The Startup Ideas Podcast - A Billion Views, but Where's the Profit?

Episode Date: November 23, 2023

Greg interviews Dylan Jardon and Henry Belcaster, founders of Clipt.co, an explainer video and animation studio.They talk about starting a "hot girl agency," the challenges of monetizing YouTube content, and wanting fame versus staying anonymous, and more.►►Subscribe to Greg's weekly newsletter for insights on community, creators and commerce. You'll also find out when new and exclusive episodes come out from Where it Happens. And it's totally free.https://latecheckoutstudio.ck.page/FIND GREG ON SOCIAL:Twitter: https://twitter.com/gregisenbergInstagram: https://instagram.com/gregisenberg/TikTok: https://tiktok.com/@gregisenbergaLINKS FOR THIS EPISODE:Production Team: https://PodFlow.comDylan's YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@dylanjardonDylan's X: https://twitter.com/DylanJardonHenry's YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@HenryBelcasterHenry's X: https://twitter.com/HenryBelcasterTheir newsletter: http://smartnonsense.comTimestamps:1:15 - Hot girl idea8:00 - Building audience12:00 - Fame vs anonymity16:45 - Getting recognized19:50 - Long-term vision24:00 - Greg's advice: focus28:15 - Juggling ideas31:00 - Clipt fees & costs35:00 - Timeless inspiration

Dylan and Henry, the clip boys. Welcome. The clip to bros. Thanks, Greg. Good to be here. Usually I invite people on this podcast and I say, just show up. But with you two, I actually threw a document your way. And I said, throw some ideas, throw some things that you're thinking about. Because you guys can go out of hand here. I need to put you in a box a little bit.

I was going to say, we're the show up guys. So we felt very boxed in by. But it'll be good. I was telling Henry, a lot of these real trends that we're seeing, it's kind of the same idea when people ask us like, how do you know what videos to shoot? Where do you get your topic ideas? We're like, I don't know, they're just everywhere. We just see them constantly.

But like business ideas, I don't know if our brains turned off to looking for new ideas, but we had to force this one. One of my ideas I copied from Sean Puri, my only idea. Yeah, you want to start with that one? Let's start with that one. Your only idea is somebody else's idea. Right. Full credit to Sean Puri of my first million podcast, how we got our start was

building out his podcast studio. He was like, you guys are sick at video. Like, I think there's this huge video trend. You should be on top of it. And I think one of the ideas that would work really well is related to this, what the big short did. What they did was they have someone like Margot Robbie or Selena Gomez come on and teach this sort of nerdy business finance topic. But they're hot celebrities. Everyone's like, holy shit, look at this hot celebrity teaching me something. What if you just had this media company that was just hot chicks teaching nerdy subjects. Like, oh, it's brilliant because who's the audience? It's nerdy guys.

Who do they want to watch, beautiful women? I know this idea appeals to like a 25-year-old dude like us at the time, but I see so much opportunity there because they're fairly valued in the marketplace of Instagram or TikTok. Like brands are reaching out to them. But all these like super attractive people, they don't know how to make money. Like Henry and I, we got a billion views last year and we have no idea how to make money off of that. If we can't figure it out and we care about business, imagine the girl in Brooklyn.

Like, what is she doing? So if you have this media company that's just built around creating awesome content, teaching nerdy stuff, that's the dream. But like the tangible thing you could start day to day is doing this for other companies as an agency. Sean was even equating it to only fans. He's like, put it behind a pay wall. These nerdy guys want to pay to see hot sexy Margo Robbie explain, I don't know, what a CD is, a CDO, put it behind a paywall. Now you've got this high quality education content as kind of a play on OnlyFans. If someone wants to start this, what would you do? Would you go on Instagram, sign some women?

You'd probably start on Craigs. Okay, like if we were to do this, I would tap into the discoverability of TikTok and Instagram Reels and YouTube shorts, the short form platforms. So if you wanted to do this tomorrow, you probably go find a good looking friend. Go watch the big short, see what they taught, create a bunch of TikToks, see if you can get traction. Here's the thing, though.

