The Pomp Podcast - #1024 Jesse Pujji Gives Tactical Advice On How To Build A Company

Episode Date: June 28, 2022

Jessi Pujji is the Founder & CEO of GatewayX and Co-Founder of Ampush. In this conversation, Jessi helps to give the advice you need to start building a company today, including the mistakes made along the way. We use one of Jessi's companies as a framework to go step by step on how you can replicate similar success. ======================= LMAX Digital - the market-leading solution for institutional crypto trading & custodial services - offers clients a regulated, transparent and secure trading environment, together with the deepest pool of crypto liquidity. LMAX Digital is also a primary price discovery venue, streaming real-time market data to the industry’s leading analytics platforms. LMAX Digital - secure, liquid, trusted. Learn more at LMAXdigital.com/pomp ======================= The Pod Pro Cover by Eight Sleep is the most advanced solution on the market for thermoregulation. It pairs dynamic cooling and heating with biometric tracking. Go to https://www.eightsleep.com/Pomp to check out the Pod Pro Cover and save $150 at checkout. Eight Sleep currently ships within the USA, Canada, and the UK. ======================= DeFi Technologies represents what’s next in the digital economy -- providing simplified, trusted access to crypto, decentralized finance and Web 3.0 investment opportunities. Institutions and investors can gain diversified, secure, compliant, and easily tradable access to a diversified set of industry-leading equity products and protocols, through a single stock purchase on a regulated exchange. Currently listed on U.S. (OTC: DEFTF) and Canadian (NEO:DEFI) exchanges.   For more information or to subscribe to receive company updates and financial information, visit our website at http://defi.tech  =======================

What's up, everyone? This is Anthony Pompliano. Most of you know me as Pomp. You're listening to the Pomp Podcast, simply the best podcast out there. Now let's kick this thing off. Jesse Pugge is the founder and CEO of GatewayX. In this conversation, we talk about the tactical ways to actually build a company. We use one of the companies that he recently built, step by step, how he did it, why he made certain decisions, and what you can take away from it to repeat for building your own business. I really enjoyed this conversation with Jesse and I hope you guys enjoy it as well. Before we get into this episode, though, I first want to talk about our sponsors. First up is LMAX Digital, the number one

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They're providing simplified, trusted access to crypto, decentralized finance, and Web3 investment opportunities. Institutions and investors can gain diversified, secure, compliant, and easily tradable access to a diversified set of industry-leading equity products and protocols through a single stock purchase on a regulated exchange. DeFi Technologies is currently listed on the U.S. Exchange at DEFTF Stock Ticker and the Canadian NEO Exchange at DEFI. For more information or to subscribe to receive company updates and financial information, visit their website at DeFi.Tech. I'm really excited about what these guys are doing. I've become an advisor to the business, and I highly suggest you go check them out. Go to their website at defi.tech today.

Anthony Pompliano runs Pomp Investments. All views of him and the guests on his podcast are solely their opinions and do not reflect the opinions of Pomp Investments. You should not treat any opinion expressed by Pomp or his guests as a specific inducement to make a particular investment or follow a particular strategy,

but only as an expression of his personal opinion. This podcast is for informational purposes only. So Jesse, how are you, my friend? I'm doing great. How are you, dude? I'm doing very, very well. I think that in some weird way, many people expect me to be most excited to talk to investors or people in the Bitcoin community,

but these are the conversations that I find, one, the most valuable, but also I think are the most exciting, which is the tactical nature and the tactical steps it takes to actually build a business. And so I saw that you put together this thread on building a business over the last 18 months, and you do it from a venture studio model, which means that you yourself may not be the sole founder or operating on a day-to-day basis. So talk us through the planning process.

How did you know, okay, we want to start a business, this is the right sector, and this is the right person to go do it with? Yeah, yeah. No, I'll jump into that. One thing I want to mention before, because you guys were talking about McDonald's and you were asking this, you know, this question of starting a business that last night I have a seven-year-old son. And to me, like I always tell people, when you want to be an entrepreneur, it starts 10 years, you know, 10 years from the day you first realized you could become an entrepreneur

is when you can actually become an entrepreneur because it takes that much time and energy. And I, my dad was an entrepreneur. So when I was probably 13 or 14, and by the time I was 25, I started my first company. But I was watching last night, the, the, the food who built America. Have you heard of this show? I have not. Oh, dude. I'm going to change your life for the next month.

