#171 - How to Generate Millions from Paid Events (Bootstrapped)

When I I first hosted my uh I hosted my first event in June, and the event happened All right, decided to do it around June first in the event. went place seven weeks later in August. And when I started, I had close to nothing. I had um a two hundred person email list. So there wasn't like this, oh, it's easy for you, you had to hustle. No, no, no, it didn't exist. Uh there was no website. There was just a domain name called Hustle Cut. Um and I hosted this event in the first

Six weeks it made about sixty thousand dollars in revenue. And fifty ish thousand dollars in profit. And A lot of people were surprised by that. It was but it wasn't that hard. The second event you can see here. So how how did you sell the sixty thousand dollars of tickets during that process? I feel like I can rule the world, I know I can be what I want to

I'm putting my all in it like a day's off. On the road, less travel, never looking back. Today, Sean, let's actually jump right you. I think want to do this Billy of the Week right away. And then I have a thing on events. Do you want to do events or you want to save that? What do you want to do? I want to do that. So I want to do this Billy of the Week. I want to hear your stuff on paid events. And then I have two. ideas. One is a cool idea I've seen, and then the other is

A brainstorm of a of a potential idea. So I want to do all those things. So let's start with Let's start with the Billy of the Week. Um This one is Very interesting. Have you ever heard of this guy before? Don't don't Google. I want to tell you the story. So don't don't Google this guy. Let me tell you the story. I I'm just I I Googled them. I'm just looking Oh wow.

Okay. Yeah. Uh young guy? Young guy, twenty nine years old, I think. So his name is Sam Bankman Freed, I think is the way you say his name. And uh when you if you heard him talk, like I actually want you to listen to a YouTube video for a second, because he sounds like, you know, an absolute dweeb. And I loved it. I was like, Oh, this guy sounds like he would be a self-made billionaire. By the age of twenty nine,'cause he sounds like a genius. He sounds like a tech genius. Have you brought this person up to me before? No. I just discovered it about two days ago, so what's this guy's story?

So This guy well you know, I'll just call him Sam for short, but s uh So this guy Sam, he's a he he He's a young guy, he's very smart. Um

S takes a job as kind of like a hedge fund trader or something like that. Oh, it's a group called Jane Street, I guess. And uh I don't know. I forget these details. They don't really matter. Guy's got a job in finance. And um He leaves and he starts something called Alameda Research. And it's called Alameda Research because he needed it to sound as legit as possible and not

Like what it actually was. So what was it? So what this guy did was He was into crypto. And there was this known thing in crypto where As crypto is getting popular, this is around twenty seventeen when the first big

Run up happening and Bitcoin went. You know, from three thousand dollars to twenty thousand dollars and it crashed later, but During that time, twenty sixteen, twenty seventeen, twenty eighteen, Bitcoin was Emerging And there was this k as any new thing, there's these like kind of

Uh It's like the Wild Wild West a little bit. And so there was this thing where in the US The price of Bitcoin l was let's say ten thousand dollars a bitcoin. And in other countries where

Um, the exchanges weren't built or the country the country had some regulations or whatever, there was like a premium for Bitcoin. There was more demand than there was Bitcoin available to buy in those countries. Uh, because you need like let's say Like in Korea. There was a famous Uh thing called the Kimchi. The Kimchi Premium.

And the Kimchi premium was that in Korea There wasn't um Kimchi like the uh like the the food. So this was known as the Kimchi Premium, and basically it was like Uh, whatever Bitcoin was selling for here, let's say it was ten thousand dollars, and Korea it was trading for fifteen thousand dollars. Because it was that big of the fifty percent premium. And it it fluctuated, obviously, and I think thirty percent was kind of like the average of the kimchi premium. over time. So everybody wanted this

So everybody, you know, any smart person saw, Oh wow, there's an arbitrage. What if I could just buy it in the US for ten grand? And immediately sell it in Korea. For fifteen grand or for thirty, thirteen grand. And so you had this like ab ability to flip it. And so a whole bunch of people were trying to do this, but there was all these problems, right? Like

Well, the reason yeah, you know, the reason it wasn't easy the reason there was this premium is'cause it was hard to buy Bitcoin in Korea. So one idea was you buy it in the US off a US exchange. You go to Korea. And you sell it. But you're gonna sell it for in the Korean, you know, w won, which is like the local currency.