I think the media company side is like, okay, you want to get traction and stuff. But really, you don't need that if you're running them as ads. My buddy was actually starting to do this. I don't know why he flaked off of this, but basically he just went on Instagram Reels and his algorithm just feeds him hot girls. So, like, that speaks to what he's into. You find the person that maybe has like $10,000.

followers. They're probably not making a lot of money. They're struggling with brand deals. It's a headache. So they're just waiting, waiting for people to hit them up. So he had DMed a couple dozen and their rates are incredibly low and he can just do these sample edits. They'll do a placement for like $250 or 500 bucks, something like that. If that, every attractive girl, like they're just, the supply is outrageous. So it's just like having an agency. Like my niche is just Hot Girl Agency. You might have to rebrand if you're going with bigger clients. But if you just focus on that, you just DM them, connect them, and you can kind of arbitrage basically charge. These exist. 10 grand for a bundle. These exist too. It's not Hot Girl Agency, but it's like

UGC agency, where I think they've gone and bundled up a bunch of these creators that have a ton of views but don't know how to make money. And you can go pay them 50 bucks for a clip, 100 bucks for a clip, 150 buzz. I think it's that simple, simple spin of only attractive people. Maybe it's not just hot girls. It could be hot guys too. But it's only attractive people. It's like, I don't know who's like, I was going to say hooters, but that's not a good example. Like something where it's just like, this is your angle and you're doubling down on that. The Margot Robbie example is the, I think it's, isn't it a wolf of Wall Street? So, well, she was in that. I think she was in both for the little teacher. Yeah, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the,

Short was the one where, I forget who directed it, but you will cut away from the shot. They will break the fourth wall. And it's like Selena Gomez in a bubble bath explaining. You're never going to get that for your TikTok agency because they're just so, they're overvalued, if anything. It's like you've got to look for the undervalued, like the eights and the nines of the internet. And you just focus on that. Yeah. So basically what you're saying is you're taking boring concepts.

You're marrying it with beautiful people. boring content and beautiful people who would want to go after this idea it's young 20 something dudes imagine if just everyone you work with is just a hot girl honestly if our content wasn't doing well I would probably do this idea actually you mentioned you guys get millions of views and you said you have issues monetizing it why it's hard I've got a million and a half subscribers Dylan's nearing in on a million it's really hard to go get that audience to actually do something you really need to nail your content and audience fit if you want them to go do something. In our case, the thing we had before our content popped off was clip.com, our kind of animation studio,

it's an agency. That's like a premium product. It's expensive animated explainer videos we do. That is not a good fit for the 19 year olds that watch our free content on YouTube. The key part is we refuse to do ads. One, people refuse to do them with us. YouTube shorts, which is where we were popping off, we'd get a million views every short we put out. but it's early on shorts. So people would be like, hey, we'd sponsor this if it were a TikTok, but it's YouTube and we don't know how to value YouTube short.

So it's just easier for us to make money through an agency and then just not monetize our content. It's just always been a real headache to work with brands. It's easier for us to productize something else and sell that, even if only 0.01% of our audience is even open to that as an option. We're in the first inning of creators even figuring out how to monetize like YouTube content, up until a few years ago, the playbook was you make your videos and you get sponsorships, you get ad dollars. So people are still trying to figure out how do I actually

move my audience to go somewhere? I really like Jeremy Giffin. He was on Invest, like the best. And he was talking about how creators monetize. He's basically like, traditionally it was sell a $10 t-shirt to 30% of your audience or maybe it's a community that's $100 a month. And you saw that to 5% of your audience. But he's bullish. on the future, which is you're only going to sell to one person and it's going to be to get equity in their company, which could be a $100 million deal. So use your entire audience just to find that one person who's going to give you a sweet deal on their awesome company. And that's where I think it's really interesting just to look at the like Tim Ferriss approach of super high

priced or free. So we've taken the approach like, hey, we're just going to make a shitload of free content. And if you want this super high priced thousands of dollars a month agency, then you can do that. But for everyone else, it's totally free. Alex Hormosey is running that exact framework. Make as much free content as he can. And then the only thing he's selling is access to companies or acquisitions.com where you're giving up a piece of your company for them to invest. Yeah, for Hormozie to win big, he doesn't need to do a lot of deals.

He can do two deals a year and get 20, 30, 40, 50% of these businesses. and people come to him and they're begging for him to partner because they're obsessed with him. And it's almost become like a Hormozi lifestyle. Hormozian. Henry was talking about yesterday. He went to an Omokasa sushi place just because he heard Jeroa. Flax. Briefly.

