The Startup Ideas Podcast - Personal Holding Companies: Build vs. Buy?

Episode Date: August 17, 2023

Today Greg is joined by Nick Huber. In the last 9 months, Nick has co-founded 6 companies in addition to Bolt Storage. In this episode, Nick and Greg break down the inner workings of a personal holding company and how to grow it at max speed with minimal risk. ►►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/@gregisenbergaLINKS FOR THIS EPISODE:Production Team:https://www.bigoceanpodcasting.comNick Huberhttps://sweatystartup.com/SHOW NOTES:0:00 - Intro3:23 - Twitter as a network accelerant 8:15 - Personal Holding Companies 10112:10 - Buy vs. Build20:22 - Nick asks Greg for constructive feedback26:39 - Avoid mental overload as a multipreneur30:27 - Substack vs. ConvertKit

Sweaty startup, Nick Huber, the man who needs no introduction. Greg, what's up, man? You need no introduction because you are a staple of the internet. You've upset enough people on the internet that the people that hate you, hate you, but the people that love you, love you. I think in order to get people to really be a fan, you have to take a stance on something, right? If you're just middle down the road, everybody thinks you're decent and nobody really likes you that much. It's kind of a tough, I think that's a tough position to be in if you're going to,

you got to pick a side online, I think, right? You do have to pick a side if you want to say something worthwhile and interesting. But you on the other hand seem like you're, you know how to rile up the crowds. Is that fair to say? I think one of the most fascinating phenomenon to me is that a human being could be going about their day, doing whatever they want. They're living their life. Most of them are in America where you can literally do whatever you want to be doing. You're either with people you chose to be around. You're in a place that you chose to move into. You're working a job that you took a job offered to do. And you're going to open up Twitter and you're going to see something that some stranger named Nick Huber put on the internet.

And you're going to get upset by that. Upset to the point where you're going to take time out of your day to just spew out a bunch of mean things or tell your friends or talk about it or just have these negative thoughts floating around your head totally mind blowing to me. I didn't know that such a large percentage of people were that easily influenced by things that just don't matter at all and are not in their control. It's not that it's not that it's Nick Huber saying it. It's just that people have strongly held beliefs. And then when you say something that's against that belief, that really upsets people. I think it goes back to like human beings or tribal. and it feels like you're attacking them, even though you're always like joking about it.

For example, like tell people about the deck tweet. Yeah, I made a tweet that said, I found this stupid picture of a contractor who put a deck on half of a slide glass door on a second level. So literally half the slide glass door, the window part of it was facing outside straight to the ground. But on the other half, there was a deck where one 200 pound person would take up the whole deck. I would get out there and nobody could stand there with.

me on that deck. And I made a tweet that said, hey, just installed this at one of my rental properties. I raised the rent, you know, from $900 to $1,500. The tenant moved out, of course, but I was able to release it at the new higher price right away. Like, this is the key to value creation and wealth building or something stupid. And I, and also just a lot of people hate landlords, man. A lot of people think that residential real estate should be an entitlement and not a for-profit business. So that one really, really took off. And took off, like, how many people saw it? 20 million people saw it. So, I don't know. A third of the daily active users on Twitter probably saw that tweet at some point or the other. And what does that translate into dollars and business?

Like, why, why do a tweet like that? You know, are you doing it for fun or are you actually, like, this will get my name out there. It'll translate into dollars. So there is something to be said for the fact that the tweet after, if you add value, if you teach somebody something, it will be seen by more people. Because if you're scrolling down through Twitter and you avoid and you see a Nick Huber post, but you just continue to scroll on, Elon is a lot less likely to show you the next Nick Huber tweet for sure. Like, hey, you just saw one of these. You didn't click on it. So we're not going to show you. But if you go through and you click on somebody's tweet, you're going to see more of that person. It happens all the time. So even my true followers,

the people who are into business, the people I'm after, they'll click on the deck tweet just to read the replies because the replies are hilarious. So the next tweet then, if I add a lot of value or if I pitch something or something or the other, it'll get seen by more people. There's kind of an afterburn of engagement. But yeah, there's no massive follower gain.

