to buy it all or any? No. But mine is skewed because I know whatever I put reasonably out there, people are going to buy it. Is it selling to your expectations? Yes, but it's very low ROI to the point where I don't really push it. it's more so meant to be a background that maybe one day could be something, but we sell at our cost, basically.

And it's great branding and people like it. If I could only talk about five things in a week, I'm going to talk about the things usually that tend to be more profitable. And this has a lot of repeat business. So everyone that basically one out of every two people who buys bankroll coffee for the first time will reorder on their own without being prompted at all. Yeah.

How much money would you say you spend on an average month? These are for the viewers out there. Just to peak their, you know, their interest is probably peaked on this, right? You got to scratch the itch. Yeah. What is a person like you spend per month? Let's just look it up. Let's do really?

Well, I'm just going to look up my credit card bill. I think my credit card bill alone is around $30,000 a month lately. And that's personal expenses. That's personal with some of our YouTube channel. Okay. Personal is probably this month, I think, is like 20-25. I just bought a new bike. Oh, wait.

20-25,000. Oh. I bought a new, like, a specialized bicycle recently. I've been into pinball machines. Oh, those are neat. Dude, it's super cool. It's a very power to have a pinball machine. So I think my credit card bill is somewhere between 10 and 20K.

So I just paid off a little bit of it. So right now it's 10. What limit do they give you? This is just a personal one. So I think it's like 12,000. And what card do they give you? I use a Sapphire card for my personal. Cool.

The business stuff is separate. And then my, like, I have a house. My house is about $2.5 million. So the mortgage, I don't know, it's like $12,000. Oh, no. with property tax probably a little more. Yeah, somewhere between like $15,000 to $30,000 a month. Okay.

I don't, I mean, I think what's interesting is about lifestyle inflation. So, as I told you, my 20s, like, I lived on couches for a year. Like, I literally tried to bring a girl home and I was like, oh, that's my sleeping bag on the floor. And then she left. She left? Yeah, Zelda. You just got to own it.

Be like, you know, I did. I did. We were trying to. That's my sleeping bag. No, I did. I was like, hey, it's a nice sitting bag. I got a pillow here. Like, I was renting.

Not even renting. I was just saying my buddy's floor. But I mean, I just lived so cheap that like actually getting to enjoy the money was a and I hate when people talk about this because it's like, oh, boohoo, you couldn't spend it. But it was to get to this wasn't right away. It was like I was doing 2000 a month. And then it kind of goes up as your income and net worth goes up. And also the reality, like I have 40 more years to live probably, maybe 60. And like good years of active life, probably 30.

So I'm going to try to fucking use it and enjoy it. Like even yesterday I was talking with Tyne in. I want to buy a sauna. I love saunas and like ice baths and shit like that. But it's like 10,000. And he's like, dude, you love that stuff. Like, you're going to use it all the time. Just go get it.

So I'll probably go back and get it next week. Paul. And what's that, what is your business overhead per month? When it's time to scale your business, it's time for Shopify. Get everything you need to grow the way you want. Like, all the way. Stack more sales with the best converting checkout on the planet. Track your cha-chings from every channel, right in one spot,

and turn real-time reporting into big-time opportunities. Take your business to a whole new one. Switch to Shopify. Start your free trial today. The team cost alone is $2 million. Just a month? Yeah. Wow.

There's our title right there. Yeah. Okay. Title. Good. Let's actually see. What actually is more concerning, I'm happy to share at a high level, is like our profit last month was $60,000.

$60,000? Yeah, $60,000. That's like nothing. That scares me. Meaning that like if a few deals go bad or if marketing ends up fucking up something, like we could be very negative. Why was it so low that month? because our operating principles got fucked up.

So my operating principle, I use the Amazon approach at our company, which is at the end of the year, I want zero net income. And it means either we got distributions or we reinvested in ads or we bought servers. We reinvested all the money. So if you look at Amazon for years, they didn't make profit because they reinvested it. So what we would normally do is that we make a fuck ton of money. And at the end of the year, there's like $3 million or $5 million left of profit. And then we give it some to the team.

We always do a team trip. So like last year, past few years we go to Costa Rica or Hawaii or wherever. We pay for everybody. All expense is paid. And then we buy all this stuff. And so basically we taper it down Q4. This year we were trying to do it equally throughout the whole year. So every month it's zero.

Not like basically Q1, two, three was like make up a lot of money and then spend all of it. Now it's like every month is try to hit net zero. So we're reinvesting all of it. The problem with that is just like if anything turns like this recession hits potentially, which I'm trying to not worry about, trying to worry about what we can control. Like it could turn all this upside down. So I want us to have basically, I want to get it to about $200,000 in net income a month. I like the Q4 approach because you want it off the books by the end of the year.

100%. And so it's like, then you know how much to spend versus every month. You're trying to project something that, like you say, you can't control a recession. You can't really control what's going to happen to the business necessarily in terms of something outside of your control. But you can't control Q4. 100%. Getting down just for tax purposes. Yeah.