No flex. It's a flex and a plug. Go listen to our podcast. I was listening to Tim Ferriss. Tim Ferriss plugged this movie, Giro Dreams of Sushi. Yep. So I go watch that. fall in love with Giro, this sushi chef. So I'm primed. Joe Rogan hops on his podcast with Elon Musk.

And in literally 10 seconds, he offhandedly is like, hey, Elon, you ever been to this awesome sushi place called sushi by scratch or something? They're in Texas and Chicago and Beverly Hills. Elon's like, no. And they move on. And I'm like, sign me up. Jiro dreams a sushi. I trust Joe Rogan and 10 seconds later, I booked a reservation. The trust, it's crazy. We were talking about why we don't want to do brand deals is because you want to avoid the FDX for just losing any credibility. It's like, hey, if we just never sell anything, we're only building trust. And when we do sell something, it's our own product, which we've created ourselves. Honestly, we haven't promoted clipped our company in the past much because we're like a six out of ten product right now.

We're not proud enough to promote it to our audience. We want to like go back and refine it, is what we've been doing the last couple months, getting it to an eight out of ten, ideally ten out of ten. And then we can come back and sell it and we know everyone that buys the product is going to have the best experience. Now they're going to trust us even more. So that trust factor is something that we're really conscious of. It's interesting because what do you charge like five, ten grand a month?

Seven now. Yeah. But depends. But yeah. You might look at that and be like, it's such a pain to actually deal with that price point, although it sounds like a lot of money. and you might be like my microphone is going to be 25,000 a month or 35,000 a month. And that's the Jeremy Giffin point, which is, I was just talking about this on my first

million, actually. Episode will be out by the time this flex slide. Henry threw the sushi flex. I figured I'd hit him back. I was telling Sean and Sam about the average client size for late checkout, our innovation agency. That's the agency that partners with Dropbox and companies, big companies, and helps them. them do product zero to one, the average size is a million dollars a deal. So you don't have to do so many deals for it to be worth it.

I actually think that agencies, a lot of these creator-led agencies and agencies in general are going to go more low-end, like cheap, cheap, cheap, or like high-end hundreds of thousands of dollars per year customer value. Yeah, I remember when you were here, Greg, you stopped by our studio and like you said that in passing. You said our average deals is 100 grand or more a month. They wanted to move on and just go like, what's the slate checkout? Like, what's design?

I'm like, dude, your fucking purchase size is this is what they're subscribed to and they'll stay with you for a decade or whatever it might be. It's like, that seemed insane to me. And I'm like, why isn't everyone trying to crack that code? Because Greg clearly figured it out. It's a tough racket. First of all, you have to say no to smaller deals, which is really a lot of self-discipline. And then doing deals with the Nike size companies of the world,

You really have to do a lot of relationship building. There's a lot of schmoozing involved. And building... Whomboze with us? Yeah. Shaking hands and kissing babies. But if you have an audience, you're schmoozing indirectly. Yeah.

You don't have to schmooze with Joe Rogan. You're just going to work with him because you know it's Joe Rogan. Totally. It's kind of a shortcut. Yeah. Like having a pod, being on YouTube, it builds affinity. I was at a party last night. This is a sort of flex.

Oh, what's the flex is going to pop. My buddy runs corp dev. at this really large tech company. Corp Dev is the people who buy companies. It's like head of mergers and acquisitions. Let's say Zuck wants to buy Clipped. Zuck would be like, okay, let me CC my head of corp dev, and that person is actually going to negotiate the deal and get the transaction done.

You'll be interfacing with that person. This guy was like, dude, the president of our company shared your tweet in our Slack and said, everyone look at this. So what did I do this morning? I woke up knowing that I DM'd her and was like, hey, like, let's catch up. So I do think that building content is like a shortcut to the schmooze. I actually put this on the dock that you made us fill out. In terms of trends we're noticing, all of these entrepreneurs, they get to the top. They've sold their thing. They've accomplished their mission. And then they're like, I just want to go make content now. I want to build an audience. Because it's much harder to do anything else if you don't have an audience.

The story version of that point was we had a blow-up, like in a good positive, like, rocket ship blow-up way a year ago or two years ago. When we were doing clips for the All-in podcast, we got close to David Sachs. And he invited us to his 50th birthday party, which is like insanity. All of PayPal. The coolest people in tech. We're all there. And even the entertainment world. So it's like crazy party.

