The Startup Ideas Podcast - Jonathan Courtney Gave Away 3 Crazy Cash-Flowing Business Ideas

Episode Date: May 1, 2024

I’m joined by Jonathan Courtney, Co-Founder and CEO of AJ&Smart, a Digital Product Design agency. We discuss various $1M-$10M business ideas, including an AI-powered brown noise device, a more sophisticated brand of male sex toys, an infoproduct to break phone addiction, and so much more.🚀  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.com70,000+ 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/Episode Timestamps00:00 First business idea: AI-powered sleep device24:19 Second business idea: Sophisticated sex toys for men28:38 Third business idea: Non-spiritual retreats33:55 Fourth business idea: An infoproduct around digital addiction47:50 How entrepreneurs can benefit from masterminds

So one of the things I really love to do is launching stuff, like taking something that's pretty boring. So our latest thing, if you go to AJsmart.com, we just launched a in-person facilitation training essentially for, mainly for corporate employees. And we repackaged it in a way that no one else in the industry is doing it at a price that's three to four times more than anyone else is charging. That's the kind of stuff I really love to do. I love to take boring elements, pull them together, and repackage them and then sell them with me as the same. CEO, we would probably max out a 10 million on a business like that. I can't believe we're doing this. Yeah, it's really cool. I'm very, very excited about it.

You know, you message me about coming onto the pod and you were just like, hey, I've got this other friend who's this big time YouTuber and he should be on the pod. But also, like, I would be on the pod too. And I was like, whoa, whoa, that person who you mentioned, by the way, I've already spoken to you about coming on the pod and I would much rather you on the pod than him. Well, I much appreciate that, Greg. I appreciate it.

I just didn't want to be presumptuous messaging you like, hey, just let me on your podcast, you know? Just I'm so cool. Just let me on your podcast because I met you once. Because we got drunk together, you know? Exactly. Now you have to let me on your podcast. That's the rule.

You know the rule. but startup ideas podcast. Exactly. And then we're bonded. You come on the pot. Deep bonding happened. Deep bonding. Yes, absolutely.

You are the internet's best kept secret as far as I'm concerned. Oh, no. Well, no one's ever said that to me in a good way. I mean, a lot of people know about you and you create a lot of content. And you're known as the quote-unquote unscheduled CEO in some circles. Yeah. In some circles, yeah. I think the unscheduled CEO is like my little, that's my secret thing.

That's my dirty, dirty secret little podcast going on in the background. Most people know me because of just non-stop Instagram ads. So I think if you think about the majority of people who know about me, they're already annoyed just because of the amount of Instagram. Instagram ads that they see you at my face on it. Exactly. But it's worked and that's kind of why I wanted you to have, why I wanted to have you on. It's just because I do think you have a ton of good ideas for better or for worse for the

internet, but I'm excited to talk more about it. Yeah, me too. I even brought a few weird little ideas to talk about as well. I know you like guests to bring startup ideas. And so I brought a couple of ideas. It's brought a couple of things that I think you're going to like. Your audience will find valuable. Of course, you had to call it weird ideas.

So it's very... Well, some of them are sexual. Okay. Okay. All right. Maybe we'll... I don't know if you're going to put this on the podcast. I listened to your last episode with Noah Kagan.

You talked about this podcast. You went on where you recorded an episode and then they did not air it. I think this is going to be what happens to me for this podcast. That's possible. That's possible. That was the 20... VC podcast, which I didn't, it didn't air. So, what a shame.

I'm going to air this. I'm going to air this. We want unfiltered, unscheduled CEO, Jonathan Courtney, you know, two names, two first names, one name, great guy. Let's go. What do you got? What's idea number one? Oh, you want me to actually go into the startup ideas straight away.

Okay. Yeah. All right. Yeah, because I do. All right. That's how we do it in America, you know? In America, it's great to business. Let's just make some money immediately.

Okay. Here's my first idea. So, I mean, first of all, just maybe a tiny bit of clarification for people. I am not a startup founder. I'm a business owner, a small business owner, right? I don't do VC stuff. I actually do invest in other people's companies, but my own business that makes me money is essentially a small business.

You know, we sell a mixture of an agent. Info Products and all of that kind of stuff. But we work with a shit ton of startups. And I'm always excited to, when I see an idea that just excites me or an industry where I can see that something should be happening, but because I don't start startups, I'm always frustrated. So here are some ideas that I want your audience to bring into the world.

I want them to make themselves billionaires. And I'll be an investor, right, in these ideas. Okay. So Greg, I'm very sensitive to not. noise. Here's my first idea for you. I'm very sensitive to noise, but I like living in cities. I also have like tinnitus, meaning my ears are ringing when it's too quiet. I don't like, I don't like when it's too quiet, but I also don't like noise, right? So what do you do? What do when your ears are ringing, but you don't like noise, but you want to live in a city?

Especially for me, one thing that irritates me living in a like a kind of building with lots of other people is neighbors walking around. So even though I have a nice, insulated apartment, there's just, there's always something that's going to wake me up. Now, I'm someone who invests a lot in my sleep. So I have an eight sleep, you know, mattress cover that keeps me cool all night. That thing's amazing. I take sleep supplements, all that kind of shit. I wear my like, you know, blue blocking glasses. But the thing that has improved my sleep more than anything else, this is not a sales pitch. This is an idea for a startup. I'm so used to pitching stuff that I'm in sales pitch mode. The thing that has improved my sleep the most,

is a essentially brown noise, just this noise coming out of my sono speaker. And I figured this out by buying different brown noise and white noise machines. So the first thing I did is I went to like wirecutter, if you don't use wirecutter for getting your products, you're an idiot. It's just a product review site. And on wirecutter, they have this product called the Electrofan Evo. I bought that. It was good, but it wasn't loud enough.

and it wasn't bassy enough. So then I started looking around the internet and I ended up finding this like white noise and sleep sounds podcast on Spotify. And I found the perfect noise for sleeping, which is called deep brown noise. Now I'm going to get to the first startup idea, right? So the first startup idea.