But now you need to like for the for the arbitrage to continue, you have to convert the Korean wand back to dollars to go buy more. go buy more bitcoin in the US. The problem was you can't convert the Korean wan back to dollars easily because the government was very like tight fisted regulations, you couldn't funnel large amounts of money from the Korean one back to dollars very very easily. So a whole bunch of people were trying to get this like pinata of money. And they couldn't crack it. And what this guy did was he was like, Okay, fuck the Kimchi premium. He went for the Japan premium, which was far less appealing. It was only ten percent.

But he's like still If I can if I could trade a US Bitcoin for ten percent more in Japan every day, I'm making ten percent compounding daily. And so he went through this like Odyssey where for like a year All he's doing is setting up this trade. So he like And for actually, by the way, first when he was trying to figure out could I capture the kimchi premium, he was like doing calculations like

If I filled up if I chartered a private plane and I filled it up with a hundred people and I flew uh you know, they buy Bitcoin in the US and I flew them all to Korea. And then they they you know sell it there. And then I could each one of them could convert some amount of that money and I could fly them back. And every day I could fly this plane back and forth between US and Korea. Like, could I make it work? And he was like, I I don't think it works. So wait, so you had to be there physically. It's not that you had to be there physically, you have to do all like all legs of the tr transaction. So you have to be able to buy in Korea, or like sorry, sell your bitcoin in Korea at the premium.

But now you have Korean one, now you need to convert that to dollars. And so how do you do that? You need to convert it there, but there's caps. They won't let you convert it because the way he described it is like look. He's like what I wanted to do. Essentially was to be You know, selling five million dollars of bitcoin.

For the local currency and converting five million of the local currency back to US dollars. Every day Yeah, like if you if you just go to like go to Korea, go to Japan, go to wherever and you say, Hey, I'd like to It's like a one way flow of money. I have five million dollars of your local currency, I'd like to convert it to dollars and exit the country.

Um and they're like Okay, but where are you getting all this money and why are you doing such a large amount? And like, what is this? Yeah. He's like You know If you t if you go to bank school one oh one That's like

Money laundering. That's what money laundering looks like. That that that is what money laundering that is exactly what money laundering looks like. So he's like, even though I'm not money laundering. I'm buying and selling a good that's differently priced in different regions. To them on the ground, to the bank on the ground where I need to do these conversions. It's shady. It's too shady, they won't let me do it. So he spends I say a year of his life Where he's like

Goes to Japan. Now you gotta find uh He gotta do m each each one of these was hard. So anyways, then the net end of this story is this guy's Arbitraging twenty five million dollars a day. of of this turn. He's making a ten percent

Compounding uh you know, uh margin. Every single day And this guy, you know, in the three years, basically he's become a self made billionaire. He's worth ten billion dollars now, which is a combination of The money he made from the arbitrage trade.

As well as He then created his own exchange. Um, and like you know, so he has a trading company that's you know has made hundreds of millions of dollars on this arbitrage. And then he built the he used that to f create an exchange, which is worth billions of dollars on paper. So anyways. This guy's worth ten billion dollars.

Because cr uh the currency is called FTX, right? That's his exchange. His exchange is called FTX. Sorry, exchange. And uh uh that is is that basically an alternative to basically a more higher end. It's a more sophisticated coinbase where you can do like derivative trades, option trades on all different types of coinbase internationally. And that's like And that's like a proper company. It's a proper company. So Baltimore made hundreds of millions of dollars in the span of a few months just doing this one trade over and over again every day. So I'm going to describe a couple things, but he got on people's radar because He was the biggest donor to Joe Biden this year. In the campaign. He wrote a f he wrote like a five million dollar check at the last hour like at the eleventh.

That let Joe do like you know, as part of this like you know, last minute blitz they did on T V ads in all the swing states. Uh, because this and this kind of interesting this guy's like very uh His whole business philosophy is this thing called effective altruism. Which is basically like

Go be a greedy capitalist. Go try to make as much money as you can, and your goal is to give at least half of it away while you're doing it. So he's got like It's not like a philanthropist giving away one percent of his money or or ten percent of his money as a tie. His goal is to give away like fifty percent of his liquid liquid like net worth.

You know, like that he makes every year. That's his like kind of like his mindset. Where did he get the money to start this? So he started it with a very small amount of money and it just compounded very quickly. 'Cause he's like basically like getting ten percent extra every day. So I I don't know exactly where he got the initial C capital or how big it was. He hasn't specified that, but he he did say at the max they were doing twenty five million a day. On the trade.