But all of these billionaires, I want to be a lot of. wanted to talk to us a decent amount. We're like interested in what we're doing because they don't have the sort of reach that they want. No one will listen to them if they put out something. No one knows who they are just walking down the street. And they want to be recognized and known and adored. They see Sax and Chamath getting adored and they're like, hey, I want that. Can you guys make me that? So we just saw, hey, they're frustrated. What if we just shortcut? Made enough money to like, you don't have to stress. Let's just get to that level and then focus on having the reach with the right audience. That was seeing it tangibly.

like them asking us for help on this thing. One of them was single, speaking of the hot girl agency, and he was like, can you help me grow on Instagram? Because I talked to the founder of Instagram, and he's like, Instagram is actually the best dating site there is. If you can be popular there, then it's like the easiest thing in the world to just DM anybody or they DM you. Blow me up there because I want to find my wife.

This guy had made all the money. He had done all the things, but he didn't have a wife. So he's like talking to the founder. He's probably talking to Kevin Sistram. He's like, can you make me popular on Instagram? I think that's just the evolution of status symbols. Status symbols used to be all about cars and houses and physical things, but like having a million followers on Instagram or having almost a million subscribers on YouTube.

I was talking to a buddy. Don't know. Nasdaily. Like that's not his name. Nasir. Yeah. He was here talking about my realization that the number one relationship in life is the wife or your spouse, I should say. partner. Sure, partner. All of our attention should be focused on the best way to find that person, like even more so than like making an absurd amount of money. He's like, dude, why are you even thinking about a wife when you don't even have a million subscribers? Just like get the reach and then it'll be the easiest thing in the world to just filter for that person. All your interests are in the world and people can see them all the time. So it filters nicely. He'll also look at always comments. You'll see your inbound if you're going to filter through to figure out who's on your wavelength.

Henry's laughing probably because all my conversations regressed to this topic of girls and wives and stuff. Yeah, I mean, sorry. I was laughing because I think what Nas said is hilarious. Well, it is hilarious. I met Nas once, and he's been on the pod, but I met him in person once. I told him to meet me for coffee. He walked in and everyone is like whispering. And we go to order coffee and I'm like, I'll have an Americano and what do you want, Naz?

And he says, yeah, I'll have an Americano. And the barista's like, I did my graduate paper on Nasdaily. And we grabbed the coffees. We sit outside. I was like, does this happen often that you get recognized? And he was like, everywhere I go, I get recognized. And I was thinking to myself, like, maybe you found your girlfriend from this. Maybe you didn't.

I'm not sure. I think she was a fan, actually. But is that the best litmus? test for finding a partner, I just wouldn't want to get recognized personally. I just want to order an Americano. So I think there's two schools of thought. I want to be famous and I want all of the attention and perks that come with that. And then the other school of thought is, once I'm wealthy, I want to get off the grid and be low key. How do you think about it? I can touch on the being recognized bit. Maybe Dylan can touch on the dating bit. In terms of being recognized, there's a different.

difference between A-list celebrity in public, recognizability, and, like, YouTuber, I feel like there's this wall between audience and A-list celebrities, a-la Justin Bieber or George Clooney or Selena Gomez. Like, those people literally can't go out in public. People can't relate to them. They almost don't seem like humans. Whereas in a C.C. Nishtak going through the streets of New York, it's this parisocial thing because we feel like we need.

know them, like they're a friend. The audiences don't actually bother them as much. Counterpoint, Casey, because Casey's studio is right next to ours, we just had the New York City Marathon, and one buddy invited him, but he's like, dude, I don't want to go run that because I'm just going to get recognized everywhere and it's going to be miserable. He hates the fame side of things. One of my buddies, he's like, in terms of like money, fame, power, like, what motivates you? I don't know. Right now it's fame just because I think it'll help me find a wife and kind of being cool social circles. Really all I want to do is just play sports all day and read books. And like if I do those two things, I'm happy, which doesn't really slot into any of those categories. Okay, if you have to

pick and you have to order it in order. Money, fame, power. Yeah. Power. I don't even know what I would do with power. Power is like influence I view as people will listen to you, follow you into battle. I don't need that. My quest is I need money so that I can have freedom for. I feel. I feel from all of the things I don't want to do and can only do the things that I have to do. I feel like you say that and like you already have a shitload of freedom. Yeah, no, I'm chilling. Our lives are pretty good. That's kind of why our friends laugh at us because we're probably the least ambitious people.

