SPECIAL: The Tools in the Solo Creator Toolbox

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And Perhaps be more fun along the way. I feel like I can rule the world, I know I can be what I want to I put my law in it like my day song. On a roll less travel, never looking back. What's happening, podcast listeners? This is Sam Parr. I'm currently walking Around Soho in New York.

It's Friday after work. And I'm doing something I never do. I'm listening to a podcast that I was on, you see. A couple weeks ago Sean and I appeared on the Indie Hackers podcast with Cortland and it was awesome. It was really good. And I'm listening to this right now and I was like I think our audience are

You people, M FM, I think you guys would love this. And so I'm sitting here. On my phone, walking on the uh Walking from Soho up on the uh water up to my apartment and I said, You know what the hell, we're gonna air this. So I'm doing it right now. We're launching it

I hope you enjoy it. Let us know what you think about this. My Twitter handles the Sam Par. Sean is Sean V P And on your spottify.

There's this new feature, they got this little bell. Click that bell for me. That way you'll get notified when new features and new episodes come out and let me know. If it works. We'll talk to you soon. Have a good day. I'm gonna enjoy the rest of my walk. Listen how loud that is. Can you hear that? This freaking city it's so loud.

Oh my gosh. Well, enjoy the podcast. See you. What's up everybody, this is Cortland from ndyhackers.com, and you're listening to the NDHackers podcast.

More people than ever are building cool stuff online and making a lot of money in the process. And on this show I sit down with these indie hackers to discuss the ideas, the opportunities, and the strategies they're taking advantage of, so the rest of us can do the same. Yeah. All right, I'm here with Sean Purry and Sam Parr to my favorite podcast host. You guys host the excellent show. My first million.

Welcome to the Antiactors Podcast. All right, let me ask you a question. What was the valuation of stripe when you sold to them? Uh I think it was like nine Nine billion dollars in like April twenty seventeen.

Three part question that results in Sam knowing your current bank balance. That was part one. Okay, I'm not gonna answer the third question. I know what the third question is, I'm not gonna answer the thing. What's the valuation now? Nine ninety? Uh it's ninety five billion dollars now, I think. Damn dude. And by the way, it wasn't even risky back then. Uh did did it feel risky when you when you No, no, no, no. It didn't feel risky at all at the time. Because Strape is obviously a good company already. But also that wasn't even on my mind. I wasn't thinking like what's the valuation of stripe. I was more just thinking like, hey, I'm running this like really tiny, scrappy website, like How do I make enough money to pay my rent?

And so I was just trying to get sponsors. And I had this giant list of like the perfect sponsors for N hackers, and Stripe was number one on that list. Like after I built up enough sales skills. I was gonna reach out to them. But before I got to that point, Patrick, the CEO, emailed me and was like, Hey, can we buy any hackers? And so I was like, Yeah, of course, that's much better than getting a sponsor. They um Sean, uh Cortland, do you know Cortland has a brother?

Yeah, I found this out the other day that you have a twin brother. Yeah, but they don't they don't look identical, but yeah, they look similar. But he came to my h he came to Austin like a month ago or three weeks ago and he came over on like a Tuesday or a Wednesday and we had a good time and then he ended up coming over on Friday and we ate dinner. And he was like, You guys wanna go out? And I'm like No, I don't really go out. But Sarah, my wife was like, Yeah, I'll go out with you and they went out until like three or four AM like partying and uh I can't even get my brother to go out with me. I'm like, Hey dude, come visit me in Seattle and he's like nah I got better things to do. Like I just saw him

Uh last week for the very first time since the pandemic started. Oh my gosh. But yeah, he's like my right hand man at ND Hackers. Kind of in the same way that you two work together. on your show, My First Million. Uh, why don't you tell listeners what your show's about, in case they haven't heard it yet. It's basically Two dudes who uh started startups

And have been doing it for like ten years. Just getting together and shooting the shit about what other startups either are cool that we've seen Or we think would be cool if somebody started. And so it's kinda it's basically a brainstorm. And uh what happens is if you listen to it, you know, most people who listen to it They um yeah, they get entertainment'cause it's kinda fun and it's off the cuff and it's you know, me and Sam go back and forth a little bit, but

The the big thing is it gets the wheels turning. Like once you start listening to this, you'll just start seeing business ideas and opportunities. all over the place, almost to an extent that's kind of annoying. It's a switch you can't turn off. And uh that's how we're wired. That's how we are. And so we are kind of infecting other people with the same disease. And a lot of people think that like we're just showing up. And In some like

In some regards it's true and that we can totally go off the cuff But we also research way more than people probably think. So throughout the week we'll see stuff and like I I I I don't actually know how Sean does it. I I think he well, he probably does the same thing, but I'll like get on the phone with someone and I'll say, Tell me everything and I'm like taking notes and I'm like, Thanks. So I mean it's almost like tr it's very like traditional journalism. And I'm like, By the way, everything you say, I'm gonna talk about, so don't talk to me about anything you don't want everyone to know. And uh It's pretty cool. Well, I think the difference is a lot of people will be like, Oh, that makes sense. You have the show, so you do research for the show. The reality is that I think for the last ten years, this is all we did in general. We're just uh curious cats who like can't stop. So in the same way that Sam's like

What was Stripe's valuation when you got acquired? Okay, cool. Then Sam will be like, you know, uh, what is a tip of Aquire worth? And then he'll like, you know, you'll do all this research just for your own, you know, shits and giggles, and then that just gets stored in your memory bank somewhere. So what happened was we just do that naturally as like a part of our daily work. I th you know, like we're lucky that our work La the our job kinda lets us Just go down these rabbit holes. You see a business like today I was going for a run. And this uh this truck was driving and it had like a a tr like a piece of heavy machinery behind it called and it was c it said Van Meer. And our good buddy's last name is Van Meer. And so I was like

I was like, Well, I'm just on this run where I'm supposed to be focused on running. And instead I'm like, I literally like pause for a second, I Google Van Meer. I'm like, Is this like his great grandfather? What is this brand? I bet you do these tractor companies crush it. How much does this Van Meer company make? And like what's their business model? And and like how long have they been around? Are there any new companies doing this? And so that's like a uh addiction that I have, basically. That's my process. My process is. Constantly go around the world. Observing things and then go down the rabbit hole to figure out what's the backstory behind all that. So I did that the other day. How do I describe it? Um imagine the back of a of a truck.

And it has these like wings, but they kinda curve in, so it's like the end of a cube. I'm I'm not explaining it well, but the end of a queue, but it's got these wings that point in. So I saw one on these trucks the other day and I was like What the hell is this? And I looked this service up. It's like a spoiler for a truck. It's like a spoiler for a truck, but it doesn't look like a traditional spoiler, but yeah, that's exactly what it is. And I looked it up and I'm like, what the hell is this thing? And there was a company based out of Redwood City making these And I just saw them on the road, I'm like, What the hell And they promise that it's gonna make you like point five percent more efficient. And it's only like five hundred dollars or a thousand whatever it is.

And I so I did the exact same thing. I saw this on this truck, I'm like, I gotta know what this is. And the company sold for two hundred million dollars, like not that long. A ATD dynamics is I believe is what it was called. Um, and so anyway, this is like yeah, the we do the exact same shit. Well it's addictive to listen to because even on my show I'll do like a brainstorming episode every now and then.

And if I just call an episode business ideas for twenty twenty one, it gets like twice as many downloads as every other episode. People are like, Hell yeah, I want some free business ideas. Then I worry that people who are like addicted to these types of shows Aren't actually building stuff or doing anything. You just wanna hear more and more ideas Rather than actually like start working on something. I call that getting addicted to the medicine. Where uh you take the medicine, it's supposed to cure the problem and supposed to like be able to move on with your life. And some people just love drinking robot test them every day at some at some point, right? You don't want to get stuck in that pattern where You just want to keep getting more and more advice, more and more ideas. It's like well

Yeah, if it's for entertainment, uh which I think is what most people do. They do get it for they do use it for entertainment, not f they want ha to have friends in their life that want to geek out about business the way they do. And we are like their friends who who like to nerd out about business even more than they do. And I also think that like we do have a lot of like legit ballers who are listeners. I mean, if you said you're a listener, so There's not that many people that ever take action on anything. But I do think we've got a really good ratio of that.