Which is basically like a a two point five million dollar like you know like profit per day. uh that they were making on the train. And so he describes That okay, so W he's like

Basically, if you want to do this, you have to like break it down into small chunks. He's like, Okay, so I need on one side, I need to be able to go buy a shit ton of Bitcoin in the US. So how do I get a exchange in the US that's gonna give me really high limits? Even though I'm this dorky kid who's got no track record and I have no like Collateral or brand name. And so he's like

finds a way to solve that problem of like being able to buy twenty five million dollars of bitcoin in the US. Then he had it like go to Japan and be he had to be able to sell a huge amount of Bitcoin there. Then he had to be able to convert it from the Japanese yen or whatever to US dollars.

And he had to do that all in the same day and wire transfer it all back to the US to buy it again the next day, to buy the full max amount again the next. So he's just cycling the money every day. And so he described like They would just the way that the m the timing worked. It was always in the last hour of the banking day. That he would be trying to get all the wire transfers done.

To get the money back to the US so that they could execute tomorrow's trade. And any day that they couldn't sound like You said he sounds cra Like I'm looking at pictures. Oh my god. He sounds extremely genuine, humble, high pitched voice, kinda like just a nerdy guy. Um, who was like he accounted for about ten percent of all the bitcoin training. Himself his alameda research. During that time period, I I believe. Which is just like insane because he was moving so much money. Dude I love the data people. I love

I love freaks. This guy is a freak. I show his setup. You know, his desk is him with six monitors hanging above his head. His neck is like cramped. 'Cause he just needs to constantly monitor the spot price in the US, what's the price in Japan, what's the conversion of yen to dollars, what's the conversion of dollars to yen. And he's and he's just constantly and any time anything broke. It was just costing them tons of money. And he had always had to make sure nobody's gonna like stop his trade to stop the bottleneck. And then he's stuck with all this like Japanese yen and can't move it, or it gets seized by the government. And so he was like, The main banks wouldn't work with them.

So that's why he picked Alameda Research as a name to like be more legit. He hired like this like kinda like sophisticated guy like who spoke the local language to be able to go talk to the bankers and be like, Hey, here's what we're doing. He also like went to like these rural banks in Japan, not the main ones in the city. He's like, Okay, these rural banks will take my business because they're like more open to what I'm doing than like the city banks that are like, you know

have a have a tighter filter on what I'm doing. So anyways, I just thought it was super interesting to like He identified one arbitrage, like money ball style. And then dedicated like a year or eighteen months of his life to just hammering this one arbitrage and ended up making hundreds of millions of dollars in uh parlay that into becoming You know, his his paper net worth is ten billion dollars. And he did that in I think four years total.

But the Because the exchange. Plus the exchange. Um Ten billion is what he what he estimates his his net worth to be a third. I love people like this. I um I mean that's astounding. There's very he's that's one of a kind. But I love people

And I try to do this with the hustle with the email addresses, uh with an email list, but it that's peanuts compared to this and what some other people do. But basically who take a small tiny kind of like Silly thing. And just Amp it up on steroids. So I love that. I think that is the coolest thing. I love people who think like that. I think it's so fascinating. Um

I'd have to think some more examples of that, but you totally know what I mean, right? Yeah, I absolutely. I've I've met this before with like people who make a poker bot And it's like, what are you doing? It's like every day they're just tweaking this little bot that's running twenty-four seven at the at the one and two cent tables of full tilt poker. And they have this like small edge, like this like fifteen percent edge. And then there there's like Tweaking the system. And it and what it what it reminds me of is

What happens a lot of times is people will go buy information. They'll go say, Oh, I pay I pay Like my my uncle does this. He was paying nineteen dollars a month for like this guy's like stock tips. I had to like sit my uncle down and be like Look like If these are amazing stock tips, do you really think this guy's gonna give it to you for nineteen dollars? Like

No, like you know, if this guy really had an edge in the market, he would not need to make money educating you, he would be pounding his advantage. Right. And try to make as much money as you can as long as that window exists. And so like oh I have another example of this. This guy on Twitter called Haralab. Do you follow him? No. Pretty fascinating guy to follow. So this guy is a high stakes gambler.