And if you look, by the way, the best selling white noise machine in the fucking world, if you go to go to this website for me. So search ElectroFans. and then go to soundofsleep.com. Now, I get very excited when I see a not very sexy website and not very sexy marketing for a product that's super useful. And this would be my first startup idea.

It would be disrupting, basically creating the eighth sleep for brown noise and creating a device that is, So it's AI powered, of course. It figures out when it hears your neighbors walking, it adds more base to the noise. It turns on automatically at the right time when you're going to bed. It gets a little bit more quite. It can connect to your whoop,

but it can tell when you're in deep sleep. So it can be a little bit quieter. It can be a bit louder when you're in phases where it doesn't want you to, when you would be more susceptible to waking up. And I think honestly just building a, I would even honestly think buying Electrofan, buying their product and resell, and reselling it with better marketing would be a pretty huge business.

It's not a multi-billion dollar business. I'm not a billion guy. I'm not a billion guy, right? The most one of our products has ever made, we're just doing the calculations of it is like $18 to $20 million. So I don't, I can't lie and tell you I know how to make a billion dollar startup. But I think taking this general idea of how unbelievably, noticeably powerful brown noises for sleep,

Like the eight sleep mattress, you can kind of, kind of tell it's working, I don't know, maybe, but you also pay this crazy subscription. But I think a company could come along and make a connected subscription-based noise device that you can also, there's going to be like a baby version of it to bring around with you to hotels. And this actually really improves my sleep. First idea. What do you think? You buying it?

Are you investing? Yes and yes. So I'm like a sleep nerd too. This is my sleep score from last night on my eight sleep in 95. Check this out. I, I didn't sleep well last night. Wait for it. Two nights ago.

All right, let me show you two nights ago first. We got a 97. Whoa. You see that? Wait, we can wait. Oh, there we go. Yeah. Oh, man.

Wow. But last night, last night because I had a late call. Oh. 88 although I will say you didn't wake up that much Is it because of the brown? It is.

There's something deep and brown in my room. Thibreification question because to me, I don't know what brown noise is. To me, brown noise just sounds like I'm going to get pink eye. It's not coming out of a body. It's not coming out of a specific part of the body. All right, right now go to Spotify.

Type in white noise. and sleep sounds. The playlist is actually a podcast called Add Free White Noise and Sleep Sounds 12 hours. Then you want to go to the podcast, which is called Deep Brown Noise and skip to about 20 seconds because you actually have to pay to listen to it

without an ad at the start, which you do not want to happen in the middle of the night, which has happened to me. Following the switch. So yeah, this guy, exactly. This guy, I hear him every night. this is the noise of deep brown noise it sounds like being in a plane could you sleep on planes by the way

um i mean not unless it's business class right no because i ask because like you know i can't sleep on plane so to me i'm like is brown noise going to work for me how do i know if brown noise is going to work for me i guess i just need to try it do things wake you up at night noises yes all the darn brown noises deep brown noise is going to work for you. So things that wake me up, dogs barking, sirens, neighbors walking around, very violent

farts coming from different parts of my apartment, including me. Just anything that makes a noise will be, the cool thing about deep brown noise is that it has the base. So white noise is 22 shit, right? People are talking about white noise all the time. That covers like the high kind of levels of, I don't know, people going, eh, like birds and shit. Deep brown noise is cool, but that's like 2023 shit. Deep brown noise is 2024 level. So it gets the bassy stuff as well.

I live in Berlin. Everyone listens to techno 24-7. But I still want to live where stuff is happening. I also still want to sleep with my windows open to get that nice oxygen, all that kind of stuff. Deep brown noise has changed my life.

And if someone listening to this is like, why don't you just wear ear plugs? Because I'm not a psychopath. Exactly. Mike drop because he's not a psychopath. I don't want someone to break into my apartment and murder me without me even realizing. I mean, the brown noise will cover it up until the moment that the knife is about to enter my brain. But with the earplugs, it would be in me already and I wouldn't even realize it.

I mean, if I was breaking into someone's apartment in Berlin and all of a sudden I hear brown noise from a machine, like this deep brown noise, I'm like, oh, I got to run out of you. This guy's crazy. Something bad's happening in here. He's got like a little plane engine. But it's honestly being, I. All jokes aside, this has increased my sleep score on the eight sleep more than any supplement, more than any fucking blue blocking glasses, more than fasting, more than putting Brian Johnson's

olive oil up my ass. Like any of these things have improved a little bit. They can improve my deep sleep maybe a tiny bit, my R.m a tiny bit. The brown noise when I switch it off, it's like I go down to 85 when it's on. I'm up to like 95. And I have a kid. And sometimes, there's non, if you have a child, guys, there's non, like, that's another thing. I do not want to wear earplugs when I have a kid in case she needs me. But I don't need to hear every cough and every like little, you know, whatever. And so the brown noise, it does this thing of keeping you aware. You can hear things if they're important, but is sleep and covering especially neighbor foot. This, honestly, if we just end the podcast right now, this will be the most valuable thing.

Annie guess, I'm just kidding. But this will actually help a couple of people who are very sensitive. And so I think this startup could then expand to light sensitivity as well. Because I'm, you know, everyone is like hypersensitive and everyone hears everything and sees everything. It's like, eh. And actually, I'm unfortunately one of these people where I get a migraine if it's too bright and if it's too loud, I get overwhelmed. And just a startup. And the research that I was doing trying to figure this out was really. really most of my time was spent on Reddit, right? And it was just constant self-experimentation. I was thinking there should just be a sweet-ass brand, eight-sleep, hire me as your head of sensitive sleep stuff. And also, by the way, the eight-sleep. Dude, is your pod sometimes just really loud for no reason? Yeah, 100% and just act up, acts up.

