The Startup Ideas Podcast - Personality-Market Fit with Nuseir Yassin

Episode Date: February 22, 2022

What could you do if you had access to 50 million people? Nuseir Yassin, the creator of Nas Daily and Nas Academy, is the perfect person to answer that question. Today's guest went from Venmo employee to YouTube star incredibly fast. His secret? The ability to assess personality-market fit and determine the likelihood of virality. In this episode, hosts Sahil Bloom (@sahilbloom) and Greg Isenberg (@gregisenberg) explore the future of the creator economy, a cool mental health service for social media personalities, and why the value of creators is only beginning to scratch the surface.Want more community? Learn more here: http://trwih.comSPECIAL THANKS TO OUR SPONSORSThis episode is brought to you by Tegus. Tegus is the fastest way for investors and M&A teams to learn everything they want to know about a company, all from an on-demand digital platform. Tegus is the most extensive source of instantly-available 1:1 conversations between investors and experts, covering companies from the seed stage to the public markets. Just log in for instant access to 25,000+ transcripts. They are offering you a free 2-week trial at www.tegus.co/room.This episode is also brought to you by OpenPhone. OpenPhone is an all-in-one business phone system that can help your startup look more credible—and it works right from your existing smartphone or computer. Each phone number comes with its own inbox for managing calls, texts, and voicemails together—making it easy to keep track of every conversation. Sign up and start using your new business number in minutes. Visit www.OpenPhone.co/room to save 20% on your first six months.

What up? How's it going, man? Ah, it's early for us. I feel like we normally do these in the evening, and I drink alongside them, but it's like the rare morning recording that we're doing right now. Yeah, so, but I know you're like super caffeinated, so I feel like you're ready to, you're ready to go. Well, I'm not as caffeinated as I otherwise would be, you know, for context, but this is like,

you know, morning after the Super Bowl. So I'm like, you know, a little hungover, um, got into it a little bit last night. And it's, it's early. This is actually my first cold brew of the day, which is pretty rare, and I'm only like a third of the way into it. So I actually, I feel like I need to need to get some energy going here. What do you got for me today to give me a little energy? I mean, I'm still thinking Super Bowl. Favorite Super Bowl ad, obviously the QR code, the bouncing around QR code.

Give me your take on that. So for people that don't have context or didn't watch the Super Bowl, there was an ad. basically it was a black screen and there was a QR code, which some people know what they are, some people don't, but basically this QR code was just like ping ponging around the screen in different colors. It was a, it was a Coinbase ad. And if you popped open your phone and scan the QR code, it took you to Coinbase. And it crashed the site. Like within two minutes, the site was down from all the traffic from, you know, 100 million people watching the Super Bowl and presumably a bunch of them logged into it at once and it took down the site. So what was your take on there?

I mean, so I'll give you my macro take and my micro take. So my macro take on the bouncing around QR code is it's an ode to, like, you remember in school when they used to like bring in a TV and we'd wait for like a video and it was that basically this like bouncing around image and it never hits the corners. And I think there's like an office episode actually that like talks that there's like a clip of it. Maybe we can put in the show notes where like the whole office is like. watching the screen and they're just kind of waiting for it.

Anyway, so the whole point is it's a nod to nostalgia. And I think like the macro thing is that nostalgia is one of the most powerful sales techniques of all time. And we saw that everywhere. That was the theme of the Super Bowl, in my opinion. Like the winner was nostalgia. So for example, like the halftime show like was nostalgia. you know, to the max.

So that's the macro. And then the micro, which is this particular ad, you know, I just think it's a brilliant way to get, you know, if they're going to spend $7 million on an ad and they're trying to get like 100,000 signups, like, yeah, it makes sense to put a QR code. And then it's like, yeah, it does make sense to like combine direct response plus nostalgia. So the stats on it are pretty staggering, by the way. I completely agree with you. the actual stats on the ad, which I looked up this morning, are crazy because they spent $14 million for the 60 second spot during the Super Bowl.

It was literally 60 seconds of this thing ping ponging around. And it crashed the site within a couple of minutes because of all the people going to it. The app went from being 186th in the world to second in the world overnight from running this ad during the Super Bowl. And so $14 million. And the return was that, that massive jump, plus all the earned media of people just talking about it constantly. We're sitting here talking about it, all the news articles this morning. I actually tweeted out something saying, if I were going to go drop a bold Super Bowl ad, I would probably pre-program my site to be down like two minutes after the thing dropped.

Because I personally think that the earned media of saying, oh, we crashed the site with our super bold ad that we ran is more valuable than the site being up and people being able to like do something on the site when they go to it because i think it extends the half life of that overall kind of ad impression for much longer than an otherwise would have been yeah i thought that was i i agree with you i also think that like you mentioned like the app store charts like one you know one thing about app store charts is once you hit the top of the charts like other people basically will be like oh what's you know we'll just be discovering the charts and be like oh what's coin base and so there's a certain amount of staying power that happens when you hit up and, you know, and you do what's called a, you know, that's called like a burst

marketing campaign where you go up and there's a certain amount of staying power. So overall, like, Coinbase, I mean, my guess is they crushed it on those ads in terms of numbers. It makes me, think, like, you know, for late checkout in our clients, like, should we be, like, taking out more TV ads, like, and throwing up QR codes? Are TV ads undervalued? Are you in your team still using your personal phone numbers for work? Do you call customers, partners, or candidates with your personal phone number? Do you find it hard to manage your work and personal calls when they're all mixed together on your smartphone? Well, we have a solution today, Open Phone. You can use Open Phone to get dedicated business phone number and keep all your work conversations separate and organized.

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You won't regret it. It's sort of interesting. I mean, with how expensive digital advertising has gotten, do you go back to the point of nostalgia, do you go back to doing the old way? I mean, we've seen it in consumer. I spent a lot of my time in consumer in my old job. the reemergence of things like direct mail and catalogs within consumer was fascinating because it was like, what's old is new, right?