It's like, we want to build something awesome in 50 years, but we're in like absolutely no rush to get there. It's like, why aren't you monetizing these ways? You're like, oh, you could build a community. We're not 100% on that wavelength, so we're not going to do it. Maybe we don't monetize our channel for another three years. and we just waste 20 grand a month for that whole time. From what I understand, you guys are bringing in seven figures of revenue from Clip. Definitely revenue.

You're making money on Clip. Yeah. And you're taking that money and you're reinvesting in content, right? Correct. All of it. Every cent. So your plan is not like the Mr. Beast type strategy, which is reinvest everything in content until you'd have all this attention and all this goodwill and all this trust.

That's the difference. We have no clue. I don't know why we're doing it. We have no clue. We have no clue what's on the other side. It works. So we'll keep doing it because we haven't seen any downside. And it's fun to do.

There has to be like an outcome, right? Like there has to be a goal that you have. Yeah. And for us, we hated school. Can we make learning fun? So it's the mission. And right now we're just blindly trusting the process. If we make education content, we make it as fun as we possibly can,

and we build as massive an audience as we possibly can. then something will come down the line. We'll point that into something down the line. But for now, it's just make learning fun, get views. Patrick Campbell, he kind of raced us. He's like, hey, you guys should have like some vision, some mission to be on, and that'll at least direct you.

So when you get on podcasts, you have like something to talk about other than we're lost, just figuring things out today today. We've had this like hazy, hey, school was shitty. We love learning, but we hated school. That's a problem.

Our version of solving that is these funny, animated sales Park sort of clips for nerds and then maybe the hot girl agency to do the same thing. We really like the educational component like teaching things. Like it's cool as see, say, Harvard put their classes online. I'd rather watch TikTok than a Harvard CS class. How do we smash those two together? Get a CS class on TikTok. Here's a business idea for us.

There you go. It might take 10 years, all right. But in 10 years, I could see us having some play on like a Khan Academy. Academy's technical videos about math equations. Every student watched them because they weren't learning in class. So maybe we do a play on that. It's just a huge library, the kind of content that makes learning fun. Then students can watch as little as they want to get interested about topics and they can go as deep as they want if we do full-blown courses or series. One of the regrets I have is not doubling down in making learning fun as a business.

I was working on a product called Wall Street Survivor. Right after the economy crash, 2008, and people saw their net worth go down 50%. And we're like, I don't understand what's happening. So we built a game around learning how to play the stock market. We added badges and gamification. I started a YouTube channel, and I wrote the scripts. and you'll appreciate this as animation people.

We created animated short videos. We published it. That business, by the way, ended up selling, so that was great. But I gave up on YouTube animation short form. And I just checked, and all the videos now have hundreds of thousands, if not millions of views. Are you going to plug the channel?

You can check it out. It's on YouTube Wall Street Survivor. You can check out the early, old. animation videos. My lesson from that is it takes time. Sometimes it takes 10 years. But I do think you're onto something. If your mission is to make learning fun, I think you're onto something. Oh, these are sick? Yeah. How are they actually sick? Are you just saying that? No, they are. And you've got millions of views. I know. It's crazy. I'm just hovering over them just like watching the kind of the thumbnail play. But I love it. It's like whiteboard animated. It's like a lot of

lot like a Patty Galloway who breaks down creators on a whiteboard. Our thing is we don't know what the best business will be out of this. We're probably like 1% monetized on what we could be. Okay, that sucks, but it's fine. 1%'s enough for us to be happy. But if we keep moving in the direction of dumping all our money back in and we're improving all our edits, we don't know who's going to compete with us because you've got to be ludicrous out of your mind to spend 20 grand a month making these and building the team.

And we have access to the best animators in the world. So it's hard to compete with that. So we're just going to keep digging our moat. Our job is just keep digging right now and creating something that's awesome and no one else is going to be able to touch us because they don't have creators that are fun or 50 grand a month and 10 years to work on building this moat. So the goal is just build the moat and then whatever castle we end up wanting to build will build. And are you guys running both companies or are you thinking about hiring someone to run clip? Oh, both. Okay, so for the listener, you have Clipped agency.