I I think in the future, I think actually we should consider alm I I'm incredibly fascinated with the idea of going daily. We haven't discussed it yet, but it's like an it's something I think about and like because I find myself listening to like Brennan Schab and all these other podcasts and I love them because they talk about current events and they give their opinion on it. And I think there's a world where we could kinda do that and and and the reason I'm saying that is we kind of already do. So like when something happens, like the other day when Bitcoin like dropped, Sean did a thing right away on a Sunday morning. And it was a huge hit. And so like we definitely we're we we don't do like

a traditional maybe podcast like a lot of people in our industry do where they're doing like interviews or something that's a little bit more evergreen and we we do evergreen stuff, but we definitely can react really quickly to things. With our angle. And that's kind of intriguing. Yeah, I think Evergreen content's overrated. I mean it's it's kind of a cliche that that's the type of content you should be putting your time into. But if you're trying to do something that's entertaining

every single day. Like nobody's really creative enough to make evergreen content every single day. But if you're just giving your opinions on the news, like shit happens and people want to know about it and they like your personality Then you can just get on the air and just be authentic or just write authentically with your voice, and you can rack up like millions of listeners or subscribers. In fact this is how most of the big media companies online operate. Sam, your newsletter the hustle, has a couple million subscribers just

I I don't know if you know how it started, but it started off when he was at the beginning, it was more like evergreen hits, long form, super interesting blogs like Like kinda like going for home runs. Like we're gonna talk about a topic nobody talking about in a way that nobody's talking about it. It's gonna be amazingly manufactured, and then we're gonna distribute that and try to get that one blog post And it was w working, but it was also like, dude, is this the treadmill I wanna be on? Or

What if we just went lightweight daily, react to the news, summarized and react to the news, uh, give people what they need to know in five minutes, and like not try to be a kind of like genius original content creator every week. As my summary at least, Sam. I don't know if that's accurate. It's very accurate. It w it was hard. I mean I could do it probably But it's a hard ass life and I it's really hard to hire for. There's a reason why C Nistat did what he did for a year and then quit. He was like, Oh my God, this is exhausting. It's challenging. Yeah, it's just too hard. Like

If your if your goal is to produce content And your strategy is that you're gonna come up with new interesting ideas for every video or every podcast and like That idea is dead on arrival, I think. You gotta index on some other source of novelty, whether it's the news

Or on this show, like I don't ever come up with new business ideas, you know, I just have people on who have their own business ideas and like that is an endless process. Like I'm never gonna run out of people to interview who have cool and interesting new business ideas. And so that's just a much better way. Let's go about it. And I think you guys on your show, My First Million, you have um

I don't know, you're kind of the same thing. You're talking about other business ideas that others have come up with. And you also just got bought by HubSpot. So I'd assume uh at least you Sam probably have some sort of financial incentive to keep working on the show. And making it clear. So we

The podcast is his job. Yeah, the podcast is my job. So when we like we were gonna sell, um like we they start reaching out to us. And during that time I had basically already made an offer to someone to be the CEO so I could do Uh podcast stuff. And w they wanted to buy us and I go, Okay, well I'm gonna have to rescind my offer to this guy because I was promising him that he's gonna run it independently and that's no longer gonna be true. So I did that with him and I go, but then you also have to promote someone from within or hire someone to be like the boss because I'm not gonna be the boss. Uh I would love to be here and continue doing and do content.

Because I I love it, but I'm not gonna be the CEO So I a and also there's no we don't have an earnout. Like there's no there's like milestones that we wanna hit, but like I don't have like money on the line to in order to hit that milestone. And so um it's a little bit different. Like when you're saying like I'm in the trenches I am

But like if I I would do it anyway. I would say it's more like uh There's a period when you get acquired where you're like, All right, give me the Kool Aid, pass the Kool-Aid, like I'll drink it. You know, like I think for mo I think for a lot of people. I d I was this way, at least, I'll just speak for myself. There's a period where you're like Uh

They give me the swag and then I show well, at le at least when you're in person, it's it's a lot easier than when you're remote, but like it's very easy to just get swept up. It's like oh I'm gonna add you to this meeting and oh, we'd love to pick your brain about X. And you know, you start getting pulled into all these strategy things'cause you're the str smart new high like high energy strategy guy who's not like scarred and jaded by all past failures. And so, you know you you start getting pulled into all these things and you're able to contribute and you meet all these people and you're you're in the cafeteria and you're like God, my life is no stress now'cause I sold my startup. Like There's a period where you're like all about it. And then uh what I've seen, I'll just speak for myself, there's a transition period where like

Okay, like Working super hard here really doesn't really get me any more or less than uh if I just do what I enjoy and I work a like a I think Corland, you're talking about this a little bit earlier. I did this at at Twitch, which is The first year I tried to kill it.

I uh I did everything I could. I wasn't like working a hundred hours a week, but the hours I was working I was like I'm gonna do the most high impact thing I could do for this company at all times and I'm gonna be me on blast. And I was doing it. And then like a year in I was like, Well I'm leading this team. And at a big company, it's really like you're doing all the jobs of a startup CEO without the upside. It's like

Hire and fire people, set the strategy, dictate the roadmap, manage a whole like thirty people or whatever. pitch for funding basically and your funding is just headcount uh and resources. And so it's like all the jobs of a CEO without the like actual freedom and actual upside of a startup. And so I went to the the CEO and I was like hey like you know I just hit my one year. I'm thinking about what's next.

You know, it's smart to either like sign up now for another full year or like And so I said, You don't have a lot of fun here, but like If I'm gonna do all this work for a startup, I should just go start my own startup. I should own all my upside. Uh you understand. He is he's a founder, so you understood. And he said, uh I said, but you know There could be a model here that works. Um

Like, here's what here's what I would like. And I w and so I like sort of laid out uh a role that I thought would be fun for me, and it was basically like You know, something I'm interested in with no direct reports. With no like kind of like It's not like w a mission critical project like the one I was doing before, so it's like more of a creativity fun, freedom pri type project. And I was like, you know, I'm gonna work this hard. And I still think I'll make an impact, but I'm gonna work like roughly this hard.

And I got all these other things I do with podcast is growing. So like if y'all are cool with all that. Then I'd love to stay on. And they gave it to me. And I guess like I've seen that that's a pretty typical path of a founder. You go from like I wanna crush it, justify it, learn everything from the learn everything I can from this company and like Prove myself.

Then you're like Okay. Don't need to like prove myself so much anymore. Prove myself, learned to learn a bunch of stuff. It's kind of repetitive now. Let me transition to either out the door or chill mode, you know, where you're you're cruising doing what just the parts you enjoy with none of the stuff you don't enjoy.

And then and then it's like gets the gets the itch to go do the thing again. That's the patternized. The buyers know that. At first I was so afraid to be like Hey, but I love I really love these people I and I connected with them, so I was like, Hey, I'm gonna level with you. And I was f waiting for them to flinch and they're like, dude, we've seen this rodeo like a hundred times. Like, we get it. I know who you are. I knew that when I got you, like, you know, when we bought the company and like

Look, I want you to be here forever, but if I like literally Emmett, the CEO m message me one day, he just goes, Look I know you're gonna wanna go start a company someday. I wish we could keep you forever. I know that's not gonna be the case. When you do your next thing, I'll be your first check-in. And so that was like a totally different mindset than this like What I thought would be, no, that like what you're saying is bad and evil and how dare you. Uh, but there's like, you know, the people pleaser in me was still like a little bit hesitant to like just be fully honest. But when I did, I was like, Oh, great, this is no problem. They understand they're And it's a and it's a big show. Like I think I'm the star and they're like, dude There's thousands of people at this company and next year there'll be another.

Yeah, there'll be a new U. We've we've seen this turn over five times. And and there's also this middle ground, which is like You it do who cares what the paperwork says? Like there's a handshake agreement that says Uh uh you got you're ethically say I'm gonna provide value to you. You're gonna provide value to me. Me personally, I'm still more important. Like I'm more important to myself than that company is. So I'm not gonna like die to help you. But like we have a handshake agreement. I'm gonna give you value, I'm also gonna extract value.

And hopefully it's a fifty one, forty nine, like when you get more value, but uh that's what we're gonna do. Well, there's this path that I see a lot of people taking right now. That Sean, you kinda seem to be on. It's kinda like this individual, successful

Investor rich Tech guy path. And it seemingly goes like this. You build an audience for yourself. You've got a podcast, or you're on Clubhouse, or you're on Twitter all the time.