The Food Who Built America? So there's a series called The Men Who Built America. Yes, one of my favorites. Okay, so they started spinning it off. So they've got The Cars That Built America, The Food That Built America, and they take you through every entrepreneur, Mr. Hershey's story, all the chocolate guys,

all how frozen food came to be, how the Pizza Hut versus Domino's war started. And last night, my son and I, so it's the way I've gotten my son, he's seven. And he loves food and he's so stoked about entrepreneurship now because last night we watched McDonald's versus Burger King. Wow. And how they got started and like the dominance of Ray Kroc and McDonald's.

But actually, you didn't realize this. The Whopper actually had Burger King winning for about a decade until they introduced the Big Mac. The Big Mac was the response. And we don't think of it now, but at the time, signature meals were huge. Anyway, it was just a fun way to start. But this is one, a great suggestion. but also too, I think that somebody who runs a venture studio, right? I'm assuming many of your

personal interests and things you do on the weekends, the books you read, the videos you watch, all that is very similar to the things that I probably watch because there's a game that gets played. And there's almost the same way that an NBA player just loves the game of basketball. There's a ton of folks who say, Hey, look, I build and invest in businesses and I love that game. And so what do you do? Like the NBA player sits and watches other NBA games or basketball somewhere or tries to go to the gym and get better. Entrepreneurs do all the same things. It's just not a sports game as you would think in the same sense. Yeah, I think that's right. And to go back to your original question, we started a slightly different variation of the

venture studio. We did a little bit of the, okay, let's research markets and let's look at industries and let's talk about a variety of different things. But ultimately, I know a lot. I looked a lot for things that have my unfair advantage. What are things that I know I can uniquely build and I have an ability to build it, not like a beginner. And so that's actually one of the most important lenses. We have probably 30 ideas and then, you know, 20, 75% of them get knocked off the list because they go, well, what can I bring to that idea that's special? So in this, you know, to answer your question, like we look at ideas and it's the selection process is actually me also, me just kind of going, yeah, I think, I think I can do that. I think I can figure that

one out and I think we can get some unique things. So this first business we started last February is called Growth Assistant. And the story behind it starts 12 years ago. You know, I started as a 22-year-old at McKinsey and, you know, I was three months into my first project at McKinsey and I'm making my slides and my manager looks over my shoulder. He goes, why are you doing that, Jesse? I go, I don't know. I'm an analyst. That's what I'm supposed to do. He goes, no, no, no. Just write some notes down and send it to VGI. And tomorrow morning, you're going to get a brand new deck that's all properly made. And I go, what the hell is VGI? Visual Graphics India. It's the division of McKinsey that will take care of your slides

for you overnight. And so me being a resourceful entrepreneurial person, I was like, I never made another slide again. I would just draw them off and I'd send them to India. I became friends with a couple of my guys in India. And, and I like saying, I know like I'm getting promoted as the best analyst in my class. Right. And so, so that kind of planted the seed. I started my first company Ampush in 2010, and we started building Facebook ads early on, super early. And at that time you had to build every ad one at a time, like literally in the interface, you had to upload the headline, write the copy and then upload a picture. And we did a few of them. They started to work and I go, we got to scale this, but there was no API. There's no bulk spreadsheet tool. Like I know what

we'll do. We'll find some people in India. We'll train them on how to do this. And, and they'll do this overnight for us. So we would send them a spreadsheet. They would sit in the interface all night in a VPN for us and they'd upload them. Fast forward five or six years, you know, Ampush is spending half a billion dollars a year on Facebook for companies like Uber, Dollar Shave Club, Peloton. And this team in India that I built is 50 people. And people would come into Ampush. They'd work for us for a few years in the US, of course. And then they'd get hired by Uber, hired by brands. And they'd call me, my alumni would call me and they'd go, Jesse, I need the India team. And I go, well, you can't have it. It's part of Ampush, you know?