You have your content ecosystem, which is Dylan and Henry. And then you have Smart Nonsense, which is the newsletter, right? Correct. And smart nonsense will probably end up being the umbrella for all of the content stuff. We didn't want to promote Clipped because it was a 6 out of 10. Our job is get it to a 10 out of 10, and then hand that off immediately to Henry's brother to run the business side. Right now, it's really painful when we have the opportunity cost of making more content. If we can just focus on creating the best content, and that's the top of the funnel,

and then we have enough money to have someone come in and run it really well, that's when the machine is going to take off. Right now, we're dabbling in both, and it's this really annoying world of opportunity cost. Like, we'll be on sales calls right now because we're trying to improve the product, which is like, ah, why are we doing this when we could be getting five million views? But it's really temporary. We've had the issue of always leaving a little bit too soon to say, start the next thing and not setting the foundation, which is why we've been in this one to two

million realm with our agency for two or three years because we immediately took off to start making content and then that blew up, but then this started to fall apart. So we fucked up in that sense, but now we're coming back to build the foundation strong and then hand it off properly so we can focus on content. It's still hard and we've had all the luck in the world. So if you can make it work like Greg, we look up to people like you that actually crush business. because business is hard to do successfully, especially when you don't have your best friend as a business partner or any of the amazing fortune that we have. I have multiple businesses that I'm running. The way I see it is you always got to start with one idea, get to product market fit with that one idea, hire an operator and hand it off, and do it one by one.

The cool part is you have real product market fit with clip. If people are paying you a million dollars or more, there's product. market fit there. I think what happened, because our marketing worked really well at certain points, it would make up for a shitty product. So in podcasts, sharing all of our clips, they'd all point back to Henry, which points to Clipped. It's like, that just blew up demand like crazy. So we could just drop the ball left and right with not ideal product. And it'd still make a million plus dollars a year. So what you're saying is you had sales, maybe retention wasn't great. Exactly. It'd be awesome if people stayed for a year or two years or something.

There are ways to build the product better. And I think we were masking a shitty product with good sales. And then when we stopped doing free clips for a Naval or David Sachs or like Tim Ferriss type, then all we're getting is word of mouth. And that's why we've just been a steady state because we haven't done marketing ever. And it's just not growing because of that. And it's kind of a shitty product. But now it's better.

Now we're figuring out how to actually improve it. Sorry to cut you off, but just pushing back on it. I don't think we have product market fit. we're starting to get that now. If I were you, I would just be spending 90% of my energy getting product market fit for Clipped because Clipped is your oxygen, basically. I would put a line in the sand. I'd say, I want my average customer to last 16 months.

And I'm going to do things to make that happen. These are the five, seven things that I'm going to do to make it happen. I wouldn't do anything else. I wouldn't tweet. I wouldn't create content. I wouldn't do anything else, except that. Once I hit 16 months, then I would move on to short form. And I would be like, okay, short form video.

My goal is to create two pieces of short form content per week. And I would only focus on that with a one product market fit metric, which could be whatever, a thousand likes on a video. Then once you have that, you can't hand that over, but you can automate and systematize a lot of it and make it easier on yourself. maybe you hire a head of script writing or content. There's a lot of ways you can do it. Then I would move on to the podcast. And then I would go and do smart nonsense, which is like making, learning, fun and easy via the newsletter.

And do it one by one. It's like a line, right? It's one by one. I call it multi-prinnership. Multi-prinnership is when you have some dots and you connect it one at a time. Where it doesn't work is when you're creating a circle and you're trying to do everything at the same time.

What do you think? This is where we've had some difficulties where we're figuring out exactly what you're saying. We launch everything too soon, like the newsletter. Now we went to this daily newsletter, which I think is awesome, but it's also distracting because it takes at least an hour or a couple hours of mind space a day or a week. We have that thing running and you have the shorts content and trying to get to the 16-month clipped customer retention. So we have a lot of different ball and the podcast we're shooting daily.

A lot of balls were juggling. And I'm in the mindset of, okay, just put newsletter on pause. Don't focus on growing it. Just focus on the business. Henry's really good at doing multiple things at once. So we get by with just me focusing on one thing and then him kind of keeping everything alive. But I don't like that because I'd rather we just both nail one thing. Because we have a lot of things that could go well.