And now, unfortunately, on Twitter, you have a ton of people trying to do it. And they kind of just, maybe that's what I look like too, but they kind of look like idiots when they don't do it right. So we have a friend, Julian, Shapiro. He tweets like once a quarter now. And the reason why he got Twitter is because he was like, there's a bunch of really smart people on Twitter and I want those people to read my tweets. It's the same reason why we all got on. And not even to read my tweets, but also that I

can go and reach out to these really smart people, send them a DM and be like, hey, do you want to grab coffee or whatever? It's a network accelerant. network accelerate now when you're creating tweets that upset a lot of people you might get blocked and some of those people that might block you those are the people that you set out to attract initially so i think a julian will use twitter very differently today than he would a few years ago because he's like i'm only when i drop something on twitter it is going to be fire like it is going to be super well research. It's going to be like nothing else out there.

It's going to be a unicorn. You're going to love it. And he doesn't want to play those algorithmic games. Whereas it feels like what you are playing a little bit of algorithmic games when you're tweeting. I should I should absolutely be more disciplined on Twitter. Absolutely. I'll say that.

Like there is not a method to this madness all the time. I half the tweets are doing nothing for Nick Huber. brand. There's nothing to gain by making a lot of these tweets. That's for sure. But like the people who block me, I think that's, that's also kind of, there's an advantage there. Like I'm, I'm weeding out the people who don't get my sense of humor for one thing. Take it too personally, politically, totally disagree with me. And people that I wouldn't maybe jive with over time anyway. I'm kind of weeding those folks out. So I don't mind, I don't mind having a couple of true fans and a lot of people who just, okay, Nick's, Nick's not for me. And that's perfectly fine. And the truth is,

even if you're not saying anything controversial, like, I don't consider my tweets to be controversial, but people block me all the time. So this morning, a buddy mine sent me a tweet and so I go and click on the tweet and I see, I can't see it. That's the best. And I, and I'm like, who's this guy, Tom? Because I can't see it. I had to see it. to check it out in incognito mode. It's Tom Sweeney. And I was like, who's Tom Sweeney? He's the CEO of Epic Games. It's like a 20 plus billion dollar company. And all of a sudden, I'm like, why did Tom Sweeney block me on Twitter? Like, what did I say such that Tom Sweeney, a guy I've never met with, A, I've never met with him before. B, I've never replied or liked any of his tweets. And also, he's

you know, Epic Games up until very recently was a client of late checkout as well. And it was a great experience. So it's like, don't go on Twitter unless you're prepared to have some of your heroes block you. 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, go press subscribe. Thank you. Enjoy the rest of the show.

I want to shift gears a little bit and talk more about the Nick Huber world, because it isn't just at sweaty startup on Twitter anymore. There's a bunch of accounts that you're a part of and businesses that you've created on top of it. I've talked a lot about recently about multi-preneurship, which is this idea around how do you create a company that creates companies? And that's something that you're doing and doing really well. Just like you, I mean, I'm a huge fan of stuff that doesn't scale. entrepreneurship, everybody talks about scalability, everybody talks about raising capital, about moats, about, you know, world-changing ideas.

I think that if you have a competitive advantage in one area, you can do regular things that other people do and make really good money. And it can become life-changing money, as you've seen with some of the agencies that you've built. And I think it's been really interesting to see our group of friends, you, me, some of our other friends, six other guys who are similarly. driven similar growth strategies all supporting each other and all kind of shift towards repeatable boring not that scalable businesses but that when you play the game at a at a big level and you know how to delegate you know how to market you know how to sell and you have

distribution you can attract talent you can build teams just amazing things can happen I think you and me have been cheering each other on you know since the very beginning of like people are sleeping on agencies people are sleeping on these businesses that don't scale So you and I both are kind of seizing the opportunity. Yeah. And, you know, we can say who's in the group. So it's me, you, Sahel Bloom, Sean Puri, Sam Parr, Nikita Beer, Austin.

And Austin Reef. That's it, right? Julian was a part of the group and he left. But it was amicable. So it's interesting because a lot of that group is, traditionally been like a venture backed type mentality. Like I raise venture capital, Sam raised money for his, you know, for the hustle. Sean has raised venture, Austin raised venture, Saho was in a P fund. And it's interesting that we've all kind of just had a collective

aha moment, which was distribution matters and just building trust as much as possible on these platforms and then what's a non-venture-backable business, at least to start, that you can build? You know, people call it boring businesses, people call it not scalable. But, you know, Shepard is a great example of something that could scale, right? Like, that's a business that could be really big. Yeah, it's not that we're not starting businesses that could be really big. I think there's examples in all of our, in everything that we are doing, from Sam to Austin, to you to me to Sean, all the businesses that we're going after, there's examples of massive companies. There's examples of companies that do, you know, 25, 50, 100 plus million dollars a year of revenue.