And then my second question was, well, doesn't this exist in the world? Hasn't somebody thought of this as an idea? And it turned out, you know, 10, 12 years later, the answer is nobody had thought of it or no one had done it, or maybe no one was ready to do it. And so it was one of the first businesses in the venture studio. I said, every brand, every DTC brand, every tech company who's doing any kind of marketing, there's a ton of rote manual tasks that go on. We need to get them full-time people offshore. We actually chose the Philippines for a variety of reasons I can talk about. We started the business in February and to get going, we made some phone calls. We called alumni of mine, we called potential contacts and I said, Hey, I got a really good

idea. This is going to help your in-house team. It's not an agency. It's just really staff augmentation. And we're going to get you three people in the Philippines. One will handle all the creative formats you need from a design perspective. One will handle all the reporting and uploading to the ads, annoying things your team doesn't want to do. And one will handle all the outreach to your affiliates and your influencers that nobody in America wants to do also. And, and someone's, you know, started getting them. We call that the happy meal, you know, to the McDonald's analogy. Those are the three that every brand team needs. and you know next thing you know today we have 100 clients and 200 people in the philippines

and the thing is growing by probably 30 people a month in terms of placements and clients that we're doing so it's been insane and it's introduced this whole new industry to me about bpo which is a big and old industry but no one has quite done it for growth marketing digital marketing and so we find ourselves at the center of three mega trends trend number one is the demand for growth marketing talent far outweighs the supply number two is remote work right and uh number three is just sort of the variety and the nature of kind of the talent of sort of different things going offshore and that being the third one. So when you start to analyze why this has been successful, how much of it was you had a unique insight versus like you had an ability to actually just

execute a solid idea versus there was some sort of like business development or capital markets advantage that you had that other people wouldn't have? Like try to be as intellectually honest with yourself as possible it's not the third one at all because i i funded it myself okay and it already generates millions of dollars of ebit uh 18 months in so so when you think of that is it that you had some unique insight or is it just pure execution it's i think it's it's it's unique insight kind of mega these mega trends but then i have a huge unfair advantage because if we just pulled even a even a smart capable entrepreneurial person off the street but they didn't have the relationships and growth marketing and brands they didn't have

the knowledge of how to do this work over like what needs to get pushed offshore and what doesn't you know funny enough the biggest training gap in the business is teaching american clients what they can and can't leverage these people for and i know that like the back of my hand right so it's it's the inside around them in the market trends but it's also my unfair advantages and definitely more the unfair advantage side of it my partner adrian who's the ceo you know she has a deep background in hr and recruiting so she was able to stand up the machine for recruiting over there quickly as well, which is another unfair advantage. And so I would definitely give it, you know, 30, 70 in terms of insight trends versus unfair advantage. And when you get started, like what

were the first things you did go back to day one, you say, okay, I know who I'm going to do this with. What do you tactically do to just build momentum? Uh, get a website up by, okay, what's what are we going to name this thing? Okay. Growth assistant, my growth assistant we bought. And then I found growth assistant on an auction and I bought it. I was like, okay, cool. We have this literally threw up a website on Wix that took us a weekend to build. So we have some sort of storefront and email address. And then go get your first five customers, you know, and if you can get and even if that takes you six months, that's a challenge. If it takes you, you know, two weeks, which is what it did in Growth Assistant, then you definitely you're on to something. And you

know, we're talking about one of the businesses, but let me talk about another one briefly. You know, the other one I was starting simultaneously was I really wanted to start my own brand. Cause I had helped all these brands for 10 years grow. And I was like, I'm the king of Facebook. I know how to do this stuff. Like I'm going to start my own. And I was like, okay, I'm so good at this that I'm going to just make up a commodity product. And I think I can sell it on Facebook. And it's the same thing. It's a very different way of doing it, but I went and found the product. I named the brand and I tried to run ads on Facebook for it. And the thing just crashed and burned. I mean, it didn't work, but we did get a handful of customers. We did go and

talk to them and we've sort of relaunched, you know, through the ashes of the Phoenix of that. And that second brand is doing really, really well. But, but that was an example of where we just got in the game. The biggest thing is get in the game, right? And you just can't know everything you're doing before you start trying to sell something to someone is just, you're making it up as you go and you can keep getting better as you go. And your brain doesn't turn off. You keep thinking, you keep incrementing, but get the website up, try to sell it to someone. I mean, those are literally the first two things that we did. So let's get as tactical as possible. When you think of the name, how, what's the process? Like, do you just try to come up with a name

that the.com is available? Do you have some other framework that you use to determine what the actual name of the brand is going to be? No. I mean, we just think of, we talk, talk for a few minutes, brainstorm, maybe go back and forth, but also time box it to like less than a week because the name is not that important. Okay. So that's going to be my question is why do you think the name is not important? Um, I just, I don't know. No one's ever bought or bought or not bought something for me because of the name. Well, at least in the B2B context in the B2C context, like we launched this brand with commodity supplements called Puforia and Puforia is the funny feeling you get when you take a shit, like a good shit. Um, and, and then

