The Startup Ideas Podcast - 80 mins of advice to level up your life with lifehacks

Episode Date: July 29, 2024

I’m joined by Jonathan Courtney, Co-Founder and CEO of AJ&Smart, discuss startup ideas, lifehacks and book recommendationsStartup Idea: "Drip" - AI-powered content resurfacing• Combats "read it later" syndrome• Synthesizes bookmarks, saved content• Delivers curated insights via SMS/email• Personalizes based on interests & goalsStartup Idea: Entrepreneur Bookmark Newsletter •  Weekly newsletter• Curated Bookmarks from famous entrepreneur• Partner with famous entrepreneursLifehacks:• Craft a personal mission statement• Avoid angry people & curmudgeons• Chasing generational wealth is overrated• Show up to meetings with small, thoughtful gifts• Use social media apps on desktop only• Use analogies to make ideas stick• Keep a learning list as your side hustleMust-Read Books for Entrepreneurs:• The 4-Hour Workweek by Tim Ferris• Anything You Want by Derek Sivers• Double Your Profits by Bob Fifer• Rework by Jason Fried and David Heinemeier’s ReworkBonus Book Recs:• Expert Secrets by Russell Brunson• Traffic Secrets by Russell BrunsonWant more free ideas? I collect the best ideas from the pod and give them to you for free in a database. Most of them cost $0 to start (my fav)Get access: http://gregisenberg.com/30startupideas🚀  My FREE 5 day email course to learn how to build a business of the future using the ACP funnel:https://www.communityempire.co/free-course🎯 To build your own portfolio businesses powered by community you might enjoy my membership.You'll get my full course with all my secrets on building businesses, peer-groups to keep you accountable, business ideas every single month and more!Spots are limited.https://www.communityempire.co/📬 Join my free newsletter to get weekly startup insights for free:https://www.gregisenberg.com/70,000+ people are already subscribed.FIND ME ON SOCIALX/Twitter: https://twitter.com/gregisenbergInstagram: https://instagram.com/gregisenberg/LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/gisenberg/FIND JONATHAN ON SOCIALX/Twitter: https://twitter.com/JicecreamLinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jonathan-courtney-4510644b/To improve your rankings your business on Google and using AI for SEO, sign up tohttp://boringmarketing.com/Links Mentioned:Episode Timestamps: 0:00 Intro03:58 Startup Idea 1: "Drip" - AI-powered content resurfacing13:04 Startup Idea 2: Entrepreneur Bookmark Newsletter18:53 Lifehacks1:04:40 Book Rec 1: Tim Ferris’s 4-hour Workweek1:08:53 Book Rec 2: Derek Sivers’ Anything You Want1:10:39 Book Rec 3: Bob Fifer’s Double Your Profits1:11:55 Book Rec 4: Jason Fried and David Heinemeier’s Rework1:16:06 Book Rec 5: Russell Brunson’s Traffic Secrets and Expert Secrets

What do you mean by chasing generational wealth is overrated and wealth is underrated? I'm not chasing generational wealth. I don't need hundreds of millions of dollars or billions of dollars. This came to me a couple of years ago, we got offered a hundred million dollar blank check to basically scale out, lay checkout and build out a bunch of new products faster, acquire faster. Just take our model and just add steroids. to it and we turned it down and the VC basically called me up like sweating bullets he goes people need a sip on jonathan jice cream Courtney yeah i'm going to just start calling myself jice cream

now on your podcast i like calling you jice cream yeah that's not what i intended when i created my gamer tag but you can call me whatever you like right well that's the internet bro that's the internet it's your podcast dude What do you want to talk about today? I've got three options for you. And I'm going to tell you them in order of what I think I would be most interested in. Number one, and also this straight up, I think, would just work well for views and engagement and all that good YouTube stuff. Number one, I've got a pile of books next to me.

And these are the books that had the biggest effect on me getting to my first million running my business. So I thought a conversation around which books were actually influential, not just inspiring, but also had practical sort of outcomes and measurable outcomes. So I thought that that could be an episode. So it's like the books that made us our first million or some shit, all right? The second idea I had was on your Twitter, and this is sort of in a similar vein, On your Twitter, you posted 50 life hacks for you today. No, 50 life hacks for you in today's stressful, competitive world.

And you had 50 life hacks. I thought we could go through those, see where we get to. I think each of them is really interesting. I think that could be really useful. So both of those are more on the entrepreneurial journey, finding an advantage as an entrepreneur vibe. And then the third thing is just like, I have an idea for a startup. Okay, let's start with the idea. Let's go backwards. We're going to start with the idea. Then we're going to go the life hacks and then we're going to go the books. If we get to it.

No. Yeah. Well, listen to the whole episode to get to it. We are going to get to it. We'll only get to it if you like and comment right now. And we'll know. We'll know. It's the least you can do. It's the least you could do. It's the least you could do. you after all we've done after all we've been through together oh after yeah i mean we're not it's not like we're someone's paying us to make these videos i mean i'm certainly not getting paid anyway i'm waiting on that check um so yeah please all we ask for is a like and a positive comment about my hair and um so before the episode started i asked uh gregg how how the comments were and he said some people didn't like your hair and i was like okay i'm going to go look for those comments now So we need more positive hair comments. So I got a big haircut two episodes ago.

That was a big haircut. So we'll need some updates on that. Okay, so we'll go with some startup ideas. I'm going to hit you with one. And I'm going to be honest with you that actually this idea came from Ammer, who works at AJ and Smart. We were chatting around lunch. And I was like, I'm going on Greg's podcast.

And, you know, he loves ideas. He loves all these ideas. he kind of like stopped talking and just went fully quiet and just stared into space. And then he came up with this great idea. Well, I like it anyway. And his idea is a product called drip, right? And the idea behind this product, it's kind of like a, you know how you, I don't know if you use Twitter like this or if you use the internet like this. I have like tons of bookmarks, tons of screenshots, tons of things where I'm like, oh my God, that's a cool quote.

That's a cool thing. I want to check this out later. And also I use like pocket cast to put articles into just collecting loads of stuff. But in the end, the truth is I very rarely go back to any of it. And I think that's really common. People rarely go back to any of this read it later stuff. Even the like best possible read it later software, it still acts as a bit of like a hole for all of your stuff. It's just like a big black box.

And Amher had this idea, which I thought was pretty cool for a product that, well, he said all of these services are basically procrastination machines, like screenshoting bookmarking, save later. You rarely go back and take action on these things. And he had an idea for an AI startup, which I thought was pretty cool. And the idea is the product itself combines your sources. Let's say you could even just start with bookmarks on Twitter on X and pocket cat. using pocketcast, the things you've actually saved. So you don't even have to create a new plug-in for it. And instead of it just being a massive pile of stuff that you go to,

you get things drip-fed to you at a pace that you feel like. And this could be something as simple as SMS. So once a day you wake up and it's like combining maybe three or four things that have something similar, synthesizing them together and saying and giving you that idea. So an example of that could be you wake up in the morning, you look at your texts. There's a lot of weird ones, you know, like a lot of weird shit. Like, I don't know. It's just I wish that person would stop texting me.

But anyway, next to that you have drip, right? And drip is an AI that's dressed up in cool drip, right? It's just got it's very vibe. And you open it up and it's like essentially it's your thought for the day or your thing for the day or your idea for the day. or it could even just be your inspiration for the day. And it's taking, the topic is around. One topic that I got really into a couple of months ago was this idea of atomization.

