The Startup Ideas Podcast - Multipreneurship 101 and Why It Matters

Episode Date: July 20, 2023

Today Greg is joined by Jesse Pujji, the founder of Gateway X, a venture studio and holding company that builds and launches companies from scratch. In this episode, Greg asks Jesse how unfair advantages are gained and leveraged.►►Subscribe to Greg's weekly newsletter for insights on community,creators and commerce.You'll also find out when new and exclusiveepisodes come out from Where it Happens. And it's totally free.https://latecheckout.substack.comFIND ME ON SOCIAL:Twitter: https://twitter.com/gregisenbergInstagram: https://instagram.com/gregisenberg/TikTok: https://tiktok.com/@gregisenbergLINKS FOR THIS EPISODE:Production Team:https://www.bigoceanpodcasting.comJesse Pujji:https://twitter.com/jspujjihttps://www.gateway.xyz/SHOW NOTES:0:00 - Intro5:00 - The truth about agencies16:14 - Framework for a successful agency22:09 - Unfair advantages36:32 - When to quit40:16 - Advice for multipreneurs

I've been looking forward to this one for a while. Jesse Pucci. What's up, Greg? Did you see my tweet on multipreneurship? I think I did. The future of multpreneurship. Yeah, exactly. That's a bit of like a hook to get people in. But when I think of multpreneurship, which is someone who builds companies, I think of you. You're like Mr. Multipreneurship.

Yeah. Aspiring at least. No, you're doing it. Like you're doing it. I saw, you know, one of your companies past 10 million ARR, I believe. Yep. You also just have like a supplement company. You've got some technology companies. So I'm, I'm just selfishly interested in just learning more about, well, first, do you consider yourself a multipreneur and then just learn more about your businesses? You know, it's funny.

I, in 2009, before I had ever been an entrepreneur, I was working at Goldman Sachs. And I put together this document and I still have it. I'll send it to you after. And it was to my Ampush co-founder as the first company I started. And it was like, here's the vision for the future. And I like to share, especially with people like you because I was like, man, I was so early to this like hold co thing. But the idea was literally we, you know, have good ideas, execute them, focus on generating cash flow. And then once you have more and more of them, like just keep multiplying it with the ultimate goal to actually be to build a,

build an awesome organization where you get to coach, teach people, learn. And an organization building has always been as important to me, if not more important to me than the business building itself. So I was 24, I think, when I wrote the doc. And then I actually tried to start a company. Turns out it's really fucking hard to start a company. And it takes every bit of you emotionally, physically. You know, we end up through the trials and tribulations of a 10-year startup journey, which ultimately ended up in a success. You know, we exited. But as I started working with a coach, you know,

I actually completely forgot about the document, but I started working the coach and started doing this stuff like, what really lights me up? You know, what's my why? And like, you know, sometimes we think of purpose as something we have to go attain or it's like a long-term thing we go get. And one reframe he had for me that was powerful was like,

no, it's just kind of how you want to be every day. Like, what's going to bring you energy every single day? And I was like, well, there's a few things that bring me energy. That initial process of like spotting an opportunity and kind of initially peeling the onion, putting the pieces together, go get it. I love that part. And I'm very good at sort of like mobilizing a lot of things in one direction and sort of that, you know, the early stages of something.

I love coaching and teaching people. And I'm much more powerful as a teacher or a coach usually than I am as like a straight doer. I love stuff like this, getting to know other people, learning, being challenged. And so as I started thinking about what was next for me after kind of that successful run at Ampush, the format of like a venture studio was like really interesting for me. It was like, wait, it would let me do all the things I love doing all the time. And to me that I think finding something I could do for 50 years was actually like the goal or 50 plus years that would keep me energized and re-energize me.

And so that's kind of how I got into this. But that what led me to picking this and this is a really important distinction, especially in Twitter land where everyone tries to be right about everything is like, I don't know if this is the highest expected value thing. I could spend my time on. Maybe picking one idea and running with it and trying, you know, or being an investor. I don't know. But this was the thing that I actually felt most excited about and I feel most excited about

and energized by. And so I was like, I don't really care if it's the most high expected values. It might not be the best ROI decision. Like a lot of people talk about growth assistant, which is a 10 million a hour. They go, Jesse, why don't you focus all your time on that? That seems like the obvious thing to do. And I'm going, yeah, but that's not, what am I solving for? You know, and the immediate rent says, well, you got to make the most money.

possibly make. I'm like, well, that's not what I'm solving for. That thing's already making plenty of money and I'm good. Anyway, that's kind of what got me into starting Gateway X, which is the name of the venture studio. You know, the three things that are distinct about it, from my perspective, are one, every idea is, kind of plays off of my unfair advantages. So it has to something to do with customer acquisition, problems that brands and marketers have, like, something I understand or have some inbuilt distribution for. The second thing is they're all, what I would describe as capital light businesses. And I think there's a big opportunity between the sort of lifestyle business and the venture

funded business. There's a lot of businesses in between that I call bootstrap giants. They're these ambitious but self-funded profitable companies that can grow for a really long time. That's the type of business we want to start. And then the third thing is they all kind of use my common cultural operating system. You know, the types of meetings we run, the way we give feedback, all those things are sort of common.