Like last night it was just like, eh! You know, I'm spending like, I don't know, thousands of, dollars on this thing and then spending a subscription service and it's just screaming at me. And you need, honestly, if you use an eight sleep, you need to use deep brown noise to cover the variation in noises from the bed. I know this is, I'm assuming your podcast is not, I'm assuming the people who listen to your podcast aren't going to be like, oh, first world problems.

It's a, it's about startup ideas. But yeah, obviously, obviously I know this is a first world problem. Oh, my eight sleep is too loud. Yeah. Oh no, the techno from the best club in the world is playing. Yeah, well. So that's my first idea. I like it.

So, if we're going to get tactical, sound of sleep, I'm on their website. This product looks great. I go to their affiliate program. I'm like, okay, maybe the way to bootstrap this is you just become an affiliate to them. They give you 30% or whatever, and then you validate it and then built your own. Then I go to their affiliate program. Our affiliate program has ended. We are no longer accepting new affiliates.

Dude, I wouldn't. If I'm making this into a business, I'm probably doing it a bit more MVP style. I'm making my own brown noise track. So my own deep brown noise audio track. So one of the things I really love to do is launching stuff. Like it's taking something that's pretty boring. So our latest thing, if you go to AJsmart.com,

this is not an ad. it's sold out. You cannot get it and we're not doing it again. But as an example, we just launched something which could not be more boring on paper. A facilitation, in-person facilitation training, essentially for, mainly for corporate employees. And we repackaged it in a way that no one else in the industry is doing it completely, like at a price that's three to four times more than anyone else is charging. That's the kind of stuff I really love to do. I love to take boring, elements, pull them together, and repackage them and then sell them. But obviously, I want to believe in the things as well. With this deep brown noise thing, I think that the way the company

white noise and sleep sounds is doing it is closer to the way I would want to play it out. And so I would probably rather sell the subscription to initially to different brown noise things, the way they're doing it. But the best case scenario would be, if I could validate this, I probably want to make, like, work with some manufacturers to create this product. But I don't do that shit, man, you know? So it's all yours. I know, but here's the thing. So I went to San Francisco recently and I met like a bunch of the cool kids at this place called Founders Inc.

It's like a lot of young, a lot of young people building startups. And a lot of them are actually... Mark Zuckerberg, for example, you mean like... Like Mark Zuckerberg was... You know, 20 years ago, he would, he would, he would have gone to this, this really cool, this really cool space called Founders Inc. And a lot of the people there are building, like, little hardware devices that they're 3D printing. That's so good. And then injecting AI and voice into it.

So I wonder if this isn't that hard to actually MVP. Dude, look, here's what I'm good at. I'm good at having those ideas. and good at marketing them and making money from them and selling them and doing internet marketing and making a physical thing, that's something I'm not going to be. If you want me to pretend for the podcast, I am going to build this. No, but I'm probably not going to build it realistically. But I'd love if someone would do that.

And I would definitely invest 10 euro. Oh, sorry, $12. Oh, okay. Now I understand. So I had Kevin Rose on the pod last week And I asked him what kind of He had this like incredible looking microphone Like it made our microphones look like it was amateur hour

Is it the one with the lights around it here? I think so yeah And it's just like this it's a gray It looks like a stainless steel block It almost looks I'm looking at an Apple studio display It kind of looks like an Apple studio display I just got one of those today Literally just arrived this morning

that's such a I mean it's not a weird thing that you say that but look I don't think anyone's going to care about this part but this just arrived at my apartment today. Oh, an Apple Studio. That's cool. That's the whole. That's the whole piece of information. Okay. Let's go back to it. Let's go back to Kevin Rose. Yeah, back to Kevin Rose. Away from Noah Kagan, Kevin Rose and then me. Oh, man. Exactly. Oh yeah. He's going to be such a downgrade.

And people are going to love this episode more than any episode. So he has this thing called the company is called Teenage Engineering. Dude, are you fucking serious? Wait a second. Let's go back to this picture. Let's go back to this picture. Let's zoom in. Now this makes sense.

What's on my desk? All teenage engineering products. Yeah. Are you talking about this microphone? Yeah. That's exactly what the fuck? Teenage engineering. So teenage engineering is like, I think they're in Europe somewhere.

Am I wrong? Sweden. Sweden, which is like, makes sense. They're in Sweden. So they've got these beautifully designed products, like synthesizers, wireless speakers. All their stuff is sold out and all of it is thousands of dollars. And all of it, like if you go to teenage dot engineering, all of it makes your mouth water. I have every single one of their products and they're one of my favorite companies in the world. So if you, like, I can imagine your deep brown noise machine to be like teenage engineering style. Yes. Deep brown teenage engineering. Teenage engineering, if you're listening to this and you want to make a deep brown noise machine with me,

I'm very close to your office. I'm here in Berlin. I'm coming to Denmark this weekend even though this podcast is never going to come out. I'm talking to you right now. Let's do this together. No, I think the move is you don't do it together with them. Like, we do it. I compete with them.

We compete. We're competitive, guys. We know. Fuck teenage engineering. Fuck you guys. Yeah. Adult engineering. Adult.

Adult engineering. That's us. Me and Greg. Yeah. Exactly. And what you do is you build as MVP. You hire someone in Sweden to design it. They have to be.

Swedish. Yeah, exactly. Got it. They have to be Swedish. So, you know, design in Sweden. And so we can say that. And then we put up a landing page, a framer, a framer, a framer, uh, frameer, uh, Flamedals? Click, uh, I don't know.