You just sort of put out your wisdom and your knowledge into the universe and the people who like you glom onto you and the people who don't Don't follow you. And you keep doing that day after day, week after week. Like you treat that like a full time job. And you build an audience. And you start to get to know a lot of people.

And through that, you start getting access to investment opportunities. So overall you're converting social capital and to financial capital. The social capital is all the trust that you're building with your audience day after day. kinda showing up and proving to people that you actually are who you say you are and you know what you're talking about. And then people come to you with deals and you can invest much earlier than the average person gets to look.

So for example, somebody's doing this really well is Sahel from Gumroad. He started Gumroad, Gumroad's huge. And that doesn't necessarily mean he's super liquid, right? Like the company throw a lot, but like he hasn't sold it or exited, so Uh, where's he gonna make money?

Well it turns out people really like Sahel. They like what he has to say. And so he's constantly going on every podcast. He's tweeting Like it's his job. He was early to Clubhouse. He's got a huge following on Clubhouse. And then he also set up a rolling fund.

And I don't know how often, maybe once every week, once every few days, somebody just puts like twenty, twenty five thousand dollars into his rolling fund for him to invest. And now I think he has like thirteen million dollars that he's investing on behalf of other people. And he gets to keep a percentage of the profits and also a percentage of the money in total. And that's pretty lucrative if you have a big audience. So Sean, it kinda seems to me like you're going down the same path. Yeah, well I think it's I actually think it's fairly um It's it's fairly paved this path, but uh I think that

It's like a path that's been paved. But then all of a sudden they built all these new roadside things. It's like, oh, that restaurant wasn't here before. Oh, there's a gas station. Wow, now we can go way further, right? That's what I see. So so I grew up and like I I there's a couple of major influences on me uh when I was kind of like Making a shift into business. And the first was uh Tim Ferris. So somebody somehow, somehow, somehow, some way I got my hands on four hour work week. And I had what what you call the four hour fever, which is when you finish the book for the next four hours, you're like, fuck everything in my life. I'm changing everything. I'm like I'm doing all these things. Wha why don't I have passive income? Why am I working so hard? Why don't I have a virtual assistant? Why don't I travel? I why don't I, you know, get fit? Like you want to change all these things because he makes it seem So desirable and so achievable, right?

So that was the first big influence on me. And a guy like Tim Ferris, you know, uh in in many ways, when you know the person who sort of shows you the way, you're like What I respect you, I like you, but also d I kinda want to be you. And so I saw okay. Here's a dude who basically took his own life experiences, distilled it down into some kind of operating philosophy. And then packaged it up for the world to consume through books and a blog, essentially. And then later, a podcast, later, a newsletter, other things. Um he translated his fame into access for deals. So he invested in Uber, invested, I think, in Twitter, and a couple couple other big ones.

And also had like a great kind of like friend group that that emerged from that. Was just always hanging with interesting people. That seemed super fun to me. So I really like this guy's lifestyle. And I thought I I didn't really even like decide at that time, but I always just thought, Oh, that's amazing. But to me at the time it felt like If I wanted to pursue that, it felt like saying, you know, I want to go be LeBron James or like I want to go into Hollywood and you know, be George Clooney. It just felt like a well, that's a lottery game. Like you there's not I can't name fifteen Tim Ferris's uh at the time at least. I thought this there's only a few people like this. There's probably not a good path to bet on. So that was the first influence. Second one was Tony Robbins, same sort of thing. I was like, oh wow, this guy's great. I discovered his content, helped me out a lot, mate changed the way I saw the world with his operating philosophy.

And I was like, I went to one of his his events and I was like, Holy fuck, there's ten thousand people in this arena paying thousands of dollars to like like just attend this guy's show, this performance. I was like I've never seen anybody like this. Never seen a speaker captivate people like this. How the fuck does this guy do it? And I was pretty like enamored with that. It was very like intoxicating to see.

And I thought, okay, I don't really want this lifestyle. Like just like with Tim Ferris, I didn't want to write books and uh'cause that seems slow and kinda boring. Just like Tony Robbins, I didn't want to go on tour, but I wanted elements of what they had, which was a cool set of life experiences which cr which you then distill into operating philosophy. You share that, you build a big trusted audience, and then the you turn that social capital into financial capital so that that funds you doing you full time. Your job, your company is you. And so I just thought, Oh, that's pretty fun. Like I th I think a guy like Tim Ferriss, I think he basically wakes up

I don't know. Sam actually knows him, but uh I I I met him once and it's he seemed like a pretty curious dude. It what it seemed like his life is is he wakes up, he's curious about a thing. Like it might be because he's having some pain point in his life. Like uh I wanna lose belly fat or like I just got diagnosed with this like disorder and this is the traditional medicine, but it doesn't seem to work so well. What are the alternatives? And then he just goes down that rabbit hole. He learns about it from the best. He self experiments, and then he comes out the other side and he teaches that to everybody else. And I thought, Oh, that's dope. This dude just gets to be like

A curious student and gets paid millions of dollars for it. That seems like way more fun than what I was doing than a normal job for sure, but even more fun than being a startup CEO, picking up market, raising money from investors, having a team that you got to go into the office every day and rah rah, keep everybody happy and keep everybody motivated, come up with your strategy. So I j I basically just looked at it. Once I sold my company I was like, All right Am I gonna stop bullshitting or what? Like am I gonna try that path even though the odds seem bad

Or Or or um I should I just put away that that idea forever. The odds aren't that bad. At the time it felt really hard and impossible. Well to be Tim Fair, it's like you said, he was like one of the only ones doing that. There wasn't like a very clear path to follow. Uh whereas now There's just someone you're going to do. Yeah. He might be number one in that kind of field. Actually Tony Robbins and others are kind of a little bit bigger than him, but then then you have him, but then you have like, you know, a rung down, you'll have I don't know, whoever

Pick your favorite, James Clear or um, you know, Ramit Senti or whoever. And then you have in every niche you have a thought leader. So you realize, okay, it's not an all or nothing game. Like at the minimum I can land it in little kind of like level three right now. and feel some version of success. And then if I just keep going, maybe I'll get there. And I'm pretty like I don't know, cocky slash confident. So I was like, Okay You know, why not me, right? Like I met Tim, I was like there's nothing there's nothing magical about this guy. Uh he seems like a normal person just like me who like

He just did him on blast for 10, 15 years. I could do that. That seems it that seems doable. So that's how I describe this path. And it's not always about in investments. Like sure, Tim Ferris made a lot of money from investing. But talking about James Clear. Just spoke with him and Mark Manson the other week. They were both prolific bloggers.

And James Clear, for example, he was able to grow his mailing list to like a million subscribers just from blogging consistently. And at being really good at SEO. And then they both wrote books. And they just kinda took their best blog post that they had proven worked the best. And they turn them into like best selling books together. Yeah, exactly. And Mark m I think Mark's book

If you read like I I went and read like an annual report from Fox or News Corp whoever owns like penguin books or something. And they're like What's his book called that's like called like Fuck It I don't care? The subtle art of not giving a fuck. Fu Subt not giving a fuck. It was it like They like positioned it as like the breakout hit that saved the company. I mean, it was like a pretty big smashing success. Right. It's huge. It's huge. I mean, people severely underestimate how much money you can make from a really good book if you have a huge audience.

Like most nonfiction books probably sell a thousand or a few thousand copies if you're lucky. But the subtle art of not giving a fuck is sold something like fourteen million copies and Mark probably makes Two or three dollars a copy No way at least. So you're telling me you think he made over thirty million dollars off that book? I think he made at least thirty million dollars. No way. I so don't believe that. That's amazing. Yeah, books could be ridiculously lucrative, but it's hard. Like James Clear again, he had a million email subscribers.

In addition to doing all the work of writing a book and getting all those subscribers, he also did like four hundred podcast interviews. before the release of Atomic Habits. The top books in their categories. But I suspect that if you have a huge audience beforehand you can kinda play publishers off of each other. Like I've had multiple publishers

Email me about doing a book for Indy Hackers. And you could probably negotiate to get higher than like the industry standard. Right. I don't remember if it's Tim that told me this or if I read it about him, but I think he said in order Revenue streams where something like So highest to lowest was

Investing. Advertising revenue. And then significantly blown number three was books. Right. And that doesn't shock me. I mean I think successful tech startups are a lot more lucrative than books, and I think Tim was like early to Uber or something crazy. And Shopify, dude. Just those two alone. That's a whole other level. It could be in the hundred million plus. I mean, being early to a hundred billion dollars shut up is among the best investments that any human has ever made ever. But even that, that's what I kept saying when there's new stuff built on the road. Uh one of the things that you know for me I used was this idea of a rolling fund. Sam does SPVs and syndicates.