I don't know if you ever read this article called the atomization of life. I think the guy is called Nat Eliasson. Anyway, I saved that article, and then I googled it, and I saved loads of other things, and then I bookmarked loads of stuff. And the idea would be one day, just, it could be a year later. It's just like, quick ad break. Let me tell you about a bit.

business I invested in. It's called Boringmarketing.com. So a few years ago, I met this group of people that were some of the best SEO experts in the world. They were behind getting some of the biggest companies found on Google. And the secret sauce is they've got a set of technology and AI that could help you outrank your competition. So for my own businesses, I wanted that. I didn't want to have to rely on Mark Zuckerberg. I didn't want to depend on ads. to drive customers to my businesses. I wanted to rank high in Google. That's why I like SEO,

and that's why I use Boringmarketing.com, and that's why I invested in it. They're so confident in their approach that they offer a 30-day sprint with 100% money-back guarantee. Who does that nowadays? So check it out, highly recommend boringmarketing.com. This, you know, a couple of months ago,

you were researching atomization. Here's a couple of new things that have come up around this topic. Here's some of the quotes that you highlighted here are a couple of things you were interested in. And it's just a little one-pager or just a text message. And that's literally it. You can either go down the rabbit hole back into that topic or nothing.

It's just reminding you of interesting things you've collected. And there's no central interface where you go and see all the stuff. So you don't have another dump to go to to see where all your articles that you're not reading are stored. And over time, maybe it can get smarter and smarter. and like, I don't want to make it unrealistic because if you're talking about like a one person startup, you're not going to be, it's not going to be able to tell which parts of podcasts you listen to,

et cetera, et cetera, but you could go further. But the initial idea is a fairly cheap service that drip feeds you back information that you've stored for yourself, add a pace that you wanted to drip feed it to you, and it's called drip AI, drip a drip. It's a little idea.

Someone should do. it would be really cool if you can also connect the dots. So for me, I'm like one of those people too. Like I have like thousands of bookmarks and I bookmark them. I'm like, in my mind, I'm like, I'm going to get back to this. Yeah. I'm totally getting back to this. Never get back to it.

In fact, on my newsletter, I started just sending out five bookmarks on my, it called Gregsletter, Greg Eisenberg.com. and I started doing that because I literally don't look at my bookmarks and I was like, this is going to force me like creating a newsletter around these five most interesting bookmarks of the week is going to force me to drill in my head

that these bookmarks, I need to like read them, write notes, but then I forget about them. Yeah, absolutely. I forget about them. What if instead of drilling into your head, you could drip out of your head?

That's what I'm saying. Breathe. That's what I'm saying. You know the drip noise. That's what I'm saying. I think it would be cool because I think a lot of people, I don't know why everyone loves to make bookmarks products. Like, collect all your bookmarks, collect all your stuff.

I'm like, I'm clicking the things in the apps that store this shit for me. My problem isn't collecting. My problem is getting it brought back to me. You know, that's what's actually my issue. Yeah, I think the easy way to do this. So, you know, you can still be a one-man. startup and build this and not have to do crazy AI stuff, build a big team and raise venture, is when you sign up to the service, it could say, what are your goals and what kind of business

are you in? So, you know, for example, I could say, I'm an agency owner and I'm trying to get to $75 million this year in revenue and I'm looking for content that XYZ. And then from those data points from that first party data from the data of the bookmarks then it's like oh hey we're going to like resurface this bookmark with this like you know new piece of information that WPP

has like acquired this agency and we think community notes edition or something yeah I would just start if I was starting this tomorrow and I just wanted to make like 99 cents per person per month or something I would just focus purely

on X my target mark are entrepreneurs or creatives who like and bookmark crap tons of stuff on X, and I would just simply build something that collects that and sends it back to them. It can be more like a boomerang thing. It's like just it always, it always chooses things from a year ago one day, two weeks ago, another day. And in the beginning it would be a little bit random just to see if people care about the idea of reminiscing and bringing these things back

and then maybe adding on this context thing, like there's been an update to this, or this Twitter, this person who tweeted this thing has talked more about it again, and here's that. So I think there's a very simple, basic baby version of this,

which could be free and maybe with ads or something. And then there's like the AI powered version of it, which adds context and synthesizes. I don't think I do a free version. Like to me, it's, you do a paid version. I think the way to get a lot of people excited about this is you create a bunch of Twitter accounts that are like Sean Puri's bookmarks, Greg Eisenberg's bookmarks, Jay Ice Cream's bookmarks.

And maybe what you do is you go to some of these creators and you're like, hey, I'll give you $1,000 a month if you just like share your bookmarks with me. I think that's pretty cool. That could even be. We take a couple of steps back. That's another product now where you could just have that as an email list. That's no true.

Oh my God. Just like Greg Eisenberg, Sean Puri, and someone else's like it's basically the entrepreneur secret bookmarks paid weekly newsletter. It's just here's what other people are liking and interested in. that would be, I would definitely pay for that. How much would you pay for it? I'm probably not the right person to ask because I would probably pay a lot.

Because I, I just spoke to you before this podcast about how much I'm about to pay for a mentor. I mean, I would minimum pay like $10 a month or something. By the way, I thought you were going to say like, yeah, minimum pay like $10,000 to $50,000 a month. You're like $10 a month? I don't know. You think you're a baller? You think you're a baller because you're about to spend $10 a month on this service? I do 10.

I do 10. Now, I just mean like I'm already sold on being able to access things like that. Like I think if we're trying to do like a large target market. But then again, I mean, if we're thinking about people who are entrepreneurs who are like maybe a couple of million behind those people who's. bookmarks you get to look at, that could be pretty interesting. But yeah, I would, I don't know, I never know what I would pay for something until someone sells it to me. You know what I mean? Totally. But I think there's two ideas here and they're all around bookmarks. People don't need another bookmarking app. People, no. No. No. Don't do it.

Do you use any of these things like pocket casts and stuff? No. I use Twitter bookmarks religiously. then that's it. But there you go. Okay, so book, people who use Twitter bookmarks, a product for them. That's a beautiful niche. Entrepreneurs who use Twitter bookmarks very often and obviously never look at them again. Come on. That's a great niche.

All right. Come on. Come on. Why aren't you more excited? Yeah, why aren't you more excited? Why isn't someone building this right now? Such a great idea. Again, the drip aspect of this is from Ammer at AJ and Smart.

I want to give him all the credit. Amher, you're a legend. Amher Khalifa on X. I just don't want to take the credit because he gave me that idea. Yeah, but we took, in our defense, we took the idea to the next level. Yeah, exactly. We took the seed. Yeah.

The seed was. He was birthed. He spread the seed. The seed was hat. What does it? What happens when a chicken seed was laid? Why is it laid like an egg? I don't know.

I saw it happen with my own eyes though. He's a weird guy, you know? Then I sat on it and incubated it for a few hours and then I brought it to you and we hatched it. Yes. And then we fried it. And it was amazing. You were lovely. Thank you.

We consumed it. We don't talk about eggs enough on this podcast. We don't. And then everyone who's listening to it, sipped it. And they sipped the egg juice. You know, when I'm looking back on episodes of this podcast and I'm thinking a lot of people, you know, there's people. Sorry, no, no, we're going back to the egg juice. You can't just say, and they sip the egg juice and just like segue it into something else.

