The Startup Ideas Podcast - My 2024 Year in Review

Starting point is 00:00:00 What a year. 2024 is done, 2025 incoming. And today what are we going to do? Today we're going to talk about my big wins, my big losses, how much I've grown on social, a wealth breakdown, including all the different stocks and equities I own, some business updates, like how my business is doing. productivity unlocks that I've had, any insights and learnings. We're breaking it down in this video. And the truth is, I don't know where this video is going to go. I don't know where this pot is going to go.

Starting point is 00:00:48 I didn't come super prepared. I just wanted it to be like a conversation that I'm having with a friend. I've got a few ideas. on what we can talk about, and it's just going to be me and you having a conversation about my 2024 year in review. And my hope is that by listening to this, you will get some ideas about your year and it'll get your creative juices flowing. So I'd like to start off by talking about my big wins. So I actually haven't announced this anywhere, but me and my wife had a baby. Yes, we had a baby.

Starting point is 00:01:51 She's seven weeks old. And it's just completely changed my perception about everything. I know all parents say this, but I'm still processing what it all means. But I can tell you that it's just, yeah, it's one of the most beautiful things, if not the most beautiful things. That has happened in my life. And yeah, just having like a mini you kind of in the world that you get to teach is so cool. Yeah, had a baby.

Starting point is 00:02:34 Looking for all the baby advice that you can possibly give. And excited to join this adventure. that was number one. The second thing is I started working out consistently. I started actually lifting consistently. And the amount of mental clarity that I've gotten from that has been amazing. I've also gained weight. Like I've gained a lot of muscle weight.

Starting point is 00:03:08 I think like 15, 20 pounds, something like that. So I'm bigger, which is kind of weird because when I look in the mirror, I'm like, I feel I look more broad. And honestly, I don't even know if I like the look. But the mental clarity is unmatched. So highly recommend, highly recommend lifting. And how I got into it, I guess, is I got a personal trainer. So I got a personal trainer three times a week.

Starting point is 00:03:40 You know, I have to show up. I'm there. And, you know, I might reduce my, my personal trainer, like maybe to once a week. Now that, like, I'm in the flow. But, yeah, definitely enjoy just the benefits of lifting. I actually can't believe it took me until, like, 35 to do it consistently.

Starting point is 00:04:11 And then the last biggest win is I launched, I basically grew this podcast into a serious platform. Actually, I'm going to give one more big one after this, but I grew this podcast into this year's platform. Last year, going into 2024, there was a very small group of people who listened to this podcast. I switched the name from where it happens to the startup ideas podcast. I really started focusing on giving away everything I could in terms of value.

Starting point is 00:04:44 I really just wanted people to take the ideas from the podcast. and implement it and see what happens. It was kind of like a, in a lot of ways, like a social experiment. And people took these ideas. They learned, you know, growth tactics on how to grow their businesses. They took a lot of the startup ideas and actually just went and built them. And it was a success. And people just started talking about the pod.

Starting point is 00:05:10 And it's probably one of my biggest wins of the year. And the last biggest win. is I hit a financial net worth number that has always been in my head that I thought that I would never get to, but I hit it. And I don't really want to say the number. That's not the point, but I did hit it. And I'll talk more at the end of why I hit it. But basically, there was a company that I had stock in, and there was liquidity. You know, I had a liquidity event.

Starting point is 00:05:51 And that was a good feeling. Okay, big losses and lessons. Obviously, you know, not everything is rosy. I think one of the biggest ones is I felt that throughout 2024, I wasn't working on the most important thing. For example, I'm one of those people, you know, a lot of people tell me this, that I'm really, quick on text and I'm quick on Twitter and I'm quick to answer people.

Starting point is 00:06:26 And I don't think that's a very good thing. I find myself, you know, I could get distracted by someone sends me a text message and be like, what do you think of this? Or, you know, some, I just find I get distracted a little bit too much. And I, it's not like I'm distracted in the sense that I'm going to go and play Fortnite, um, distracted. It means that some other business text comes in and then I end up or email comes in and I end up, uh, I just end up in a rabbit hole and all of a sudden like two hours, uh, goes by and I'm, I'm just really unable to, to get back to where I was thinking.