On Angelist. So like I'm pretty sure Tim was investing his own money. Maybe there was like some back end deal where like whatever Sequoia gave him money as a scout or something, but I think he was just investing his own money. But like for example We're nowhere near Tim size. No, we're nobody not even close. And um I tweeted out, Hey, I want to raise a rolling fund, you know? If if any if people want to coinvest in deals with me, I've been investing and here's you know here's

Here's an option, here's a link, basically. And that turned in for me with zero outreach, zero meetings. Um and zero reaching out to my own personal network. So these are all strangers from the internet. uh who just follow the podcast or follow me on Twitter. And that became four million a year of investable income. Just to put that into terms, that's not a huge number, right? I think Sam will probably

Invest even more, maybe five times more this year. off his syndicates. Uh and he did the same thing just leveraged his own fame to raise money. And so if you just do the math on that, right? So let's say four million a year. Um my you know, standard carry is twenty percent. I don't take any management fees, but like I could take a two percent management fee. So two percent management fee, that's eight that's eighty K a year. So that's like, you know

Pretty much like a starting salary, you know, for for that pays the bills. That was my salary, you know, that was my salary when I started. Yeah. Uh so that's the first part. Then you take the carry. So you're basically saying of every four million invest or every four million invested, it's the equivalent of me getting to write about eight eight hundred thousand, let's just round up to a million, uh, a million dollars a year of startup investments. So and uh these starter investments take, you know, let's call it 10 years to to mature for that fund to to fully pay out. So that's basically 10 million dollars. of investment of of Money.

That I get to invest. that I didn't have to take out of pocket. So that's$10 million of equity value without a counting in the appreciation of any of those investments, right? And a good fund might three X in value. And so uh you know, a a good font i it could do better, but but even just like normal solid returns over the ten year period would be a triple. And so that would mean that my

10 million in equity value, it becomes like 30 million in equity value. And this is for something that I did put that's I just train I just snapped my fingers and turned audience into cash. But it's a win win. It's not like I'm charging them something. I'm giving them access into a my brain of knowing what startup investments are good and bad, but B, my deal flow of uh deals they could never get access to in the private market. So you get this win win with your audience. But it's pretty massive value, and that vehicle that rolling fund that didn't exist. for, you know, Tim Ferris. It didn't exist for Tony Romans. They had to find a different way. It's just everything's easier now. Um, just like Stripe made it easier to take payments, like It's easier now to raise money. It's easier to create merch. It's create it's easier to create a course. It's create easier to do all the different business model tactics that you can do. Like

Pomp, uh Pomp is another kind of like solo creator. He's got like a job board. And so he's big in Bitcoin and he's that's what he's known for. So he created Crypto Pomps crypto jobs dot com or something like that. So he's making I I believe he didn't he didn't confirm this, but uh you know, just my own kind of Sleuthing here.

Uh, he's making almost a million dollars a year off his job board. Right. So he was like a you know, high level person at Snap, at Facebook, whatever. He's basically replacing that with a passive income stream. Again, just snap his finger, spin up a financial asset. Tim Ferris could have done that, right? But they didn't have these tools nor awareness to use it. They were following the traditional playbook, which was like Write books. give uh speeches like go to go get paid thirty thousand dollars to go talk at some company.

Um and the last one was like he created a TV show. It was like, you know, go for mainstream media. And um and now we have like way more tools in our tool belt that we can use to to generate much more income. Right. And despite all these tools that help you make money, I I

I still don't think it's like necessarily the most accessible path to start with,'cause you gotta build an audience first. Right. And that's a dog eat dog world. Like a ton of people are out there hustling, trying to make a name for themselves. And most of the people I know who've succeeded are kinda like the two of you Where you have these previous business successes. That lends you credence. And help your audiences like build trust with you. Yeah, but by by the way, we didn't

We didn't have that audience either, like eighteen months ago, and neither did Pomp Pomp didn't have that audience two years ago, three years ago. So it it can be built fairly quickly, but you're right, not everybody wants to or can. I'm not this is not a thing where I'm like anybody can do it. It's Or sorry, it's it's it's anybody can do it, but not everybody can do it. Um so it is open to all, but it is not uh gonna be achievable by all. Alright, look, most businesses have something that I hate.

Silos. Say it with me. Silos. What does that mean? It means different people are using different information across your company and no one ever actually knows what's going on, or they're using one source of truth. It's a pain in the butt and it costs you money, it costs you time. And it hurts. It hurts. So With the HubSpot CRM platform, you can bring all your data together in one roof.

So this is like Sounds a a little fluffy and these big words, but I'm gonna put it together in a very simple and easy to understand way. Look. You have salespeople, they're going out and selling stuff. They need context. They need to know who's talked to a particular customer. They know you need to need to know how that customer has interacted with your website, with your customer service. They need to know what's going on. So when they go and talk to that potential customer, they can make the sale and they can get it done.

Now, most of the time they're gonna be prospecting, spending tons of time researching how does this person know us? How do we know them? What's their background, yada, yada, yada. That's a pain in the butt. That is called silo information and waste of time. You don't want to do that. That is why HubSpot CRM platform exists. So With the HubSpot CRM platform, we're bringing together all the data under one place with no lags between marketing and sales. Need to sync your data and keep it clean? No problem. That's what the operations hub is, and that is what it can do.

connect to other apps, clean customer data and automate business processes. This is music to my ears. So check it out. HubSpot CRM platform. Just go to HubSpot.com and save about a decade of tears and crying and heartache over not being able to have your data across your business. Check it out. Okay, so let's let's get into some ideas. Let's talk about ideas that like the average person can do or build.

Uh you guys have your own sources of ideas. Sam, you've got the hustle. You've got a team of journalists who are literally working around the clock. to find new interesting business stories and ideas to bring to you. Uh for me I've got ND hackers. I'll go to the NDHackers product directory and I'll sort by Yeah, I'll just sort by like recently updated and then I'll look at who's making at least ten thousand dollars a month in revenue and just see what pops up. Like see what cool ideas people are working on. You need like a growth rate one. Yeah, I should add that for sure.

I built this whole directory a few years ago. And there's only like a hundred Products on it. And I checked the other day, now there's like over fourteen thousand products where people sort of uh shared what they're doing and how much money they're making and what they're working on and how they come up with their idea and stuff. So

I should definitely add more features to it at this point,'cause it's pretty cool. But uh One of the trends I've been noticing is just people sort of deconstructing and making like really small niche versions. of big venture funded apps.

So a good one is like Calm. dot com. It's a it's a big mindfulness and sort of meditation app. Um and there's some others in the sector that are making like tens of millions, hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue and they've got like a ton of investment. And then on anti hackers I've found people who are making like little small versions of them. So one of them is called Mantra.

It was built by this guy a few years ago. And you can look at his timeline and see like exactly what his thought process was. So he says he was lying in bed watching his girlfriend at the time use a daily affirmations app and he figured he could build something better. And so this is the very first app he's ever made.

And it's super simple. Like I downloaded the app You open it up and it's just got different categories for affirmations. So it's got like Improve your sex life. These affirmations will help create a more satisfying sexual experience in your life. And generate wealth. These affirmations will help attract wealth, abundance, and prosperity to your life. And just stuff like that. That's hilarious. And so it turns out a few years later. Uh two hundred thousand people have downloaded this app.

And he decided to add subscriptions. So you pay twenty bucks a year. to get access to themes and music and whatever. And I think he made thirty five hundred dollars in his very first month. He's got ten thousand reviews. And the average rating is four point eight. Yeah, he's doing pretty well. So his his latest update, he's now at fifteen thousand dollars a month in revenue, and he writes about how he's completely underestimated how big his app could get. He totally underinvested in it.

He hasn't spent a single dime on paid marketing. And instead he spent like the last few years just working on other apps. So he kinda regrets it and now is going back to work on mantra and giving more of his attention. Sean, you should tell'em about um horoscopes. That's the exact same thing here. What what about horsecodes? Um we did we interview the guy? His name was Ross. There's this guy who raised money from um

Bunch of New York media folks. Maybe he raised fifteen million dollars and he was his app was in the same space as this mantra app. But basically Uh, Cortland, did you know that like women love horoscopes? Uh I've yet to date anybody who wasn't into astrology, so yeah, I'm aware.