Sip the egg juice. That's my next idea. Egg juice. But I was going to make a point related. Like when I come to this podcast, so obviously I've been on a couple of episodes of this podcast. And I'm sort of like an anomaly in it. Like as an I'm regularly here. But when I look at the comments, I'm like, oh, yeah, people don't realize that my brain is a bit broken and that I'm just kind of also a silly man.

I'm a silly man. And when people come here for like hardcore back-to-back business ideas and I'm on here. There was some guy in your in your comments last week who was like, I want to give you some constructive feedback, Greg. I saw that one. Don't have this guy on your podcast anymore. And what did I do? What did you do? I actually didn't check the follow. I texted you and I was like, hey, you want to record a pod right now? Hell yeah. I would like to give you some constructive feedback, Greg. This guy sucks. Is that what he said? No, it was like, I'd like to give you some constructive feedback.

Something like I don't like listening to this guy and doesn't bring value and he just rambles. And I'm like, that's true. The reality of the situation is that startup idea with the insight around bookmarks is a huge insight. Now he should give constructive feedback on how huge of an insight it is. Like, period. That's a really good insight. No, and it's something I'm going to think about. So, yeah, listen, you might talk.

about egg juice here and there. And that's really, really strange and unusual. And I hope you're well. I'm not well. But, you know, in a sea of egg juice, you sprinkle on some great startup ideas and some good insights that I think people should be taking notes. And I take notes. So that's why I bring you on. All right. Yeah. Thank you, Matt. All right. See you. I'm going to bed. Next segment. You want to talk about life hacks. Okay, look, you did this post right. I bookmarked it. Yeah, you did.

Craig, I bookmarked the shit out of it. I see your team has to, I'll try to reduce the swearing because I know they have to beep it out. Okay, so let's, I'm going to, I'm, you did this post on Twitter. Your team can maybe bring it up on screen. It's 50 life hacks. I'm going to just go to a few of them and ask you to expand on it or to talk about them and, or just very heavily agree with them. Maybe I'll just choose the top 10 of your 50 life hacks. Can that sound good?

Well, let's do that, but be sure to bring up the one around Instagram close friends. Okay. I'm going to do that. First thing, and it's really the first one, use social media apps on desktop only so that you don't get sucked in. I mean, so fucking, like, do you basically then have no social media apps on your phone? the only social media app I have on my phone is TikTok. Oh.

And that sounds like an addictive one though. And it's like buried away. And it isn't something that I post on. And for me it's not an addictive one. So I think, I mean, I think the advice is don't have the, you know, certain apps are more addictive to certain people. Like Twitter for me would be the most addictive. Instagram to others would be the most addictive.

So I just remove the ones that are addicted to me. And it's just the experience on desktop isn't as dopamine-friendly. Yeah. You've got to be crazy to put social media apps on your phone. Just you got to be crazy, period. I agree. Do you sometimes though sneakily log into X, on your Safari browser?

No, actually, I don't. You don't? No, but sometimes I will say if I'm out of the house for like a really long time or I'm traveling or something and I've got like a tweet or something that I just can't get out of my head. A banger.

A banger as it as a kid's day. I'll all download it and and you know quickly push it live and then delete it after. Okay, you'll delete it. Yeah. I deleted social media on my phone years ago. but I'll occasionally get sucked into, you know, it's your fault that I'm back on X. I was off X for like four or five years before I did the first one of these podcasts.

And then you were screenshoting what people were saying about it. And I was like, I'll just log in. And now I'm so addictive. It's so good. But yeah, I also don't put these on my phone. And again, I try to use this brick, like this brick thing that I talked about a couple of episodes to block things. Okay, use analogies. people remember them. Can you give me an example of what you're talking about there in an analogy

format? I tweeted this and someone who listens to the pod was like, yeah, and the river goes into the steps into the river. Remember from like four episodes ago? The worst analogy ever. Yeah, I made like the worst analogy ever. Yeah. So I read a book a long time ago. And maybe this is actually interesting because we're going to talk about books later, but it was called Made to St. I love that book. You remember that book? I remember it and I love it and I actually refer to it a lot of my training when I'm training people in facilitation.

So I read it maybe 15 years ago at this point and it talked a lot about how do you communicate in a way that sticks with people? And one of the ways is just analogies. The reality is when you have a conversation with someone for an hour, they're going to remember one or two things. that you were covered in egg juice and the smell of it. Even egg juice, right? It's so visual.

You can kind of picture it. I can picture it. It's, oh yeah, you can smell it, unfortunately. I can smell it right now. So analogies work. And in the context of business specifically, like creating content, selling people, analogies just really stick in people's minds. Absolutely.

I especially if you're, I think one of the best analogy formats, because I remember, so made to stick is an amazing book. It also talks about this concept of the curse of knowledge, which is amazing. The idea is that once you know a topic, you now can't, like, you can't act as if you don't know it anymore. You can't imagine what it's like to be a person who doesn't know this thing anymore. And so you actually get worse at explaining something, the more you know it. So when I'm trying to sell, facilitation training, and I've been a facilitator and a designer for 14 years, I have to remember this curse of knowledge thing and bring myself right back to the basics. And analogies are an amazing way to bring things back to the basics. And there's this like a format that I saw Russell Brunson use to make things into more of an analogy. And it's like he uses the, you know how, da-da-da-da-da. Or it's like, yeah, it's the simple format he has is that it's kind of like, or it's kind of like when. So sometimes it's like you're thinking about, okay, how do I explain something like facilitation to people? Well, it's kind of like when you're on a trip with your

friends and nobody's in charge of how we're going to get from the airport to the hotel and it just feels super chaotic and everyone's kind of bickering at each other. Well, imagine if one of the people in the group just said, I'm going to take care of transportation. It's kind of like that. It's kind of like, and this is something we actually use in our ads is this analogy, is the being on vacation with your friends, it's supposed to be something nice, but it gets really frustrating when everyone needs to decide where to go for dinner.

And imagine if there was someone who was taking the lead. So it's kind of like thing when you're making copy, when you're writing copy, when you're writing an ad, just keeping this written somewhere in front of you, it's kind of like, and then something relatable. So anything you're trying to sell or anything you're trying to talk about, you've got to remember that it's kind of like and something relatable, something I've learned from analogy creating. The other thing related to this, that some of the smartest entrepreneurs I know do is they make it conversational when they're writing copy or they're communicating. So what they'll do is instead of saying,

I remember a story that Steve Jobs said and just explaining what the story is. You say, you know, when Steve Jobs was at WWDC and, you know, everyone thought that, you know, BlackBerry owned mobile, Steve Jobs goes up on stage, he goes. So using the words he goes, and then you just talk like you are Steve Jobs.

when you're conversational and you talk like the person that you're bringing up, it puts the person listening, gives them a front row seat, and it is just a way more effective way to get your point across. 100% agree with that. Have you ever had Neville Madora on your podcast? No, I don't know him, but... You need to get him on your podcast. I do. I do need to get him on the podcast.

He has a book called This Book Will Teach You to Write Better. it takes 15 minutes to read it's like an amazon printed book and it goes into a lot of these topics about how to tell stories from other people's perspectives but he has one statement in there when it comes to copy when it comes to all of this thing we're talking about and he said when you're writing when you're writing and he goes and he goes yeah and he goes did i actually say that he said oh yeah okay and he goes and i'll just do his accent and fully And he goes, when you're thinking about writing for people, the one thing you have to have locked into your head is nobody cares about you. They only care about themselves. And this is one of the key, this insight that I got when I read that book really locked in for me to the point that whenever I'm writing copy or whenever I'm talking to my team about copy, I'm like, I'm like and I go, are we writing here about us and about how great we are or are we talking about what they're going to get? So this is something. that just like super locks into my brain.