You had all these people all of a sudden realizing it was so expensive to acquire customers online and spend money on Google and Facebook and all of those things. And so they went to sending direct mailers and like these beautiful catalogs that were really immersive and interesting. And that became the new way to acquire customers. It was the same thing with small footprint retail like three, four years ago. All these stores realized that it was more expensive to acquire customers. customers online than to put up a small, you know, store in Soho and have that be like a billboard

plus a place for them to create an immersive experience. But this feels like the next emergence of that. It was also very clear that crypto was kind of one of the themes of Super Bowl ads this year. You just have all these crypto companies that have raised so fucking much money and needed to find creative ways to deploy it. And it was kind of a cool coming out party for a lot of like Web3 crypto, the nouns thing that you've talked about in the past, that ad where they made an appearance in the Budweiser ad. It was pretty cool. It was cool to see. Definitely, definitely cool to see. I definitely had like moments where as a crypto person, I was watching that and my, you know, my heart warmed a bunch of times. I think going back to like TV ads as a medium in 2022, I think like why Super Bowl

ads work is because people tune in to the, to Super Bowl ads. Like I bet you more, you know, more people prefer the halftime show and Super Bowl ads than the actual Super Bowl itself. And the difference between regular TV ads is its interruption. You're just like, you're there. You're like, okay, you know, chlorox. You're like in my face, like get out of there. So I think that what works is, you know, traditional TV advertisements or traditional advertising in channels where people are tuning in,

not tuning out. So that was a small takeaway I had. Yeah, I think that's a really interesting point. It's also an interesting point on the halftime show because I don't know if you've ever seen the mechanics of how that works, but basically the NFL contributes like a million dollars towards the halftime show and any other amount that the artists want in order to create an amazing experience of the halftime show is self-funded by the artist. So like last year, the weekend, I think invested seven million of his own capital into making an amazing experience, the halftime show. This year, Dr. Dre put in $6 million. And so they spent seven total in addition to the one.

And the rationale behind it is pretty interesting because it's basically a 15-minute ad for that artist to go and hook people on what they're, the content that they are creating. And so relative to like spending Coinbase spent $14 million for a 60 second spot, Dr. Dre spent $7 million for a 15-minute spot of all these artists. It might not be quite as relevant for Dr. Dre, Snoop Dog, Eminem, maybe. they're not touring as much. But for the weekend last year, the amount of ROI that he got on that $7 million is probably astounding in terms of, you know, tour ticket sales, merch, Spotify streams. All of his songs ended up on the top charts in the days that followed. That's worth a lot of money.

So it's pretty fascinating when you think about the mechanics of these halftime shows as well. It makes me think like, is there an opportunity to do halftime shows but for other events? So obviously Super Bowl has 100 million people watching or more. But there's tons of events that have a million people watching, 100,000 people watching, 10 million people watching where you can create a business that basically creates these tours and you can combine these artists. You combine the brands and then you sell it to the NFL, the NHL, college, whatever. Thoughts? Yeah, it's kind of interesting. I mean, the challenge is would you still capture as much attention as you do during?

in the Super Bowl. To your point, the value here is the fact that there's, I don't know, 100 million people watch this, how many of them are tuned in specifically for commercials and for the halftime show? And so you know you have this massive captive audience when you're delivering that content. Could you start to shift the narrative around these other events and create a place where the halftime show is actually drawing people into the other event? Maybe. And you could, I mean, effectively get a discounted rate from the fact that you're actually

contributing value to the main event. via the halftime show. So it's, it's sort of an interesting. Here's what I like about halftime shows. So, and by the way, this is a stream of consciousness.

So let me know if this doesn't make sense. So halftime shows are for everyone. Games are for some people. So if you could create interesting, you know, halftime shows and create cultural statements and, and bring culture to events that are beyond just like hardcore sports.

I just think that there's, A, it makes the game, like, richer and more, and more interesting to folks. And, and B, I think it gives artists a channel to, to access audiences and to, you know, beyond their tour dates or beyond, like, shows that they're going to do. It also brings communities together. I don't think it's crazy what you said.

It brings communities together because, I mean, you think of the case of the Super Bowl, the amount of Super Bowl parties, people that come together, cool moments that that creates. And that's because it's an immersive and welcoming environment where it's not just, you know, men watching the Super Bowl. It's everybody. My wife loves to watch the Super Bowl because of the commercials and because of the halftime show. And she likes the football and gets engaged in it. And it's a fun experience for us together.

So I don't think it's crazy at all. I think like post-pandemic, these Super Bowl type events are going to get a lot bigger. and the ecosystem events around a lot of these events are going to get a lot bigger. So, yeah. Yeah, it's cool to think about how you could build a business around creating. I mean, you kind of alluded to it earlier, create half-time shows or similar events, short like 10 to 15-minute events that are really immersive that can be inserted into either physical or digital events because these gatherings are going.

to be more and more prolific and at more and more scale within the digital world, right? You can just get so many people versus in a physical place. And so how do you insert, how can you like aggregate and insert interesting content into that in a profitable way? I think it's interesting. Cool. Yeah. I mean, I think that was my light bulb moment last night.

Nistalgia and halftime shows something there. Yeah. So I was thinking more and more, it kind of got me thinking more and more about these ideas that I've talked about around creators and owned audiences. You know, we were talking about the kind of owned audience effect of people tuning in for the Super Bowl and how it's a good way to capture a bunch of people at once. And it's effectively priced in, right? They price the Super Bowl ads. And so you're not really getting a deal on it per se. But if you do something really splashy, like what Coinbase did, Coinbase did, you can really win.