Even like I dismiss horoscopes as like some like woo woo nonsense bullshit. But even like smart women like my wife and um like Sean's wife like are into it. Even if it's at a casual level.

thinking like oh I'm also into like a ton of like bro science as well. So it's just like their version of bro science. And uh There, we we we found so there was this app that raised maybe 10 or 15 million, and they're probably making millions of dollars a year doing horoscopes. Then we went and found. horoscope was it horoscope or Sudoku? Something like that where it was like the most like Old school, not nice looking website.

And they were very likely could be making ten million a year off of these things. And it was just getting crazy amounts of traffic because the amount of people who read or consume horoscope content Is like Like half of America.'Cause it's it's like eighty percent of women like check account of number. And it's smart too because it's daily. Like you don't just check your horoscope once and then never again. Like you come back and check it every single day.

It's like uh what we were talking about earlier with the news and entertainment, like This is something where you can collect subscription revenue and people aren't gonna stop coming back. I was given an example of uh there's a guy who's building some app that's like it connects you with like kinda experts. So it's sort of like um Oh, if you're redoing your kitchen, you can actually like get a fifteen minute video call with this that person from HG TV. Right. So they found all these like, hey, Justin Bieber stylist will like give you style advice for thirty minutes if you want to pay 150 bucks or whatever. And so it's sort of like cameo, but you're booking these like fifteen, thirty minute calls with The who's who of fashion, beauty, home improvement, all these categories.

And I was looking at their their number and I was like, Oh yeah, that's great. You've seen some growth. Like which which vertical is it? Is there one winner? And they were like, Yeah, you know, it's spread out. And I was like, Yeah, but like certainly one has to be doing better than all the others. And they're like Yeah, actually uh astrology is doing pretty well. And I was like, Uh it's like not even on your site. He's like, Yeah, yeah, it's like over there on the far right under this thing'cause even he was kind of like, you know It's not the thing we wanna lead with while we're fundraising. And like he didn't say all that, but like you could tell it wasn't the f it wasn't what he thought would win. Nor was it what they were promoting the most. But it was the thing that was working the best and he showed me and so I went down the rabbit hole. Again, I'm professionally curious. So I

Go on Instagram and I start finding all the Instagram astrology accounts, astrology influencers, basically. And it's like Eighty thousand, ninety thousand, two hundred thousand, five hundred thousand followers. And these are like just like, you know some chick in Florida or like you know, some chick in like Huntington Beach who like, you know, dresses us the way you would imagine and like Her her

Every every post is like, uh, you know, like the chakras are aligned and like today if you experience a good event, it's because you I told you this or whatever, right? Like some bullshit. And um and then in like Ling in the bio is basically like an OnlyFans. to book a reading with her. And you go and so I'm like, all right, hell yeah, let's book a reading. Let's see, let's go end to end with this this professional curiosity. And it's like sold out. Just every session is booked for like weeks. And um and so what he was doing was those some of those people were using his platform, but even the others were just using a bootleg version of this.

It made me think there is an only fans for uh for palm reading, astrology, horoscopes. You know, like sort of like rel relationship like voodoo or whatever. And like the same thing happens not just like in America. In India, this is a huge thing. In India, when you have a kid, you take your kid to like the the local guru,'cause of course every village just happens to have like a mystical guru that lives there. And he'll like you know, he's like Rafiki holding the baby, you know, Simba. And he like looks at him and he'll just like he'll write you on a scroll like your whole life story and like the do's and don'ts. It's like You know, don't eat black beans, don't get married in the month of September, you know, don't date anyone with the letter J in their name and it's like And people believe this like to their core. They're just like, Oh, you know, he's a great guy, but like his name is, you know

uh you know, Trajan or whatever. It's like he's got a J in there. We can't we can't date Trajan. We gotta break up with Trajan here. And it's like sh like people believe this in every c every walk of life. And I think that's one area that like s a Silicon Valley doesn't talk about, but um B, there's just a lot of simple software solutions you could build that uh that can get you maybe not to a hundred million in revenue, but like you can get to ten K a month of profit, you can get to fifty K a month of profit doing these bills. It'll make you rich. Like Yeah, he's we uh we like talk a lot about that on the podcast where like It's pretty

Like raising money and going big, I think is sick, and I'm happy that the people who do it do it. Maybe I'll do it one day. But if your like goal is to optimize for like wealth creation. some of these apps or smaller relatively smaller ideas are actually significantly likelier to make you wealthy. And Perhaps be more fun along the way.

And a lot of them are just repurposing ideas that have existed in the past in some form or another That used to be doing really well. So you can kinda just look at like what people used to do that worked. and then just try it again. So like the horoscope industry You know, it's always had these influencers who people really trust.

And I don't know if you guys remember Miss Clio. She had this like mystical hotline in the nineties. Yeah, you've heard Oh yeah. Yeah, okay. Like that business was crushing it. Like they made like a billion dollars or something crazy about that. I mean She was just a a hired model or like I mean she actually was Who she wasn't mystical? She was like she was like a professional palm reader, but like the owners of the marketing company like heard her speak and they're like Oh my gosh, like you are our She's perfect. You're gonna be our woman. You know, you're our our spokesperson and uh they paid her like not you know, like a hundred grand a year or some like normal salary.

And uh It was pretty wild. And and a lot of the stuff seems scammy, but here's uh there's other examples. Like there's uh like sleep is a great category. So you're talking about Calm and one of Calm's biggest features is sleep stories. And uh it's a paid feature, but like we m we know and have met owners of sleep apps that do everything from, you know, just white noise or like raindrop sound effects or whatever, to sleep stories to sleep stories, but just in other languages. And they just focus on like, you know, the Spanish speaking market or whatever. And there's just like an infinite number of these niches that exist, both in software or You know, D to C. Like for example

Um, just to tie it back into what we're talking about earlier. In the D to C space Uh like the fact that Tim Ferris doesn't have his own like no tropic drink or like kettlebell brand, left money on the table. You know what I mean? Like and it and the person who actually did this really well uh was Joe Rogan. And um, you know, right, he has like Alpha Brain or whatever that that that supplements company is. And I think Sam, you know the numbers better than I do on this, but that's like a hundred million dollar a year company, I think. It just sold. Uh maybe I'm a little it was over. It just was acquired the other day and um friends who know the company told me it sold for three hundred and fifty million dollars and that Joe owned like twenty percent of it. Right. And so like

He Hey, that's his his own passion area. He talked about it anyways. Why take sponsors money to talk about somebody else's brand when like you could just be part owner or white label any of these things, right? So ha there's a whole suite of those types of ideas. And this happens again, like To look at another country, look at India. all the famous like kind of like gurus in India, it's like, oh, this guy's a saint. He only accepts donations and like makes millions of dollars off donations. And then the as they get famous, like Miss Clio style, like the I think the top guy, like has like his own ramen noodle company.

Uh and like put right, so he does license his face onto ramen noodles and crackers or something like that. And is like a billionaire from from this ramen noodle company and uh yet at the same time supposed to be this like religious saint. Just the most basic stuff. Right. But like we can learn from them. Like if you're trying to learn this like what is this solo like kind of solo creator playbook. Well you gotta y know what are all the tools in the toolbox and then use the ones that that you want. But actually I was gonna ask you a different question, which is Joe Rogan reminded me of this. Who is having the most fun with what they do for a living.

Uh I somebody had asked me this question or or in our group chat somebody asked this question. And I was like, That's a great question, right? Because once you see that, you see a model, you're like And it's it's not they're having the most fun, but it's like I think that would be super fun if that was me, as kind of like a c one questi one version of the question. Um, because that bec that can become a blueprint then. Like why don't why don't I just go in for that? And my answer was Joe Rogan. And I'll give you kinda my defense with Joe Rogan, but I would love if you guys have other answers of somebody who you've seen just having a blast are you

Yeah, they're having a blast and you think it would be a blast for you too. I'm curious if there are any other answers like The Joe Rogan reasoning to me is He basically he's got the podcast, which like clearly he does for fun,'cause he was doing it before it made any money, before he sold it to You know, before he sold the rights to Spotify for a hundred million dollars a year. He was doing it for free kind of in his in his bedroom and uh when when there was no promise of money.