The funniest part of what you just said was that you tried to do Neville Medora's accent, but then you just used your own accent. Oh no, I was thinking like if you're going to really embody the person and I try to do a big Austin accent and if I was trying to do the Steve Jobs, California accent and getting like, like if I overthought, if I really incorrectly took your advice and I thought you meant full impersonation. Yeah, like you started talking about Steve Jobs and then you're like, oh, give me a second and you like pull up a black turtleneck and you just start changing. Yeah, 15 minute change.

Yeah. And then like practicing for ages and then the person's gone. All right, move on. This one, I really want to know what you think about this because I really want to know the exact thing you do. You said you should show up to meetings with small gifts. The ROI is insane. I have a lot of meetings coming up. Especially with people who are a lot more important than me, I would say.

They are more important than me, but they're more successful than me. What kind of gift? I'm always wondering what to do. Talk about this. Tell me what you do. So when I first moved to San Francisco, I became friends with a group of 10 Japanese people who had just, just moved to San Francisco. two. And they all could barely speak English. It really was, they were learning about American

culture and stuff like that. And one of the first things I noticed was every time I'd meet them, they would show up with a gift. And although I didn't need a pancake mix as a gift, which was one of the gifts, it didn't need stuff like that. It was just so nice that they showed up with a gift. So I took that to heart. And when I was in my early 20s, I remember, I bought a thousand mini buddhas. Because who doesn't want luck of a, of a mini Buddha? Okay, so a thousand mini buddhas, and you gave them all to one person, right? Yeah.

No, I gave, so I spent, I gave out those, it was like the year of the Buddha. I gave out all a thousand Buddhas that year. Fucking hell. Yeah, I had a lot of meetings. In my early 20s, I was just like meet with anyone. Yeah. And people just like started talking about it. It's definitely memorable.

Yeah. People started talking about it. And I like kind of became known as like the guy who showed up with gifts. From that. And by the way, I was giving gifts to like the founder of Uber who I just like randomly met and all these crazy people that I shouldn't have been in those rooms. But I was in those rooms. And they would send me an email right after and be like, by the way, thanks. I'm looking at the Budo right now.

That's really cool. So it works, especially if you're trying to build your network and you're trying to create a lasting impression in people's minds. I think it also puts you in a humble position, I would say. I don't know if this is even remotely the intention, but it shows somehow some respect to the other person, I feel. I think so. What do you do today?

Like, okay, I am going to me. meet some people over the next few weeks and I want to bring them gifts. But what kind of things? I'm always kind of struggling between like what's too expensive and desperate seeming and what's too stupid. What do you think I could bring? It like price doesn't matter. It's really just the thoughtfulness. Yeah. You know, I don't know if a thousand Buddhas would make sense today. Maybe they would. But it's just thinking about, you know, maybe today people are really stressed about the election, let's say. And it's generating anxiety. So what is something that you can give to people that is the ante of that? What is something small, thoughtful that you can give? Zanix.

Yeah. You know, maybe you should just go to... Become a pharma company. Has Costco tell Zanx? I don't know. Okay. I get your idea, though. So like a nice tea. Yeah. Well, the problem with tea is that you're done, right?

Like, I'm sure that there's people who still have these little Buddhas on their desks. Tea pot? Tea pot is a good one. So it should be permanent, like something that stays. What about, okay, if I was meeting you, I don't know if I'm going to be able to pull this off before my next meeting. But if I was meeting you and I got you the play date, this little cute yellow console from the guys at panic, would you think that's cute? I would think that's real.

I would love that. Like, that would make me so happy. But that's not permanent, I don't think. A little yellow. Actually, yeah, it's pretty permanent. I take it back. It's pretty permanent. I actually just annoyingly realize that that's a great gift for people right now.

and I don't know if I'm going to be able to get it on time. Fuck. I was going to get people these, the little TP7, but they're really hard to buy. Could you get me one of those? Yeah. Yeah, but it's really,

it's something we all, we forget, like, I don't know, it's actually a really good, intangible thing to do. I feel like it's something that not a lot of people do. And I think also,

there's something about coming across, as, I don't know how to put this. When I meet, okay, just tell me if this makes sense, the way I'm going to put it. I often meet people who are a lot more successful than me. And after a while, you sort of become friends with them. And I feel like what other people do that other people do wrong is that let's say I become friends with someone who's like, who's been running a company for 25 years, super successful.

I'm years away from ever getting there and I may never get there. And they clearly have all the connections I would want, all of the things we talked about this canvas strategy idea. And I'm here. And eventually I become friends with them. I think what a lot of people do wrong is they're like, oh, now I'm friends. So now I'm just going to get all this person's contacts and I'm just going to call them whenever I feel like, et cetera, et cetera.

Whereas I would always, in my... my mind think, okay, so like this person is still being very gracious to give me their time, even though we're friends, et cetera. And so I think giving a gift. And would you give gifts every time you meet someone, like, or just the first time? Basically, how many gifts am I going to get is one I'm trying to figure out? The best time to give a gift is to give a gift when the person least expects it. When they're in the toilet, kick down the door. Here you go. Here's a play Oh no, Jice cream's here. Play it!

How did you get my address? One thousand Buddhas. Gah! They're going to bed. I'm hanging off the ceiling with 1,000 Buddhas. Like, ghar, holding them in a box and shaking, sweating. What are you spraying at me? Why are you spraying egg juice at me?

Yeah, one of them falls in their head and they're like, you know, like it's like a horror movie. The camera kind of pans up and I'm there, like, strapped to the ceiling, like, ah. What I mean by that is. On people's birthdays, they often get gifts and they're busy. Yes. Are they more likely or less likely to remember a gift you give them on their birthday? Less likely. Exactly.

So you want to give someone a gift when they're not expecting it. So that could mean the first time you meet them. but then also like at month six or month 18 or month 24 so it's not just about every time you meet them in person yeah yeah don't be like a bot it's not like a system you don't create like a system where it's like okay on the third week of every you know I buy this thing and I create a script no like be a human being you know what I think a great book grace I ruined it I think a grace gift what I give to people is this book. I mean, having a book that you gift to people. Why, I think this is a nice gift. This one. Hell yeah, Hornell. Hell yeah or no by Derek. It's one of my favorite books

of all time, by the way. By the way, I can't believe you're going into books even though. No, no, no, no, but this is one that I gift people. I give it as a gift. So I buy it in bulk off the website and then you can get like this hard cover version. The one you get on Amazon sucks. It's like a soft cover kind of like crappy looking one. But you can get the nice hard cover additions from the website. I buy like 20 of them and I give them as gifts to people. When they come to my apartment, I give it to them as a gift. So that's kind of like something I do. That's cool. So that's just an example of a. That's a really good one is always have gifts in your apartment or house. Yeah. To give to people. It's like no brain. If anyone wants this when they come over to my place. It's like

a glasses cleaner, but it's covered in other strange stains. I wasn't trying to bring the book thing in. All right. Wait, let's do another. Okay, let's go back to this hack a hack list. Okay, keep a learning list. Make learning your side hustle. What do you think about that? I mean, I wrote it. So. What do you mean by like a learning list? Like courses you want to do, books you want to read. I have, I use the things to do list app. Oh, you use things. I think it's made in Germany. I think somewhere. It's made somewhere. I think it's Germany. Somewhere in Europe, for sure. I think it's Germany.