So we're not talking, we're not necessarily talking like a small one-man solopreneur journey here. We're just talking about stuff that's already been done before. Like this stuff has all been done. There's marketing agencies. There's pay-for-click agencies. But if you do it well, you're a good salesperson. You're good at building teams. magic happens. And all of us kind of got that. It hit us all at the same time. And we were kind of

on a race to do boring shit and make as much money as possible. It's been really fun to watch everybody crush it. I feel like the majority of people in this group chat now have, now have like offshoring agencies. Yeah. Austin's got one. Shonson shufford. Yeah. It's a yeah, I mean, there's great business models and there's poor business models. And we can all tell the difference. Totally. I want to talk about buying a business for a second. So at the end of 2022, we bought a business and out of that business was incubated our fastest growing property right now, which is boringmarketing.com, which started off as an AI technology that we ended up spinning up to help brands with SEO. And now I'm hooked on this idea around what else could

I buy because not only are you buying the assets, but you're really buying a team of operators who have systems and processes. And you can just like on day one lean into it. So my question to you is you want to be buying more businesses. Like what's your framework for thinking about what to buy, how to buy it, what price to buy it at. And as much detail is you're willing to share. Buying a business is exciting to me because there is nothing harder than the first seven or eight months of a service business startup. I own R.E. Koseg, which is doing 150 grand a month now and has reached escape velocity and is going to be an amazing asset. It's a life-changing business that Mitchell Baldridge, myself, Dan and Mitchell's wife, Mel, have started. but still at the six-month mark, the six-month mark,

we had a phone call where our operator is near tears. We're selling, we're selling 50 grand a week of cost segs, and we can only deliver 10 grand a week of cost segs. We're having massive bottlenecks inside the organization of actually delivering. We had overloaded the company with business. We were doing a good job promoting on Twitter, and it was exploding. but that was really, really hard and really, really stressful, as sleepless nights for me as a non-operating partner.

And hell for our operating partner, which is Mitchell's wife, Mel. We got through it. She's a badass. The company's going well. But the idea of buying a company that has got that part covered, that is extremely intriguing to me. So how I will think about buying businesses will be the same way that I'm thinking about starting them, which is turning.

my cost centers, like looking at my profit and loss statement and looking at where I'm spending money. And the interesting part is, like, if you look at the 10 businesses that I've started, eight of them were businesses that I was spending money on it at Bolt Storage, property and casualty insurance, debt brokerage, cost segs, SEO link building, performance marketing, website development, recruiting. All these things were things that I needed as a business owner. And it turns out that if I need them as a business owner, then a lot of the business owners who follow me on Twitter for the management advice and trust me because they listen to my words, they read my newsletter, they listen to my podcast, whatever it might be. They'll need the same type of things that I need. So it's a comfort thing. And I also needed the personal cash flow. Like the personal cash flow is new to me. Like having liquidity, having money in the bank is new. A way to risk at all, in my opinion, was to buy a business that was too big and the turnaround fails. And all of a sudden, I'm personally guarantee. the people that I raise money from are pissed. I've ruined a reputation. So I'm just now getting to the point where my personal monthly cash flow is starting to stack up enough where I can take some swings.

But I also, I'm kind of thinking about my, you know, Mick Huber holding company as a, as an accumulation of talent. I'm trying to get talented operators in. I'm trying to get to know them, get to know their strengths, get to know what they're good at. How good are they at building teams? How good are they at, you know, doing these things inside these companies? And over the course of a year, two years, three years, while we're collecting money while we're building the bank roll, I'm building this rolodex of operators that I can, you know, okay, maybe Web Run didn't work, but I know that Will at Web Run is one of the best, you know, team builders on the agency side that I know. So I'm going to go with Will. I'm going to buy a company. I'm laying the groundwork of businesses that all companies need.