So he's just meeting badass people Elon Musk, Neil DeGrasse Tyson, he's just having conversations with interesting people. Through that he gets a bunch of fans who love him. Uh that sounds fun. Then he loves the UFC, he's the UFC commentator, but he also does it Where he doesn't go to every event, that would be exhausting. That would be like the trade off where the job become the hobby becomes a shitty job. And instead he's like, No, I'm only gonna do the big pay per views in Vegas. So that's a easy flight for me. I'm not gonna travel around the world trying to chase this thing around anymore.

So that seems fun. And then he's a stand up comedian, which is like a hard challenge, super fun thing to do, and he sells out arenas all around the world. And so like And then he's got his brand, alpha brain or whatever, and he works out all the time. Like Joe Rogan just seems like He is doing all the things he wants. at the highest level. And so it seems like that's a blast. Who do you guys think is having the most fun?

Okay, I'm gonna go with the founder CEOs. of these humongous like hundred billion dollar plus tech companies. And so I'm talking about like the Patrick Collinsons of the world, Bill Gates, Larry Ellison and Oracle, uh Jeff Bays was on Amazon. Uh just these absolute titans. who are controlling a ton of resources

And they're not like just some higher gun CEO who came in later on to like turn the ship around. Like these are people who are working on the projects that they started that used to be tiny. So it's kinda like their life mission. It's kinda like their baby. And once it gets big enough. Like it takes a lot a lot of work, a lot of heartache to get to the point where they're at now. But once it gets to that size, like

You can kinda delegate most of the important Like urgent work to other people, like your trusted lieutenants. And then You're kinda, you know, in control of like a massive amount of resources where you can work on your favorite thing. And you can do side projects and all sorts of stuff. So I think that's kind of

The most enviable position to be in. We're having um I think next week we're having the co founder of HubSpot on Darmesh. And I'll ask him. But I talk to him regularly and I'm almost positive he doesn't have any direct reports.

And I'm also You can look this up actually. I think he's the largest individual shareholder of HubSpot and his value of just HubSpot shares is over a billion. And I was like, What did you do this week? He's like, Oh, I bought my wife for her fortieth or fiftieth birthday. I bought her this domain called humanist dot org. It's like a it's a it's this like philosophy we buy into and it's this community.

And I was like, Is this what you do for fun? He's like, Yeah, it's like it's the greatest job on earth. I'll have to ask him, so I'm not insinuating this, but um it appears as though he's got a pretty nice life. And it I I agree with you that having the resources of a huge company is quite amazing. It's almost like you're at the top of a cult where you've got millions of people and like you know, maybe they're not following you because they believe in you. Um they're following you because they're getting paid. But they're still following you nonetheless. They'll basically do whatever you ask them to do. You can set up whatever lifestyle you want to do, and you have a a certain amount of power that I think comes from only having lots of people working in concert with you that you can't get just from having lots of money. You know, you can deploy that money if you're super rich to get people to work in concert with you, but if you have a company, kind of everyone's bought into the Kool Aid and they're pushing in the same direction. And you can launch any sort of cool, fun side project that you want to. Or you could just go take off for a few weeks and like people won't really notice that you're gone because everything's sort of delegated.

When I compare that to like the content creators of the world, like Tim Ferris. I'm sure Tim Ferris has some fun, but it seems kinda stressful to like have to be Tim Ferris all the time. It's definitely stressful. My my um I mean he's like blogged about like depression and shit.

And he suffers. part job, part genetic. But my Best friend Jack Smith. Jack Smith sold his company for eight hundred million dollars, something like that. Uh he probably walked away with before tax, nearly nine figures, so nearly a hundred million dollars. He started the company when he was twenty-three. He quit working there at when he was twenty-six. He's now thirty-three or thirty-two.

Um he lives in a house in Hawaii. He has no social file. He has a Twitter handle. He has a Facebook profile, but he doesn't like He probably has a hundred and fifty followers. He's not trying to impress anyone. He doesn't do any angel investing. Uh, what he does in his free time is he's a he's a pen pal for uh inmates in prison. And so he's currently pen paling with this guy who's like a mat who like taught himself math and he like gets joy out of helping he'll h the the guy's like, Yeah, I wanna get this book and so Jack just buys him the book. uh like the math book and he enjoys conversing about it. He um he loves um

testing different supplements and testing different products on Amazon. And he doesn't have that need to create content or be a big shot. He's incredibly comfortable in his own skin. His wife started um Coffee Meets Bagel, so she's also a big shot. And so uh he lives on the beach in Hawaii in a rental unit that he probably pays ten thousand dollars a month for. And I think he is having the most fun because he doesn't feel the need. I think both Sean and I, and probably you, Cortland, because we're like these like public facing things, we definitely have this need to be loved.

Uh Jack doesn't really have that. uh he he no he only wants to be loved by his close friends and I and I think that there's something uh great to be said about like contentment and like Uh humbleness and you n you are happy with what you have and you don't nearly we don't really need much or want more.

on the content treadmill. No, he doesn't need to be a treadmill. He's not on the money treadmill. He's not on the on the social climbing treadmill. He's not on the content treadmill. He's not on any any trouble. I I I kind of agree with you, Sam. Which has its downsides. Like not having a mission, uh sometimes it seems to get sad, so I'll have to like pick a project, but go ahead. I was gonna say I I I uh so I totally disagree with what you said, Corlin, and I kind of agree with what you said, Sam. So I'll give you both. So Corlin, I I totally disagree in the sense that what I've seen, at least, is the kind of the CEOs of the unicorns, here's your day. Your day is mostly Uh a combination of

people problems. So like, you know, your whole job was to put the right people in the right places, but then all but people are one of the like buggiest pieces of code out there, right? So so you're always debugging that. You're always debugging people. And then the second thing is Um You're putting out fire. So there's like always a fire in any big company, any sufficiently large company, there's always, you know, some rotating set of crises every month. And uh, you know, that requires your attention. And so like you know, I don't think when Zuck creates Facebook, he wants people to be like sharing cool photos of their lives. He doesn't want fake news, misinformation, and like you know how much of these guys' day has to like

go into like solving the gnarly problem of the of the moment. And so So I think you know, they try to hire away that, but like at the end of the day, they're accountable for it. And so they have to like ultimately deal with with these problems. People problems, then you have big company problems. And the last bit is like You sort of lost the magic and the connection and the fun of like building something yourself hands on, which is probably what you like to do if you started one of these companies. Uh, secondly, working with a small crew of people because now the place is so large you don't even recognize people in your own company. Um, and also like you lose the like um You in order to make a large company run, you need to recruit certain types of people, right? You need generals of armies and not like guerrilla warfare like you're used to at the beginning. So a lot of your good friends from the beginning of the company have moved on to do other things if you're still there. So I've seen there is a big trade off in addition to the cool stuff you mentioned.

Uh, and so that's why I wouldn't say there's too many trade offs for me to say, Oh, they're having the most fun. I think they're the busiest. I can see at Stripe you can see everybody's calendar. And I I just like pulled up Patrick Collison's calendar. Like what's this guy doing this week? And I can see like every single event that's on it. Screen share, bro. Let's go. Well, it's it's one of two, right? It's either thirty minutes, thirty minutes, thirty minutes, thirty minutes, and there's an executive assistant or two dedicated to like one. Getting this c like they work their job is his calendar, basically. And like f everybody wants his time and he's got a and he wants his own time and so you know, there's thirty minutes back to back everywhere. And then there's the other one which is super sparse where it's sort of like Well I kinda don't do anything now.

Which is sort of fun at first, but I could also just quit if I really wanted to do nothing. Uh so instead I'm kind of like in this like slightly unsatisfying position of like My job is not to do any of the jobs. It's uh I'm sort of doing nothing. I'm supposed to think about the vision and shit like that. And so uh what do you think about that? Is that true which one is he? But also like He does a lot of projects outside of that, and it's like very strictly like eight to five, nine to five. Like then done. There's nothing outside of that. There are no obligations. And like he is working on extra projects. So he does, for example,

uh the fast grants during Covid. Where they're giving out money which is all the researchers. Super awesome. And this is like a kind of a fun project. And before that he was working with Tyler Cohen on doing a research project with like why scientific progress has like slowed down. He's also like learned to fly planes. Uh I was talking to him a couple months ago about like a project we might work on together. uh just the two of us about like helping to fund like underrepresented minorities and groups to like basically cool do cool things. And so it's like I don't know if he's a superhuman who just works

Sixteen hours a day, but like he's somehow finding time. to work on all these cool pet projects with like small groups of people. And to fund it because he's got the resources of an entire organization behind him. So it's probably you're right, it's like not the most fun job. He still has like a crazy amount of responsibility buyers put out. If he wants to go to these things. Sam brought up a good point, which is like There's the people who no longer are chasing desire.