I would do Framer just because it's more beautiful, but you would do ClickFunnels probably because it works better. ClickFunnels. It's so, we got to talk about ClickFunnels in a while. Your audience, your audience needs to hear more about click funnels. We'll get to ClickFunnels. We won't leave this conversation without talking about ClickFunnels again. As that said.

I'm still with you. Your audience is going to be so annoyed at the amount of interruptions that are happening here. And you put up a landing page. You get some creators to back it and you pre-order it. You do pre-sale. And then you figure it out from there. Yeah, dude. I would do it.

I love the sleep space. Yeah, and this is the only one you can actually measure. Honestly, if you wear an aura ring or a whoop and if you are sound sensitive, this is just a huge topic that people haven't been tackling, but it really changed my entire life. The other thing that I always thought Apple would build but never built, which has also changed my life in Miami, is an air purifier. Right. I haven't gotten in on that game yet.

So there's just a ton of dust. and allergens in the air in having, you know, not that I'm like allergic to a lot of things or, but whatever. I have people over. They might be sick. This removes it. I have like, I open the door on my balcony and there's like pollen and like mold from the outside that comes in.

It just keeps like a fresh air. I always thought Apple would potentially build like an air purifier. They never did. but I like the idea of like starting with a deep brown noise machine and then like moving into like. Yeah, working your way up. Working your way out. But I think like, you know, we call this company sensitivity.

Sensitivity AI and billions. Yeah. That's it. Or a lecture fan, if you're listening to this, I'm sure Lectrofan, the guys at lecture fan probably listen to this podcast every week, call up me and Greg, what we'll do for you guys is we'll take that product off your hands and we'll resell it under a new brand called Adult Engineering. Yeah.

And you know with teenage engineering, you always have to have a cryptic name like the TP7. So we'll call it the Adult Engineering DN2. Deep brown. Oh, no, DB. Deep Brown. and DBN. Perfect. I need to go home.

It's been a long day for me on this end, dude. I'm at the end of like campaign meetings. Like it's, my eyes are so red. Look at me. Oh, they're great. You look so fresh and I look red. You're firing at all cylinders. What's idea number two?

That was idea. No, I'm kidding. Let's see. Dude, I put a lot of them together here. Well, we do a naughty one. Let's do it. How naughty can we get on your podcast? I mean, it's the internet.

You know, you've seen the internet. It's a pretty naughty place. I don't know, dude. You know, some people's podcasts are a little bit more like, we got to be careful, but what we say. There's no advertisers. Good. Okay.

Yes. You know the way. And this is something that I'm sure people have been thinking about. So the other day, I was on The verge yesterday, the verge.com. They were showing off this product called orifice. If you haven't checked out orifice. It's the world's first AI powered sex toy for men.

And I was looking at this and I was thinking, why do women get all of like the nice, cute, like, just Apple-like branding around sex toys and guys get the fleshlight and orifice AI? I genuinely think there's an entire market out there for sex, oh, I don't know what pleasure, self-pleasure devices for men that is like as big a, as big a thing as it is for women, but just not creepy and not weird and not like some dirty shit that you have to like, I don't know, just like the fleshlight, you know what I mean? It doesn't, you don't want to have that lying around if someone walks into your apartment, you know?

Not that you want to have other sex toys laying around when you walk into an apartment but still there's something deeply not cool or like sophisticated. That's the word I'm looking for like if you look for there's a lot of like brands

and I don't know if this brand is in Germany or in the US but in Germany there's this brand of sex toys called fun and like there's a whole store it looks like an Apple store it's mainly toys for women this just could be the biology thing where maybe you can just make more of a variety of toys for women. But I think we got to make like the Apple more sophisticated kind of self-pleasure toy business for men

that isn't called orifice or fleshlight. And it's rather called something like adult engineering. It's also the next adult engineering product. Because that can also help you sleep, Greg, if you know what I mean. That's right. So I agree with you. The naming is absurd. I mean, you invite a friend over to come have some tea or something.

You see my orifice? No, it's, oh, oh, you just dropped. Oh, you just stepped on my orifice. Be careful. I say that even if I have no sex toys lying around. Yeah. So that's a bit weird. And so I think, you know, the cannabis industry actually did a really good job of taking

something that was like pretty like it was for stoners and stuff like that and then in l.A. there was this company called med men which basically created like the apple for cannabis stores. Yes. That's what I mean. Exactly. Like because it is really, I wrote this as a joke. You said I can say whatever I want and I was careful because again, you know, I do a lot of work in the US, a lot of work with US companies, a lot of work with EU companies. In Europe I can say anything I want in a meeting. No one cares if I swear. In the U.S., I was recently in New York and dropped the F-bomb in front of like 57 people working in a large bank and I got a like, and I was like, oh, sorry, sorry about that. Just going to tone that back.

But I did have a joke name for, so what I wrote here is, is there a way to make masturbation toys for men less creepy? A cool brand like liquid death, but for male sex toys, not called 5,000. for example. Yeah. Exactly. We shouldn't call that. That should be the name of this episode's just so out of context. 5,000.

Yeah. Watch this episode to the end. All right. All right. I'll give you another one. Dude, I have a lot. I woke up this morning. I got your message saying three to five ideas.