Starting point is 00:07:09 So, you know, I'm spending more time on do not disturb mode. Um, I, I really, I really think that it's, it's like the only way to get work done. I'm spending more time with pen and paper. I'm starting to write things down more. I'm spending less time in like more hardcore productivity software stuff. So less time in places like Notion where I get distracted and more time in places like Apple Notes where I feel more focused. So that has been a loss just because I haven't been able to get to the goals I won't

Starting point is 00:07:47 wanting to get to just because I've been getting sidetracked throughout the year. Quick break in the pod to tell you a little bit about startup empire. So startup empire is my private membership where it's a bunch of people like me, like you, who want to build out their startup ideas. Now they're looking for content to help accelerate that. They're looking for potential co-founders. They're looking for tutorials from people like me to come. come in and tell them, how do you do email marketing? How do you build an audience? How do you go viral

Starting point is 00:08:22 on Twitter? All these different things. That's exactly what startup empire is. And it's for people who want to start a startup but are looking for ideas or it's for people who have a startup, but just they're not seeing the traction that they need. So you can check out the link to startup empire.com in the description. Another big loss has been, I put too much trush. trust in 24 in certain teammates without checks and balances. So I'm one of those people that, you know, I look at, you know, I hear people like Andrew Wilkinson, you know, friend of the pod talking about how he hires CEOs and he builds these businesses and he has complete trust, you know, and a lot of trust with these people. Or, you know, Warren Buffett talks a lot of,

Starting point is 00:09:12 a lot similar to that too, where, you know, he trusts management to do the right thing. I feel like it's trust management or trust teammates, but with checks and balances. There needs to be checks and balances. And I didn't include enough checks and balances in 2024. And I had to pay the price. This is going to sound like really dumb. And I'll admit that this happened. But we had someone on our finance team that was.

Starting point is 00:09:47 Just like putting in not the right numbers, like the numbers were incorrect. And there were, this was a costly mistake, you know, hundreds of thousands of dollars type mistake. And it's going to be okay. Like, we're going to, you know, it's fine. But like, we figured it out. But this is a person who we hired remotely who is literally working a second job. She wasn't doing it maliciously, but you need to have these checks and balances, especially in a remote work environment. You need to have checks and balances. Big lesson learned there. And then I'd say another big lesson, or key learning, I should say, is that this year was a less profitable year than in 2023.

Starting point is 00:10:43 and that's okay. I mean, it's a, on one hand, like, we, you know, we did a year in review and like, oh, my God, you know, we made less money this year. You know, we pride ourselves in building cash flowing businesses and, and that, you know, we, the reality is we were less profitable this year. But it's okay because we are reinvesting our businesses, we're investing more of our cash into technology. and I'll talk more about that later. But, you know, it is a loss. Like, you know, the truth is it's a loss. Like, we should be at least 15 to 20% more profitable every single year.

Starting point is 00:11:30 From a free cash flow perspective, we weren't. Next year, we'll do better. I could, you know, I'm telling myself, well, you know, we're just reinvesting more of the money into technology. That's true, but I think we can do that while also maintaining profitability. So right before I recorded this, I went on Twitter, X and asked, recording your year-in-review podcast, what question do you want me to answer? Nothing off-limit. So let's actually answer off-the-cuff some of the questions that you all have. And what's rock? or or says what are you least happy about in your current life i would say i still i've gotten much better at

Starting point is 00:12:24 sleep but i find i still like wake up a couple you know sometimes at night and i wish i had more deep sleep and i'm still trying to figure out how to optimize it i know that sounds like so trivial, but like sleep matters so much to me. And like, you know, it sets the tone for your whole day. So having, just like crushing sleep is what I'm least happy about. Eric says, what are the stupidest things you're doing right now? Stupidest things I'm doing right now, honestly, is probably not just like going harder, doubling down. This is such a good time to be building businesses. I feel like I have so many unfair advantages. I feel like I'm going fast,

Starting point is 00:13:12 but if I'm being honest with myself, I think I could be going faster. What's the one best idea to have to grow your business next year? Invest in technology. Just build software around each of our businesses. If you were to focus on just one thing, what would it be? hiring great CEOs and finding partners to incubate businesses with.

Starting point is 00:13:42 Is that two things? It's basically like finding partners. The one thing I want to focus on is finding business partners. And business partners that I want to work with, not just for one year, four years, like for the rest of my freaking life. What was your primary leverage for expanding your personal brand this year by Cody? Probably X is the leverage.