So theoretically, you should be able to sit in any of them and feel like you're kind of working at the same company. And that's kind of where the hold co element comes into place. But it's a different version of it because we're starting everything so far at least. We're not buying anything. I want to read you a text I got this morning. So there's been a lot of people we know, including myself, who've launched agencies, including yourself actually too. I mean, growth is in a lot of ways is an agency.

So a very well-known person sent me a. a text message. And he says, I've seen so many of these agencies launch over the last six years. Number one, big announcement. Number two, get to 50 to 100K a month, MIR. Think you're building the next Uber in agency form. Number three, uh-oh, your way to efficiency was stealing other people's content and algo boosting. Number four, clients start turning faster than you can replace them. Number five, you hate your life. Number six, Twitter, public post, we've decided to shut down our agency number seven, bring out the popcorn. What do you think about that?

Yeah, I mean, I think they're easy businesses to start. They can be very challenging businesses to grow and operate. I mean, Ampush was not intended to be an agency, but we turned into one. You know, my quick story, born and raised here in St. Louis, my dad is an entrepreneur. Always knew I want to be an entrepreneur one day. I went to Penn. I went to Wharton, which is like the, you know, Wall Street Trade School.

And that's been a couple years doing management consulting and then a couple of years on Wall Street. And by the way, you know, management consulting in Wall Street, we don't talk about this a lot, but they're services businesses, just to be completely clear. They sell services. They sell really high-end services, but they're services businesses. So you can learn a lot about services by actually spending time in those places. And then we started Ampush and we started doing it in performance marketing.

We discovered Facebook. Facebook called us in our first year or so, said, who the hell are you guys? you know, we were one of the fastest growing advertisers, and we ended up being one of their earliest marketing partners, and they gave us access to their API. We built software. We tried to sell the software to people. Nobody wanted software.

They wanted services. They said, hey, I don't know how to run this. And, you know, our customers at that time were a bunch of startups, names, a lot of names you wouldn't recognize, but then a lot of names like Uber, Dollar Shave Club, Peloton, Blue Apron. And we always thought of it ourselves as a tech company until someone was like, well, why don't you just see? sell your tech now. Then we were like, well, people will pay us one or two percent of media

for that, but they'll pay us 10 or 15 percent of media for our services. Like, why would we do that? And that's when we kind of realized we were, you know, we'd become more of a tech-enabled services business. There was a joke when I was a CEO, I'd never call Ampush an agency because I was like, we're so much more, you know, that's not what we are. We're much more than that. But, you know, I've talked to a lot of people since then. And I think like people don't build them to scale. You know, I had the benefit of coming from management consulting where I saw this hugely scaled services enterprise and I just things that they did naturally became natural to me. So for example, we recruited top young raw talent and we trained the hell out of them.

We always had a sales pipeline running to go along with the business in a very meaningful way. We chose our customers carefully. We chose customers who would grow over time so that like we didn't have to worry about churn. Even if there were some churn, you would still have like your your sort of monthly revenue would grow consistently. It was funny. There was like a five year period where I'd walk into Starbucks with my wife and I would just be like, my jaw would drop. And I'd be like, oh my God, this place is amazing. And she's like, what the fuck's wrong with you? I'm like, there's five employees here.

None of them own this place. None of them make more than 15 bucks an hour. And this place is crushing it. And that's actually what we became. We like, we need to make Starbucks. And so we started designing these little pods internally where like every single, you know, the systems, the way things work, the way we manage them all became very, very common. And that's how we scaled the business to, you know, half a billion a year in ads

been in 200 people. Technology helped also, but it was really that Starbucksification of each pot inside the organization and then some of the reporting structures and things like that. So they're really easy businesses to start. Then what happens is the founder runs the whole show. They're never able to get away from any sort of client delivery or client service or anything. And then, you know, all these, everyone wants to take the business in-house at some point. I mean, that's just the natural way of things. And it's just a matter of when, not if. That's another people lie to themselves about. It's like at some point they want to take it in-house. One of the fun things about growth assistant is like it really is like a staff

augmentation business and it's like kind of been the opposite of an agency. Like we get you people and so we've seen the retention in that business is way better than the retention was at Ampush. Because once you have a couple of great people offshore, like you're not trying to lose them and you're not, you don't care how much you're paying. I mean, you know, you're not going to fight us over a few hundred dollars of margin that we're taking versus you or something. But yeah, I think they're tough businesses to run and scale. Yeah, I think a lot of people are seeing Twitter people like us launch agencies. And they're like, well, I want to do that. There's also that guy, Brett from Design Joy, who has a course on productizing agencies. And I think that is a whole new, new generation

of entrepreneurs who are looking at this and being, wow, so you're saying, you know, going back to your asset like thing. So you're saying I could basically build up a Twitter account, launch a service, and then all of a sudden be making seven figures a year. Right. This is the dream. This shit's so hard, man. You know, have you ever done the Enneagram? It's kind of like a better Myers-Briggs.