And it just gives us, the other thing I'm noticing with businesses is that I don't know if people should be working at 100% capacity. Like you want to have the ability to, like, fuckups happen. having a break. Yeah, that's your money. It's your fund. Yeah. So having more of a buffer where either we'll have to move

some of the teammate costs around, reduce our marketing spend, maybe try to increase the top line. It creates less pressure on the overall business. So I'm going to try to get it back up to around quarter million a month in net income. Cool. Like cash flow.

Cash flow. And then where do you invest personally? I don't think I've ever showed this. I'll show you guys. What's the biggest thing you've ever wasted money on? I mean, we spent a million dollars for Black Friday at Absumo to get people to list their product in Absumo.

Like if you listed a product, we'd give you a thousand bucks. Oh, wow. And that was pretty much all, I don't think we, I think our ROI on that was maybe 50K. Jeez. Maybe,

maybe. That was my call. That was a bad decision. Why do you think it failed? Because it was just like, we didn't understand the economics of having a product list and what the ROI is for our business to have them list. I think that was number one.

I don't think we tested it really well. We have principles. It doesn't mean we're great at it. Yeah. So I think that was pretty interesting. I invested in a church that I lost half my money in that. They bought a church and they were going to turn into like a bar. And I'm like, oh, this bar, it's a popular bar in Austin.

But then the bar went out of business. It's not guaranteed. And then so they sold the church for half. So I lost half of money in that. Okay. This is my personal finance sheet. All right. Let's see.

Dang, so vulnerable. Wow, this is incredibly thorough. Yeah. Oh, wow. Why do you not just use mint? Because I like the intentionality of actually having to go and look at the numbers. And then I feel, I don't know, Mint just felt like it was a little lazy.

I felt like I have to actually, every month, so in two days on April, was it June 1st, I'll go and do this again. I've done this every month for, probably like 10 years. How you did your long-term investments, your risky investments. Yeah. Rolex, $200,000. I collect Rolexes. What Rolexes do you have?

So I buy them in specific moments of my life to honor it as like a memento, but it turns out Rolex as like a annualized return. is pretty fucking insane. Or it can be, yeah. It has over the last, like, probably 23rd. It's gone up, in the past few months, the past years have gone up insane. Yeah.

I bought it, like, when I got engaged. I bought this one when I became CEO. I didn't, but I don't get it. So I just bought a Smurf, but I'm not going to get it until we hit 100 million in revenue. Lately what I do now with the watches is I'll buy two or three of them

and then just when some moment happens with me and a friend. So me and my friend both got a house. I got, like, we both got Bat girls. I bought it for both of us. I thought you said bad girls Bad girls Yeah

Got a Rolex for that No the Smurf So I got my pilot's license So I bought an Air King Cool I have another one When I get married again I already bought

I bought Pepsi's To get the other friends But the Rolex has actually Held their value pretty well Why don't you have a Daytona I feel like that's like the Go-to Yeah

I bought one for AIMN our CEO The previous CEO I don't know I just don't have a good reason Do you know Like make up a new reason Coming on the ice coffee hour. Yeah, exactly.

Well, that was like, those are kind of, I don't know. The other ones all have like specific, specific things. Like, I don't know, I guess the Hulk was green, Daytona. I don't have an association with it yet. That's cool. But yeah, I was basically, and I don't mind putting it in public. I was basically trying to transfer crypto out. And so some watch brokers will take crypto.

And so that basically reduces tax liability. Well, that's good. All right. That was a great episode. Thank you so much for coming out. Yeah. I appreciate it. Experience of like a dating, AP sumo,

business, finance. All that everything. Well, thank you so much for coming on. I'll link to your channel down below in the description. I guess we're going to be doing a video as well, so I'll link to that video. Go and check that out,

and then down below in the description. Check out F-T-X, guys, because they're a great sponsor of this episode. Yeah, and you can also get a free stock at public.com. You can also check me on Instagram, S-E-L-B-Y, and you can check out NOAA. If you're a single female,

hey, do your pitch, do it. There's one. I guarantee you there's one that's going to. All right, if you, here's the thing. If you're a single female and you have a good personality and you love life, I'm looking for someone that's positive, excited to be alive. Hit me up on Instagram at Noah Kagan. Or if you have a friend that you think would enjoy interacting with me, any race, preferably female gender.

At Noah Kagan, holler at your boy. Thanks, man. Thank you, guys. And if this works. Oh, my Daytonas. Daytonas to celebrate. If you get married from someone who puts, you know, where did you hear about me? Iced coffee hour.

100%. So they're going for like, what, 30K each? It's like 30K? No, you don't talk about like... If you get MSRP, then maybe like 15. It's really tough to get it. I've bought it all of mine second hand. Yeah, like at Crono.

Daytona. But you know what? Dude. But you know what? Federico talks watches, might be able to help us out here. Is that the guy? Shout out him as well.

We've mentioned Fedrico so often on the channel because he's like our watch guy. He's the guy. He is like your plug? Yeah. So is a guy? Yeah. Delray watch supply.com.

All right. Thanks. I'll see you guys. Thank you, man.