Starting point is 00:14:06 I think I don't know I think I'm at I think that's what you're trying to ask right I used X to to create the flywheel for everything else around my personal brand how did that growth impact sales and revenue I would say without my personal brand sales and revenue would be like 40% less so you know millions and millions of dollars a year yeah it's actually crazy Many, many millions of dollars a year. For obvious, Joe Devin, for obvious, says, for obvious reasons, no one wants to talk publicly about hidden techniques to win at the social media game.

Starting point is 00:14:52 From pain engagement to astroturfing and engagement pods, it's gotten harder to reach critical mass. What percentage of larger accounts got there using these techniques? Honestly, like, I don't even know what astroturfing is. The engagement pod stuff, I feel like, it's definitely happening, but it's not the number one reason why someone grows. I don't like this mentality, to be honest. Yes, it's hard to grow, but it's also, I don't even know.

Starting point is 00:15:34 Honestly, I think it's probably on X specifically, it's probably easier to grow to zero to 100,000 followers today than it was. last year at this time. And that's because the 4U page of X highlights more smaller accounts. So just like, honestly, like forget about paid engagement astroturfing, whatever that is,

Starting point is 00:15:58 and engagement pods, and just like create really great content that people need in a format that they want to accept it and do a lot of, and be a reply guy, like reply a lot to people, build relationships. And just like forget about,

Starting point is 00:16:12 just forget about these things. What single thing is having the biggest impact on your biz? Building media around our businesses. What's your best return on investment item? Like physical item? I mean, MacBook? Right? Given the volume of ideas you've generated come across this year,

Starting point is 00:16:42 how did you keep yourself focused? I should have been more focused, but, you know, every day the three things that, you know, I write down the three things that I need to get done today. What are the three most important things? How many hours do I work on average in 2024? Hot take, 40 hours a week. You can get a lot of stuff done in 40 hours per week. I honestly, 99% of my entire career has been.

Starting point is 00:17:17 I spent working 40 hours a week. Of course, there's been times where I work 70 hours a week, and there's some deadline ahead. But I think you can get a ton done in 40 hours per week. She's got to be very constrained and focused. What is everyone in your industry completely wrong about right now that GPT rappers aren't real businesses? Did anyone take business ideas and run with it?

Starting point is 00:17:47 People are always taking business ideas from this podcast and running with it. It's absolutely amazing. Those are some interesting, some of the interesting questions from the tweet. Okay, let's talk about platform growth. YouTube. At the end of 2023, I was at 11,000 YouTube subscribers. Today we're sitting at 146,000 subscribers. So that's a absolutely insane.

Starting point is 00:18:17 grow trajectory. I actually cannot believe it. And, you know, the insight here is, I talked a little bit about in the beginning. It's just like knowing who your audience is and really just, you know, leaning into it. I think another smart thing that we did was we got really good at titles and thumbnails. And I think that helped. And the way we did it is we reached out to people who are the best in the game. We reached out to the people who did, the guy who did titles and thumbnails for Mr. Beast and was like, would you give us 15 minutes your time?

Starting point is 00:18:58 And you'd be surprised, either you can ask these people to like, you know, give feedback or just like pay for their time. Be like, hey, how much is 15 minutes going to cost to give us a little bit of direction on where we can go. And a lot of these people, I mean, you can even, like, here's a hack, like, go to, and I'm not affiliated with these people, but go to, like, intro.com and, like, see, like, what are popular YouTubers on there and just be like, there that have millions of subscribers

Starting point is 00:19:36 that you can just be like, hey, I'll give you $250 or whatever they cost for 15 minutes and tell me everything you need to know about titles and thumbnails. So YouTube, big lesson there, focus on the niche, and titles and thumbnails make a big difference. X, I grew from 361,000 followers to 420,000 followers. So about 59,000 followers there. A lot of people here know me. from X. I, you know, I think, you know, most of my followers came from a few tweets.

Starting point is 00:20:22 That's just the reality of X today. Either your tweets go ballistic or they go absolutely nowhere. But I still think it's a great place to gain followers in the business niche. and my strategy there is the same, you know, I've talked about it before. I have a notes file with just key observations I make through the week. On Fridays, I'll go through it. I'll make it more into actual tweets. Some of them are bad.

Starting point is 00:20:56 I'll discard those. And then I'll post the ones that I'm ready. And I try to make my social platforms like a bit more alive. I don't want YouTube to be the only YouTube and the pod to be the only place where I talk about startup ideas. So I started on X to just be like, okay, here's some free startup ideas you can take. And it started to work. And I think I started to become known more in 2024 as a guy who gives startup ideas. So that was a huge win on the X front.