And, you know, there's this whole concept now that creators are kind of the future of brands and advertising. I was talking with Alex, one of the founders at Morningbury recently, and he was talking and he's been tweeting and doing videos about how he thinks that creators are really the future. And, you know, the fact that they have an owned audience and the fact that they have a really fervent and passionate audience and a community built around them, that that is the future of consumer, consumer brands, distribution, etc. And it got me down the rabbit hole on Mr. Beast, who I'm sure you're familiar with, but like one of the most prolific YouTube creators. I think we've talked about him in the past in the context of that Squid Games reenactment video that he did, which I think now has like 200 million views or something like that, something completely insane.

But Mr. Beast recently launched this chocolate company. And that was like a light bulb moment for me personally as I was thinking about it because look, this is a 23-year-old. young man. He has 90 approaching 100 million subscribers on YouTube. I think 15 billion plus video views to date, 40 million in revenue or something like that in 2021. That Squid Games reenactment video did more, generated more revenue than the original, which is completely insane to me. And I think he grew by like five million subs from that one video, which is remarkable as well. So Mr. Beast has gone and launched this chocolate company called Feastables.

And they've done it in a very interesting way where the whole launch was tailored around this like Willy Wonka chocolate factory type deal where you had like tickets like golden tickets in there. And so there's a chance to win his actual chocolate factory. There's like a million dollars in prizes. You can be in a Mr. Beast video if you get one of the lucky tickets. And it's such a fascinating case study of like the future of where these consumer launches and brands are going because he has a massive owned audience. I mean, imagine the number of people that are going and buying this because they're seeing him holding it in their videos. They're seeing him interact with it, talk about it, et cetera. It's a good product.

You know, they're like doing the whole like very few base ingredients. I'm sure it's kind of best in class in terms of a formulation standpoint. And they brought in a really legit team to help run it because they know that. immediately this has scale to it. It's not like a consumer brand that you need to get off the ground and slowly build a base. He has this enormous embedded community and audience around it. So I've just been thinking more and more about this. And like, what are the opportunities to build at scale around this concept? Like, it's great on an individual level that a Mr. Beast can go do this. But what are the business opportunities that exist around this general trend that is developing?

Have you heard of night media? No. Okay, pull it up. Yeah. So I know about these guys because we work with them on some projects at lay checkout. And basically... Is it night as in like a medieval night or like a night? Like it's night time.

The website is night.com. Okay, I got it. Yeah. So basically they manage talent, including Mr. Beast. They, this is a dope website, by the way. They're a venture studio. So they basically partner with operators. So like you, Sahel Bloom might partner with like a top, you know, YouTube creator that

they manage to create a product. And they do investing. This is really cool. So this is what I'm doing. getting at. Like, there has to be an opportunity to create a, like, holding company of sorts where this is more of like an agency as far as I can tell where, like, they're representing these people and they will kind of bring them to bear and then there's ownership. I thought it would be interesting if you got like 10 creators together and basically gave them joint ownership.

Like you came together Twitter, TikTok, YouTube, et cetera, and you kind of take joint ownership of this holding company. And the holding company then has an investment fund. which I imagine you could go raise a billion dollars for because people would definitely give you capital given the collective influence the fund would have. And then you would have everyone's individual brands underneath it, probably some sort of just like revenue share where like 10% of the profits they may go back into the holding company pool. And then you have any individual brands you're launching off of it. And you launch them and then you kind of hire a team and you can spin them out. Like it becomes this like creator IAC of the future that I think is like a really, really cool concept.

And you know you call it too, right? You call it half time ventures. Half time ventures. There you go. There's probably something really cool to do with it. You're normally the guy that brings up tokenomics and Web3. But I'm just thinking about like over time because you would set an ownership base presumably at the beginning.

But over time as different people grow in different amounts and are contributing different value to it, it would be pretty interesting if you had a way to kind of have the creators that are growing the fastest and that are contributing the most value to the holding company actually kind of profit from that in some way. And similarly, the people that are following them that want to kind of participate within that value creation might have a mechanism by some form of token. Yeah, I think the really cool thing about creators in general is, and we talked about ecosystems before, is you have the creator and then you have their communities and ecosystems around that. So if you could create, you know, a new version of IAC or holding company where these creators are incubating products, but, you know, they're seeing upside, which is really cool. Their communities are seeing upside, which is really cool. And you can use Web3 to do really fun things like, for example, you know, maybe you can't, you know, maybe you get, if you stake, let's say, your tokens, you get certain best.

benefits, you get extra tokens, like, you know, maybe there's ways to reward, you know, communities and creators that are more, I guess, just are in it for the long haul. So I do like that. Yeah. That piece of it. That's a good point. Yeah. I just feel like one of the trends that I see happening right now is that creators are individually going and building kind of equity in things, right? And you kind of have like a bunch of creators that are raising small funds. We've seen that, obviously, a bunch of our friends. I'm a part of that movement. Like, there's a bunch of people doing this. And I tend to think that like one plus one equals three, if you bring these people together, if you had the collective sway of a bunch of the

biggest YouTubers, a bunch of the biggest Twitter, a bunch of the biggest TikTok, a bunch of the biggest Instagram, et cetera, and you kind of brought it into a single fund, that would guaranteed be able to go and raise and collect more value from LPs and the fee base of that and the potential future carry of it than just these individual small funds that people are able to raise. So I think it'd be pretty interesting to actually see something like this come together. I've seen like I have a friend Marshall Sandman who runs Animal Capital, which is like the Swayhouse guys, Josh Richards and those guys. Is that his name? Josh, Josh Richards, right? And And that's pretty interesting because they're bringing this collective kind of sway.

But can you go do that on a mass scale where you bring a bunch of people together and you have a holding company structure where you can spin things out? I think it's pretty interesting. And there's probably a bunch of adjacent infrastructure businesses that would need to be built in order to enable people to do that. So how would you do it? How would you do it? So let's just say someone is listening to this and wants to go and create this.