I'm just trying to get a claim to feign here. An American using a tech product that's made in Germany is like a big deal, you know? We don't tend to make much stuff over here. Yeah, it's made in Germany. Okay. So, yeah, I use this German product called thing. Yeah. There we go.

That's right. That's right. Cultured code. Get in behalf. if you're listening to this episode, you guys make a lovely product. I think it's a really lovely product. It's a lovely product.

I use it. I have one of my tasks on it is learning list. And every quarter, I have three new things that I'm trying to learn. Oh, okay. I don't do that. It's basically every month I'm trying to learn a new thing. And the thing I'm trying to learn to learn, sometimes it's about business,

but sometimes it's just like a personal thing. So it could be, well, actually right now I'm taking a bunch of Stanford online courses on finance. Oh, interesting. So I never went to business school. Of course I can read an income statement, a balance sheet, that sort of thing.

But, you know, I figured, hey, it would be great to be better at this. So it's one of the of those things where if you don't put it in a list and actually have homework and put in your calendar, you're never going to get around to it. How do you decide what you want to learn? Is it just like following your interests or is it related to like business weaknesses you have or life weaknesses? I think it's business weaknesses and life's curiosities. So like right now I'm also like for this upcoming three months, I'm also just trying to get better at guitar.

So taking a guitar course, and then if I pull up, I'm also learning how to golf. Oh, interesting. Yeah. Probably a good way to network with high net worth people as well is golfing. It's also I live in Florida, so, you know. It's a golfing place. It's a golfing place. Mm-hmm.

What do you mean by chasing generational wealth is overrated and wealth is underrated? This came to me a couple years ago. we got offered a $100 million blank check to build, to basically scale out late checkout and build out a bunch of new products faster, acquire faster. Just take our model and just add steroids to it. And we turned it down. And the VC basically called me up, like sweating bullets.

He goes. He goes. This is a black bear. He goes, I don't understand. This is like a surefire way for you and your team to get generational wealth. Yeah, he has a similar voice to you, actually. Yeah, it's similar voice. Very similar voice to me.

And I go, I'm not chasing generational wealth. Like, I don't need hundreds of millions of dollars or billions of dollars. In fact, when I, you know, the people who I look up to, have that sort of wealth, they give away 99.9% of their wealth anyways to charities. What I'm about is I want to live a wealthy life. I want to live a rich life. I want to be able to do whatever it is I want. But I don't need generational wealth. I think that's, it's something that what I don't like about chasing general generational wealth is it's infinite. You're chasing an infinite goal. I have zero interest in generational wealth either.

Maybe it's just because I don't think I can actually make it. Maybe if I had a, no, but really, I also like, I guess this die with zero concept where you use the money and when you die. Like, I was thinking about it, like my daughter doesn't need to have crap tons of money from me when she's older because I didn't have that. And I found it really fun to figure out how to make money. I worked in bars. I worked in restaurants. Then I started making my own things. That gave me sort of like something to do and sort of like a purpose.

So yeah, I would definitely agree with you. How would you define normal wealth, though? Like how do you define that for yourself? I'm currently working with like a financial advisor to figure out for me like what is it that I actually should earn. I run like a creative thing and so it's variable based on my vibes. So like how do I,

how do you and me figure that kind of thing out? That's so frustrating to the financial advisor. They're like, so what's your goal? And you go, it's very just based on my vibes. He literally, really nice guy, Sebastian, can definitely recommend him if you're in Germany. Reach out to me and I'll connect you.

He asked me what my goal was and I was like, first of all, he was sitting in the AJ and smart office, which looks like, like just looks like an art museum of some sort, like a chaotic art museum. And I'm like, look around like, do you think I have goals? My goal is to keep making stuff that I want to do. I want to just do stuff that I enjoy. But yeah, I don't have any goals at all. I don't know what I want to do. I mean, financially. Yeah, do you have like a number or like just keeps going off? I don't have a number because people I know who have numbers are just, they hit the number and then the number becomes 2x and then they hit the number and the number becomes 2x and they hit the number

and becomes 2x. Yeah. The way I think about it is I want to be able to do what I want. Yes. You don't want anyone to tell you what to do where to be. Yeah. Yeah. And there's a lifestyle that I want to have and that requires like a certain amount of money but that's kind of where I'm at. All right. That connects to that connects to number 20, which is craft a personal mission statement to guide your decisions. First of all, do you want to share your one? And second of all, how do I do that?

Well, what's your personal mission statement? I don't have one. You don't have one? Even around like facilitator.com and my personal mission statement. is I want to follow my interests and then make stuff that make things that I find interesting, with other people. I don't like to make stuff just by myself. And ideally other people like using those things.

I don't have a mission statement, but if it would be something like that, make interesting stuff that I find interesting. It's very much around making things. I like to create stuff. I like making things. So where this came from was a lot of companies have mission statements. Most companies have mission statements. And I realize that founders, because they care so much about making the business work,

they kind of lose sight of what their goals are. I have recently very much lost sight of my goals. of which I've never defined, but I can sense it. Yeah. So that's my point on this life hack. It doesn't make a difference. How do you do it? It doesn't make a difference what your mission is or what mine is.

It's just like have a mission. But what does one look like? Can you like tell me what that statement sounds? Like I literally don't know what you mean. Yeah. So help me. Help me, help you. Help me.

A personal mission statement could be something like, it could be numbers. You can say, I want to make a million dollars a year and I want my children to have the best possible life and I want to have a happy family. And that's a personal mission statement.

You know, it could be, you can put dollars in there. It could be, you can add personal, of course, into it, family, friends. So you obviously don't want to share yours, basically is what you're saying. It's personal.

Personal. Personal. Share it with us, Greg. Okay, guys, if you like and comment, share it with us, Greg. Then in the next episode, Greg will share his personal mission statement. No, but it's interesting. A lot of Americans say things like, you know, that's sort of like my purpose or my mission. It's very rare to hear people outside of the U.S. saying these sentences.

And so, yeah, it's interesting for me just sort of trying to understand it and trying to see if that makes sense for me. I like the idea of having like it. So what I have is a Post-it in my kitchen, which says, 24, do you want, actually, can I go get it just to show you? Or is that an annoying thing for me to do right now? Go for it. Yeah. All right. Just because it's so, it's so like not a mission, but it's like,

I'll just go. I'll be back. I'm not wearing any underwear pants. I'm just going to go. Sure. So at the end of 2023, I think it was the 29th of December. My girlfriend and I did like a, it's this Tim Ferriss thing. It's called the end of year review, something like that. And then we created our goals for next year based on how that works. It's kind of embarrassing to show this because it's not like a public thing that I've ever

showed. But just to show you, I think maybe my version of what we're talking about, which is very much within the year. So it looks like this. And so it's like three questions for myself. And then like one physical activity that I am just going to lock into. Yeah. It sounds like a weird thing.