I'm a huge fan of it. And I'm a type 7. And type 7 is the enthusiast. And it's like the person who like jumps from thing to thing and, you know, gets excited by the shiny object. And a lot of entrepreneurs, not surprisingly, are type sevens. You know, I had, I grew up in a, my dad obviously was, you know, a lot, a lot of ownership, kind of an immigrant style upbringing. I had good partners who would help me keep me focused. But I think there's a lot of entrepreneurial types out there who are the enthusiasts who are like, oh yeah, I can just

get that going. And then to run services is hard enough to scale services. You have to become a great manager. You have to become a great trainer. You have to get good at writing things down. And You have to build. It's boring-ass stuff that helps you scale services, any business really, but services, business in particular. You got to give a lot of feedback to people. You got to do a lot of things that are the opposite of, like, launch something on Twitter and see if it'll grow and scale. And I think it's just you either got to pair yourself with the right person or you got to create space in your mind that those things are important. I have the benefit of like knowing they're important, not necessarily debbie my strengths. And so that allowed me to kind of manage around them and find the right people to be around. get out of their way. But I see a lot of hype guys and girls out there. Then you got to go run these things, man. They're hard. It's hard to run someone else's ad spend, explain to them why it's working or not working, manage their expectations, put together a plan you can deliver against. We had this moment, which is a crazy story, actually. So four or five years ago, McKinsey walked Ampush in to Stars Lionsgate. And,

And so, you know, there's this huge movie house. They're this like cable channel. And they had decided they wanted to build an OTT service, you know, like HBO Max of stars. You know, it's a multi-billion dollar company. They had a $300 million annual marketing budget going towards like linear and billboards and all these random things. And so McKinsey was like, well, we're going to take half of that, $150 million and

start, Ampush is going to build you guys a digital marketing program. So we built it from scratch, built all the Google ads, the Facebook ads. They had been doing a little bit things, but nothing that interesting. we grow this program, it starts to scale. And they love it because it's so much more measurable than the stuff they're used to. They're used to like premieres or whatever. And the week before their biggest show power premieres, and what would happen is their CPA, when their biggest show content would launch,

would drop by like 90%. Their best show is about to show, that's when all the signups happen. And that's when you spend the most money. And then when their shows aren't running, you pull back the spend. And we did all this optimization. And I think we were like two or three weeks out before their biggest show. and the Facebook pixel breaks, meaning all of us,

and McKinsey had been, I don't know, they had been running. It's something, they basically said, well, no, no, keep spending,

like, and we said, no, no, we don't think we should keep spending. It's no, keep spending. They say,

keep spending. We keep spending. And then all of a sudden, they're like, we're like, well, why can't we get the CPA back down? I'm like, well, we told Facebook that we were okay

with $300 acquisitions. Their pixel now thinks that. They're not, it's not going to work. And so this thing gets, their CMO's involved. their CEO gets involved. I'm on a call.

I get dragged down to L.A. They're like, what is going on, Jesse? We pay you guys $5 million a year in fees. Like figure this out. What is happening? And I said, guys, we need to delete this pixel.

We need to go dark on Facebook for a week. And then we need to reboot with new pixels by show or something. Like I had some strategy that involves shutting off. Facebook is in the room with me. And they're like, no, we don't agree with that plan. And I was like, I bet the account, guys. If I'm wrong, then take this, you know. And so.

we did the plan finally. They agreed. And like the first few days were dicey, but then once we turned it back on, everything kind of normalized again right ahead of their biggest premiere. You know, and so you are on the hook for someone else's results to explain it to them, to help them understand it,

and to be able to like take the risk and put things on the line for it. And it's not even yours. And even if you do it, you get, you know, 10% of spend or something like that. Another way to think about it is, you know,

you're on the hook. and like you're going fishing, you're on the hook, and you catch a fish, but you don't get to keep the fish, you just get to keep the lure. Totally. Like you keep a small piece of it. And the, you know, the hope is that you get a bunch of lures and that you can diversify and, you know, you're not just, you know, focus on whale fishing. Because if you're just whale fishing, like, as you know, like, that's another downside to agencies, which is churn and clients churn. They churn, and our little trick we learned around this from the folks at Red Ventures was to get long wind down provisions in the agreements. And it's funny because I'll tell this to agency owners and you'll see their head just explode when we talk about it.

And most of them are working month to month with a week. And they'll say, well, how would I say? I'm like, well, tell them that you can't fully invest in the account unless you have 60 days of notice so that you can properly readjust your resources. It's better for them. It's better for you. And they're like, oh, wow. And I'm like, just imagine how your life changes if you have 60 days notice before someone can actually fully pull back the revenue and churn. But I think it goes back to maybe your original point, which is like people start these businesses because they think

they're easy and whatever. And they're actually, that's, that's never a good reason to start a business. But at the same time, you look at, you know, growth assistant and that business is doing well. Like, why do you think that service-based business is doing so well? Well, like, is there a framework for starting a successful agency? You know, some of the things I would think a lot about are, I think it's important to figure out what you want and what you're trying to aspire for, right? So do you want to grow something to run it and make money? Do you want to grow it to sell it?