And they're happy. Because they're sort of at peace. They're not just like at war with some part of their life. And that's like, you know, the monk, but there's like the modern day monk. And you do meet some people like this who just like they're not like driven by their desire they've their desire, right? Because desire is basically saying I lack something. Right. And so you're you're agreeing to be unhappy with the current thing to go desire more. And then there's like the people who I think me and Sam try to be more like right now, which is I don't think either of us try to be the guy with no desires. I think we try to be Well I have healthy addictions. The things I want f

I I I think are positive for me in the world. And the pursuit of them will make me ultimately better, healthier, have more fun, and a happier person. All right, so like Yeah. I gotta choose an addiction. At least I chose a healthy one. And um I think those are the people like kind of second second second most fun.

What what's the end game though?'Cause I'm like I guess in a way like me and Sam are like following in your footsteps. Like both of our companies got acquired. Both of us are still working at the acquires, like I don't Sam, like when d when do you quit HubSpot? And what do we do after that? I don't have an end in mind. I think that you and I, Cortland, are in different positions, maybe well

You guys don't have like like I don't have like a goal that I have to hit and if I don't hit it I don't make money. So like truthfully like My life is awesome. Like I I thoroughly enjoy what I do. Um I spend most of my time doing c uh podcast stuff. Uh, I'm happy.

I I'm I'm happy with my life. I think that I enjoy Um being a HubSpot employee. Inevitably I'm going to quit. And when I do, I probably won't start something. I'll probably chill for three, four, five years, and then start something. But

There I don't really have an end game. I do think about it a lot and it stresses me out, so I try not to think about it. I'm really trying to enjoy the journey as much as possible. I'm in a position now that like I have no once out of life. Like I have I'm happy where I am. I would be happy with significantly less though. Um And so I'm I'm a little I'm quite in a satisfied Area.

Uh for now. But I like like I do experience envy. Like Sean People love hit when he invests in their company and I'm like, fuck, that's like easy money. That's a great deal. And he also is really good at spotting them. And so like I I experience like envy or I experience like, Oh, I wanna do that too. But I it's definitely not like a uh I'm willing to dedicate my life to doing that at the moment.

Sean, what's your end game? Because you don't have some date, you know, in the future like Sam does where he's gonna quit and do something else. You're kinda just like staring ahead at the rest of your life. So what's What do you do when you don't necessarily have like a specific goal in mind? Yeah, uh so I I'm basically chasing this thing called the perfect Tuesday. And uh what I realized was

Having these like goals or milestones or accomplishments is a false promise you make with yourself where you're like, Oh, that's what I want and then it's You know, as you get there you're like, Okay, well you move the goalposts and you you want something more, right? Like already I have more than I would have ever asked for ten years ago. And now I'm like, Oh, I want more, more, more, more. And there's like this disease of more. And so instead, I basically went the other way and I was like, Okay, instead of thinking about what's this ten year vision for myself and what's the end game, it was sort of like What's the now game? What is the

What is the perfect Tuesday for me right now. The perfect average Tuesday. And so I did this exercise once that kind of changed the way I look at things, which is I said, What's the perfect normal day for me? And um and not perfect like everything goes right, but like if I was just to do all the things I love in a normal day, what are all those normal things? And they're they're not that hard, right? Like it's like you know, I love to wake up w without the alarm. So like I love to wake up naturally rather than alarm waking up saying, Oh shit, you gotta do something and I'm feel groggy.

So now I wake up around seven thirty. I'm just gonna start going to sleep earlier'cause I got a kid, but like I don't wake up with an alarm. anymore. Um and so that that already was like one thing and this I d these are gonna sound really stupid, but like I'll just give you I'll just walk you through some of the examples like of how stupid this is, which is like I um I I like I love to shower. Like I I just love having a shower. Um I'm like I get great ideas in the shower, shower's super relaxing. I just noticed like on a normal day, that's like one of my favorite parts of the day is

Taking a great shower. And so then two things. I like started to appreciate this thing that seemed really mundane. It seems like stupid to have a goal of taking a great shower every day, but now I have a goal of taking a great shower every day because I know I love showering. Work out. I love to work out. So I want to have a great workout every day. And not just like generically a great workout. It's like what are the most fun types of workouts for me? I want to do those every day. And so I have this day kind of mapped out where I'm like, these are the things I love doing on normal days. They don't take an outstanding event or it's not a vacation. It's like if my normal day was like this, I'd be a happy camper right now. And then I so I have like a great day.

Then I mapped out in a gr what's a great week, meaning like what's a thing I do once a week. I'm not gonna do it every day, but I wanna do it once a week. What's a great month? What's the thing I wanna do once or twice a month that I'm not gonna do every day? And then what do I do once or twice a year? And so I wrote those out. And I even I love this exercise so much I had my mom do it. I was like, Mom, you're you're getting old, you gotta be having great days, all right? Like you know, you don't think of yourself as an ambitious person, but you should be like

You've you've you've did all the hard work. You raised the kids, you worked your whole life. Like now you should just be maximizing joy. I should also be maximizing joy. So this exercise helps me maximize joy. And so now I'm basically just chasing architecting my life so that I'm having that perfect Tuesday as often as I can and getting as close to it as I can. And same thing with the things I want to do every once a week or once a month. So and I was a little bit convoluted, but that's what I'm after. No, no, I love it. It makes perfect sense. I think out of every group of people on the planet entrepreneurs have to be the most neglectful of the present moment. Like we're always obsessed with some huge goal we've set, you know, we're gonna build that company, we're gonna

You know, launch this app. And we kinda forget about the days in between now and then. you know, like we just sort of neglect the present for the future. Which is dumb because the present is what life is made out of. It's made of an endless string of present moments. And so Uh, if you want to have a good, enjoyable life, like you can't

You have to kinda resist that entrepreneurial urge to only care about the Yeah, like if you just imagine, like draw uh draw a line, and that's the time of your life, right? And like let's say it's a year or ten years, that line represents. And then like you have this milestone at the end, this goal at the end you're shooting for. And you have two options. Either you say I'll be happy when I get to the end. Okay, cool. Or you say, I'm gonna have fun the whole way.

all along the way, right? Like it's very obvious when you draw that line, which of these diagrams is better? The one where you have fun just in that dot at the end, or the one where you have fun on the every single dot along this line. Is this like so obvious? It's nothing new, it's nothing insightful. Everybody's heard this cliche of enjoy the journey, not the destination. Like when I look at that diagram, I'm like what the fuck? Who cares what that end destination is? I want this like this line to be dope. I wanna be I wanna be having fun all the all the way, especially if this line represents 10 years of my life. Then like I gotta make that that happen. And so that becomes the focus. Well I think the issue is like

People hear this. And it's almost like a cliche. And that doesn't mean that it's wrong. I think a cliche is something that's smart enough that it became common advice. You know, it's about the journey, not about the destination. But it's still hard enough that people have have been repeating this for years And people still don't understand or follow it.

Yeah, I think people hear this from a couple of rich guys like you two and they're like, Okay, yeah, it's easy for you to say Um but in their shoes they often see themselves As having to have this difficult, arduous journey.

to get to the point where they have enough money. And then they'll use that money to have a good journey and do something else. So like Sean, you are at this point Where you can design this cool life for yourself. In part because you have enough money that you don't have to go to a nine to five job.

Ever again. And so when you say this, it's not like it's not easy for other people to follow that advice. Well so so so what I'm saying is what I'm b basically saying is I'm not telling people Don't chase the money. I guess what I'm telling people is It's a false choice that you either

You know, you suffer till you have money, or you have fun, but you don't have money. There are plenty of examples, and so if there is even one example, that means it is possible. There are plenty of examples of have funny have fun and make a ton of money. That's a byproduct. So if that's an option on the table. You're crazy for settling for anything less than that, if you're a sufficiently talented person, right? Um if you're if you're a talented enough person, which most people are who are listening to this, if you're sufficiently privileged and you have your faculties about you, Uh that is an option on the table. Have a shit ton of fun and make a shit ton of money. Both Um

Then choosing one or the other is a silly option. Okay, so Question for both of you. Uh, what's your favorite example or story of uh how somebody can do that? Like if you're an Indy hacker right now You're just starting out, you got nothing.