He's a professional gambler, which usually is an oxymoron. Uh like is there's no such thing as a professional gambler. But he he was a professional sports better. And what he realized was back in I think twenty six I I forgot it was twenty thirteen, twenty twenty twelve. I don't remember when it was. It's like Maybe it was even longer than that. I think it might have been like Fifteen years ago now. He realized that in Vegas the books were like

They were So sports books, it's kinda like hard to beat the house. The bookies are always like spot on. And there's one type of bet called the you know, over under. It's basically like in basketball, it's like what's the total score gonna be? Is it gonna be If you add up the total of both teams, is it two hundred

More of and then you bet if it's gonna be over or under that. And the over under is really, really accurate. But what he s noticed was that Um he noticed two things. One was The bookies did not take into account that actually in the first half

Like in the basketball game, the second half, the score is usually higher than the first half because At the end of the game, the team that's losing will start fouling. Uh,'cause they're like, look, we have to try to get back in this game. So I'll foul you to save the the clock stops, you get two free throws, and then I'll come back trying to hit a three. And so that's usually the end game for most most teams. Like if you're down, you foul the other team, the clock stops. They score while the clock is stopped.

And then I try to shoot threes to get back in the game and I'm pretty desperate. So what he noticed was that The total over under If you just divided it by half, that's what they would just fifty percent, that's what they were making as the first half over under. And very few people bet the first half over under because it's not that fun of a bet. It's like

Who cares what the halftime score is gonna be? If you're gonna bet the score, you just bet the end of the game score. Um So he realized it was a small edge where They thought they were taking the full score and dividing by half and making that the line. He's like, Oh my God, this is almost always gonna be under. And he specifically noticed that these three teams

their coaches would like do that foul strategy way more in the second half. So he's like, okay. There's these teams That these coaches do this strategy more. And the first half is like the my arbitrage, and he doesn't say shit to anybody. He just starts hiring people to go to the books. All the different things that you're gonna do, this guy Harala Bob.

And I'm kind of like I'm kind of paraphrasing. How do you spell that? H A R A L A B O B Harala Bob And so um and now he works for Mark he works for the Dallas Mavericks, I think. He works for Mark Cuban because he like got a big personality on Twitter because he was a sports better, and like the way he made all of his money was like He had identified over these like ten years of being a sports better, he found like three different edges.

One was he just like went super hard on the Shaq and Kobe Lakers. The second was this first half. Like Uh first half over under bet that was just mispriced. And he just took that mispricing and he just went all in on this mispricing. Wow, this nice crazy. Anytime a sports book would limit him. He would then like pay a guy

Hey, go walk up and bet twenty five thousand dollars on this game, please. And then you like do that. He had like people betting at all the sports books in all the different casinos at the same time so that he could be betting the type of money he wanted to bet. to maximize his advantage while this arbitrage existed. And so um anyways, I love people who find these arbitrages and then like

the length that they have to go through to maximize it. It's like the movie twenty one where they're counting cards in Vegas and they're like, strapping cash to their body walking through this airport. 'Cause they like need to go like pounce on this edge. You used to have this guy who worked for you named Steve, or Steven, I think. Um But he and then he so basically what if I remember correctly, what he did was he would create these

I don't know if he created or bought, but like So he would buy uh a really small Twitter handle that was called like today in history, and it would just tweet like a picture of what happened fifty years ago, you know, uh JFK was shot. Uh then he would buy like a cool car. Twitter one where it was like

Uh here's all interesting cars. And then like I can't believe it it can fly, which is like weird flying devices that when you look at them, they look silly. And he eventually bought, I believe, hundreds of them to the point of where he built a business. So he would two things that were interesting. The story you said was he goes Basically, I control the internet. Let me show you how. By the end of the talk, I'm going to Have X trend.

Yeah. Like I'm gonna have this. Say a word and people would be like gobbledygook. He's like, All right, cool. While we're talking, um, in thirty minutes, we're just set a clock here. We're gonna check Twitter in thirty minutes. And then sure enough, Gobbly Gook would be trending on Twitter, the number one trend in all of Europe. Because his accounts would all start talking about Gobbly Gook in meme format. And it would just like start to go viral basically. And nobody even knew what it means. And he he parlay this into getting sponsorships and