we put normal commodity products you could get at the store. And, you know, we got a lot of feedback that like, the name's kind of silly guys. I don't think you're serious, whatever. And the thing we kept hearing from customers, 75% of which were women was, um, I have this thing called bloating and I hate bloating. And so then we actually ran one of these ABCDE tests. We tried rhythm. We tried Puforia again with a new, new formula. We tried lightness. We tried superbiotic and we tried unbloat and unbloat outperformed by 50 to 70%. So in a B2C context, it's much more important. And that's the way we would figure it out as we just test a bunch of stuff in a B2B context. i just it never i don't know it never comes up it's never that important someone i know uh i was

recently talking to them and they said that they had migraines uh and and had a pretty bad migraine over the last week or so and so they're like so i went to the store and i bought motrin migraine and i was like oh i didn't know that they had that and they go yeah it's just regular uh and they just put migraine as marketing and i was like man like i bet you that sales spike for people who are looking specifically for migraine medicine, right? But it's a pure just rebranding of the exact same formula, I guess, on it. And so to your point, the consumer may care, but maybe B2B doesn't care as much. Not in my experience. Yeah. And I think, and you can test on the consumer thing, really. I mean, that test I just talked about cost us two grand

and we just had the exact same ingredients. We ran, we had single Facebook ads made by someone in the Philippines, one of our growth assistants, and they just had the brand name and colors and said, sign up for the wait list, 20% off. And we ran to be tactical, right? We ran five different ads, exact same ingredients, different name. And we just looked at what the click, the highest click through and the highest click to sign up rate were and unbloat beat everything else pretty handily. So when you run that test, uh, which I think a lot of folks, you know, they've read, uh, Tim Ferriss's, uh, for our work week. And there was this whole kind of period of like growth marketing. People want to say, Hey, how do I learn better at that? And testing was a huge

piece of it. I think that the famous story from Tim's book is that he like took just like a piece of paper that looked like a cover and he went, he put it over books and then just waited and watched to see who picked it up in the bookstore. I was like, okay, that's the best one. But you're talking about much more sophisticated testing to a degree. How do you think about, okay, we're gonna take $2,000. We're going to run these five ads targeting. How much traffic do you need for it actually to make sense? Like, like walk me through the process of running that test in terms of making sure that you have confidence that the answer is actually the answer? Yeah, yeah. It's a great question. You know, look, I think it's not that much more complicated. We

run it through this lead gen ad, so you don't even need a website. And you have to be very careful with false precision in these situations, because that's the nature of a lot of entrepreneurs, especially in D2C I talked to is they're constantly talking about statistical significance. And in this case, you know, we basically, we looked at the first, we did this trial with $1,000 and basically picked the two winners who were actually pretty close and neither were statistically significantly better, but they were definitely better than the other three. And, you know, you're talking about for, let's do, let's say the CPMs on Facebook are 30 bucks. So for $30, you can show it to a thousand people. So your click-through rate is definitely

statistically significant. Your conversion to an email submit, that might take more N, but at least in that first run, we were able to go, hey, we showed this, you know, say 200 bucks each. So we showed it to 5,000, 5,000, 5,000, 5,000. And it was just clear that two of them had a much higher click-through rate, rhythm and, and unbloat. And then we just squared those off with $500 each. And then it became very, we had, then we had enough end to figure out that there was enough submits on unbloat. And basically the Delta was big enough in that case. If it wasn't big enough, we may have run a second one, or we may have tried to do some other experiments, but in that case, unbloat was just way better than rhythm when we just separated them.