And myself and my girlfriend just sat down and we just pumped out a couple of ideas. Okay, let's stay on the sex concept in Berlin, right? We're in Berlin. I don't know if you know much about Berlin, but it's a very sex-positive environment, which I think is great. I think, though, what I will say is that a lot of the sex-positive stuff, I don't know if anyone knows about this sex-positive idea,

it's just the idea that like in Berlin there's a lot of clubs where you can go and, you know, I don't know, dude, I don't know how far I can go. go on this podcast. Do people know that generally the Berlin thing? Like, people kind of know that. But all right. Okay, let's say you're a couple and you're interested in like, I'm just, I'm interested in exploring kind of what's out there, you know, and we're not talking about like going as far as swinging or whatever. You start looking at retreats, like sex positive retreats. Like maybe you learn tantra, whatever. I feel like there's a missing part of the market for people who are not interested in the spiritual stuff.

who are not interested in the psychedelic side of things and who just kind of want to go and have a more, yeah, just a non-spiritual, non-psychedelic sex positive retreats. And what I have written separately is, I think there's also a part in the market completely separately for entrepreneurial like unplugged retreats that are again, non-spiritual, no yoga, no meditation, no women. Hoff, none of those things. I think there's like, sometimes these interesting ideas are mixed with things that are a big turnoff if you're not into spiritual, kind of more psychedelic-y things. So that's another, I feel like there's a place in the market for looking at things which are usually mixed with psychedelics and usually mixed with meditation or yoga and removing those elements and making it more practical. Look at the weird thumbs-up thing just appeared.

It's so weird when that does it. I think, no, I think I like the idea. So a buddy mine has an app that he's beta testing right now in New York and Miami called Beyond. Beyond. Beyond. Oh, oh. Yeah. Tell me more.

It's a naughty app. So the idea is basically It's an app for open-minded people Basically the idea is Have you heard of the field app? No, I haven't. So field app is like a popular It's kind of like Tinder, but for multiple people.

For like couples looking for other couples. I have another idea on that in my coming up for you. But yeah, no, I haven't heard of it but I'm going to check it. Yeah. So that app is apparently like really is getting really popular but it feels very like Tinder in the sense that it feels from a UI,

UX perspective. Like if Tinder is like the Walmart of the internet, Raya is like, you know, a boutique. It doesn't it feels very different. You know, so he was like, how do I create the Raya but for open-minded people? And it's really starting to take off. That is very interesting. The way he's scaling it is through these parties.

Sorry, I shouldn't call it parties, retreats. like what you were saying. So he's doing one soon in El Salvador, where he's like renting a big place. He's inviting a bunch of people to community. He's curating it. And it's like more along the lines of what you're talking about. And it's starting to work.

For me, it's like a framework for like these retreats are actually a really good way for user acquisition. And like getting really be stoked about what you're doing. I'm not personally saying that this is something that I, interested right now at this point in my life, but I think it's something where I'm just exposed to it a lot in Berlin. And I just see, I just do see a gap for it. There's like a definitely a space in the market for the non kind of spiritual version of that or like the non, don't know, whatever that would be. All right, let's go, let's go non-sexual for a second. And actually, no, I'm

got a really bad sexual. No, um, okay. Do you know the app brick and the product brick? You use it? I have one right there. Yeah, I do use it. Okay. So brick, I think it's an amazing product. I use it every day. Let's see what my current streak is. My current streak. Let's take a look. Let's get it. 319 hour. Is it? 319 hours is my current streak. Why is my phone so wet looking? So brick is basically a physical product, which you can use to lock certain apps on your phone. And when you lock these certain apps on your phone, you have this physical product. Imagine it looks like this. And then it's also magnetic.

You can like stick it somewhere in your kitchen. And you cannot get access to those products. There you go. You cannot get access to those apps again until you physically use the brick to touch off your phone again. Now, I think that's a cool idea because I think there's a lot of problems forming and I don't think it's going to get any better anytime soon when it comes to phone addiction. I think people also don't realize they don't realize they're addicted to their devices yet. I think it hasn't really been defined. People kind of understand what it looks like to be addicted to things like alcohol or drugs.

But I don't think there's a clear understanding yet of what it looks like to be addicted to your physical, your digital digital. device. And I think there's a huge space in the market for a company to come along and be essentially the digital, you know, like the product zero for fasting. Something like zero, but paired with something like brick. So not only can you get a lot of education on maybe potentially the dangers of using digital devices all the time, but you can also- Explain what zero is to people for people who don't know what it is. Zero is a fasting app. It helps you to fast, do different types of fasts and track those fasts, but it's also got a lot of educational content from people like Peter Attia, Dr. Peter, Dr. Peter Atia. And so it builds the education around why you should,

why fasting is valuable, but it also tracks your fasts. And it also kind of builds streaks and gives you a lot of feedback. So I think it's a great product for just keeping track. And actually, Kevin also created a product called Zero Alcohol, which is a product. Kevin and Mike worked on this product called Zero Alcohol. And this is a product that does something similar, but for alcohol. And I think there's a huge gap in the market for people. First of all, a lot of what I like to do is show people that they actually do have an issue. A lot of marketing is like, hey, do you realize that this is actually a problem? And then showing people how they can work with it. And I think that Brick is probably one of the first products that's actually helped me reduce my time on my phone.

And honestly, I just see also having a daughter now, I really want there to be some infrastructure for people dealing with digital addiction. But Brick is just literally a utility. And I think it could be turned into a brand, a product, education product, a media company around digital addiction. So it could do something good. but also I do think that's something that people would pay for, especially entrepreneurs like me who are on our phones all day,

just having something like that where I'm like, no matter what I do, I always just keep checking my phone. I'm just addicted. I just want to see what's on Twitter. And so I need something that literally physically blocks Safari so that when I'm sitting on my couch and I open my phone or I'm sitting on the toilet and I open my phone, I would literally have to walk into the living room, pants down,

to get that block to unblock Safari so that I can look at it, which I would have no problem doing. But still, you know what I mean, right? It's just this extra layer of friction that stops you from using your digital product. And so the idea would be a bigger brand. You see the pattern here. I'm looking at boring stuff and thinking about how to make a bigger brand, making content like a content strategy around it because that's what I do.

So how would you, okay, so say you were, say you bought, what I would do to make it a bigger company? Yeah. All right. You ready, Greg? I would just use my own playbook. I mean, it's not, it's, again, just to clarify, I am not someone who grows businesses to billion. Like, I don't know how to do that.