Now, I don't know if you know him anymore. I don't know him at all. Yeah. But I I I read about him and I and this company went public It went public in a really shady way. So I don't know if I believe everything. There's there's something about it. I don't have too much evidence other than it. It's just a roll up of a bunch of bunch of media companies. Something was weird about it, but basically I think it went public in England for like two or three hundred million dollars market cap. And so it turned him into quite wealthy a quite wealthy person I think. You just released a book called uh what is it? Happy sexy millionaire. Happy sexy millionaire. Yeah. So go buy Steve's book. Um anyway, it's the same principle. He found mispriced assets. So I remember the first one that he

uh discovered was one that was like shit freshmen say, or it's like fr like, but you know, whatever the the the UK slang for that is, is basically like A me a parody account that tweeted out funny things that freshmen say on a college campus. And what he found the reason it was mispriced was Most of these accounts were made by accident. By somebody who was eighteen years old and sixteen years old and they were bored at home and they just made a

You know, like Harry Potter, you know, Harry Potter jokes. Twitter account. And it gets to a million followers and they don't know what to do with it. And then they kinda like They get paid like seventy five bucks on Venmo.

To like shout out some app or like They get paid like a two hundred dollars to like say a protein powder or like or they would make a blog selling, you know, like protein powder and they would just Like Try to funnel some traffic to that, but it didn't make make sense. It wasn't very sophisticated. He needed it he needed promotion for his business.

So he was working with these guys. Then he realized Screw my business. This is just a really powerful promotional engine. We used him uh early on when he was he you know, we brought him on and he was part of my team. We used him and we became the number one app in the UK, number one app in Europe. Because

We used his like network to like Talk about our app. And What he had the insight was was that you don't say Like our app was Bebo at the time. So it wasn't

Go download Bebo, it's a great app. No, he's like that shit doesn't work. I was like, Well, we need that and we need the link in there so we can track how many clicks it gets. He's like No, that's not how people talk on the internet. I was like, Okay, so tell me what do you mean?

He's like You gotta think like What you want to do is we have so many accounts that we want somebody when they scroll on Twitter, they see Bebo mentioned like seven times. And that they don't even nobody's explaining it. Nobody's selling it to them. They just realized why is everyone saying this thing Biba? What is that?

And then they go Google it or they go search for it. And then they actually download the app because they think this is what's hot. This is what people are talking about. He's like, So we'll what we'll do is we'll make content that's like Um My mom when she sees me check Bebo for the fiftieth time today, and it's a meme of the mom throwing your phone out the window.

And it's like So the i the implied meaning is that Bebo is this addictive app that you keep checking that your parents hate that you keep checking. Well, what is that app? Why would it why would this person check that app 50 times? I don't even have that app, never heard of it. Right. And so that was the genius of his marketing like tactics at that time. Um, and then he had the like audience to back it up.

So they got Spotify and Microsoft and all these companies to pay them. Tons of money. Because any time they needed to spread the word about a new thing that they were doing. This was the most effective way to reach a bunch of people, uh a bunch of young people. And so then he parlayed that. He started right launching his own consumer brands. So if they have a bunch of food accounts.

They would launch like a food subscription product where they had a bunch of fitness accounts. They would launch like a women's athletic wear, you know, like Company. It didn't all work, but man, like crazy ass like business that came, you know, out of the work. If you

If you wanna go research it, it's called Social Starts, right? Social chain. Social chain. Steve What's his name? Bartley. Bartlett. Yeah. You should follow him on Twitter. He's a great follow. Uh now he tweets out just like I don't know, inspirational shit all the time and like motivational stuff. Yeah, he's like a mini Gary Vee, although it's like a better Gary Vee, to be honest with you. Probably a getter. Yeah, I was gonna say he's probably better. Give him like five years and he's gonna be Much bigger than what Gary V is today, I think. um if he sticks with it. But uh yeah, and it it there's some articles that are cool. If you go search like

The twenty-one year olds that control the internet. I think there was like a Vice article, like twenty-two year olds that control it. BuzzFeed. BuzzFeed, yeah. So BuzzFeed and Vice did like crazy articles about them. I mean, at one point they had twenty five employees that were all under the age of twenty two years old. And they were all just managing these media accounts and they were just making tons of money and they like Yeah, it was insane. They built like an office with like a playpen inside and

No, it's a good article, is it? So do you want to talk Okay, so I was doing research, Abreu showed me this and and a few other people did. Basically Our most watched recent video is something I you you've you've kicked ass on Instagram. I think I've got the YouTube prize so far. Um, but because our most watched article or most watched video is on paid communities. I think the title is

How to make twenty million dollars a year doing a paid community. Something like that. Um, because we talked about a company that does that. And now we'll make this title like How to make like a million dollars or how to make a hundred thousand dollars a year. Doing a paid event. And I've bring you asked me to talk about it. So I came with a few bullet points. So