The questions are, number one, am I optimizing for state? And that just means my state of mind. Like, am I optimizing, am I living my life in a way that's going to optimize for how I'm feeling because when I feel good and when I feel excited, everything else works better. A really simple example of that is being very, very cautious of things like alcohol, not sleeping, over-caffeinating. I have my own list of things that cause my state to turn bad, also social media. Am I lowering noise and complexity? So this is something where

just thinking about like, you know, you and I talked about this a couple of weeks ago as well. I actually shut down my holding company after realizing that even though it makes sense from a financial perspective, the noise and complexity, even though it wouldn't, for example, be a problem for you, for me, that overwhelms me massively. So am I lowering noise and complexity? And then the last one is kind of interesting. Am I being radically integral? I don't even, I don't even know what that means. Yeah, I know. It's fine. It's also a bit pretentious. Again, I wasn't planning on showing this. So it was only for me. The idea there is that, am I being, first of all, am I telling the truth? Like if someone asks me something like, how am I feeling? Am I just telling them the answer to

the question? But also, am I basically living in a way that that actually reflects what's happening in my head or am I just living in a way that's good for others to get what they want, being integral, like having integrity, the idea is just like, yeah, am I being integral, do I have integrity? Are the things I'm thinking similar? Are the things I'm thinking the same as the things I'm saying, the same as the things I'm doing? Those three things lining up. And then, yoga. I actually have done one hour of yoga per week since January because I was having some back pains. So that that also worked out well. That's kind of more like an optimizing for state thing. So yeah, I don't have a mission statement, but I kind of break it down into like the three things

I want to focus on for the year. But the mission statement thing is pretty interesting. Is there any like thing I can watch or read about how to create a mission statement for myself? Yeah, there's like a few frameworks for it. I think there's one called the three question framework. So it's what is most important to you? What are your goals and what values guide your actions? So for example, the integral piece that you talked about, the value that you have is integrity. So then you have pieces of it. That's one framework. There's also the purpose for, values, goals framework. So it's purpose, what is your life about, values, what do you stand for, and goals, what do you want to achieve? So I kind of like that one because I do think that you

need to have some number, you know, associated it, like from a goal perspective. Because otherwise, it just becomes like so lofty. And then the last one that I've seen, is the five-step plan. So it's, what are your past successes? Identify themes from your past achievements. What are your core values? List and prioritize your most important values. Identify contributions, how you want to impact different areas of your life.

Identify goals, short and long-term goals. And then it's right mission and vision statements. So you're basically synthesizing all the above stuff in concise statements. Love it. I'm going to look at all of those after I have them open. as tabs. Have them tabbed out. Tabed out.

Okay, one more. One last, one last? One last? And then more or then end of episode? No, then we can, then three to four books. Okay. I just want to talk quickly about the Instagram close friends one just because it's on my mind.

Yeah, say the Instagram close friends one. I don't see it here. Did I not put that on the list? Oh, yeah. Being on someone's IG close friends doesn't mean you're close friends. So I don't know if this is just me But recently I met like a couple people out in the world And they just like throw me on close friends

Yeah it's like homie we just met I don't use I haven't used that feature in quite a while So I can't say much to this thing So so you're telling the public just to not add you to close friends I'm saying that if someone just if someone adds you to close friends It doesn't mean they're close friends and if you want to get deeper, it's like you only have a couple close friends in real life.

I think that's also interesting because what you could do is if someone adds you to the close friends thing and then you see that they're doing something like a wedding or a family party and you haven't been invited, you could get really irritated with them. Like, oh, thanks for the invite to your wedding. I thought I was a close friend. Yeah, I thought I was a very close friend

and I didn't get put on your will interestingly. So yeah, okay, fair enough. That's a good one. Okay, can I choose one more? Just to end on one that I like.

Okay. Avoid angry people. They suck the good energy out of the room. It sounds like really obvious. And I would say not just angry. Or maybe you, I don't know if you agree with this, but I would say you also generally,

want to avoid people who are super cynical, super pissed about everything. It's like you meet someone and they're like, oh, did you hear about this stupid thing, this stupid politician did, this country's fucked, and you're like, oh man, I was having a good day and now I have to listen to this stuff. When you say angry people, are you saying someone who's just got a generally negative vibe or someone who's actually angry? So in my mind, I wasn't going to use this word on Twitter because it wouldn't hit the same but I think of them

as curmudgins curmudginess the people who are not going to hand out candy at Halloween because like they hate the kids or the kids listen to loud

to rock music or whatever it is you know what I mean? Like also the people that just are rooting for you to lose they're also the people that if you come to them, let me see if I can get this down to the perfect crystallization if this is exactly what it is for you. You're really excited about something.

You're really excited about a new thing. Let's say you got this and you're super excited and you show it to your friend and they're like, I heard teenage engineering are actually a shit company. Oh, that's like a waste of money. That's crap. Like no matter what you do, they like see that you're excited and they're like,

let me just take the pin out of that like let me bring you down a few pegs just to make sure you're not too excited and too happy about stuff. A lot of people hate this podcast for that reason actually. Because it's like positive vibes. There's a group of people who love this podcast.

Thank you for listening. I notice on Twitter, there's another group of people who are like, oh, the startup ideas podcast, ideas, that's nothing. Execution, that's everything. And like they hate on idea people. And they don't realize that this is like a positive, fun, creative way to get people's juices flowing. Like, that's what this is. And those people that are just anti this podcast to me are like curmudgins. And I think that when you're building a startup, you want to, you can't have curmudgins in your life.

because it's so hard as it is. This is, you know, you've probably been given this advice or you've read it before that to succeed, you need to be surrounded by people. I've heard this before and I took, I unfortunately took the wrong lesson from it. When I was growing AJ and Smart in the beginning, one of my mentors was like,

you need to be surrounded by people who will question everything, who are like the devil's advocates, who are like the ying to your yang, And I was like, oh, yeah, you're right. You got to have those people around you. And what I realized is that maybe you want to have those types of people around you when you've already massively nailed it and you need to have, let's say you're running Facebook.

You maybe need to have people around you who are like, oh, let's hold the brakes. Let's make sure this decision doesn't have like crazy consequences down the road. But generally, you're mostly, you mostly don't want to be surrounded by people who are questioning everything and being the devil's advocates and telling you all the ways things can go wrong when your business is just starting out and you're still under 20 million. You want to be surrounded by people who are enthusiastic advocates and who are excited about what you're doing. And I think there was a time at AJ and Smart where I really brought a lot of people up to the top of

the business who kind of opposed everything I did because I thought that that's what you're supposed to do. And so it's like, and in the end, what happens? is the founder or the person running the company just loses steam and gets less excited and the whole thing just kind of falls apart. And so yeah, I think as long as you're, especially when you're like, the company relies on your energy and you being excited and you being positive, curmudgins are the ultimate like kryptonite for a founder. The problem is they're everywhere. And the other thing, the best quote I've ever read on this is pessimists will always be right, but optimists will always get wealthy, something like that.

Something around those that's what it was. You don't have, that's what it was. Yeah. Something like that, right? And I think that's such an amazing sentence to have in mind. If you're building a business or if you're running a podcast or if I, even as a guest on this podcast, I'm going to get curmudgins in the comments telling me

that I ramble too much or that I look stupid or that whatever. Fuck y'all. You know, I need the positive energy to even keep going. you're not on this podcast, you're not out here running the startup ideas podcast like Greg is and putting all the effort into it. You're just sitting around complaining online. And I think that energy isn't, you're 100% right. Like that energy is not what you want to have around you. And then people will say to you, Greg, which you've probably gotten, if you would do that as a post on its own on Twitter, people would say to you,

oh yeah, sure, just surround surround yourself with people who just like, you know, brown nose you all day or whatever. And that's not the point. The point is you're not at the point yet where you need people to pick things apart. You're not at the point yet. You're still momentum is still important to you. And so enthusiasm and being enthusiastic, being excited is super important. Oh, shit. That's how excited you were.