Do you want to raise money? Like, what game are you playing? One of my mentors always says, what game are you playing? And then how do you win that game? And, like, how do you win is where everybody focuses, but what game are you playing is actually usually the more important question. So what game are you going to play? okay I want to start an agency

I want it to get to 2 million EBITDA a year or 10 million EBITDA what do you want I mean there's very different answers to that question how long were you willing to take all that stuff then the next question is like to me what's your unfair advantage and this by the way this is true for all businesses not just service but like what do you know and typically like it has to be a crossover of at least two

maybe three things that you really like because normally in the case of growth assistant like I knew growth marketing well. I knew offshore well also. You know, Adrian had built a lot of recruiting engines and that sort of thing. Like there has to be a lot of things crossing over. And then you go, oh, now I think I can be in the top 5% of these things. Because even any of them individually, you're probably not in the top 5%.

So what's your unfair advantage? The next thing is like I always think of like building your one page offer sheet, like productizing your scope and what you sell. Is it 5,000 a month? Is it 2,000 a month? is it 10,000 a month, and then also solving for gross margins inherent to that offer. So it has to be something that you can push out and deliver, and you're already thinking about having at least 60% gross margins.

Because once you shape the front of the offer and then people want to buy that offer, then the whole part of the business is how do you deliver that offer at that margin. And that's step three. Step four is like go out and sell to people, especially people you know, or people who know you know, right? like people who are going to be friendlies and I'm pretty honest about where the things are. I'm like, okay, this is new. This is a new thing we're doing right now.

Like, what do you think about this? And then the last thing, I think most important miss is like you got to deliver something amazing on the other side. And then once you deliver that amazing thing on the other side, you have to figure out how you're going to do it without being involved as the founder or the CEO. That's like that part takes anywhere from six months to six years, which is how can that thing happen when I'm not involved. And I was like, remember at Ampush, the Zen moment was like, our sales guy closed the deal, our onboarding team onboarded it, client success person brought it on

and they did the services for it and the finance team invoice and collected the money. And I had nothing but bullet point updates. Like I didn't have to get involved at all. And I was like, oh, this is starting a business. And so yeah, I think it's that last part is where I usually tell people, I was just talking to Alex Lieberman about this. You know, he's starting one of these influencer, or copywriter things for people building your personal brands. And it's like, you know, you have five or ten customers, let's say, how do you make sure that it's less than 25% of your time and they're getting a better experience?

That may take you months to actually get to that point, but that's the point where you can scale. And then you have to hire and kind of plug people back into that model consistently and see where it goes. So that's the last part of it. I think the other thing that I would say in my case, in both the case, I think of Ampush and Growth, assistant, you know, you got to ride some trends. We rode Facebook. I mean, that was the best wave

ever, right? There was a many, many multi-year period where we were the only, like one of the few companies who could do DR on Facebook. And then for growth assistant, this is this whole offshore trend, especially for marketing. Like, that's, that's a new thing. It's not, it's not a thing that's everywhere. And, and I think there's a lot of people starting these things that, you know, they're not writing any trends. They're not writing any sort of secular tailwinds behind that. Well, it's a double trend, which is one, you know, COVID force a lot of companies to go to remote. And then the second trend is a lot of companies are looking at cost cutting. Yes. And marketing is, I think the demand for growth marketing talent versus supply is way out of whack. There's like not enough people who know how to do

things on marketing. And so plugging in people from offshore. And one of the interesting things we've seen actually, one of the funny selling points we have, especially when we're talking to more senior people for growth assistant is growth assistant helps you retain your own team like what like yeah we're not talking about the talent our talent we're talking about the talent scarce on your side so you don't want to lose this awesome growth lead or this awesome facebook ads person and if you make them do all the crappy work all the time and you don't have a growth assistant they're going to leave you know if you have them sitting there uploading ads for four hours every day every other day like they're not going to like their job so a growth assistant takes on the work they don't want to do and guess what that person

going to stick around longer. And we're starting to see that exciting trend where people move companies and they're like, hey, I need some growth assistance now. And so I think that's also been a big trend around, you know, marketing as a talent. It's kind of like engineering. Like there's always been this missing unlimited demand for engineering talent if you can find it. And it's really a supply driven game. And I think the same thing's happening in marketing.

Quick interruption from me. If you're listening to this on Apple Podcasts, or Spotify, you're getting any value. You need to come to YouTube and subscribe to the Where It Happens podcast YouTube channel. I promise you the experience is richer, more interesting. So if you're getting any value, just stop what you're doing, open up the YouTube app, go to the website and press subscribe at where it happens on YouTube. And if you're watching this on YouTube and you haven't subscribed. What are you doing? Go press subscribe. Thank you. Enjoy the rest of the show. You talked about unfair advantage. A lot of people listening to this are going to be like,

easy for you, Jesse. You just sold, you know, Ampush and have 100,000 or whatever Twitter followers, or easy for you, Greg. You know, you have this big community of people that you can just seed ideas to. my question to you is does everyone have an unfair advantage your college student just starting off you're living in a small town in india and you don't have a huge network either on social or in your own town city whatever yeah i think that the younger you are maybe the harder it is to have a super valuable unfair advantage but you definitely have some unfair advantage and i don't i don't mean to say that it should be the end-all be all of your entrepreneurial career, but it's going to make starting something easier. We have an intern this summer who goes to Duke, and he manages the TikTok for Duke basketball.