Starting point is 00:21:30 So not only did I grow, but I think I also kind of changed positioning and perception there. LinkedIn, I went from 82,000 to 149,000 followers. That's literally with doing like no zero work. It's just, you know, copying and pasting my ex-tweets and posting some of them on LinkedIn. Podcast. Again, big year for the podcast on audio and Spotify, which, by the way, you know, a lot of people listen on video. definitely go and listen on audio on Spotify and Apple if you're you know if if if if if if you prefer to just like go for walks and listen. I know I enjoy that too. It went from 360,000 downloads in 2023 to 575,000 downloads. So I think it it grew, but not nearly as much as YouTube. So I'm still trying to figure out audio. I'm still trying to figure it out. And I also have like a bunch of bad. had reviews on audio, like some mean reviews. So I don't like that. I don't know why I have some

Starting point is 00:22:43 mean reviews there, but in 2025, I'd love to get more podcast downloads and I'd love to get less mean reviews and more nice reviews. My newsletter went from 72,000 subs to about 120,000 subs. So huge, huge growth there. And I finally cracked the nut with the newsletter. So created a bit of a flywheel with, you know, people, I post on X some like free startup related content. Then there's a call to action to go and listen to the podcast or watch the podcast on

Starting point is 00:23:24 YouTube. And then people watch the podcast on YouTube mostly. And then there's a call to action with a lead magnet that says like, hey, if you want more of this stuff, go and download XYZ guide. So in 2024, I started creating guides that were lead magnet. So that flywheel works. And it really started taking off towards the end of 2024. I wouldn't be surprised if this time next year, the newsletter exceeds $200,000. thousand subscribers. I think that's relatively conservative and totally possible.

Starting point is 00:24:06 Quick ad break. Let me tell you about a business I invested in. It's called boringmarketing.com. So a few years ago, I met this group of people that were some of the best SEO experts in the world. They were behind getting some of the biggest companies found on Google. And the secret sauce is they've got a set of technology and AI that could help you outrank your competition. So for my own businesses, I wanted that. I didn't want to have to rely on Mark Zuckerberg. I didn't want to depend on ads to drive customers to my businesses. I wanted to rank high in Google.

Starting point is 00:24:43 That's why I like SEO and that's why I use Boringmarketing.com and that's why I invested in it. They're so confident in their approach that they offer a 30-day sprint with 100% money-back guarantee. Who does that nowadays? So check it out. Highly recommend Boringmarketing.com. Okay. we're going to go into the next section.

Starting point is 00:25:03 It's the wealth breakdown section. I'm going to tell you about some of the stocks I own, stuff like that. So this year, my net worth has gone up 38% year over year. So it was probably might have been my biggest, yeah, it's my biggest year ever. And a big reason for that, as I mentioned, is there was an investment that I made years ago that that, you know, I got liquidity in. And also the stock market ripped. Like the stock market absolutely ripped. So those are the two reasons. My net worth in terms of breakdown, it's 75% in stocks, 16% in private equity, 7% in real estate and 2% in crypto. So I'll just tell you some of the

Starting point is 00:25:57 stocks that I own. This is not financial advice. Do your own research. I'm just sharing if in case it's just interesting to people. So 10% of my net worth is in Berkshire, Berkshire Hathaway.

Starting point is 00:26:14 And the reason there really is I'm doing such more high risk tech stuff. I'm just like, what's something that's like extremely boring? And that's why it's such a large percentage of my portfolio. Same is true with SPY, 10% of my portfolio. SPY is the S&P Index, S&P 500 Index.

Starting point is 00:26:41 Apple, 8%, Amazon, 7%, Microsoft 6%, WCLD, 5%, which is a ETF for the Cloud Computing Index. in my last year, 2023 year interview, I talked about my thesis on this and it panned out if you would have listened to that video in that episode and actually bought WCLD

Starting point is 00:27:09 you would have done really well. The thesis at the time was, and it's so similar thesis, is that if you're a cloud company, you're very well situated to be an AI company. So the thesis This was that cloud companies were going to become AI companies, which turned out to be true in a lot of sense.

Starting point is 00:27:33 So, you know, that's WCLD. Google, 5%. I actually trimmed some Google towards the end of 2023. Shouldn't have done that. I was worried about they're losing their search advantage. And of course, I do think that they will, like they had a monotivide. on search. So, and it is their big moneymaker. But at the same time, like, they have so many different business units now.