I got too excited. I got too excited. You know, it's the enthusiasm and excitement of a founder of a small business. or a startup is so unbelievably important. Like, it's not, it's one of the things that brings down startups and small businesses most often is the founders just giving up and burning out. That's it. It's that and running out of cash. Yeah, but they run out of cash also because they just run out of energy for it often.

True. Or they also, you know, something bad happens. Open AI changes their, you know, their price. Don't be a curmudgeon, dude. Don't question anything I say. No, you're right. I think it's, but I read this thing. This is Ram Sharam, who was on the board of Google. He's wrong. O.G. Silicon Valley guy. He was on the board of a company. I was at a few companies ago. that I was helping run. And he's the one who told me. He was like, there's two ways that a company dies. Either the team gives up or the company runs out of cash.

Yeah. And I think number one, the team gives up usually means the leaders give up. And just run out of energy and run out of steam and just can't be bothered with the, like you see that often with content creators as well. Like when they get bullied offline or something, it's just a matter of whether they are going to stick around or not. And it's really often like that with especially small businesses. When AJ and smart, when this business that I run, when it's doing its best is when I'm excited and enthusiastic and then I can make my team excited and enthusiastic because I'm the cheerleader

at the company. But when I give myself, like if I surround myself with people who are just telling me everything's wrong and everything sucks, then I also. can't cheerlead myself or my team. I think it's a huge one. If you're listening to this and you want to work with a founder like Jice cream, J.I.S. Green. Jay Ice cream. You don't want to be a curmudgeon.

Like you want to be positive. You can give constructive criticism, but in a positive way, not in like a passive aggressive, curmudgiveness way. Absolutely. I think that's really a really hard line to to manage like yeah i guess if you i guess some people get mixed up with like they read stuff

online about um you know somehow they they read stuff online about being more competitive and saying what you mean and all of this kind of stuff but they're not thinking about the fact that a huge amount of things in the world work just because people are excited about doing them and people are motivated to do them. And yeah, I have that problem when I'm also talking to my team and giving my team feedback. And Laura, Laura, who I run AJ and smart with, she's told me I do this where my team will present something to me. And I'm like, I don't like this. I don't like this. And I don't like this. And then she's like, yeah, but like then they're not excited to do it. And I'm like, yeah, but I don't like this and I don't like this. So it's easy also to fall into it, even if you know how it feels

from the outside, you know, even if you don't like it, it's easier for you to do it too. And that also mixes well with your comment about like be nice on the internet. I think like you said, you probably meet a lot of people in real life that you talk to on the internet, right? And so you probably, if you want to be a business person, you probably don't want to be shitting all over people on the internet unless you, like I guess Elon can do it because he's already nailed and finished the business game. But I think, like, it's, I can't imagine you going around trolling people on, on their content and on the internet.

Well, it's just not my vibe. It's like going back to like personal mission statement, like, that's not my MO. All right. Let's get to books. I know you got some books that matter to you. These are the books. I just want to, I just have a pile of books next to me. And these are the books where I feel like if you're, either you're struggling with your business or you're working at a company and you want to start your own business or you just want to get like a good download of good business stuff into your brain. I just have a couple of books here and I think you've probably read a lot of them Greg. And I'm going to start with the most cliche, most obvious one. But often people have what I've noticed with entrepreneurs, people have not read it because they think it's like not cool anymore

to read this book and it's like it's played out and it's out of date. Can you guess what it is actually? No, I can't. Okay. It's the four hour work week. This is the book. I was working in a company here in Berlin, full-time employee. I picked up this book. It was at my aunt's house or my or my parents' place. I don't know. My mom reads a lot of these types of books as well and I looked at it and I was like, this looks like Tony Robbin. It looks kind of like, I don't know, it looks cheesy. It's not, I think this looks cheesy and not cool and like not a vibe. Anyway, picked it up.

That's a theme of a lot of books actually in my life where I think they're going to suck and then I read them. I picked this book up and it changed my brain completely. Within probably four or five days of reading it, I already decided I'm going to quit my job and start my own business. I think it's one of the best books that just like lays out how to just how to make money by selling things and how to do it in a way that just doesn't burn you to the ground. It like teaches you the absolute basics of business delegation.

And there's just a lot of concepts in here that I've never heard of in my life. And yeah, it's kind of the passive income Bible. It's like the digital nomad Bible, whatever it is. It's the first book that I read on that topic and still holds up really well today. So that's the four-hour work week. I think it's amazing. I think every entrepreneur in the world should read that book. So it's shocking that the four-hour work week still holds up.

It's so good. Still today. I still remember the framework for the four-hour work week. It's basically some of the biggest business books all are based around like one framework. and in the four-hour work week, it's the deal framework, definition, elimination, automation, and liberation. So definition, you know, I just sort of Googled it to remind myself, defines the new rules for work and lifestyle design, elimination, focuses on eliminating unnecessary tasks and time wasters. Automation explains how to automate income and tasks. By the way, couldn't be more relevant today in an AI world.

and liberation focuses on achieving mobility and freedom. So, I mean, the frameworks make sense and are still relevant. Of course, some of this stuff is not going to be as like an oh my God moment. Like, I remember reading the four-hour work week in 2006 or whatever, yeah, 2005, 2006. And hearing that like you can hire people, VAs in like different countries, I was like, I can't believe you can do this. now everyone knows you can do that or are these people listening to this pod

that you can do it. I also love things like the little lifestyle things in there like the mini retirement. It was just so many things in there that completely broke my brain. And it's, I was so lucky it's the first business book I ever read.

Like was the four hour work week by Tim Ferriss. And it's a, it was a completely mind-blowing experience. And obviously his follow-ups like Tools of Titans, tribes of tribe of mentors also great. But this really feels to me like, I also love that this book, you know, goes into practicalities like running Google ads to a landing page

and testing the copy. It's a super practical book as well. It was the first time I also even learned about things like this. What's your next book? So cool. All right. There's no, they're not in any order.

I'm just kind of looking. The next book I think I probably read, it might have been the next book I read. because Tim Ferriss connected me then in his world to this book was anything you want by Derek Sivers. And it's 40 lessons for a new kind of entrepreneur. And this book really teaches me, taught me about like that you just do not have to run a business

the way other people are running businesses. You can really just make your own, you can make your own really specific brand of business. This guy, Derek Sivers, again, you know, his other book. I got to be honest. yeah or no. I just Google Derek Sivers. I have no idea. I didn't know who he was. I'm very surprised about that. I think this is one of my favorite books of all time. Who's Derek's? Why is Derek Sivers interesting?

He created a company called CD Baby, which he sold for either 30 million. So he created like an online digital product, sold it for many, many, many million. and then he just went off and disappeared and decided to not do that anymore. And he's just living a really fun-sounding life. And so it's inspirational. He's like a, he's a creative, I guess it connects with me. He's like Myspace Tom. That's the Myspace Tom effect.

Yes, exactly. So he didn't get caught up in the money making. Generational wealth. Freak show. He didn't chase the generational wealth. Okay, cool. So he can teach you things and he doesn't care. about, like, he doesn't need any money anymore, but he's teaching because he wants to teach.

And I think that's really interesting. Next one, double your profits. Another old school looking book by Bob Fifer. I don't know if you know this one. It's really, really good. So this book is 78 ways to cut costs, increase sales and dramatically improve your bottom line. This is a book I read two days ago again, and I read it almost like every quarter. It's just like a good, it's just a good reminder of little tactics, and you can open up a page, and there'll be a tactic in there. I think one of my favorite things is this chapter.