He's super entrepreneurial. He's amazing at he's doing all these different stuff. And he's like, what should I start, Jesse? And I was like, well, what do you know really well? And I was like, you know how to get into Duke. You should start a social, you know, TikTok channel for how to get into Duke and sell people a $50 or $100 guide. And I was like, maybe you sell it to, a thousand people a month or something like that. You know, I don't know. There's probably five million people who apply to these top schools or whatever. And I'm like, it's just enough to get you going and you're going to learn more through

that process and you're going to build other unfair advantages as you do it. And that's a big part of getting anything going. We didn't know anything about digital marketing. When I was 25 when we started Ampush, we knew numbers and data and we had a decent network from our friends in college and other worlds. And we just used the things we had. You know, and we tried to squeeze the most out of them that we could. And then we learned as we went how to do more and more of those different things.

So I think it's strange when someone doesn't know anything about anything and they're like, they pick a random sector and they start going in at it. Like there's some people who can do that and it works. But the vast majority of people, you know, it's a real struggle. There's some people who, well, first of all, if you're listening to this, you have an unfair advantage. Yeah. Like if you're, if you're listening to this, you beat 99.9% of people because you're going, out there and you're trying to gain information to better yourself, you have some unfair

advantage. Now, there's going to be a group of people who will tell themselves, who are not listening to this, but who will tell themselves, I don't have an unfair advantage and who play kind of like that victim mentality. And I feel like you have access to the internet, you have an unfair advantage, period. Yeah, and I think, again, remember, it's multiple things. My definition of it is it's multiple unique intersection points of who you are. So if you're in a town, a small town in India, but you do read Twitter, it's like, okay, you're, you know, you speak Hindi, you are in the small town, you have access to all these people, and you read Twitter. Okay, those are enough unfair advantages for you to construct something that's going to be a value to somebody.

Probably it's educating those young Indian children about chat GPT or something like that, right? There's always some unfair advantage when you look at enough vectors of your life overlapping that you're going to be the top 5% of that thing. And that's a great place to just get going. So moving on a little bit to unbloat. I look at that and I'm like, why is this guy creating a, first of all, like a D to C product?

Like he's got this like cash flowing, you know, eight figure business that's doing really well. And then I'm looking at that, I'm like, oh man, that is probably so hard to like go. and find the product and create it and create the brand and do like take out the Facebook ads. What got you excited about that? And where's what's the opportunity that you're saying that someone like me is not saying? I had helped so many brands grow. You know, Hubble contacts, Dollar Shave Club, Birchbox. I mean, you name it. We had helped them scale. And if not scale,

built their customer acquisition from the ground up. And so I think more than anything, I was like, man, I want to do this myself? Do I actually know what I'm doing? Is it actually different if I own the brand or is it just going to feel the same? And, you know, I kind of said, all right, well, I know what works on these things, like high margin, recurring revenue, solves a real problem and has fun marketing angles. Like, okay, so I kind of had this formula, you know, this idea in my mind of what could work. And high margin recurrent, like, you know, you get into the medicine supplement area pretty quickly. I was also trying to find what else fit that profile that's done really well. And erectile dysfunction was like a, I don't know, there's like at least three multi-be.

billion dollar D to C brands started off for rectile dysfunction. So I want to find something as big as that. And so we went and talked to seven or eight doctors and asked them a bunch of questions, but the main question we asked them was, what's the one thing people complain to you about that you don't have a good answer for? And we got 43 different issues from foot doctors and stomach it, whatever. And we literally just searched them, try to see the search volume, how much Amazon volume, and then like are there products on the market for them?

And only one issue was as big as erectile dysfunction. it was bloating. And it was like, wow, I would just never have guessed that, right? I'm sure you wouldn't have guessed that either, that it's searched more often than E.D. And so we're like, well, what is it? And we actually started talking to people and what, tell me about you, you blow? What does that feel like? What does it look like?

And really there was two. And then we started talking to kind of the people who make, you know, stuff and supplements, trying to figure out what causes it and how do you solve it. And really, like, came into focus for two reasons. I think one is similar to ED, it isn't not just a medical issue. It's like a very distressing emotional issue because nobody, and especially women, especially premenopausal women who tend to be the biggest customers, they don't want to feel fatter or look fatter than they are.

Like they don't want to gain weight and like it's a stressful issue. It makes them like want to go home from the gym or not go out for the night. Like, oh, wow, okay. And then the second thing was like it's pretty solvable. Like there's four reasons primarily why people bloat. They don't digest food. They don't poop. They have like issues with their digestive system, the bacteria or whatever.

And they're not getting enough of certain things. And you can kind of solve all of it. And we like went out and looked at all the skews on the market and realized you have to buy four or five skews to get all the things you need. And we sort of just did the dumb entrepreneur thing where we said, can you put this all in one pill? And the manufacturer was like, it's an expensive pill, but you can do it. So we're like, all right, let's try that. Let's throw it all into one pill.