Easier for Sahel Bloom to do it with half a million Twitter followers by the time we hopefully by the time we put this out. You know, what sort of advice can you give to people who might not have an audience, but who want to create something like this? Yeah, I mean, I guess the actual putting together of the structure, I think would need to be led by the individuals that were going to be a big part of it. Like, they would need to all be on board for it. But the individual pieces of like business and infrastructure around it,

I think could really be anybody. like when you think about first off pitching them on it I think there's an interesting thing to just be pitched. I would be glad to be a part of that because I think it's a pretty interesting concept that I've played around with different people.

But I do tend to think that like the infrastructure layer of somebody going and launching a new brand like a feastables, is there a kind of is there infrastructure and tools that exist that allow creators to very quickly spin up product drops or new consumer brands.

Things like that where you're kind of playing the adjacent trend, I think, are probably the more reasonable way for anyone to get involved in that type of movement. But I don't know. I need to think about it more. We should muse on it more because I actually do think there's something interesting here and something that we're probably uniquely well suited to go and play. Like, here's how, if anyone's listening, here's how I would think about it. To me, it's very similar to how you start a conference.

and you want to get guest speakers. So the thing, or you're starting a podcast and you want to get, you know, great guest speakers. You know, you try to just like get bigger and bigger names and use those names to leverage other names. And then once you have, you know, let's say Mr. Beast as a part of this or Mr. Beast coming to your event, then it's really easy to get anyone else. So I think the way to do this is you have to make a compelling, like make a video or something, like record or video, make something really cool, like grab an iPhone, but make it like unique and interesting and just like DM as many people as possible. And then wait until you get that one person to say yes and then use that one person to say yes to like leverage and then be like, I've got this person. You should come on board. Yeah.

It's a hustle game. It's a hustle game in the early days. I feel like that's a good transition, too, to bring in our guest for today, who is an amazing creator in his own right, but also has kind of taken the creator, the creator path and now effectively transitioned into building really scale businesses and equity around it. So I want to bring in, I want to bring in our guest and we can dive into it with him and go a little bit deeper. Cool. Let's do it.

So I want to kick off by just. We're recording now? We're recording? Yeah, but we can delete out whatever you don't like. Oh, okay. Well, first of all, nice to meet you, Greg. Nice to meet you, man. Nice to meet you.

I must admit, I've seen your videos. So it's like, it's weird for me because you and 10 million others. It's weird for me because it's like, I don't know if this is a video or my dreaming or what's going on. But great to meet you. Greg, tell me more about yourself. Who are you? Yeah, background in. in building, you know, internet communities, was an advisor to TikTok,

advisor to Reddit, started and sold three companies, ran product strategy at WeWork. Now I run a holding company, which is called Lay Checkout, which does investing, incubating, and agency work building Web3 and community-based products for some of the biggest brands. That's smart. That's cool. I love your website. Thank you. Okay. Great.

This is great. Wow. It's amazing website. It's an insane website. Completely insane website. So maybe we can just start. I want to dive in and get your story and background because I think it's so interesting how you have progressed from where you start. You grew up in Israel. I want to kind of hear the background. Like, yeah, I've looked up and spent a bunch of time understanding, you know, your path. And it's such an interesting one to where you are today and the business building that you've kind of created around the creator economy as well. But maybe we can just start at the beginning.

I'd love to just hear your kind of journey to us. Yeah, yeah. First of all, guys, Greg Sayil, thank you so much for having me here. Really appreciate it. Yeah, so my name is Nassire, like yes, sire, no sire, yes, sire, no, sire. It's complicated. I was born raised in Israel. I'm Palestinian Israeli, so it's double whammy,

moved to the United States for college, got into Harvard, not a double whammy, graduated, worked as a software engineer at Venmo before it was cool. Now Venmo is really cool. Back then it was cool, too. And then decided to become a creator. And so I started making videos, put them on the Internet, and then, to my surprise, like, people started to watch.

I made a thousand videos and a thousand days, never missed a day, not even once. I adopted Facebook as my platform as opposed to YouTube. Maybe that's why half your audience doesn't know me. And it blew up from there. And now Nasdae has 47 million followers in 13 different languages around the world. And after I finished that journey of making content, I started a tech company going back to my software engineering routes. So we're building basically a master class for creators. And we have been building it for two years.

We're venture funded, series A. And we will be series B very soon, I hope. And that's me. I'm talking to you from Dubai. So I need to back you up a little bit on this whole thing because there's so many interesting points in that story. So you get into Harvard. You ended up at Harvard.

I think I read that you were originally going to do an aerospace engineering degree. ended up doing economics and computer science, which I think is probably more practical. Maybe you'd be working for SpaceX or something now, working in the space economy. But you end up at Venmo. How did you decide to quit your job and go off on this journey? Because you were on like, probably what was a very lucrative and great track. And as, as someone with, with immigrant parents, an Indian mother, Jewish father, I was always someone who felt like the safe track was the one I was supposed to be taking. And I imagine your parents had maybe similar perspectives.

Yeah, no, that's a great question. I mean, that decision happened six years ago. I think the riskiest part of that decision is not the money. It's actually the visa. Because when you quit your job as an international, you lose your H-1B. And you need somebody else to sponsor it. And you need to win the lottery again. And I was just like, I don't know, it was just a stupid decision in retrospect.