Every company needs a link building service. Every company needs paid ad support. Every company he needs these things. You know, the cash flow allows me to buy them. The services allow me to accelerate them and I can own and hold them and either sell them or like my five year goal is to build my Rolodex full of badass operators that I know and trust. They've come in. They've shown me what they can do. And I think that's kind of the underrated part of me starting these companies. Yes, I talked to Andrew Wilkinson on the phone a couple days ago and he's like, Nick, what are you doing, man? You're starting all these companies. You've got to just go buy them. You're playing the game on hard mode. And he basically said, your ability to go buy these companies is going to be dependent on who

and how you can hire the operating, the management teams. I was actually sitting in this seat in 2020 when I spoke to Andrew Wilkinson, when I was just starting late checkout. And he gave me basically the same advice. Greg, I don't understand. Why are you starting so many companies? Why are you building so many products? Just go and buy them. And my reaction to Andrew, was yeah, but it's so much fun going zero to one and building from scratch. Like I love coming up with the name, coming up with the brand, do the positioning, like the zero to one. And while I'll always love that, he was right. Like it took me a few years to realize, you know what? Like, okay, you know, if going zero to one is art, going one to end is more

science and playing only in zero to one is a bit of a mistake when there's no reason why you or I can't be doing both. We can still be incubating and buying. If you try to start on third base, if you try to start by just buying a big company and turning it around when you've never operated a small company, you've never started a company, you've never built teams, you don't have a ton of experience delegating. It's really hard. But I'm looking forward to these new challenges. And Andrew is absolutely right. You and I are both. seeing the light that you can buy companies and you can pull a couple of levers and create millions of dollars out of thin air of equity value and cash flow. That's, that's exciting. I think you and I are both

going to love that. We're going to love it. You're already proving that you can do it. I'm excited to challenge myself and try to do it, but I'm not there yet. How do you think about what is the right size in terms of purchase price for the first deal? I would buy a company now that has two or three hundred grand of EBITDA. I mean, that's enough. That's enough. That's enough to you know, hire some decent people. They don't have a management team. At two or three hundred grand, the owner is the manager, but they have some people who can execute.

They have some client leads. They have some people who can deliver whatever the services they're delivering. I think that's a beautiful place to start because it can be really low risk. You can get a business really cheap and seller finance almost all of it. And if it crashes and burns, then you hand the keys back and walk away. It gets tougher for the first one, especially if you go out and need to take an SBA loan for hundreds of thousands or millions of dollars and you've got to raise money for the equity. And it's not rocket science.

And I think that people can do it. Absolutely can be done. Especially if you know how to delegate and build teams. But it just seems riskier to me. But it came down to, hey, do I want to buy a business that does two or three hundred grand a year? Or do I want to just do the work in six months and get my own business there and save the four, six, seven hundred thousand dollars I'd have to buy that company for?

The assumption you're making there is that 100% of your bets. are going to make it there, but they're bets, right? Like, we incubate stuff all the time that fails. So, like, we'll often put 250 grand into something and try it, and it fails. Now, one of the things I'm learning is, like, all these starts and stops that you're doing, 250 grand here, 150 grand here, 100 grand here, 300 grand here, I'm kind of seeing the light where I'm like, actually, I want to do less incubation, reduce that budget, still do incubation, but reduce that budget and take that budget to actually just buy something that's working.

I got a question for you, Greg. You know me really well now. Yeah. We are friends. We've been talking weekly, almost daily for three years now. You've seen how I've evolved. You read my tweets. You follow along closely.

What could I be missing? What constructive feedback? I love it. I revel in it. And I'm not easily offended. Like, what do you think I'm done? doing wrong or what do you think I could do better or what blind spots do you think that I could have or what do you think five years from now I'll look back and say damn I wish I knew that and I

would have started doing that earlier now because I feel like you you are five years further ahead than me so so I think that you could be acquiring one to two companies per year and if you know in five years from now if you're acquiring one to two per year you have eight companies after after five years, I think two of them can be smashing successes, way bigger than anything you've incubated. I think that you're a finance guy at the core. You said seller financing, assuming that everyone is listening to this understands what that means. You understand your way around the books. So I think that because you understand distribution and the books and deals, to me, it makes total sense that you should be buying companies. If I were you, one thing I would