Starting point is 00:28:04 It's such a conglomerate. Waymo is really, really crushing it right now. That's a part of Google. They've got Android. They've got YouTube, Google Cloud. Again, you know, that's a part of my thesis. And Google Cloud is absolutely on a tear. So I'm feeling.

Starting point is 00:28:24 good about Google and it trades at like 27 times PE or something like that. So I don't think it's super overpriced. Pershing Square Holding is Bill Ackman's fund. He owns, he actually owns Google, he owns Chipotle. You know, my thesis there is basically, he's kind of like a mini Warren Buffett. So I wanted to place a bet there and see what happens. Yeah, and just, you know, yeah, just place a bet there. IWM, which is an index of the Russell 2000. You know, if you look at the growth of S&P 500 versus Russell 2000, which is, I think it's small cap stocks under $1 billion,

Starting point is 00:29:23 The S&P 500 has absolutely destroyed the IDM, the Russell 2000, just pulling it up. For example, year-to-date, the IWM is up 11%, where the S&P is up 26%. So I actually think that small caps are going to be, they've just been not in favor, but I actually think they will at some point come back in favor. So that's why I placed the 5% bet in IWM. Constellation Software. Consolation Software is another part of like, you know, I invested 5% into, you know, Bill Ackman's,

Starting point is 00:30:12 Pershing Square, which kind of operates similar to Berkshire. And Constellation Software also operates similar to Berkshire. They own vertical SaaS businesses, a bunch of them. and it's a 3% allocation there. Mark Leonard is the founder. He's like he kind of looks like Rick Rubin. He's like a Canadian Rick Rubin. He doesn't do interviews.

Starting point is 00:30:41 We'll put up a chart of like how well consolation is done over like the last 20 years. It's like absolutely insane. Like gone up. Let's see. I mean it's up 24,000 percent all times. time. It's just absolutely crazy. Absolutely crazy. So he's a good steward of capital. And we'll see. That's a bet. Other stocks at 8%, fixed income and cash at 3%. The private equity is mostly in funds and startup investments. Real estate, I actually bought a new apartment for our growing family. So that's a part

Starting point is 00:31:29 there. And crypto, 2%, and that's mostly Bitcoin. I guess this is a bit of a loss. I trim my, like I rebalance my portfolio. I'm not one of those people that is like glued to my phone to see like what, you know, how my portfolio is doing at any given time. I think that's a huge distraction. But, you know, every month or every three months, I'll look into it and rebalance. So I was rebalancing crypto as it was going up. Huge loss there, right? I was selling Bitcoin when it was at 60,000, and 70,000 and 80,000. But that's the way I roll.

Starting point is 00:32:14 That's the way I roll. I keep it pretty discipline. I think that a crypto allocation of 2% is healthy. And also in my private equity investments, you know, call it another 2% or 3%. is in crypto funds there as well. So for all the crypto heads, you're like, I can't believe you're so low investment in crypto.

Starting point is 00:32:37 I think I probably have a, you know, 5% allocation in total, which I don't think is crazy. So that's my wealth breakdown, uh, 2024. Um, and I don't really think I'll make huge differences in 2025.

Starting point is 00:32:57 Uh, you know, maybe just add to, those positions as I get more more information. Okay, business updates. Late checkout agency, which is our design agency that builds new products for the biggest brands in the world from Shopify to Nike to Dropbox, had a great year. It had an absolutely great year.

Starting point is 00:33:27 And I think we really hit our stride, especially as we've designed some of the biggest AI products. Because people were coming to us and, you know, years ago, literally, and saying, hey, like, you know, we're Dropbox and, you know, we're cloud, you know, we're looking for a new AI product. We want to build a new AI product. So we would build it for them. We would design it for them.

Starting point is 00:33:52 We would help them to think through a lot of these things. So I would say there that, um, 20, you know, it was a good year. Like the lesson there, I think is, especially with agencies in general, is like you do need a niche down. I feel like we found our two niches in 2024, which is building new products. I call them community-based products. So what is a community-based product?