So once you know that, okay, look, this is the brand we're going to run with. how do you think about distribution there's a famous saying first time entrepreneurs worry about product second time entrepreneurs worry about distribution how do you think about jump-starting growth is it just pure you guys are great at paid ads and so you go and run a bunch of paid ads and you're able to monitor uh kind of traffic and conversions uh or are there other things that you put into consideration when you're starting a brand and really trying to get it off the ground yeah you know one of these advices i always give to dc founders especially in the early days is one day every channel is going to work for you but they're all they're

not all going to work at the same time. And each of them is, and I got this advice from someone very early on, each of them takes 90 to 120 days of a founder's level of energy to crack the code on them. Right? So today for Unbloat, Unbloat just hit a thousand subscribers. We launched it in February or yeah, February. And we've used Facebook and email. That's it. We tried TikTok for like a month or two, and I think we'll come back to it. And I'm very excited about TikTok, but it was too much. It was too much at once. And it was distracting people and the upkeeper associated with it. So one of the reasons I'm big on being capital light, Pomp, is I don't even believe human beings can track that many things at one time. And I think they have to get really good at one

thing at a time and kind of stack the pancakes on top of each other versus trying to do six things at once. And most early first-time entrepreneurs do six things at once because they have no idea what's going to work. They have no idea what they're doing. And then they just hope to get lucky with one and then they go hard at one, right? That's the typical formula. But for me, it's no, I know what I'm pretty good at. I know what's got resonance. I'm going to go hard on that and I'm going to crack the code on that. And then once that's working, we'll stack on the second one. Like we're going to launch Amazon in the next month, right? So we're going Facebook first and email, of course, is just extra stuff. Then we're going to launch Amazon on top of that

because we see people Googling or searching, not Googling, searching on Amazon for Unbloat. then we'll probably circle back to search and then by the end of the year we'll do tiktok but and by the way for each one of those we have what we call waypoints and that's kind of my version of okr is where waypoints are they're more definitive than okrs in the sense that they're like you're at the second level of of a game and until you beat the boss you can't go to the third level right so the boss right now we're trying to figure out is make sure conversion rate's a certain level and retention's a certain level and if we if we launch three more channels without beating this boss, we'd kill ourselves, right? We would start losing money on all these other

places. We wouldn't know why. So we basically, we think of each thing as a graduation level that you have to accomplish a certain goal to or fail before you get to go to the next level. That's how we think about each of these channels and distribution. So when you start to roll this out and you go Facebook over Amazon, why did you do Facebook first? Is it just that's where you guys had, uh, the most experience. Yeah. Just unfair advantage. Okay. And then, um, how has Facebook ads been affected? People have read all about the Apple privacy stuff. I've heard some DTC founders say, you know, their return on invested, uh, or advertising spend has been off the charts, uh, kind of increased. What, what have you seen kind of tactically on the ground?

Yeah. You're going to love this. I, you know, uh, let me talk philosophically and I'll tell you tactically we've seen it work really well for Unbloat. It didn't work really well for Puforia. And I think that has more to do with the names and the products and a few other things. It wasn't bad, but it wasn't great. You know, the thing I think is most annoying is the tracking and the signal is all messed up, right? You've got these third-party services that tell you one thing, Google Analytics tells you another thing, and Facebook tells you another thing. So your windshield is a little bit foggy. But in terms of the drive and your ability to get there, we have not seen any major difference.

Now that's like, you know, I don't know. I'm not trying, I'm trying to be humble here, but that's like, um, pick your favorite hedge fund guy, right? The Renaissance technology guy going, I'm not seeing any issues in the market. Like I know I've been doing this for 10 years. I've spent billions of dollars in Facebook ads, like for me. And you know, then the philosophy behind this, just so you know, it is, it's really important. Like I used to tell CMOs when I was running Ampush, when you tell your board that Facebook is getting more expensive, you're actually outing yourself as a bad marketer. And they'd go, what do you mean by that, Jesse? I go, well, CPM is not determined by Facebook. It's determined by the market. The market bids

on this piece of real estate called a CPM for a piece of real estate on the Facebook platform. And if it's gone up by 20% and your CPA has also gone up by 20%, that means you're at the beta of the market. You're basically just the same as the market because you haven't seen any value you incrementally. And somebody else is bidding that up because they're getting more yield per impression than you are, right? So the analogy back to the farm thing is like, it's a piece of land. Imagine I have a piece of land, you and I are bidding against each other. If I have a better tractor than you that gets me more crop yield, I can pay more for the land than you can. And I'll actually probably make the same, if not a better profit margin. So the secret in Facebook is,

we measure this, Amplish invented this metric, not invented, but came up when we used to use it called click-through and conversion. It was click-through and conversion combined. We called it APM. Think of it as per 10,000 impressions you serve, how many sales do you generate? And because the CPMs are growing up all the time because the marketers are competing with each other, your APM has to go up faster than your CPM or your CPA will get worse, right? And so that metric, we spend a ton of time on how do I get more yield out of these impressions? And some of that tactically is, are my ads videos and are they a little clickbaity? Do they get you curious? If I say, take the quiz to figure out if you're bloated, you know, that's going to get more

people to click. And then I have to make sure I convert them on the back end with a discount or something a little bit different there. But, but you're constantly measuring that click through and conversion combination. And you're constantly like, I track that metric weekly to go, is that APM getting better over time? Cause I have to be going faster than the CPM for my CPA and volume to keep getting better over time.