do is I wouldn't buy a $200,000, $300,000 EBITDA business. I would go and just say, how much is it to go to an MBA school cost? I don't know, 50 grand a year. So I'm going to take a budget, my MBA budget. It's going to be 50 grand. And I'm going to buy something for 50 grand. I'm going to do the negotiation myself. I'm going to, I'm just going to manage the whole process from A to Z. And I'm going to put an operator on it. And assuming this $50,000 investment goes to nothing, but just a way for you to test and hit the tires on this, you know, put it into your audience, see if they like it. And I would also not do a service-based business because I would also want to test what are other types of businesses that my audience would like. So I tweeted

at you a couple days ago. You were tweeting about Jobber and a few other SaaS products. And I always see you tweeting about these different SaaS products. And I'm kind of like, well, why don't you own one of these SaaS products? Like, you talk about how, you know, you're building businesses for you, but you're probably spending hundreds, thousands of dollars a month on these SaaS products that you could be owning and actually building for you. And as you know, the multiples on SaaS businesses are a lot higher than the multiples on service businesses. So if I were you, the number one thing I'd be doing is buying a cheap SaaS product, giving it to my audience, iterating from there,

writing my learnings after three or six months, and then say, okay, I did it for 50K, now let me try to buy something with $300 to $500,000 to $500,000 in EBITDA. That's good advice. Yeah, I need some SaaS products. I need them. I know that I know it's on my roadmap. I just need to take it more seriously. I think you're right.

And I said it because we're constantly incubating SaaS products. And the other thing that people don't talk about in SaaS line that much is that you can literally incubate a SaaS product in 30 days. You know, I'm old enough to remember like, you know, five years ago when you wanted any SaaS product, it was $2 million. It cost $2 million to build a SaaS product. That was like pre-product market fit. That's just like a product. And now it doesn't cost $2 million anymore. How much would it cost me to build a Google review aggregator?

Because I need Google reviews on every single one of my companies and 63 self-storage facility, you know, brick and mortar locations. I need a way to aggregate and automate getting Google reviews from customers. And so does my entire audience. So should I build that or should I find somebody who had tried to build it and couldn't get any customers and wants to sell it to me for, you know, under 100 grand? I mean, I would start with finding out if that exists somewhere else. One of the ways I typically do that is I go on product hunt. And product hunt has like a C. a failed failed.

So 99% of the products that are on product times have failed. And you might find something, you know, from 2015 or 2017 that actually looked really good. It's basically a dormant business. Operator might have just lost interest in it. you know, a lot of people lose interest in these businesses because they're just not seeing traction. So if you can come to them and be like, hey, I'm your traction guy. You're the product person. Like, help me revive this. I'll give you $50,000 to do it. And I'm going to give you upside. I think it's compelling. That's a good idea. I'll be on product time the rest of the

day. I also think that you could, you can also partner with other people, right? Like you can partner with a firm like ours where like we've done deals where we'll just take upside and sometimes a little bit of cash a little upside and partner with people you know we've partnered with Mr. Beast has night media and they've built some some products and we've partnered and took equity in some of those so I also think there's groups like ours like for people listening to this that like are interested but might not you know want to put out a lot of of money like cold call different agencies and partners and even if on their website it says they're not they don't do this stuff like you never know it's the same thing with hiring a potential employee right

someone might have a job but if you DM them or you send them a message who knows you might catch them on a day where they're having a bad day and they really like what you're doing and all of a sudden you're able to convince them to come join your team i like it the world is swimming with opportunity that's for sure it's almost like you can't you can't keep your head above water it's coming so fast sometimes. Do you ever feel like you're doing too many projects at the same time? Because every time I start a project, the analogy I use is it cuts my brain in another section. So if you think about it as like a pizza, you're cutting it in another slice and another slice and another slice and another slice and another slice. And it's a bit of mental overload. So sometimes, you know, I look at what you're doing

And I'm like, whoa, this guy's like, we're working on a lot of projects. Is that just me or how do you feel about it? Yeah, I'm an overdelegator to the extreme, meaning I'm not going to interact with any of the customers. I'm not going to have an email address for the company. I'm not going to have a job in the company or I'm pissed off. And that's a blessing and a curse. It's a curse because, you know, it's 80% as good as it would be if I were doing it myself. I could do it myself better.

But it's a blessing because I can take more shots and I can invest in an operator who I know is awesome. I mean, an example is my property and casualty insurance company, which could be the biggest of all my businesses in 10 years. The CEO of that company is my business partner, Dan Hagberg, who I went to college with and founded the storage company with and owns half my real estate portfolio. And I know he's a killer. And I have not been on one meeting. I have not done anything at all for that company, except ask him on the fourth hole of a golf course, oh, hey, by the way, how's, how's Titan Risk going?