Starting point is 00:34:20 It's like, we'll basically go into your community and build them a website, an app, a new product that really speaks to that community. it drives revenue and drives word of mouth, and then just AI interfaces. We've become known as an AI interface, an AI interface agency, and we are just booked up. We are so, so booked up. We'll probably do more partnering with some of the big AI companies and just basically take some cash and some equity as a part of those deals. So we did a little bit of that in 2024, and we'll continue to do that in 2025. And which really cool about that is the cost, you know, are covered.

Starting point is 00:35:11 And then you basically just get upside in these, you know, really, really fast-growing businesses. They're not even startups at this point. And then you just build that portfolio. and I'm very excited about that. I don't think a lot of people, I don't think a lot of people are doing, you know, equity for services. And we're very specific on, you know,

Starting point is 00:35:39 there's only a few companies in the world that we'll do it with. And they need to be multi-billion dollar companies, but I expect to do more of that. Okay. Oh, and by the way, LATE checkout agency, we actually kind of like rebranded to LCA.

Starting point is 00:35:54 I don't know if it was a good thing. honestly I don't know if we should have just kept it late checkout agency or just call it LCA. We did like a whole rebranding thing, effort. You know, it's definitely fun to rebrand.

Starting point is 00:36:11 But like, did we need to do it? Does late checkout agency, is that a better name? But I'm, you know, I'm starting to get used to LCA, but I do notice that people still call us late checkout or lay checkout agency. So I don't know. that's a question mark.

Starting point is 00:36:30 That's me being real with you. This is me having that friend-to-friend conversation. Who knows there? Okay, next business update is boring. So boring marketing, at the end of 2023, we had started to scale it. It was doing millions of dollars a year of revenue, AI-assisted SEO. And it continues to do that. It continues to scale.

Starting point is 00:36:58 We're starting to use a lot more agents, and they're not even starting to use. The implementation of Boringmarketing.com has a lot more agents and a lot more AI and a lot more proprietary technology that we built. Okay. So, you know, what you're going to get from us in 2025 is just more tools that you can use on your own. So you won't need to, you won't need to sign up to this. the service to actually

Starting point is 00:37:29 to get the the amazing result of of boring marketing.com. That was one of the key insights, I guess, for 2024. Some people have their own SEO teams or have their own marketing teams and are just like, I just

Starting point is 00:37:46 want to implement myself. And it's like, okay, great. So we're building a, we're unbundling a lot of the product. So in early 2025, you'll see some cool stuff. there. We also launch Boringads.com. So Boringads.com is crushing it, absolutely crushing it. And it's the same idea, which is like AI assisted for, you know, creative and the best possible

Starting point is 00:38:19 ads. Because the reality is, you know, meta and a lot of, you know, the platforms, like, they do a good good enough job at actually managing it but it's like how do you actually create how do you actually analyze you know the the best industry and competitive ads to find winning creative strategies fast and I think um it's just starting it's really really starting to pay off and work we spent a hundred million dollars in ad spend um we've scaled you know billion brands in 2024. This is going to be a killer business. It already is a killer business, but I wouldn't be surprised if boring ads

Starting point is 00:39:01 becomes bigger than boring marketing. And you'll see the same sort of approach, which is, you know, we start with, you know, we start with consulting to figure out the problem. Then we build technology to optimize our workflows to be ahead of everyone else. Then we, yeah, we basically sell that into our consulting clients. They start getting really good results. Word of mouth goes like crazy. I mean, the word of mouth of, like, I'm boring marketing and boring ads.

Starting point is 00:39:34 The word of mouth is absolutely insane. Like, I got a note in our Slack yesterday that we have 76 booked meetings in the next couple weeks just for boring marketing. And I'm sure boring ads probably has more. So it feels really good not to have a lead problem. And just like it feels really good to have customers have great experiences and just tell other people. So I think what will happen with boring ads is again, same sort of thing with boring marketing is we'll unbundle some of these ad tools that people would be able to use themselves. So we're ready doing that.

Starting point is 00:40:11 Stay tuned. And what's happened is now we have boring ads. boring marketing is now under a new company called Boring Holdings. So it's essentially we incubated a holding company. So it's pretty meta. We have Lay Checkout, which is a holding company that owns LCA, owns Boring Holdings. So that's an interesting thing that's happened here in 2024. Okay, business updates.

Starting point is 00:40:43 And you probably need a robot. You probably need a robot was a newsletter, was a newsletter that 60,000 people signed up to you to get information about AI and how to use it to become a better solopreneur, better an entrepreneur. And we shut it down. So we shut it down. Well, we shut down. Yeah, we shut down.