But we're doing none of them. Right. Yeah. What do you think, Henry? Yeah. Turn it into group therapy. It's like what Dylan said where we're like. like big zero to one guys. As soon as the things getting on the tracks, we're like, okay, we don't

want to manage all these people and do the same thing over and over again for all of eternity. So we always leave at like 0.9. Like on the product market fit thing, Clipped works for the 30 customers we have. This turn thing is the problem. I don't know if it's a product market fit thing. We like literally didn't know how to do sales. So there was no inbound. And we weren't running any sales process on anybody. We had a wait list 200 people that we just forgot about. and we're like, oh shit. And then we hit them up six months later and they're like,

now I already figured out my problem. What are you guys doing? We should have sold probably. If someone goes to clip.co, it'll probably be different by the time this comes out. But it works. It's just we don't have the entire front end or the demand side of the business figured out.

And we're not nurturing leads. We had the demand and it was just creating the good product. And then we stopped promoting it. So demand went down. And it was all kind of confusing. figuring out the 16-month client lifetime. It's like, how do you test that in two months? Because we're trying to get out and do these shorts that are working right now

that we don't know if they're going to work forever. We think they will. Is there a way to test? Maybe it's referrals or something like that for, like a proxy for who would stay a year and a half without waiting the actual year and a half? A lot of agencies that we run, we're constantly doing temperature checks. Just checking in with clients to see how we're doing. and also if they're thinking something and just getting ahead of it,

you can extend, not only could you extend the customer retention, but they actually really appreciate you coming up and saying, oh, hey, I noticed you were silent when you saw this logo. Is there something wrong or just really being attentive to their needs? That stuff actually works and systematizing the whole thing. Like, how do you automate those emails? So it comes out when work is delivered. And that's where the systems and the processes are really important,

which I'm guessing you don't have automated emails and NPS reports. We've got nothing. We're getting in there now. We're starting to figure it out. It's not a product market issue. It's a processes issue. Right, right. We look at a normal company and they're very hands-on.

Our company was like, here's your editor. You guys do whatever the hell you want. We're going to check in when you cancel. There was nothing with the little temperature checks you're talking about. That's business 101, but we ignored it altogether. So I think that would probably double retention in itself. So that's sort of what we're working on now. We're in that transition.

We're like barbelling things. We want to go pretty low end with a headhunter model of like a lot of people use our world-class animators for like shitty podcast clips. You don't need the best animator in the world to do that. We should be charging more because if, If we're charging less, we're charging five grand a month and someone's using the best animator for shitty podcast clips, that's a problem. We're not charging enough. So we're getting to like just pay us once. We're going to find you someone awesome.

And that pays for us to keep hiring the best of the best to use in our own content and maybe a 25 grand a month or 50 grand a month. Or maybe one day the Greg, 100 grand a month package. Dylan and I probably have to acknowledge as founders is we'd rather not be the one to 100 guys. So I think what we need to do is find that person because it's just not our strength. I think we should quadruple down on our strength, not try and fix this thing that we're not that great at. Which is why I'm bad at YouTube, because I already crack zero to one on YouTube.

And he's gone. Getting to 10 million subscribers is just like one to 100 with the business. I don't want to do that. So then I'm like, oh, the newsletter. That's a cool thing to do. I think our goal is build a good product that gets enough cash to find that person that wants to take it one to 100,

and they can figure out what the best product. It's like writing a job description, CEO of Clip, and putting it out there and trying to get someone who's the best at that and just be like, I'll give you 10% of the company or whatever. Let's go. That's pretty much where Henry's brother actually gets growth in a company. His startup sold to a big bank. He has no desire to make content, no desire to be the face of something.

Do you have any business wisdom like where you see us going wrong? Well, first of all, I'm impressed with you guys. That's why I wanted to chat with you guys. You're doing cool stuff and you're doing your, own way, which is interesting. You're not just copying other people. You've got a unique perspective. That's really cool. If I were you, that would just think what are the individual business units I want to create with the one KPI and just focus one by one? You did the hard thing, which is acknowledging that there's certain things that you're good at and certain things you're bad at. I think being real

with yourself around like, I don't like cleaning the dishes, but I should be cleaning the dishes. There's some things that you just have to do and some things that you don't want to do. Acknowledging that, it will be important. But also hiring out for clip. I think having Henry's brother will be important. But I also think you guys know the business. You've dealt with clients and created amazing animation. And you've created clips for the world's biggest podcasts.