It's also one of the most highlighted ones, Chapter 10, Step 10, and it's maximizing customer satisfaction leads to bankruptcy. And he talks about this idea of when you're creating a product and creating differentiation, make sure that you only provide the elements of differentiation that the customer is willing to pay for and not those that the customer is not willing to pay for. It sounds really stupid

but sometimes we'll make stuff at AJ and Smart where like 20% of it is stuff nobody gives a shit about nobody uses but it costs us a lot of money to make it and we're making it because one or two people said they wanted it and I think remembering things like this is very important.

Another book I'd actually like to put on the list which is behind me well I'm not going to get up. It's reworked by Jason Freed and David Heinemeyer Hansen. That was probably this, I think that was the second business book I ever read. And that definitely defined a lot of how I think about building products. So rework Jason Freed,

get him on your podcast. Guys, if you want to get Jason Freed on this podcast, can you like go on to X and tell him, did you see that? Did you see that? I saw that he replied to you. Yeah, so.

Yeah, I, uh, I'm trying to get him on, trying to get him on. Yeah. He's great. He's great. But let me just... I'll give you the inside baseball. Those one of the best books I've ever read.

Cook's Jason Freed story just because I think it's interesting to you. You'll find it interesting because you're always like, Greg, how do you like meet everyone? So I tweeted out... I did a tweet about bootstrap businesses. And then by the way, we'll get to one last book recommendation after I tell this quick side tangent story. So I tweeted out just about bootstrap startups and why I think they're great. and how I've been enjoying building them. And Jason Freed replied.

Doesn't follow me, but he replied. I responded instantly. I was on desktop. Instantly, I replied, and I was like, you should come on the pod. And then he was like, email me. So I emailed him, and here's what happened.

I'll pull it up. Subject line. Actually, here. I'm just going to share my screen. And the reason I'm sharing this is because I think people might find this interesting in terms of like getting people, like busy people, well-known people, and working with them in some capacity. So I go, hey Jason, big fan. So I keep it really short. I have a podcast that gets 250,000 downloads a month, not an interview podcast, just a pod where I bring in three to four half, where the guest brings three to four half baked ideas and we jam on it.

If this is something of interest, I can work around your schedule. Just tell me what works, basically. and then I include Pascets, include Alexis O'Hadian, Sam Parr, Andrew Wilkinson. Jonathan Coyne. I actually, and then I take a screenshot. I know he's a busy guy, so I took a screenshot of the tweet to remind him who I am. That's good. You like that?

Yeah. Yeah, I love that. I think that's great because you're being humble and not assuming he remembers this interaction. Saving a time. So then he responds right away. Yeah. Sounds fun. Format sounds really interesting. Let me watch a recent episode today to make sure I can bring something worthwhile.

Sound good, Jason. I could have easily been like, absolutely sounds good. What are you going to do next? You got to. That's not my vibe. That's not your vibe. You're too good. You're going to suggest a specific thing for him to watch.

A few options for different types of recent episodes. Jonathan Courtney! Yep. Kevin Rose, big, fun ideas. I include the YouTube and the Spotify because I don't know what he's going to prefer. Cody Schneider, D-Gen scrappy. Ideas and Jice Cream. He's a friend, so more of a jam. I haven't heard back yet, but I'm optimistic. Yeah. Jason's not opposed to receiving reminders. Well, no one's opposed to receiving reminders, by the way. No, but as in it doesn't see, yeah, he wouldn't take it as a, like, being bugged. Yeah, really cool. Yeah, he's, Jason is a huge, I think Jason Freed, cable sasser, Tim Ferriss, Derek Sivers are probably like my...

You're my Rushmore. My Mount Rushmore. That's the German version. my Alexander Platz Tower. I think it's great to, I mean, yeah, anyway, these books are like... Give us one last one. One last recommendation before we head up. Okay, I'll give you a double whammy.

I'll give you a double whammy. The two best marketing books you can read are expert secrets and traffic secrets. Expert secrets teaches you how to talk about what you do and how to turn like a skill into something you can sell. And traffic secrets tells you how to get leads and actually bring people. Is that still relevant to it? These books?

Absolutely. Yeah. I mean, traffic, absolutely 100%. Yeah, like I have, I think almost every page of this book is highlighted. It's crazy. It's all about list building. It's all the stuff that's still super relevant today. These books are beyond relevant.

Like, they're the best marketing books you can read. And I think what makes them also great is that, and nobody I've said this before people don't people in our world don't like Russell Brunson because he's cheesy but he's also just very smart

and a very good writer and he's not trying to be clever you know what I mean he's not trying to be deep or clever he's just like here's how you do exactly this with very little anecdotes and very little just straight into it

I really like that stuff I'm going to a new thing that I've been doing is whenever someone who I respect mentions a book it's an auto

Amazon order that's why you're not going to buy this one because you don't respect dude I already I've been buying I just went on Amazon I've been buying

and we'll include the links in the YouTube's description if it only if you like subscribe comment by the way if you're going to like this YouTube video, which you should, I want you to click the thumbs up button, but because you

liked it so much, click it again. When you click it again, it's actually going to unlike, unlike it. But then I want you to like it again. So it's like three times because you like it so much, even though it's only going to register once. Or click it really hard? Yeah, just click it really hard. All right. I want to see those injuries. Hey, ice cream. Could you guys also let us know what you think about my hair like did you prefer it longer? I like it I like it longer personally it's like more it's more crazy longer. I don't I don't want to be my personality already so now you know what the issue with your hair is is it's it's not short and it's not long it's medium it's mid it's mid length do you agree um and for anyone I I kind of like it I like the it doesn't go in my mouth I didn't

like that the like when I was eating with my when my hair was like to hear it would go in my mouth and this is going to sound really you've changed you used to like the hair in your mouth I used to like hair and my mouth this is another thing and this sounds really stupid and I don't care about your audience complaining about me rambling but when my hair was longer I felt more chill as in I felt like I felt like I couldn't not be chill like you know what I mean it's like wearing baggy clothes and having long hair makes you feel different. I don't know how to describe it. I needed a haircut because I felt like I wanted to go into a new phase where I was a bit more like switched on and a bit more, I can't describe it. You ever see the Royal Tennebombs? Yeah, a lot, very long time ago. So I'm not sure

I think it's Richie Tenenbaum. He has like, he has like, the tennis player has like really long hair and then he like shaves his head. Yeah, I kind of remember it. Anyways, that was you, But it makes you feel different. It makes you feel like when my hair is long, I'm kind of, people assume, first of all, that I'm super chill. You're not. But I'm super like, I'm not that. I mean, I'm not chilled out in the way that many people would think with my hair being so long. I mean, you run a successful business.

You're busy. I'm busy. Yeah. I'm busy. You wouldn't think it with the hair. So anyway, guys, I am being 100% serious about the comments on the hair thing. Cool. Well, I'm glad we ended on that note.

It's been real. Thanks for coming on. I appreciate it. This is the longest we've ever chatted. I don't know if anyone made it to the deep end, but if you did, here's, you know, thank you for listening. And hopefully, well, you're traveling a bit, so you won't be on the pod for a few weeks, but you'll come back soon. We'll be back. We'll be back very soon. All right.

We'll be back. Thanks, everyone. To me. See, later, boss.