I don't know how to do the VC thing that Kevin does where you just make these crazy, huge companies. I've never hired, I've never had more than 36 people working at this, at, I, AJ and Smart. And I've never made, I've never had a product that has made more than 20 million. I think it's $18 million. Just, just, so when you're listening to my playbook, this is me thinking from a pure maybe 37 signals, kind of no VC bootstrap, just it's about making money. But that might not be the big type of business that some people listening to this podcast would want to have. But okay, I buy brick. And my goal is to make lots of money with it, as much money as possible, and spread awareness

about it. The first thing I would probably do, maybe in week one is I'd probably start a YouTube channel. That YouTube channel would be 100% focused on grabbing all the keywords around digital addiction, phone addiction. Annie, I would just do the keyword research and the easy way to do that, by the way, if you just want to be really very low-fi is go. to YouTube and start slowly typing in the thing. Like so, for example, I would write phone,

I would write first phone addiction and I would, I would just press enter and I would remake the top three videos better than the ones that are there already. Then I would click into the first video and I would remake the first recommended video. So the start of me creating a YouTube channel or the start of when we move into a new topic at AJ and Smart is essentially remaking all of the most popular videos. And I don't know if you know this trick. I can't remember. remember who I learned it from. If you find a video that has a lot of views, but very few subscribers, that's something that YouTube really likes. And so you want to remake that video, essentially. So I would start, one stream would be having a YouTube channel to build some sort

of content awareness. And it would be purely SEO focused. So I'm not trying to build a, like a YouTube channel like Mr. Beast where people are super engaged. I'm doing what we've done with AJ and Smart where people are searching for keywords and finding a on YouTube. That YouTube video would probably link to a free mini course or could be literally a small e-book or it could be a free community. I mean, we both use school.com. It would just be a place to collect and nurture leads for a while. So I would just be creating content, collecting and nurturing leads on this topic of digital, um,

digital addiction, et cetera, et cetera, the product itself wouldn't be super interesting. To be honest, like I'd rather do this without having to buy this brick product. Right. The logistics behind that wouldn't be very interesting to me personally.

I think I would make, I think one would make a lot more money doing this without taking on a physical product. Um, what I would do is I would build essentially a media and content business, an info product business. around digital addiction. I would write the book on the topic, but I wouldn't launch it with a publisher.

I would launch it the way that a direct response marketers launched their books, which is the way we launched our previous book. I would create a book funnel. A book funnel is just like essentially you're, you're losing money on every book because you're giving it away for free, a physical copy of the book.

And you're getting, but you're bringing people through, like a lead collection funnel and potentially upselling them to something like a course or something like that. I'm always thinking in the way the things that work for me is selling info products. So I would probably sell training, in-person training. I would very likely try to get corporates to book me and my team to do large-scale digital awareness training for their employees. and I think you, with me as the CEO, we would probably max out a 10 million on a product, on a business like that.

That's my problem is that I am not as ambitious as like a lot of American CEOs where they're like, I'm going to take over the world with this thing. I'm like, that's fine. That's enough. Well, a lot of people are coming to that realization now that, especially people listening to this, that like that VC treadmill is. is definitely a treadmill. And so a lot of people are,

it's becoming now popular to do what you've been doing for a while and what I've started to do over the last few years. Yeah, dude, you're also doing that a lot. I see you with the school group, I see you with the boring SEO company. These are just,

it's just so much more enjoyable to look at the P&L every month and just be able to see, this is how much money we make, this is much money we spent. And now we can optimize base on those things. This is how much our ads cost. This is how many people bought our thing. Yeah. Just selling services or info products and masterminds or any sort of education

thingies. I don't know about masterminds. Masterminds, like, here's my take on masterminds. I've had really productive, what people would call mastermind sessions with Sean Porry, for example, from my first million, used to have this like mastermind. type thing that he used to do. And it was super productive. So I've had, I've had instances of that. But these like pay for a mastermind type experiences that I see a lot of people do, like to me would feel weird.

Like I don't think I would launch a mastermind personally because I would be like, I'm not going to charge you, Jonathan, $30,000 a year to like hang out with me. I disagree with you. I agree with you that I, don't personally want to run a mastermind and charge people for it. And I've tried, I've kind of tried different things on that, on that general idea and I've never personally enjoyed running them. Or even every time I've just, every time I'm just about to start running one of these things, I quit. I will say that I am currently in a mastermind that's been ludicrously helpful.

And previously, I was in Sam Ovin's mastermind for three years. And Sam Ovin's, Maybe within the first or second day of being in the mastermind changed literally. Like I joined in like, let's say on a Tuesday, the following Tuesday, I completely rethought everything about AJ and Smart. And the product we created in Sam Oven's mastermind with Sam's help is still our core product four years later, still the thing that makes us our most money. And what I will say is I like, so when you have someone, I think you've met Sam, when you have someone who's very special and who has like done the thing you want to do, I actually prefer to

be able to pay them for their advice rather than trying to figure out how I can deliver value as well, if it's possible. So if someone has a way for me to pay them, just to get the fucking advice, I would rather pay them. Sam's mastermind was $36,000 per year. Just like the connections I made, the information I got from Sam, the energy of being in that group was always worth a lot more than 36K per year. And the other thing I will say is almost everyone who's been, who was in that mastermind is still like really good friends with Sam. So I would disagree with you on that one. The current mastermind I'm in is actually one of the members of Sam Oven's mastermind, a guy called Blake Lagrange. and the product we just launched, the full stack facilitator,

we wanted to launch this for 3,000 or 4,000 euro or something like that. One 30-minute conversation with him where we talked about repositioning it, increased the price to $9,000 and it sold out. So we like just the amount of money we wouldn't have made if I hadn't had that conversation with him. But I do understand why you wouldn't want to do that or why I wouldn't want to run. it. I just, I would just find it annoying. But I personally am very happy that masterminds exist for my own sake. So first of all, you've changed my mind on things before. So literally like the first minute I met you, you're like, hi, I'm Jonathan. And then I was like, oh, I got to

record a bunch of videos for, or what was I saying? No, I was like, oh, I have a cohort based course I'm doing next to week. Oh, cohort-based courses. And exactly what you said. You're like, cohort rates courses. What are you crazy? And then you changed my mind on that. And ever since then I never, I stopped doing that cohort after meeting you.