How can you do something that works and that makes money and that's also Uh allows you to have fun in the process. Yeah, give me one. All right, I was at a friend's house yesterday and he was like thinking about starting a He wanted to help kids start shit and I'm like

Basically I think that Like if you wanted to if you were eighteen years old and you had a summer and you wanted to build a business that made a hundred thousand dollars a year, I think it would be shockingly simple, not easy, it would be hard physically. to just dominate Yelp for a local service. that would take you only like three to six weeks to like master. So

Maybe Trimming trees or something like that. Um, I think that you could probably crush it that way and make hundreds of thousands of dollars. uh and a relatively straightforward, non intellectually challenging Low risk way.

I I think that that that most people could probably do that. Right. I think it's low risk. I don't think it's super like Strategically difficult, but also is that like fun. Like how many people really enjoy going out in the hot weather and like trimming trees all I don't mind. Like I just paid a guy eighty dollars an hour to come to my house off Task Rabbit to power wash. And he had like a rinky dink two hundred and fifty dollar washer or whatever, and I asked him what his plans were for the day and he was like I got eight of these planned.

So I mean like And is power washing that like I know, does anyone love it? I don't know, but it's kind of fun to like start a job and finish it and you can work outside in the sun. Okay, I've got one. Uh, this is a company another company that I found on Indy Hackers. It's called High Performers.

So the guy calls it master class as a service. For pro athletes. So I'm looking at this guy's timeline. His first post is from November two thousand and twenty. He says, I spoke to five pro athletes and I've got one of them to agree to partner with me. And then he helped this guy his athlete create a course.

It's basically like a PowerPoint presentation that you created. And he put it on you to me. And then he helped this athlete sell the course to his own followers on social media. And so now, uh eight months later he's got this whole process on repeat. He's hired a salesperson to do all the outreach. So he only has to do the part that he likes, like actually working with the athletes and creating the course.

And he's making ten thousand dollars a month. Basically just doing what he loves and just making money in the process. And the idea isn't even that creative. I mean it's just master class for a niche. I did this with um There's this guy nam Askren who's in the UFC and he's uh an Olympic wrestler.

And I was a fan of his. I became friends with him on Twitter. He started talking to me about digital stuff'cause he didn't know anything about it, although he was like had a huge following and I was like, Why don't you start a course? He's like, I have no idea how. I was like, dude, I'll just call you once a week for like four weeks and we'll get this shit done. And he did it. And he's got a a wrestling course. And so I total I didn't charge him anything. I just wanted to become friends with him. But uh I he would have paid. He offered to pay me money, so I I agree that that could definitely be a thing. Right. And you literally did that for free. I mean so that was just because you have I think it's different people have fun doing different things. So I'll just speak for myself. If I was twenty one again or twenty two or whatever, and I'm like, all right How do I have a bunch of fun and make a bunch of money at the same time? What I would do is actually very similar to these guys who hooked me and Sam up with our podcast like studios that they set up for us.

And um and they're crushing it right now. So here's what they are twenty one, by the way. They were basically like Hey, we're big fans of the show, right?'Cause they are fans of the show. I would be a fan of our show if I was, you know, a yeah, a kid again. And um And they basically reach out and they're like, Hey, your guys' camera stuff like looks like shit and your sound kinda sucks sometimes, like We're really good at this.

Do you want us to come like help you out? Like I'll set your thing up for free. Um just s you know, basically like pick a weekend n next weekend, the weekend after that, when can we come and set your thing up? I like I'm tired of listening to you guys with crappy audio and crappy video. And um And so we were like, uh okay. And then they they showed us their YouTube channel. They're like, look, here's my YouTube channel. I don't got a ton of followers, but just look at the quality and you'll see, like, would you like to look like this? And I'm like, Hell yeah. And then he sent me a menu. He sent me three

setups he's like, here's you could look like this famous guy, this famous guy, or this famous guy. Which which setup looks best to you? And I was like, All right, fine, come on out here and give me give me option C. And he's like, Great, we'll be there this Sunday. They flew out here, they hung out, they did the hard work, they didn't ask for anything in return. And I was like, dude, let me pay you guys like something. Like this is you know, so so what would I get to do? I'd I'd meet somebody who I'm really like I'm a big fan of. I would hook'em up with something using a skill that's pretty easy to learn, really. Uh like, you know, they they basically found some lights, they drilled into the wall, and then they like picked the right microphone, they plugged it into the right slot and whatever. They they just they did the setup. And then they they followed up and they were just like, you know, already I was like, dude, I'm gonna

I'll help you guys out. I'll mentor you guys. I'll hook you guys up with your we want another opportunity. What do you want? And they were like, Yeah, we're just trying to figure out what to do and What they figured out was there's a lot of podcasters like us out there that had really good hour long content. And what they did was they had uh from the from their own content, they had stubborn into a this setup where they've Find talented video editors basically overseas in the Philippines or wherever else.

And they train them on how to edit clips. Uh and then basically they have a business where they just charge Podcasters like us, tens of thousands of dollars a month. Yeah. Have you seen those have you seen ours, Cortland? Yeah, they look super good. I see them on on Twitter. Yeah, we pay'em thirty grand a month. They look super good. Have you put them on uh YouTube yet?'Cause I'm trying to find you on YouTube now. We are we suck at that part right now. F forget that. But I guess my point is these guys are making thirty grand a month just off Also has one client, right? And they can make

pr they probably can't charge everybody that much, but they can have like twenty clients doing this. And basically they're just doing labor arbitrage. Talented people in the Philippines. Um and then they're they're getting to meet like yesterday's all in podcast, which is like one of the most Famous business podcast. It was like the whole first half of the thing was all about these guys. They said their names probably fifty times. They said their names fifty times. Like, yeah, this kid Henry. Henry Bellcaster keeps sending us clips and uh and then we're in DMs with them and Chamont's like, dude, you're DMing Henry Bellcaster? Wha what why? And he's like, Yeah, they do a great job. They were like it was like a professional infomercial for them. They've become friends with these guys. They're hooking them up with great content. And sure enough, those guys started paying for it. And And you know, the next and the next, these guys will be making one to two million dollars a year of profit if they play their cards right, as twenty two, twenty three year olds.

Just for operating a like, you know, sweatshop of video editors in the Philippines. Right? That's what they're doing. I can't believe they pulled that off. They told me that they were gonna try and do that and I was like, Yeah, I mean it'll work. And these guys kept at it, kept at it, kept at it. They killed it. Basically kept sending me clips of my show where he had edited Edited the episodes better than I was editing them. So I eventually just hide. What does that do? That does three things, right? You get good at content creation, because that's you're basically practicing that craft every day. That's a really valuable skill to start compounding at a young age. Second thing, you meet a bunch of cool ass people that are highly networked, they love they they know you and trust you. And if you ever wanted to do a thing, if you have bigger ambitions, They you can hit'em up in one call and you're you're no longer cold, you're warm.

Um and then the la and and they know you're good. They know you hustle and you do good work. And last thing is They're gonna make at least half a million dollars, probably close to one to two million dollars of profit off this business in the next couple of years. That's you know, you're a millionaire. Congratulations, right? You had a bunch of fun doing it. So that's a per that's an easy example to me of something I would have done if I was their their age. Okay, so if we distilled this into like a playbook. that people can follow. First you find something that you genuinely like and you take the time to get really good at it.

And then you look to find somebody who's like famous or cool, who's not really doing that good of a job at that thing. And you do it for them for free. And they'll probably take notice because these are like hard workers who really want to get better at whatever it is they're doing. And so they'll hire you or they'll pay for your thing. They'll probably mentor you.

And you can just repeat this playbook. for anyone you like and make a ton of money in the process while also getting to meet your heroes that's a that's it that's one path that that's one path that works. There are many. That's one Cool. Well that's a good takeaway to end the show on. Sam Sean, thanks for coming on. Can you let listeners know where they can go to find your podcast and whatever else you're working on? Yeah, you can find our podcast if you just Google it. You may have to scroll all the way up to the top of the charts because we're pretty high up there now. So just go all the way up to number one and then we're just below that. So uh my first million in the podcast app store, whatever. Uh follow Sam, he's the sampar on Twitter. I'm Sean VP on Twitter, SeanPurry.com, that's my newsletter.

I feel like I can rule the world, I know I can be what I want to I put my all in it like my day's off On the roadless travel never looking back

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