Actually, it made me smart. But I was like, I don't, I don't need America. I don't, I don't need the visa and I don't need the 120K for year. Because I had 60K savings already. So 60K is, is all it takes really to feel a sense of I'm never going to be homeless, you know. Yeah. Are there companies, just to pause you on the visa point because you're sparking an idea, are there companies that help people?

with this, like a company that you can nominally work for and acquire a visa via that when you're doing a non-traditional path? Yeah, that sounds like illegal. Nominally work for equally illegal. You think so? I don't know. Like a company that will kind of basically take people that are going to go on a non-traditional but potentially lucrative path and bear the.

risk of the payment on, you know, on whatever it costs to get them the visa, but then gets a percent of the upside around it. It's sort of like they're investing in your future, which could be potentially much more valuable, and they're the ones that are going to incur the costs around the visa process. Well, you are very entrepreneurial, man. I got to admire that. But I think the U.S. government asks you why you want the visa. I'll raise you, you know, I'll add to that idea. So LinkedIn, but it's for jobs that, you know, U.S. companies will sponsor your visa. J1, which is your internship visa, which is really easy to give.

TN., which is your Canadian U.S., you know, it's just all broken down and categorized around different categories. As a Canadian myself and who moved to the U.S., like I dealt with so much pain around just like visas and stuff like that and so many friends have. Totally. And it doesn't need to be this way. I mean, it's insane. And we're in a job short of it, right?

Like, we need to hire people. Yeah. And highly technical and skilled workers, too. I mean, it's an insane problem. I mean, I have close, close family who grew up in Bangladesh and are still Bangladeshi citizens, I believe. And it's impossible. One of them worked for Amazon and then wanted to go start a startup, but literally couldn't leave Amazon because of that challenge of like, oh, well, then I'm going to have to move back to Bangladesh because I won't have a visa.

Yeah. Wow. Crazy from Amazon to Bangladesh. Anyway. Back to you, Naz. Super interesting. Anyway, back to you. I got to ask.

So, you know, you said something when you were kind of explaining a bit about yourself, which I really dialed into, which is you basically were like, hey, I started making a bunch of videos. And then to my surprise, people started watching. And I made it a thousand videos every single day. So number one, like, how surprised were you actually? Like, and how long did it take for you? Like, how did you do it, basically? Like, what advice could you give to people listening who want to create something, who want to, you know, create videos, create tweets, create whatever?

What sort of frameworks could you give to people to help them get hundreds of millions of people watching? Yeah. Well, Greg, the problem. The problem with this podcast is that people cannot see my face, right? When they see my face, they realize, wow, this is not a Hollywood face. You know, there's a lot of this way. Don't tell yourself short. Come on, man.

You know what? Thank you for being nice, but that's bullshit. Because before starting Nasdaity, I went on Tinder and I swip right to basically on every single girl for the next 500 girls. And then I just got like two swipes back. Two. Two. People don't want a Hollywood face anymore.

They want a TikTok face. That's what they want. Okay. Well, I guess preference changed in the last six years. Well, unfortunately, I've been in a relationship for five years, so I don't need to swipe anymore. But when I swiped, I got no responses. So that's when I knew, statistically speaking, I don't have the face to go viral. That's number one.

Number two is I scream in my videos. I don't know if you've seen the videos, but I fucking scream. A lot of people think that's annoying. Number three, you know, I'm from Israel, which is a very controversial country and all this stuff. So, yeah, a lot of reasons. That's why I was surprised people resonated to my storytelling. My recommendation for people watching is probably, you know, What is my recommendation actually?

You know, the truth of the matter is, you know how there is companies that find product market fits? I think there is such a thing called personality market fit. There are just some personalities that literally cannot go viral, that literally cannot be relatable. And there are some personalities that are just make one video and you'll be immediately in love, people in love with you, like Charlie DeMille, for example. So my recommendation is first, understand if you have personality market fit. And for that, you need to look at very early signals in your day-to-day life to see if you could rally the crowd around you. So I'll give you one of the earliest signals I knew that I could have, I could have, I potentially could have a career here, despite my Tinder failure, which was, I looked at my. my Facebook, my personal Facebook, and I uploaded status update, and it got 60 likes, 60.

And I looked at my roommate, and he uploaded one status update, and he got six likes. Now, I was wondering, like, why is my status update 10 times more engaging than my roommate, who was actually 10 times more attractive than me? And those are the signals that started to understand, like, oh, my God, like, my personal Facebook is consistently popping. You know, if I throw a rooftop party, people show up. If I throw a nice summit six years later, people consider showing up. And I was like, huh, there's something there.

I wonder if I could find 60 million people as opposed to 60. And now we found 47 million and we have 13 million more people to go. So that is fascinating to me, the way that you laid that out. Because I think it clicks with me in a lot of ways in my own experience as a creator with the Twitter stuff. done because in prior lives, I had done, I had experienced something similar with Facebook on a personal level or with LinkedIn on microscales. And then with Instagram, I had a, I had a brief appearance as like a travel Instagram photographer deleted my Instagram in 2017 because I didn't think it was healthy. But I had those same moments and just never really thought about it the way that

you laid out, that you have these kind of signals. The other thing that you're not giving yourself credit for is you created 1,000 videos over a thousand days. Yes. And one thing that we consistently come back to on this show, whether it's with the founder of Reddit, Alexis O'Hanian, or whether it's with Scott Belski, the head of product at Adobe, these amazing entrepreneurs, founders, creators that we've had on is the consistency, the relentless consistency of effort is a common threat among all of them. All of them actually say that they're not particularly special, which I call

called bullshit on, by the way. Like, everyone says that. I think it's this great thing of humility. Awesome. I, like, I respect the hell out of it. Yeah. I think it's bullshit. I think all of you are very special.

But one thing that you all have in common for sure is this uncommon, relentless consistency around the efforts. Once you've found something that works, you know how to just go deep, deep, deep, deep deep down that rabbit hole. Yeah, that is very true. I think you would call it in a different world, like obsessive. session because it took me 270 videos to actually, you know, make it big with Nass Daily to get to, you know, to 4X in one day. So, so my overnight success took 270 days every single day, every single weekend working and making that one minute video.