Starting point is 00:41:11 You probably need a robot as is and turned it into, you know, added it to a business is that we already had running called Startup Empire. Now, what is Startup Empire? A lot of you already know what Startup Empire is. It's a membership that people sign up to, who want to accelerate their ideas, who want to build businesses. There's a ton of contents there, tools there, community there.

Starting point is 00:41:41 In some ways, it's almost like the de facto membership for this podcast. and there's like million plus dollars a year in savings and discounts for tools. You get a free school membership, which is worth $99 a month, and people pay $149 a month to be a part of it. And it's really designed to essentially break even. But for us, like the late checkout team, to basically hire from there buy companies, invest companies, stay connected. And what we basically realize is like the startup empire monthly email was so similar

Starting point is 00:42:27 to the you probably need a robot monthly email. It's like why are we dividing and conquering? And how do you simplify that in a way that just makes sense? So we just basically said, okay, we're going to bring that email into startup empire. we're already doing so much of the same stuff, which is like people in startup empire are interested in using AI and agents to build their businesses.

Starting point is 00:42:54 Let's bring it in there. So it was a win for the startup empire community because now of a sudden they got more content and they're getting better emails. And it was a win for late checkout in the sense that dude every time you add a new company it's just like another trial that you have to manage so if we can simplify things that's something we really want to do um so that is what happened with you you probably need a robot did it fail i mean it failed as is um but like is it succeeding in some form yes like

Starting point is 00:43:43 startup empire. People are getting tons of value out of it. And it's nice to see it live on. Designscientist.com. So that is a design subscription that people pay monthly for and they get on-demand decks, on-demand, social assets, that sort of thing. That business did, you know,

Starting point is 00:44:15 I think around 1.3 million in revenue. So it has some staying power, like people like the product, but that is being evolved into something else. I'm not ready to talk about what that is going to be. But there's some product market fit there, but I think it could be a lot bigger and in the current setup, you know, current setup, I don't, I don't see it, I don't see it getting to 10 million.

Starting point is 00:44:51 And it's like one of those things where it's like, you have to ask yourself, if this gets to $10 million, like, do I want to be in that business? Like, do I want to have a thousand, you know, eight, it's not a thousand clients. Do I want to have 200 clients I'm managing? And the answer is absolutely not. So it's a helpful exercise for people to basically ask yourself, you know, if the scales, do I want to be in that business? Oh, if not, what is the business that I want to be in? And that's what that's the current exercise that we're doing with design scientists. We actually have an offsite, Jan 6 to 9th, where we're going to be talking with all the partners of Lake Checkout, what we're going to be doing with it. So stay tuned. So that's the business update of all the businesses. And overall, super happy with how things are going. I mean, they're cash-filling businesses every single day,

Starting point is 00:45:55 spinning off cash, great teams, teams happy. We don't have like a lead problem, which is really good. It's just about fine-tuning, optimizing, and scaling these businesses to being, businesses that have more enterprise value, less services driven, more AI driven, working with more cool companies, and looking to acquire and partner with interesting entrepreneurs. That's something that, you know, boring, for example,

Starting point is 00:46:31 came out of a 50% acquisition that we made in December 2020. We want to do more of these things. We want to find entrepreneurs. to partner with and build businesses with. I want to do more of that in 2025. And I didn't really mention it, but we're also incubating a bunch of new products. I talked about offerbunton.com,

Starting point is 00:46:58 which is kind of like a little widget to help you sell your company. And there's things like that that we're incubating. So we have like a little dedicated team that's incubating a bunch of different products, using AI coding, using agents. And it's one of those things where you throw stuff against the wall and you see what works and you evolve them into something that you're excited about.

Starting point is 00:47:27 And that's what it is. That's like the big learning from running a holding company is that. You throw a lot against the wall. You make a cash flowing. you evolve it into something that excites you. You simplify it wherever you can. You know, last year, 2023, going to 2024, I said my main mission is to build skyscrapers, not strip malls, which what I mean by that is instead of having like a hundred little companies, how do we have only a few companies and build it up higher and higher? And that's kind of

Starting point is 00:48:04 what we're doing. We're trying to simplify as much as possible. And we're kind of asking ourselves, the hard questions around, are we excited about these businesses? And if not, how do we evolve them into something that really gets us stowed? Okay, moving on to the next section, productivity gains and productivity unlocks, 24. What's the things I've changed? One is, I started sipping on Yerba Mate. Okay, I got to be honest, this is coffee, but Yerba Mate. to drink in the afternoons.