So obviously, you know what you're doing. You just have to have a North Star. And in entrepreneurship, you have to have these mini North Star. That's my biggest advice for you. And honestly, anyone listening, anyone interested in this sort of thing? It's like, you'd be surprised how simple the advice is. And I like the one KPI each. So say it is the 16 or year and a half retention for clients on Clipped.

Just focus on making it the best experience. And then, yeah, it reminds me of the Peter Thiel thing where it's like everyone has one metric. That's the only thing you're focused on. Don't talk to me about anything else. Yeah, I really like that. Before we head out, who's one creator or business person that you're looking up to right now, each of you. Dylan's been talking about Jeremy Giffin a lot. Bonus points for non-obvious people.

We're trying to get to the first principles of inspiration. Get to the primary source, which would be like Warren Buffett, Charlie Munger. We're always looking for the most timeless stuff. Our whole approach to content is rather than compete, like, basically, everyone's competing in the world of content. and it's really freaking hard because you're competing. If you just decide not to compete and be in this world of your own, then there's no competition there. I'm really into SEAL teams and like military stuff.

This is Sean Ryan's podcast I've been listening to. Four military content, there weren't many podcasts talking to operators as an operator. He owns that world. So anytime I'm thinking of something like, oh, what is this SEAL teams like or what is the Army Rangers, whatever it might be, I just go to that. But that's just with my own personal interest. For every person in between Warren Buffett and Alex Hormozi, there was loss of information. And we want to be doing stuff that was applicable 100 years ago.

I was invited to a small Tony Robbins event. So I went, don't judge me, listener, or you guys. I was really impressed with how he laid out his whole stage. I made that mental note. I went home. It was the day the Alex Hormosey webinar was. I watched the webinar. and it was exactly the stage that Tony Robbins had.

The next day I went back to Tony, and I spoke to Tony's team, and they're like, yeah, Alex is like a big fan of Tony Robbins. It just goes to show you that everything is a remix of something, someone else. Everyone has primary sources, et cetera. I used to put Casey Knyset on the ultimate pedestal. Then I found out Casey Nyset's actually just a carbon copy of his brother Van Nizet, who's just a carbon copy of the artist Tom Sacks, who's probably a carbon copy of. 10 other things. That's when I had the same kind of realization. I think the only reason that Dylan and I are sitting here today is because of Naval Ravikant. Right after college, we were really lost. We were both unemployed. And we found Naval Ravikant on Joe Rogan's podcast and like changed our

entire life. Change how we think about everything, how we value our time, how we value money. Just as like a tech philosopher guy, he changed the course of our life. I've been really into Palmer Lucky and what he's doing. He was on Invest like the best, recently and he was talking about what you're saying, Greg, of looking at what's timeless. He was saying how everyone now, we're just obsessed with looking around us, what other people are doing and copying. Rarely do we look more than 10 years back. And so everyone in VR was competing, looking at what other people were doing in VR and it was

all failing. But he'd just go back and read 60 years ago, like the ideas that they had around VR. And he was noticing everyone was like, hey, if there was one design that had simple optics, but it required a lot. They just couldn't do it at the time. So they discarded the idea, and no one ever went back to it. But now people were still using these super heavy optics that they had to make up for having lack of compute back in the day. They didn't realize we have the compute now. So he just went back and was able to basically reduce all of the weight that they had on their VR goggles and just simplify the actual physical part of it and optically distort the images

so it worked out. I'm way above my pay grade in terms of the technical. side. But same thing happens with Anderil and military companies. Everyone's ignoring what they were researching in the 60s, just applying those old ideas to current day, new technology, but people forget about all these classified documents, but returning to those with the modern technology. Warren Buffett missed the internet. Everyone's talking about AI. Warren Buffett just skipped the internet. He got Apple. He got it late, didn't he? He wasn't buying Apple in the 80s or something, right? Right. I think it was like 2018 or something. 10 years after the iPhone.

Eight years after the iPhone. Yeah. Yeah. It sounds like homework assignment. We've got to find older texts to read and figure out all this stuff. Absolutely. The Rosetta is that a stone. Agavad Gita is that one?

Boys, this has been real. I knew you'd bring it. You said you'd bring ruckus and you brought some ruckus. We'll put the links to your YouTube and the show notes. Twitter and clip.coe. How do you spell it? C-L-I-P-T-D-co. Clicked dot co. Check it out. Thanks, Greg. Later, guys. Thanks, Greg. Let's see you.