So that was kind of how we got started with it. And then running the Facebook ads, I'd say definitely has been more challenging than I expected. But, you know, the business is at about $3 million in sales. It's making a little bit of money. It's only 14 months old. And for the most part, I've been pretty happy to say, like, a lot of the things that we built at Ampush and I learned over those 10 years have translated into being able to, like, get this thing off the ground successfully. It's not perfect by any means. but there's a lot of opportunity I see in it.

And we think it's the first of many things we'll launch like that. Both growth assistant and unbloat have really good names. And enough people don't talk about how important the name is to the success of some of these products. But unblote.me, I think is your URL, which I think is really, really high quality. The funny thing is, you know, we did a painted door test to figure it out.

I don't know if you've ever done one of those, but we had five completely different brand name. and like basically had the like fake brand where we were like sign up for 20% off of the launch. And I think one of the brands was feather. One was rhythm. Um, I forget the other two. And then unblood.

And like we spent $500 on each just to see kind of click throughs and signups. And unblote was off the charts relative to the other four. Yeah. Just you look at it and you know what it does. Uh, you look at growth assistant. You know what it does. So that just feels very gateway acts now. that I'm starting to see what you're creating, which is really cool that you're creating.

And I think a lot of people should think about this is how do you think about your values or your culture of creating new products? And maybe you're just doing this. It sounds like you're doing this a bit subconsciously, but there's that. And then I think, you know, recurring revenue. You have a recurring revenue component. A lot of testimonials and stuff like that, a lot of credibility. How do you think about paid versus audience?

So to me, growth assistant, correcting if I'm wrong, grew a lot from Twitter people talking about it. It feels like Unbloat has grown more from a paid marketing perspective. How do you think about organic versus paid when you're creating new products? Yeah. I mean, I'd much rather have organic or paid if I can. Totally. It's interesting. I'm probably to a fault, I under-temple.

businesses because I just don't believe that you can you can put everything in a box and think it's going to work out a certain way. Well, I have a question for you. Why wouldn't you have said, if you prefer organic to paid, why wouldn't you just look at start unbloat and just be like, okay, everyone, we are not going to spend $1 on paid in the next 12 months just so we can build the muscle for building audiences, building communities. Yeah. I think that's a good idea.

We started the first few months with like, hey, we're only going to do TikTok organic to learn it. And, you know, we just didn't make the progress. I think I would have liked to make. And I think you, you know, there's a constant interplay between the people running the businesses and different skill sets and different things that start to play out. And you have to, you have to balance those two things out with one another all the time, right? And I think one of the things that makes this model work,

And obviously one of the liability is like, I can't be everywhere at all times, right? Or if I did want to be everywhere at all times, I'd have to go much slower. I'd have to do fewer things. And it's like, okay, first spend five years learning how to audience build and community build, use Jesse's genius at doing this because I know how to do it. Then we're going to learn how to disseminate that out to different things, which could have been an option for how we approached this. But we didn't.

And so I think we tried it. We gave it, I don't know, three or four months. The team was not able to come up with enough creative with it. I'm sure if I, you know, if I had spent more time, maybe it would have given us a better shot at doing that. And I said, well, we do know the paid media playbook. Let's get enough scale in this thing. And that's going to be able to fund more future ability to test different things.

Let's get that going. And the other thing is like that is a core skill set of mine or core thing. I know I know. Like I don't know TikTok organic. Now I know Twitter organic, but just I learned that on my own by doing it over the last two or three years. Let's talk about Kahani. Is that how I pronounce it? SaaS product.

So you've got your service, service-based business, you got your D to C business, and then you've got a SaaS business. Why did you start that? Where was the opportunity? And what's interesting to you about SaaS? Yeah. I think the SaaS one, I mean, this one has actually been the hardest probably by far, for me at least. And, you know, I think, and maybe the rightly so, like, it's the one furthest away, I think, from what I know. The other two are sort of, like, decomposed ambush, like, selling things to brands on one side and then the other thing's running ads, which is sort of what I did for 10 years.

You know, I think this one was, hey, what's a big, what's a big bet we can go take and try to figure out a solution for? And it was like, hey, the e-com experience just seems old and seems really boring. And meanwhile, you know, we're on TikTok and Instagram and they're so, so immersive. There's vertical media. You're tapping. You're swiping. Why isn't the e-com experience like that also? And so the first product we launched was basically stories for the e-com experience.

So you could go into an e-com site and you could tap those circles at the top and you'd be in the stories experience. And this is a really good lesson for us. You know, I think every single person who sees it goes, wow, that is super cool. And then they're like, all right. right, I got to go. And you're like, well, when are you going to buy this? And they're like, I don't know, I got some other things. I got some other priorities on my list. And so, you know, it became a solution chasing a problem. It just, we just noticed that very quickly within six months of launching it. We had, you know, we had some decent MRR and distribution,

but it just wasn't, you could just tell. It wasn't necessarily capturing anyone's challenges. Like, we went to shop talk and I had a sales guy from both companies there from Kahani and Growth Assistant. And Growth Assistant, you know, they do all this matching stuff. The growth assistant guy got 25 meetings. The kind of guy got five meetings. And it was just very clear. And now the five meetings that Connie got were interesting.