So I would say it's like, you know, like deep down inside, like I knew this was, this is supposed to work from day one. but it took 270 days for it to actually work. How did you deal with the emotional side of creation and of the process? Like it's very similar to entrepreneurs. Very. To this in his own entrepreneurial journey, the highs and lows, the swings are enormous. And there's a high incidence of depression, I think, among entrepreneurs and among creators for this reason, because you have this daily scorecard of your performance.

And when you're posting something on Facebook every day and you thought it was amazing and two people like it, or in your case, you know, 200 versus 2000. You're the only person that really thought about that, by the way, but it really does impact your mood. So how did you deal with that emotional side of the process and journey? Yeah, the truth of the matter is I don't, I don't deal with it. It stresses the crap out of me. And you're so right, it's very similar to entrepreneurship. Like yesterday, I thought my company is going to be $10 billion. Today, I think it's going to be a failure, you know, like literally within 24 hours, there's a $10 billion difference.

Every day when I was, every day when I was making those videos, if one video tanks, I say, okay, I lost my Facebook page. It's gone. It's dead forever. And I had that feeling 500 days out of the thousand. I'm not here to give any advice because I suffer from this every day.

I do think about getting a shrink. I do think about getting into like a mental hospital or something because it is, You know, it's when you take content and entrepreneurship at the same time, you know, the highs and lows are doubled. So, yeah. Here's an idea. There's no solution to it. You got to suck it up. Here's an idea.

Mental health hospitals for creators. Dude, I completely agree. I'm all in on that. I think it's brilliant. Like, even just like a tailor made daily video or something that you can. click on when you're facing those very common problems that creators all face. Like hedonic treadmill, you know, getting a thousand likes on a Twitter thread in the past for me was like, holy shit, I just got a thousand likes on this.

Now a thousand likes, I feel like, holy shit, that's a dud. Why did I spend the time to write that? I'm useless. I'm a piece of shit. It's like dealing with those daily things. That's something everyone deals with. And again, it's such a personal journey and you're the only one that thinks about it. So I agree, Greg.

I think you could build a very simple mental health curriculum with like little modules where you could just click on that video of like something to give you perspective on X, Y, or Z plus kind of peer to peer matching or like a community effect where you could talk with other creators in real time about how you're dealing with that. Like our WhatsApp group, Nuz, is one of the most amazing things because it's a it's a WhatsApp group that was put together by our friend Sri Ram over. over at A16Z. And it has just a bunch of amazing creators in it across YouTube, Twitter, TikTok, you know, Instagram, et cetera. And people actually share things they're struggling with on a daily basis. And then other people come in and give them perspective on it or think about it. I asked one time how to deal with negativity and everyone gave their perspectives and it really

helped me. And that's how we connected by the way. That's how we connect. Exactly. That's how we connected. And so thinking about how you productize that, Greg, to your point, I think is Okay. I got the idea.

You know the company. Sorry, I got the name. I got the name. We're going to register the name after this as soon as so when this is live. And if anyone wants to work on this, because I think it would actually make the lives of creators a lot more healthy and happy. And in turn, hopefully make other people happier and healthier. So the name is creatorsgeneralhospital.com.

Okay, that's amazing. I love that. We could bring in, like, I bet we could bring in 10 or 15 creators as like part owners of this, by the way, and you'd have buy-in from people that could talk about it with their audiences because creators tend to have a lot of aspiring creators in their audiences. So the distribution of it would actually be really easy because you could just talk about it and you would know you had, you know, 5% ownership or something of this company. We just need to find someone really good to build it and run it. I think you cannot put hospital as a trademark in the company name, I think. It must be reserved somewhere. But actually, a similar company that's doing it is from Israel. It's called Better Help.

No, well, I, like, look, I think that that is, I think the thing that's really interesting about this idea is that it's like this general framework that I talk about often of, like, the, I think it's like generally Christensen's model of disruptive innovation, where you have a space that is massive in mental health. And you have companies that are trying to serve the entire spectrum of mental health. That's very hard because what happens is you end up overserving some customers, underserving others. You're not providing the perfect service to some people.

And so what you'd focus on with this for creators in particular is provide the exact set of mental health services that creators need. And you'd go to creators and figure out exactly like what are the 10 or 15, you know, swings in emotion that tend to happen, whether. it's too high or too low, you know, negativity on the platforms, whatever it is. And you'd create simple modules and simple products that would allow you to feel better in those moments. And then you'd pair it with community because I think that that's a super interesting thing

that you and I, nods have seen is really powerful when you have a community you can talk to or rely on. And you'd figure out basically how to provide that very specific set of services. And I don't think it would be that hard to set up actually as a company. and you could be the creator mental health platform very quickly. And if you launched with creators and partnership as part owners of the company, you could probably get to scale pretty quickly as well. There you go.

There you go. That's a $100 million idea. Greg, what do you think? I love it. I think what I like about it too is it's relatively simple to get going. Like it's just about scoping. what are those nuanced services that you need? How do you ensure that the mental health professionals are high quality and can do the job?

And then it's just like a landing page, really, a great brand and a landing page. Yeah. Yeah, and I think you go talk to 100 creators. Like go talk to 25 TikTokers, 25 YouTubers, Twitter or whatever, and ask them what the, you know, swings of emotion are. Give us like three things that impact your daily mental health as a creator. And then you go, you know, partner with mental health providers and mental health doctors who can actually create the services that would improve their lives in those regards. And then you pair it with communities so that people can pop in and ask their questions or talk to someone that's unbiased or even anonymized to help with those things on a daily basis. Because I do think there's going to be more and more people.

It's a great macro trend. There's more and more people that are going to be creators that are thinking these things. and people are going to feel this more and more because we're in this world now that is going to be increasingly digital. And so that connection and the more time you spend there, the more negativity you're going to face, the more of this like kind of highs and lows swings you're going to face. There's a pretty interesting business to be built around this. Yeah. And I think there's a social good angle too, right?