Right. So, so I'd say the market is so, so, you know, I'm not trying to hate on anyone, but if you woke up one day with iOS 13, you know, we saw the Ampush team, which is still very much around, had about two to three months of disruption. So CPAs got 30, 40% worse. They recalibrated, they fixed up some analytics, Ampush built some of its own technology to solve this. And then by 90 days after that issue, this was the end of last summer, we were kind of back to where we were. And now it's just as better than ever because ultimately there's some gobbledygook stuff like campaign structures and whatever. I can go into all that, but the core principles of

do you farm the land better than other people? And are you continually getting better at farming is the most important thing for continuing to be successful on Facebook, right? And there's still a hundred billion dollar revenue business. So there's plenty of people spending money and making it work on Facebook. For sure. Let's zoom out with the last few minutes that we have together. The venture studio model, you've got kind of a modern version or a twist to it. But I have to imagine that capital allocation for you personally, and for kind of the business is a huge piece of what you spend thinking all day? Should I go and take capital that is being thrown off by these businesses and reinvest it to grow those specific businesses? Or should I go start new

businesses? How do you think through it? And are there any lessons that you've learned about capital allocation over the years? Yeah, yeah, that's a great question. You know, I'm not sure we're quite at that point yet. I hope to be there in the next couple of years. Right now, we've got one business that's quite profitable. The Unbloat is about to become, I think this month will be cash flow positive because we're leveraging like Settle and a lot of these third party financing solutions. So they basically front your media and your inventory. And as long as your economics are decent on the, on the marketing front, you actually start ending up being cashflow positive, sort of the Bezos trick of, I get the money from consumers now, but I don't have to pay my vendors

for 60 days or something. And my, man, my media in this case. And then the third business software business is still consuming cash. You know, one thing we generally do is we stay lean. We use the waypoints concept. So we don't take on too much at once. We really try to find one or two ways to move things forward. Um, because we think that's the right way to approach it. And then I think over time we'll learn how to capital allocate. And right now it's crazy, dude is, is like, I've started these three businesses for less than a million bucks. And I think theoretically in aggregate, they're probably worth a hundred right now. If we were to like kind of go put them together and go raise money against that, maybe a little less than that.

And so it's hard to argue that with the right approach, starting something from fresh for us is not going to always be the best method of capital allocation and probably letting third party people finance the growth of something else. And so I don't think we're going to go raise any money for the first two for the software business. We are likely to go raise some money because we just think it's going to need more time and energy. And it also has a slightly different profile than the other two when it comes to creating enterprise value and other things. And so, but I'm also figuring out as I go, like I originally started this thing going, I'm not raising money for anyone. It's going to all be reinvested all the time.

And I had a couple of smart people who challenged me. He said, well, Jesse, if this is what you want to do the rest of your life, it seems like you should try all these things. You know, I'm 18 months into it and I want to do it for 30 years. Like it seems like you should just be much more flexible with how these things grow and scale. And I think that's sort of where my head's at now. Like I'm, I'm in learning mode around them. How do you go and learn? Like, is it just by doing, Hey, let me go raise money for one of the companies. Yeah. Like for Kahani, Kahani is a SaaS app. It's like super cool. Um, I want to show it to you. Like it's, it's basically our the thesis for kahani is the mobile experience has gone forward with like

tick tock and instagram and it's so interactive and it's so native and yet e-commerce literally looks the same as it did 10 years ago and most e-commerce sites look the same so why aren't they using those mobile features it's you know they haven't had the right tools and technology so we've we're gonna be able to see this on the youtube it's uh there you go a little bit see the story bar so we built the story bar from instagram basically onto a native experience here and now you're in a story like experience and you can tap through it and you can swipe it's e-commerce with the mobile functionality so that people can kind of discover and uh and navigate through like one of the products we want to build is the tinder swipe so you're you're an e-com site