Nike was one of those meetings. And we go, well, Nike, we asked them, why did you meet us? They go, well, we need better ways to do discovery on our site and we think this is really innovative and blah, blah, blah. And so that one has been one where I'd say we're definitely dealing with the more classic product market fit issue. We're trying to reboot the product now a little bit because the signal we got was that people really want ways to leverage their influencer content and repurpose it.

And then the other big one was like, if you can help growth marketers lower CPA, that's when there's a real people will pay you for something. Like this cool thing at the top, like they may buy it, but it's just not that interesting for them. And so that one has been an interesting one. But I think like SaaS, I mean,

the obvious thing, it's it scales, it's software, it's recurring revenue. I think there's plenty of problems I have a decent understanding of, but building product is hard. And like one of the big differences I learned between services and software is in services, a growth assistant or ampush, you could kind of tell me your problem in a vague term.

You know, here's my issue. And I'd say, well, here's a human. This human can probably adjust themselves to solve that really nuanced, specific problem you have. In software, the code has to do that. And that means you really have to get intimate with a problem and understand it in a really deep way. And I think, like, it's just a very different challenge. How do you know when to quit?

So how do you know with Kahani, you know, you're at this moment where it's like, okay, we've got to change this. We've got to move this. You've got some signals that are suggesting like, wow, there's something here, but you've got others being like, I don't know. How do you know when to just put it up on Acquire.com or just like shutter it versus like we need to double down because, you know, Nike is huge. And they're They spend millions of dollars in a year. And, you know, Nike itself could be a $5 million a year account. Yeah, yeah. There's no perfectly right answer for it. I think from my perspective, my point of view, and like I used to chase things a little too long, I think early in my career and learn this from the guys at Red Ventures and Rick, my mentor there.

You know, it's a little bit like there's an adage in trading that you never go broke by taking a profit. And what they mean by that is like, yeah, you may sell the stock early, but if you always sell when your, when your stock's up a little bit, you're never going to go broke. You're always going to make a little bit of money. And yeah, you may give up some upside, whatever. I think the entrepreneur's version of that is like, you never go broke by making a quick pivot. And so, you know, I think, how long have we given it? A year in change? Like, to me, it's like no more than a year. You know, and six months of like really

out there selling it, pushing it, pressing it, hundreds of conversations. most great businesses, you know, they start out great. Meaning, and yeah, there's a classic story of the pivot, but even the pivot, it's all I was two years in and I kept going, but I did something totally different and then that thing took off, right? The idea that's something you've done for multiple years and then one day it takes off, I mean, again, you can also hold a stock too long and lose your ass. Like it's the, that may work for some people or the lore is it there, but I'm one of these

people who goes, I don't actually care why it's not working anymore. It's just at some point, I got to blow it. the whistle and I got to I got to like you know reshuffle the deck and and do that and so I think it's like arbitrary it's you know a year six months to a year like it's it's not that long yeah I feel like the the hallmark of a good multibrepreneur is someone who who knows when to shutter things even though closing things down or selling them those are those are really hard to do because you're kind of admitting, yeah, you're admitting defeat. And as multipreneurs, we're kind of just like, we've got a lot of conviction and the ideas that we want to put out.

Especially when we're putting it out publicly, right? If you're putting it out on Twitter and you're like, hey, you know, this is the future of shopping. And then six months later, it's like, you're like, no, it's not. Here's the thread on, we're shutting it down. Yeah. Eat some popcorn. Uh, so it's, it's, I think it's the most brutal part is like, you know, you, you, you, you, you know, you, you know, in this case, we had to let go of a few people.

Like, you know, there's people join there. They sign their careers up for it. And then you're just honest and you say, guys, I just don't think this is going to be what we thought it was. And, you know, I hope over, we have enough scale like Gateway X over time to absorb people into different parts. So it doesn't, their jobs don't have to be on the line, but we're not quite there yet. And that part's, you know, it's, it's a your idea, your things and then having a big human impact on, on other people. And I think that's something, you know, I never want to get comfortable with, but, but it's a big part of what we do. If someone wants to build their own gateway acts, if someone wants to become a multipreneur, what, what advice do you have to them to be

successful? Yeah. You know, we talk about this on Twitter. me and you and people are doing it. But like, you know, Mark Zuckerberg is a multi-opreneur. You know, how many P&Ls are running? Like, he's got WhatsApp. He's got Instagram. He's got the big blue app. He's got his Oculus stuff.

He's got some AI. I mean, there's a lot of organizations, you know, Elon Musk and him aren't all that different, even though they're technically separate companies, right? Or GE or Microsoft or Red Ventures or Apple. I mean, these are all, anyone running these scaled businesses is running multiple things. There's just no way they're not. And the same challenges come up. You've got to have the right people's. You got to have the right culture, operating systems in place, all these different

pieces of it. So if I could do it all over again or if I was giving someone advice, I would say find one thing, like find one business and just go really hard at it for five to seven years and make it enough scale so that you can either sell it and make a lot of money or it generates enough cash flow that you have some flexibility and make sure along the way you built a culture and you trained to people so that you can be done you know you can move yourself out of the day to day at around year five or year six and then from there start to like expand out into multiple different areas using the unfair advantages you developed over those five to seven years right but I think the idea of people come to me at yeah I don't think I could have done this I couldn't