You can do like for every hour of mental health help that the creator buys, maybe you give an hour to, to, to someone who needs it who can't afford it. That's interesting, too. Like a Tom's shoes, buy one, get one type thing. Buy one, give one, rather. Are you guys in the like, like brainstorming phase in your lives where you're looking for the next company to build?

I think we're always in that phase. I mean, part of this show is ideating and real time, basically giving people, we called it where it happens, which is a play on the room where it happens, and basically give people a lens into the kind of insight to idea to execution journey that entrepreneurs, founders, executors, operators go through. And so democratizing access to the rooms where these interesting conversations happen and where ideas are created and formed. So part of it is literally this type of thing, where we're, we're on and we're talking and we're like, oh, holy shit, that's an interesting idea. Let's go down

the rabbit hole a bit on it. And then we have a community set up in Discord where we'll try to go deeper on those things and where people are actually trying to go start some of these ideas that have come out of the show. Wow. That's smart. How many companies have fun out of this so far? Well, we're only, what is this, episode 10, Greg? We're not very many episodes in. We launched this show a few months ago. So there's actually, I mean, there's three separate channels now built around specific ideas that have come out of the show and you have people going and doing research on different things that are coming out of there. The ultimate vision is that we can create a fund around the show that actually invests behind these ideas. And you can kind of seed them out where it's

almost like the show becomes a holding company of sorts. That's great. Yeah, I think it's pretty interesting. So tell us, before we run out of time, I want to hear more about Nas Academy as a company. And so you did your creator journey. You had scaled massively on Facebook. You then launched your YouTube in I think 2019. You've scaled enormously on YouTube as well. I love your video going to North Korea, by the way. It was fucking awesome.

Fascinating. I watched it with my wife. It was so, so good. So I'm curious then how you kind of thought about jumping into building a business and maybe kind of slowing down some of your creator output and focusing on building equity and building a real business that, frankly, enables a lot of other creators to go and create what they want to. So look, here's the way I think about it for any creators that are listening to this.

You have a shelf life. You have a shelf life that either the market dictates or your mental health dictates, which is basically like to say five, six years. You know, even the algorithm on Facebook and YouTube does not like you forever. At some point, the algorithm's best interest is to recommend other creators on the platform. to keep it fresh. So you can never be the biggest creator on Facebook forever. So your shelf life is five, six years.

When I was reaching my shelf life, which was roughly year three, four, I was like, shit, quick, I got to build a company so that I need to build it for the next three years. So by the time I'm out of my shelf life as a creator, I have a billion dollar company. So basically I'm using my creator lifespan as a leverage to become an entrepreneur. the last thing you want is to be caught in a cycle too late. Then you'll just be a husband as a creator and you'll be a failed company as a company. So this is why I made the jump. I've also always dreamed of having an organization that works when you're asleep. The problem with creation is that when you're asleep, there is no creation.

But when you have a thousand people working, you can still be productive 24-7. And last but not least, I think every creator is a business. You're an individual as a business. You're a business of one. That's what a creator is. Nothing else. So going from a business of one to a business of 1,000 shouldn't be that impossible. So that's why we're taking on that challenge as well.

So these are the reasons why I decided to start a company. Now, the question is, why did I decide to start this specific company, Masterclass for creators? Well, there's a need. Nobody's teaching in the world. Greg, I don't think you're teaching. Sahil, I don't think you're teaching other than those tweets. And you have knowledge. What the hell is, you know, what's going on?

Like your knowledge is really highly privileged. It's only your friends in that WhatsApp group they can access that knowledge. So we really are on a mission to convince as many creators as possible to productize their knowledge and share it with their audience. And that's kind of the idea behind Nuss Academy. So both Sahel and I have done a few of these cohort-based courses. Oh, you did? Shit. I assume you're not teaching.

And I just checked Naz Academy. Is it cohort-based or is it like recorded? And could you talk a little bit more about, you know, the best way for creators like us to educate people? Yeah, so it's actually cohort-based recorded. So that's the beauty of it. It's like hybrid. So the problem with just cohort base is that you need to be teaching all the time. Every single cohort you need to do the work.

It doesn't scale. With NASA Academy, it's like it's recorded, but the recordings are only available at a certain time. They unlock at a certain time, finish at a certain time. So every hundred students are put in one group and they learn together. There's a coach assigned to them to make sure they all meet each other and communicate with each other. And then they watch your video files when they're. they unlock every day. That's kind of the idea behind it. So it's a scalable way for creators to teaching cohorts. So how would you, like I'm familiar with, like I think Greg and I both

did our courses with Maven, which is sort of the biggest platform now around like the live cohort based courses. How does it work? You know, one of the things Maven I think has done really, really well is they actually teach teachers how to be effective teachers. Like, you know, the future digital professors, they do a course to teach them. How much. training are you doing around like with the creators so that the quality of the content and the course that they're going creating the videos etc is exceptional so i invested in maven and maven invested in us so we're we're sister companies basically um you know we love them i love the gun west they're incredible people um and they've done something amazing i think maven is specializing

in the live we are specializing in the uh pre-recorded uh but it's all cohort based uh we actually do a lot handholdings. We have a curriculum team. We have a video editing team. So we go to your house, Sahil, and basically we shoot you for two days. We help you edit the classes for very, very, very, very, very cheap. And then we put them out on the internet, on the marketplace setting of Nas Academy. So NASACademy is not just software to help you teach, but it's also giving you a distribution. Think of it like Amazon and Maven is like Shopify, right? We're trying to build the destination, kind of like UDEMI and Masterclass. while Maven is building, let's say, the infrastructure, teachable and intubu-bye.