I don't do core-based courses anymore. Yeah. I'm glad you don't. Yeah. And it's been great because it allows me to run my businesses. It's just so much energy to run a cohort-based course. Yes. What I did do is record a bunch of my frameworks.

playbooks, put it on school, community empire.co. And that's going really well. And then I show up to some AMAs here and there. And that way I actually get to know people because in the core base course model, I was just kind of like, I felt like I was regurgitating all my stuff. It sucks. Yeah. So it felt like the ways of time.

Anyways, you changed my mind on one thing. The mastermind thing, I totally understand like, okay, the right mastermind could be impactful. The wrong mastermind could be crap is basically what. you know, it's basically the idea. I've never been in a bad mastermind. So I think it also depends what type of person you are. I think I would imagine you are the type of person who can take the best out of almost any interaction. For me, I'm like, I'm looking at every mentor and every mastermind or everything,

or every course I join is just like a giant blob. And I'm looking for the tiny bits that are useful for me. I don't care about like Sam Ovin's mastermind. I was in it for three years. I never once turned up to the in-person events in L.A. Never once. I never turned up to it. I almost turned up to nothing.

He never saw me. My way of using things is like, I turn up, I ask one question, and then six months later I turn up and say, this was the result of that question, and now I have something I'd like to ask. And that's worth 36K for me because it saves me 36K worth of time working on what I do. What I will say is masterminds are not. The $36,000 mastermind is not useful for someone who doesn't know how to take action, but you're not. Like, for example, I think a mastermind that would be good for you, this will be controversial.

This is back to ClickFunnels. If you're selling info products, I think there is like one mastermind, which actually, I am not joining right now because the price is so high. Plus, I don't live in the US, plus all the events are in the US. But if I lived in the U.S., I would join this in a heartbeat. And it's not someone, some, it's not a guy that people like in maybe who listen to your podcast. It's more likely someone people don't like. But I'm bringing a weird angle.

It's Russell Brunson's top level mastermind called Atlas. Only 15 people are in it. I don't think there's a better, again, we're talking about the info product space. We're talking about marketing. We're talking about direct response marketing and copywriting. We're not talking about VC nice looking landing pages and, like, fancy looking products. We're talking about stuff very much just like money making. I think that's not Sam Ovens.

I think Russell Brunson's Atlas Mastermind is probably insanely valuable while it exists. That's the other thing I think about when I was thinking about joining Sam Ovens. mastermind, I was like, this guy is going to, once these people get rich enough, they just, of course, don't do masterminds anymore because they're just chilling. Like Russell Brunson, who knows, you maybe have two more years worth of getting access to something like this for, I think it's $250K per year, I think, which might seem like a lot, but you obviously would only join if you knew that the advice could make you more than that. I would join it if I lived in the U.S. Just my vibes. So I don't know much about Russell Brunson besides kind of like you seeing his ads in my face for so many years. And he seems scammie and he's got that kind of like energy that most people in our world don't like.

So talk to me, why is Russell Brunson someone you look up to? and why is ClickFunnels something that people like me should take seriously? I didn't think I'll be doing a sales pitch for Russell Brunson here. Okay, I'll tell you that. So as AJ and Smart, we were a normal design agency up until 2016. We were selling in-person training. We were doing a lot of content marketing based on like Gary V. We even went to this like in-person mastermind with Gary Vee where there was just 12 people.

And it was great. We have a YouTube video on that, actually, of doing this mastermind with him. And so we were all in on this Gary V method, which is kind of like creating shit tons of content, building up your brand. And then that almost automatically leads to sales and et cetera, et cetera. But then I was introduced to this book called Expert Secrets in 2016. And this is when I was trying to, when I was thinking about this idea of digitizing the in-person training we were doing. And the idea was, actually just to digitize it for our clients because they were asking for videos of the in-person training. I read the book Expert Secrets and it completely blew my mind. Like, I read it and I didn't know anything about this Russell Brunson guy. And I was like, holy crap. Like, I've never heard of a webinar. I don't know what this one to many marketing is. I don't know what direct response marketing is. But then I realized I actually had been exposed to it for a very long time. You know, no Oa Kagan, who was on your podcast recently, one of his best friends, a guy called Neville Madora, maybe you know him or know of him. He's the first person who introduced me to copywriting.

And all of this world is connected. It's direct response. It's called direct response marketing. So direct response marketing, as I understand it, is marketing where you can literally measure every cent you spend. So like for every ad you put out there, you can measure this. is exactly how much money is coming back because of this ad. And it's a lot about, it's, it's not about building a brand. It's about actually getting a direct response from what you're putting out there. And this really appeal to me versus just this broad branding approach, which I couldn't really tell whether it was working or not. And so we ran a webinar using the structure in the book, Expert Secrets, in 2016. And,

we didn't have the course yet. We were saying we had it because we were going, we basically said, if we make more than 10,000 euro, we're going to make the course. I did the webinar. So first of all, I created a Facebook group. We ran ads to fill up the Facebook group. It was called innovation hackers. It's still there, but it's dead. And then I ran a webinar to the people in that group who didn't know me. And we made $50,000. And I was like, what the fuck is this? Like they've prepaid for a course that we haven't even made yet. And by the way, like, if you know what it's like to work with clients,

a $50,000 project can be quite a lot of calls and back and forth. And we were a design, product design studio. And I was like, $50,000 and I've done a one and a half hour webinar. Okay. So we made the product. And then I said, Laura, who I now basically run the whole company with, she runs all of the digital course stuff. I said to her, if we can make 50K a month, then I will build a team for this. And it was like, it made, it made like over a million revenue in the first year.