do I tried to do this at 25 I had the document and I totally forgot about because I didn't even had a know how to do anything. And so I think you need some foundational skills, knowledge, capital to a certain point. Now, in this case, I started Am Push, I learned all these things, I sold it, now I'm doing it in this new format. And there's some challenges with that, you know, in and of itself. But I think you need a foundation. I don't think it's a thing you can do is starting at age 25. I just don't. There's this, you know, Michael Rubin, I'm sure you saw him. It was so funny. when I was 19, there was a Wharton summer camp, and we met him. And at that point, you know, his business, like, it's just, just to think about where a guy

like that started, he had three ski shops, and he had just launched Sports Authority's website as GSI Commerce, which was his first business. It was this business that took over the dot coms or created dot coms for retailers and fully operated them on the back end. And he ran that business for 12 years. I mean, it was the most unglamorous business. could imagine. He had warehouses for sports authority and he would run all these outcomes. And he was kind of a big agency because eventually they'd want to run it themselves.

You know, and I don't know if you know his story, but he sells it to eBay. Then he spins back the best assets to himself and the best of the best assets. Like his brain clearly like like I did with Unblowed, he was like, what's the one group of people who's always going to want to outsource this that have the highest value apparel out there? Oh, sports teams. Okay, I'm going to sell my whole business to eBay, but then I'm going to buy Fanatics back. Now Fanatics is worth 10 times. whatever GSI was ever worth. But that was like a 25 year journey. I mean, he spent a lot of time grinding and learning as he went. And so I think I think you need a good five to 10 year period of depth and building fundamentals. And then from there, you can spawn into launching multiple

different things using those unfair advantages. Yeah, Fanatics is actually a client of late checkout and dispatch or design subscription. And just learning about that business, has been like nuts. Nuts. I did a business breakdown on it. I don't know if you've ever heard that podcast that I record, but we interviewed their main investor at Insight Venture and it's a nutty business.

Yeah, it's pretty cool. But like, again, he couldn't have started that without 10 to 15 years at GSI Commerce, which was this like really unknown, unheard of whatever business that was a grind. Yeah, I think the MVP of being a multi-preneur is can you create content in one niche that people resonate with? Like can you, before you create product market fit, can you create content market fit in one topic?

Then can you do it in two topics? And then can you build one product? And then can you build two products? And then it's just you layer it on. As you get older, it's definitely easier and your unfair advantage grows. But, you know, I don't want to dissuade the 17-year-old who's listening to this because I think you just start. Yeah, just start. I mean, that's always the answer is just try to do something.

Yeah. You know, one of my biggest mistakes in college and I always tell this when I talk to college kids is like, I was used to joke, my brain was bigger than my legs. So I could think I was a Wharton kid. I was like, oh, here's the market size. And oh, you know, we had a, we had a t-shirt business in college that did $200,000 a year in sales and like $70,000 EBITDA. Like it was a good business for college kids. And we thought we thought about expanding it once to be a national college. We basically did bulk apparel for all the fraternies and sororities.

That was the business. And our big Wharton brains were like, oh, the market's too small. This is not a good idea. And meanwhile, like our legs didn't know how to actually build a business like that. But just learning anything, we could have gotten, you know, to something that would have been very meaningful. And actually one of my co-founder's friends started a similar business on his campus.

And he came up with this genius idea of like, I'm going to sell a sponsorship to like Pepsi on the T-shirts and provide them for free to the sororries and fraternities. And I'm going to make $20 a shirt instead of $7 a shirt. And he turns into a multi-million dollar business that he ends up selling, right? And so the lesson is just like just start, get things going, solve. The other thing I tell college kids is try to get just your haul on an app. Before you think you can sell the world on something, can you get the 20 people who you see every day to do, like, to use a common app to like plan groceries or something?

Just you build the app, build a simple app. And I'm like, you'll learn how hard it is to get something done, like to build something. And that and that lesson is super valuable. That's why I think building an audience or building a community, even like a WhatsApp group chat or a group chat, is such a great place to train yourself on can I create something that people are going to want to do. Because people are busy. They don't have time to download your app unless you're Mark Zuckerberg and your, launching threads.

Totally. That's why I'd love just starting with audiences and communities. Yeah. That's one of my earliest piece of advice, too, to people is they're like, oh, I want to start a business that sells life insurance to millennials and blah, blah, blah. I'm like, well, can you just, why don't you just start a newsletter for them and see if they'll just, like, read about what you're talking about? Right.

Before you sell them something. Yeah. Just see if you give them information for free. Exactly. They'll actually read it. Totally. And they're like, oh, that's really hard, actually. Yeah.

Jesse, if people want more of you, where do they go and follow you in the journey? Twitter and threads, I guess, J-S-Poogee, J-S-P-U-J-J-J-I, Jesse at gateway. XYZ. You know, we're always looking to meet potential people who want to partner with us to build businesses, always looking for interesting opportunities to collaborate across the spectrum of what we're doing. Love it. Well, thanks for the time. This has been great, Mr. Multipreneur. Thanks, Greg.