and all of a sudden you can show your products yes yeah swipe right swipe left give you all these tools and technology. And, you know, I think there's, I don't know, two to 3 million big, you know, total stores in e-comm there's like probably 50 to a hundred thousand that are of some meaningful scale. It's a big SaaS business if we build it and we built the prototype we've, we've launched on 20 sites, it shows revenue lift for a lot of these sites. And so I'm kind of like, yes, we could, we could just do this without any money, but I think we want to get the product out and done faster. I also think we still want to maintain the bootstrap mantra. And so even the money we'll raise will be like a one and done, like let's raise three to 5 million and then

never raise again. So, because I don't think we need more than that to get to scale and get to some profitability. That, that makes a ton of sense. When you think about the first 18 months of this journey, what's been the biggest surprise, the thing that you didn't expect, but, but you've taken away? Such a good question. I'm more surprised that my unfair advantages work as well as they do. I think, I think there's a part of me that was insecure. Like, yeah, you think, you know, you think, you know, all these people, Jesse, but you're going to call them with something different and new, and they're going to tell you to, you know, see you later. Like you're, so I think it's been really gratifying to see that works. You know, Twitter has been a huge

thing for me. Like I started it right. As I started gateway X, I had 1500 followers and I have 140,000 and I'd say growth assistant and Kahani have gotten hundreds of inbounds from both of them. So these B2B businesses have really benefited from Twitter. That's been a huge surprise. You know, the third one I'd say, which is still, I'm still developing is this is the job I'm in is not the CEO of a operating company. And I think it took me a little, it's still taking me time to transition to what is that? How do I get good at this job? And what I'm learning is that like, and I, you know, I do a lot of coaching and stuff. And like my coach is like, trust, you know, trust your zone of genius, Jesse, stay within the things you want to do and that you're

really good at and don't do the other stuff. And as somebody like, you know, immigrant father, entrepreneur, you know, my dad's like, what are you doing? You got to stay focused. You know, like don't let you got to count every penny that's coming in the door. And it's been hard for me to pull away in that sense and go, no, I'm going to focus on prioritizing what we work on marketing and sales, um, talent. Like I'm going to focus on a few of these things and I'm going to get them really right. And that has also seemed to work that I don't have to be the end all be all for every single business. I can be a certain set of things. And that has actually seemed to, to, to be successful so far. And I don't know if it'll work in five companies, but

it's working, you know, working ish in three. I love it. This, the day-to-day experience of what you're doing is so valuable for folks. And it feels like, uh, as you learn more, it makes you better. Right. But, uh, this is not theoretical. This is not, uh, reading about it in a classroom. Like you take dollars, you put them in the machine, either you drive more revenue or you don't, you win or you lose. And that is the single best way to, uh, to play and to really learn. Um, and so you're getting that feedback loop on such a quick timeframe that you've probably learned more in 18 months than most people who, you know, quote unquote study business, uh, will learn in, you know, 10 years. Cause it's just actually doing it and figuring out what works

and what doesn't. Yeah. And even when I reflect on my own journey for the first five years of Ampush, I learned a ton. The second five years, we were scaling something that was working and was fine. We were making a lot of money, but we weren't doing a lot of new things. I even feel like in 18 months, I learned more than the last five years on the business front. And you're right. And one of the things that's made me also good at this job or why this job is better is when you're in the seat of being the CEO and founder, you're told you got to tell stories to people. You have to pitch how things are working. And I made this mistake previously. It's really easy to start lying to yourself. And because I'm kind of once removed from each of the

individual situations and I get to see all three of them, I'm much more honest with myself and with us than I otherwise would be. Um, like, and I, I realized how scared I am of failing when I was building this, like Puforia was a dumb idea. I came up with it in a night, but I really wanted to build an e-commerce store and get it off the ground. Next thing I know, like I'm up all hours of the night looking at our Shopify and I'm talking to my wife about it. And, and, and there was this thing of like, Oh, I'm scared. I want this to work, but what if the best thing is to kill it. And it made me just much more honest to go, the economics aren't very good. By the way, growth assistant in the same time that we had maybe made 25,000 in revenue for Puforia had