But the crazy thing is we were just using one marketing tactic. And that was a webinar. Just the same webinar on repeat, pre-recorded, just playing. just people could just unlock it. And this just completely blew my mind. And so I think a year later, my team and I decided to go. So we read the book. We signed up for the guy's newsletter.

And he has this conference in the US called Funnel Hacking Live. Like I rolled my eyes and cringed the first time I saw the landing page for that in the video. I was like, oh, fuck this shit. Like it's so American. Tony Robbins, all this crap. I'm not interested. But I don't know, somehow we decided to go because we were going to pick, as a nice thing for the team, we were going to pick up. I don't know if you've ever seen like in the background of a lot of marketing videos, you see these funnel, these like awards that look like discs. I don't know. We were going to pick up one of those. It's if your funnel makes over a million dollars. I actually think that's cool to have an award that's based on an exact amount of money versus just fucking design agency awards we used to get, which are just bullshit.

So I was excited to bring the team on a little trip to Nashville. We went to funnel hacking live and we were fully converted. We were just like, Russell is daddy, right? Like, this guy is not as stupid as he looks. He's not like this just pure scammy salesman. He's just an unbelievably amazing copywriter. And he's so good at packaging our products. And honestly, I don't even want to tell your audience about this because I feel like it's a bit of a secret in the, like, because a lot of people just see him and just go, oh, fuck this guy.

It is a little bit of a, I don't know, I feel, I feel like it's something that not a lot of people openly say they like Russell Brunson. But I think his book, Expert Secrets and then his traffic focus book, like how to get leads called Traffic Secrets. I think they're like the best marketing books I've ever read. I've read all the highbrow ones as well, right? I read all the ones that you're supposed to read, but these ones are my favorite. First of all, thank you for being so brave. Thank you. You know, you could have, you couldn't, you could have just not said anything about ClickFunnels,

said nothing about Russell Brunson being your daddy, but you did anyways. And I appreciate it because a lot of people. listening to this probably ignore a lot of the ads and what they've seen about Russell. He definitely doesn't make his way around like Silicon Valley circles either. Not at all. Yeah. And I'll be the first person to change my mind on something. Like that mastermind conversation we had like a few minutes ago, like initially I was like,

I'm not going to do. I would never do a mastermind or I would never be. I would never be involved in a mastermind. And then after thinking about it, I'm like, you know what? I personally might not. want to lead a mastermind, but I can see the value in it. And maybe one of our teams runs it. And now I'm starting to think, oh, maybe we should do a mastermind for this or we

should do a mastermind for that. Same with Russell Brunson. It sounds like there's probably some insights that he has, that it's worth diving deeper, even if you don't like the guy. I think that I feel like I've spent all of the money on all the marketing books and all of the marketing gurus and like I said, Gary Vee, like all of these things. And I haven't, I haven't seen someone create more actionable content or learnings than Russell Brunson. For a small business, that's the thing that's important. We're not taught. He does have a multi-billion

dollar software company, but which he uses these tactics to sell stuff. for but mostly it's for info products meaning if you have a book if you have like courses if you have communities if you're looking at paid communities if you have like a Patreon things like that for his tactics are amazing for that kind of stuff teenage engineering shouldn't use his tactics it would cheap in what they do for example you call it a small business but like doing 18 million dollars a year or doing 18 million dollars or 10 million dollars or 6 million dollars

if 2 million dollars like these you know you're doing millions of dollars a year like as long as there's a decent profit margin there like that's a great business you know it's a great business yeah I'm not I think I just assume that because there's like this startup

element of your podcast that I was thinking I'm coming in because also okay Noah Kagan has like a third 38 million dollar per year business or something. Kevin Rose, I mean, Kevin, obviously, just bawling out of control. And then I am the next guest. So I'm like, I basically run a business that makes the amount of money of like maybe a couple of restaurants in a city. So yeah, I just wanted to, I just needed to clarify it so people don't take my advice and try to apply it to like something that's as big as

something what Noah or Kevin do. My thing works great for, yes, smaller operations, which are not really built, not being built to be sold necessarily. I've spoken to people about selling AJ and Smart. I actually probably someone you also know, I was chatting with someone on Andrew Wilkinson's team. And like, it is humbling to talk to these guys. right, when they're looking through the numbers of AJ and smart.

And they're like, yeah, like if you add another many more million onto it and automate a lot more systems and then get the profit margin up to this. And then maybe we could, you know, but yeah, it's we're we're still. We're like, I call, I talk about us like we're more like a high end restaurant. We're like a little high end restaurant that has global appeal just because we can use the internet. But yeah, we're not a startup that's getting any funding or anything like that. J.C., unscheduled CEO, this has been, this exceeded my expectations. Oh, no, it's over. I don't want it to be over. Well, we might do a part two if people like it. And if people hate it, then we certainly will not do a part two.

Yeah. Are you actually going to post this? 100%. Cool. Okay. Thanks for having been on. I really appreciate it. We're posting the unfiltered, full thing. Everything you are listening to right now happen. And Jonathan, where could people find you on the internet? Probably the best place to go is the unscheduled CEO podcast on any podcast platform you listen to. I don't really use social media because I find it too addictive.

If you're interested in the way we sell stuff at AJ and Smart, you can check out AJSmart.com. But yeah, that's it really. Unscheduled CEO. Just hanging out. Beautiful. All right. I'll see you. Thanks so much, Craig. See your round about then. Later.