So do you have, does Naus Academy have like an all-access pass in the way master class does? Or is it self-serve kind of individual courses? Yeah. So the problem with a class pass is that eventually you lose control as a creator of your class. You have no incentive to teach in Nas Academy because if you're bringing one extra user, we make all the money, you know, forever. So that's why we're actually keeping it by purchase only. We're enabling subscription for you.

So you can subscribe to Sahil $20 a month to learn from him. So it becomes like, it's like a mix between Patreon and Masterclass, basically. This is interesting. Super, super interesting. And then how does that tie in for you as a business to these summits that you're on? So we are, you know, we know, Nass, people in Arabic. It just happens to be in my nickname, but Nas means people in Arabic. And we just want to build the people company. So Nass Academy, People's Academy, Nass Summit,

Nass Daily, stories of people every day, Nass Hotel, you know, Nass Fund, everything. We just want to build Nass. Everything ties to everything. It's like a flywheel effect. In the Nass Summit, we're bringing creators, Casey Nistadt, by the way, is going to be the keynote. That's going to be very exciting. You know, we're trying to bring creators together in physical settings just to make the tide rise for all boats. And we'll benefit a little bit, but you'll benefit the most. And this also is the same way we run Nass Academy. You make most of the revenue. We take a small cut. I love it. I also, I just love how it overlays community into all of this. Because I imagine, you know, when you bring this many great creators together, they're all going to be building. They're

going to start collaborating on different things. They'll do videos together. They'll be working together. There's just a lot of interesting things that will then trace their lineage back to the summit that was happening in Dubai or whichever summit had occurred digitally or physically. Exactly. We just want to make interesting people meet other interesting people. That's it.

So, yeah, I was just going to say, just because we're running out of time in a few minutes. but, you know, do you have any five-year predictions around where creators are going to go? Like, what does the future of creators look like in five years, according to Nas? Oh, man, that's a great question. Well, I want to say something controversial. What can I say? Like, if I say it will increase, well, whoop-de-do Sherlock Holmes, also cancer will increase. You know, like, so of course it'll increase.

I think the idea that you need to be a video creator to be a creator is going to be like not, it will disappear. I think video creator is going to be minority potentially. Like you could be an NFT creator, a 3D artist creator. So I think the definition of creator will increase from just vlogger to NFT artist or even an engineer could become a creator. Two, I think they will make a crap ton of money. I think you're going to definitely see a creator. Will you see a creator of billionaire? I think you will. A hundred percent. Yeah. There will be a creator billionaire. I don't think it's going to be Mr. Bees, by the way. I think they'll come from India. I think a lot of people

in India are like killing it, but the mainstream media in the United States does not listen, doesn't I watch? Like an academy, for example, is a $4 billion company started by a YouTuber. Bayju, Bayju is the biggest educational company in the world worth $15 billion who was started by a teacher who started on YouTube. So I don't, you know, let's get out of the US bubble a little bit. It's already happening. So we're definitely going to see a YouTuber who becomes a billionaire in the next five years. The first YouTuber creator billionaire will come from India. You heard it here first. Oh, you should tweet that, bro. That would be insane. I love that. That's a great. I have a lot of my audiences in India because of my own heritage as well.

But that's a great prediction. I think it's an interesting one. And I think your prediction on the kind of dynamic nature of what creators will look like is a fascinating prediction as well. Greg and I have talked about that in various forms on the show, pseudonymous creators, you know, creators that never show their face in any way in this digital world. And as we increasingly move towards living in and caring more about our digital worlds than our physical realities, I think it's more and more going to become the case. I completely agree with you. Yeah, that's exciting.

But the problem is you're we're not, we're not building for that world. You're not building for that world where we're still video. Actually, are you a video creator? Would you say you're a video? We post videos around this show, like this video will be posted. And we do half the episodes live in person and so that we can post videos. But I wouldn't consider myself a video creator yet just because of the scale of my reach there is so low relative to on Twitter. Eventually, I hope to be.

I don't know. I don't know if I'm as. What's that? How's your Tinder game? That dictates if you have a, you know. My Tinder game is zero. I've been married for five years. So you're going to try to get me in trouble here. I've got a baby on the way. My Tinder game is non-existent. If my wife is listening, non-existent. That's great.

No, this was awesome, man. I'm super appreciative of your time. I know it's late on your end as well. I hope I can make it over to one of these events. And if not, we need to just do more together. I feel like there's a ton of energy alignment around all of these things. And the future is very, very bright for what you're building. So I'm excited to watch your journey. Thank you, guys. I mean, Greg, Seale, thank you for having me on this podcast. And if you're ever thinking about teaching, you know where to go.

Absolutely. So where can people find you? Just give us a quick plug. Where can people find you? Yes, Y-A-S-S-I-N at Nasdaily, Nass-Academy.com, Nass-D-Laddy, of your social media platform. We got the, we got the user names.

So yeah, I can't, I love it. I love it. Well, congratulations on all the success. I'm impressed that you put your email out there to, to thousands of people who, who are listening.

So, you know, people listening, like, hit him up. We were talking, we hit him up. We were talking earlier about,

uh, you know, how to get creators on board for different product ideas. And we talked about like, the importance of just like, reaching out and doing that grind. So thank you for making it easier for people to spam you. Oh, of course.

By the way, I read every email. I don't respond to every email. So definitely I'm so, I'm much easier to reach than some people with like 50,000 followers. I don't understand like why everybody plays I'm hard to reach. I'm easier to reach. I just don't respond if there's no like, you know, connection. I read it. I like that.

I like that. Well, thank you so much. Hey everyone, Sahil here. By now, you know that I love going down rabbit holes. And today, I get to share one of my secret tools with you, Teegis. In today's market, we don't have time to spend weeks getting up to speed on a new company, industry, or idea. Teegis is the fastest way for investors and M&A teams to learn everything they need to know about a company, all from an on-demand digital platform.

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