Other companies are different. Like, not all operators are as competent as Dan. But in a way, like, they're, they're impressing me. Like, these people that are running these companies, they're impressing me. Like, I don't need to talk to the guy who runs my recruiting company, but once a month, and we've done $76,000 of revenue in the first three months, and recruiting cycle is like long.

Recruing sales cycle is long. So I don't know. I think I will pull the plug on some, but none of them right now are like, damn, this is the one I probably am going to need to pull the plug on. I like it. I like being able to check in.

I like looking at the new leads and all the companies. I like it's kind of addicting to kind of look at the trajectory and the tough part. But yeah, then there's stressful. Then there's stressful parts, of course. It's like one of these companies did some work for my company and it didn't go well. And Dan's like,

hey, Nick, I need to give you some feedback. this was fucking shitty. Like, we're going to fire your company here if they don't get their stuff together. I'm like, oh, damn it. That's stressful. So, yeah, it's not all without, it's not all without its stress. That's for sure.

But I still spend 10 hours a week on the golf course and 10 hours a week working on my personal brand. And I hang on my family a lot, you know, so I feel like I have a decent balance. But I'm definitely, I'm definitely working hard right now. That's for sure. I like the rule of I don't have an email address. Mm-hmm. It creates this distance between you and the business.

And I think Andrew does this really well, Andrew Wilkinson, which I think he got from Charlie Munger and Warren Buffett, which is it's all about the operator and we respect and support the operator. And we're here to help. But we're not really here to be in the day to day. Like if we're, if I'm here in the day to day, then there's an issue with the operating team. Yep.

And they're varying level of investments too. Like the property and casualty insurance is a money suck right now. I'm personally investing 30 grand a month into that one. The business brokerage is another 30 grand a month. And I'm just, I'm investing because I believe in those companies, but it's just a longer sales cycle and permitting and requirements and, you know,

getting paid on a deal closing when you start a business brokerage. You know, best case scenario is six to nine months after you start the business. So definitely varying levels of personal investment. What about email, email newsletters as a form of, you know, nurturing leads? You know, you have a really big newsletter that I subscribe to. I love it. You send weekly emails. And in the emails, you know, you highlight some of your companies. Are you thinking about having individual newsletters for your companies? And is that a big part of the strategy? No, we, we've thought about it. I've had operators bring it up that they want to start writing a newsletter and I just can't see the value of building

a whole other audience and being responsible for a whole other newsletter when I can, you know, yesterday's, or Monday's email, I highlighted bold SEO in the top of the email. We got 24 leads, 24 leads. Our sales guys booked up for the whole week. Like his whole week's schedule, he's got six calls a day now. So yeah, it's, it's my newsletter is the core strategy. Like Twitter's awesome. The individual Twitter accounts are awesome. We can, you know, reach our customers pretty well on Twitter, but email is where I can really, really, really drive value. I don't do any outside advertising on my newsletter. I don't let anybody pay for spots on my newsletter. I take up all my own space really inside of these companies now. And it's, so far, it's working pretty well. Some,

some services are harder to sell than others, but some of them, just a lot of business owners need, which is a blessing. Your newsletter is on ConvertKit. Yep. Love ConvertKit. You? Yeah, so right now I'm thinking, I'm thinking about switching from substack to convert kit. Sell me on why I should move from substack to ConvertKit.

Convert kit is really good link tracking. I can change the links after I send emails out. I can stack sequences on. So I know that if somebody clicks on the bold SEO link, I can then drip them. three more emails over the next week about SEO services because I know they're a pretty warm lead even though they didn't fill out the form on bold SEO.com. So yeah, it's just the customizable if you're if you're going to start promoting and selling on your newsletter, it's really good for that. I don't even utilize it fully. But then there's the creator network of like everybody being able to

recommend each other that you know the quality of the emails aside. I know that three out of four might be a total joke. You were, you were bringing up some stuff this week about how it could, it could be getting just a lot of confusion among people, not even knowing they're signing up for my email list, but that's still been, I've still noticed like a uptick in like the sales, which are important to me. And at two or three bucks an email, it's worth that. So yeah, it's all convert kit just does a good job, but Behive substack, they're all, they're all doing similar stuff now too. So yeah, the, Beehive, we use Beehive for you probably need a robot, which are our AI newsletter. And it's really amazing for just like you want to get a message out there and you want to push it out in a really beautiful way.