already gotten to like 150,000 a month. So they were side by side and it was like, sure, theoretically you can't compare them, but sure. Yeah. At the end of the day, you can, right? That like one is growing with very low CAC, one is scaling every month. Like the other one, people don't really want to buy it. They're canceling as soon as they get it. So you can actually start to create some more honesty, which I think is the most important part to making the model work is you can't lie to yourself. And, and I think that's, that's also one of the benefits of sort of this, this unique model where we get the benefits of me being really close to the numbers and the data, but we don't necessarily have the cost. Typically it happens to an

entrepreneur where they get so attached to their own ideas and they get so bought into, they kind of, you know, they, they believe their own BS and I still do that a little bit, but, but I'm much less likely to do it in this model. Yeah. I, I, I think that my biggest takeaway from working on the growth team at Facebook was this idea of how do you get to like telling yourself the truth and uh one of the the frameworks that they always used was like you have to do two things when you're doing testing you have to understand what the design of the test is you know what are we going to do what is the goal what does success look like what does success not look like all the things that most people would think of in testing but the second thing that most people

forget is you have to run the test perfectly just do exactly what you said you were going to do you have to run it perfectly because if at the end your conclusion is it didn't work but you didn't run it perfectly you're then left asking yourself was it that the test actually like our thesis wasn't validated or is it that if we had run it correctly it would have worked and so the only thing you can control right is make sure you run it perfectly and then that will always give you higher signal on the result and if you do that over and over and over again you actually do get to learning you are honest with yourself and then you can go ahead and figure out what the solution is yeah we we created a cultural practice which we're not perfect at but we're pretty good at

that I picked up from the guys at Red Ventures who had bought a stake in Ampush and I picked it up from my coach. And we call it accounting and response. And it's not like financial accounting. It's accounting is, did we do what we say we would do and did it work? There's two questions we ask every week

at the end of a series of running campaigns or tests. Did we do it and did it work? And the first five or 10 minutes is a complete yes or no. There's no emotion. There's no spin. There's no explaining why it quite didn't go the way we wanted to. And we just say, and nobody's in trouble either way. Did we do it?

Oh, we didn't, we said we would do these 10 things. We only did six of them. Well, what we didn't do for, okay. And the six that we did, did they work? Yes or no work defined as we'd previously defined, you know? And then, and then we go, okay, that's accounting. Accounting's done. Now let's talk about how to respond to that accounting. Do we have too much on our plates? Did we misprioritize, you know, why didn't we get everything done? We said we would do. And then the second thing is, did these things not work? Well, what did we get wrong about them? and and then based on that we come up with a new set of things but it sounds stupid but the but separating accounting and response because typically you walk into a meeting and go what's

going on with the test they go well the you know this one's not quite performing the way because on saturday this thing happened in the morning and and it's just hard to get the truth it's hard to get that real just blanket accounting um and so we just try our best to like and part of that by the way as a leader is you you have to make it okay for things to not work including people not doing what they said they would do, you know, but that's also just a part of the process of, well, you said you would do it. Why didn't you do it? You're not in trouble. You have too much on your plate. You know, you didn't mispronounce something came up emergent. And it's a little bit like the agile sprint process in engineering, where you keep getting better and better.

If you create that room for people to say, I didn't do it, or I did it and it didn't work. And that's a big system we will use to kind of build that ability in the business. I love it. I could talk to you about this forever. Where can we send people to find on the internet or find the companies yeah yeah so uh js puji uh my twitter that's perfect and you know the companies i don't have them yet on my bio but uh growthassistant.com unbloat.me is the is the ddc brand and then kahani app.com k-a-h-a-n-i app app.com um those are the kind of the different things we're running and um and you know ambush is still around and and so if you're you're spending 10 million plus in digital media and need help with growth marketing,

it's the best place to go. I love it, man. We're definitely going to have to bring you back as you make more progress. I feel like people can learn a lot, especially the tactical kind of day-to-day stuff. So thank you so much for taking the time to do this. And we'll definitely do it again in the future. Thanks for having me on. All right. See you later, Jesse. Thanks so much for listening to today's episode. I really hope you guys enjoyed this one. Make sure you're subscribed on Apple, Spotify, or your favorite podcast player. And if you're looking to try to transition to get a new job in the Bitcoin or crypto industry, we've got you covered. Head over to palmscryptocourse.com. We've developed a curriculum with the top teams across the industry. It's a three-week intensive

training program with over 50 events packed into that three-week time period. Go to palmscryptocourse.com to learn more, and I'll meet you guys for the next episode.