Starting point is 00:48:41 I drink a brand called Amanda traditional. I think it's Amanda Traditional. I can include the links in the description. And I just, I find I sleep better because I'm not like drinking coffee in the afternoon. I get the energy kick from it. It's more sustained. The way I drink it is over ice with a little bit of honey because it's a bit bitter. You can also use maple syrup, syrup, shout out Canada. And I've been enjoying it.

Starting point is 00:49:17 So I highly recommend your Bermate. Number two, I started using Apple Notes way more. So from 2023 into 2024, I was using Notion for everything. Our whole business is run on Notion. Our team likes it. I'm not hating on Notion. But, for me, it's too complicated. And Apple Notes is like the bare minimum of what I need. And I just find I'm extremely more productive with

Starting point is 00:49:48 Apple Notes. It's simplified my thinking process. So highly recommend just like simplifying your productivity stack if you can. The last thing is I used an app called

Starting point is 00:50:04 Things on my phone and And on desktop, it's a to-do list app. It's just like the most beautiful to-do list app I've been able to find. And I've honestly have had things since 2011, but I haven't really been using it. I've used more complicated to-do list apps. And again, like you're hearing it again. It's like simplification things.

Starting point is 00:50:36 It's just, it's very focused. It's a really pretty app, and it's been really helpful in terms of productivity gains for 24. Okay. Another section, new insights and learnings. I wanted to share a couple of these with you. So there's something I called the Friday afternoon test. I didn't make it up, a friend of mine told me about it. he basically is a CEO of a few hundred million dollar company and he says he only makes big decisions on Friday afternoon. He says it feels right when you're tired and ready for the,

Starting point is 00:51:20 he says if it feels right when you're tired and ready for the weekend, it's probably right. But that was really interesting. So a lot of the time you make these big decisions when you're in the most, moment and you're really stoked. You've got a lot of coffee in you and you're like, this is amazing. Let's go. Take a second. Don't make any impulsive decisions. Let it like sit for a bit. And when you're tired and ready for the weekend, let's say it's a Friday afternoon, how are you feeling about it? Are you still really excited about it? Are you more excited about it? Are you less excited about it? And maybe it doesn't need to be Friday afternoon for some people.

Starting point is 00:52:07 Some people could be 6 p.m. on a Wednesday, right? You're like trying to get through it. But I think the point is have that, you know, weekly reminder, Friday afternoon, Wednesday night, whatever it is for you. And ask yourself, you know, is this the big decisions I need to make this, you know, this month. Maybe it's not a weekly meeting. Maybe it's a once a month. These are the big decisions I need to make. are I excited about it?

Starting point is 00:52:39 And the same founder actually gave me another insight in learning. He calls it the day zero integrity test. So he gives someone a small task with unclear instructions. And then he basically sees if they ask any questions or they just guess. And he tells, what's, what's, cool about that is it tells you everything about their future behavior. So this is for like when you're interviewing someone or it's their first week on the job. Just give a small task with unclear instructions and you'll learn a lot about how someone works. And I guess my last kind of insight, and this

Starting point is 00:53:26 is going to be obvious to people, but like I don't know if I can sleep with all this like AI agent stuff that's going on. You know, like, I. My insight here is there's a ton of opportunity right now. And some of the biggest opportunities are in the most boring spaces. So I'm just trying to strike while the iron's hot. I think the iron's going to be hot for at least 2025, maybe even 2026. But it's a really, really exciting time to be building. And I want to thank you for being with me in 2024.

Starting point is 00:54:13 This has been the most fun year of my career. It's been so fun recording this podcast, having people listen, seeing the comment section blow up. Thank you for being there. Thank you for commenting. Thank you for liking. Thank you for subscribing. Thank you for just thank you. you. Thank you. And this year, I will give more startup ideas, more growth tactics. I will never

Starting point is 00:54:45 gatekeep anything from you. This is not about gatekeeping. This is not about gatekeeping. This is about just giving you free value. So I hope that in 2024 I gave you an ounce of free value. And I hope this conversation, you enjoyed this conversation. this is this is this is this is it this is what I'm going through in 2020 at the end of 2024 these are the things I'm thinking about and I'm curious to know what what's on your mind so thank you for listening and see you in 2025

The Startup Ideas Podcast - My 2024 Year in Review

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