And I love at the end of each Beehive newsletter, you can say like, do you like it? Did you not like it? And there's almost like a common section. You get to understand how valuable the email was to someone. And that's my favorite part about Beehive. but if you're actually trying to sell stuff convert kit with the automations i.e. like what you're saying you click this

therefore i'm going to put you in this drip fomo sequence of you know teaching people about SEO for example before they buy it right there's so many people who might click on your SEO link or your ra cossag link and just not be ready to buy so they're in this phase And it's like, how do you nurture them and build trust during that time so that, you know, maybe after the five email sequence, they're, they're ready to make the jump.

The most valuable part for me, I haven't even really utilized, like my marketing team, we have a plan to really utilize these sequences to like you're saying, nurture these leads. I don't do it well yet. What's the, like, lead magnets are like the best way that I can get high value people on my newsletter. Like, hey, here's a PDF. It's free. All you got to do is give me your email. Here's some awesome copy on Twitter.

Why you should click the link and why you should get it. I wish I could share my screen and just show you like all my, I can track all my pages, all my lead magnets. I can see how many people visited the page, how many people signed up through that lead magnet. It tagged them. So I know which of my subscribers came from like a really high value real estate. Like somebody who signs up through like, hey, here's the 20 aspects of closing a real

estate deal. I know that the 450 people who signed up through that lead magnet, they're in the real estate game. They're valuable. Those followers are worth 20 bucks a pop or more. But I know that the people who clicked on like, oh, here's a list of 200 plus business ideas. I know that they're all entrepreneurs.

And that's fine too. But I have all that like separated inside of ConvertKit. And I can post these lead magnets on a schedule over and over and over again. And I can track how many people are signing up on each one, which ones are hitting, how they're hitting, like different copy changes and stuff like that. So substack have like no, dude, like no, not even close. Like not even close.

Substack is the fastest way to get up and running if you want to create a newsletter. So when I'm doing anything, if I'm trying to post on TikTok, if I'm trying to, and I don't post on TikTok, if I'm trying to post on Instagram and I don't post on Instagram, if I'm trying to buy a business and I'm not, and I've never bought a business, I always. ask myself, what is the path of least resistance so that I can see if I like this thing. So I chose substack, you know, three, four years ago because it was so easy to do. I got set up in 30 seconds. Now, you know, I think it's important for people to, in whatever it is they're doing, to quarterly or yearly ask themselves, like, what is change between now and then? And for me, personally, what has changed is I now have 70 plus.

thousand subscribers. I'm also selling some of my services within my email newsletter. And my open rate is starting to really go up and my clickly rate is going up. So I'm starting to really build trust with people. And subsect just doesn't give me the tools. I need, you know, the tagline for ConvertKit should be take email seriously. Like if ConvertKit hired lay checkout our design and branding agency, we would probably do something around that. And we would try to own the category of taking email seriously. I mean, my dream, to be honest, is a mix of beehives design and like poles with convert kits serious automations. Like that's my dream. I wonder, yeah, it was amazing to watch convert kit just take over drip. Like drip used to be the

one. Like three years ago, Dmit's. grip was the only one people used and it's just been a slow move to convert kit but i wonder when nathan is going to add you know the the design forward front end to convert it it would be easy to to do those polls and i mean i hit him up i hit him up the other day and i was like dude hire lay checkout we'll crush it for you so maybe soon i'll tell them to hire i'll text them right now tell them to hire late check out i got a run but dude thank you for letting me and everyone take a peek inside your multi-printerer brain. I think the world of you and you're doing incredible stuff.

And I can't wait to see what you build over the next three years. And bye. I appreciate it, man. You're a pretty serious influence in my life and I look up to you a lot and I appreciate the fact that you want to see me win, man. And I want to see you win and I know you're crushing it. So I appreciate you having me on and thanks for everything. All right, man. I'll catch you later.

Where could people sign up to your newsletter? Yeah. I mean, the newsletter is how you get to know Nick Huber. I mean, I write a 1,500 word email every week about management, delegation, hiring, recruiting, building companies, real estate. So, yeah, go to sweaty startup.com and get on my newsletter. Love it. Later. Thanks, Greg.