Uh, do you want to talk about paid events? I want to because this is how the hustle started. So this is like your roots. And also we're starting to plan HustleCon again. And I have a feeling now more than ever Is the time to plan a paid event. a in person paid event because I think you can you can do really well because there's gonna be very little competition and people are really eager to go. We've talked about it in the past, uh about events, but

So Sean, if you go to the my f uh the million dollar brainstorm document. Uh you'll see I'm highlighting my name. Um I actually listed all of Oh, you're on your phone, so it might be a little challenging, but I've actually listed a whole bunch of our old profit and loss statements from our events. If you hit metrics all time. You can actually see are all time metrics, although actually this only goes to 2018. So it's not all time. It's missing three years. But

Um, you can kinda see the data. You can see how much money we're making and we are making uh in the first coup in the first year of business about I think um I think about Five hundred thousand dollars with like eighty four percent margin in our first year business. And so let's talk about events. So

Uh and this won't this isn't gonna this is gonna be a uh a a ten minute segment here, probably. But basically Uh the the when I I first hosted my uh I hosted my first event in June and the event happened Right, decided to do it around June first, in the event went place seven weeks later in August.

And when I started, I had close to nothing. I had um a two hundred person email list. So there wasn't like this, oh, it's easy for you, you had the hustle. No, no, no, it didn't exist. Uh there was no website, there was just a domain name called Hustle Cut. Um and I hosted this event in the first Six weeks it made about sixty thousand dollars in revenue. And fifty ish thousand dollars in profit. And

A lot of people were surprised by that. It was but it wasn't that hard. The second event you can see here explained. How how did you sell the sixty thousand dollars of tickets during that process? I'm gonna explain. And and so I just wanna give a little give one more bit of context. The second event, I think it made about a hundred and fifty to two hundred thousand dollars in revenue and something like a hundred and fifty thousand dollars in profit. And I did these events six months. A part a part. Uh um I would basically host an event. Go travel.

When I needed money, I would host another one. And so I was starting each time with close to zero dollars. So So let me explain to you guys um a little bit about how I started my events and what I would what I would do if I was starting again, which is basically if I was starting again, I would do mostly the same stuff. But I think every everyone in the next if you're listening, if you're willing to spend eight weeks working forty hours a week dedicated to this, I think you could make at least a hundred thousand dollars profit. Starting probably in

September because that's when uh I think events, conferences are gonna be okay. So anyway Um the the biggest thing that you have to do here is your email list is the most important thing. So the hustlecon dot com, I launched that website on June sixth. Okay, and within just a few weeks, we were averaging around a uh a thousand to two thousand unique visitors a day. And the email list jumped from about two hundred people to about twenty five hundred people in seven weeks.

Keep in mind at the time I didn't even have a Twitter. So there was no Twitter. I mean there was, but I didn't use it. And so what I would do is hustlecon.com was basically a landing page where I explained what the event is, and then you'd enter your email. And that was called the front door. The side doors were all these blog posts. So I would write Two to three blog posts a week on each speaker. I would post that on hacker news. People would come to the website via the side door.

Only Five percent of them would say, This is interesting. What's this website? And they would click the homepage and I would collect their email there. And then once I collected their email, I would send them a variety of uh other blog posts I had written. And at the end of each blog post that I sent them, it would say, PS, this person's speaking at HustleCon on uh August first and September. You can get a ticket right now for ten percent off if you buy in the next twelve hours. By the way, the next twelve hours, that code was working all the time. There was no such thing as twelve hours. It was always the next twelve hours. The countdown clock, there's a simple plugin that you could buy and it just starts and shows up. So Sorry guys, I'm sure everyone knows this now, but I don't even Shopify wasn't popular at the at that point, so

Um Not everyone had that technology, but that's what we did. Pretty easy, pretty basic. And and doing it. I remember vividly the one you did about ICracked. Um, which you kind of did like as I'm info infographic. I remember the one of Pandora would do. But explain what Explain what you did and like also these were speakers. So you got speakers to agree, legit speakers to agree before you even had an audience or anything.

Yes, which is the second thing I'm gonna talk about is how to land a speaker. But for the the blog post, I basically would just use Forbes, Business Insider, all these places and just write a biography on the person, but I would do it in an interesting way. And eventually what happened is we would create infographics. So um I had John who worked there And I would say, um, John, um Here's the here's the bulleted points of their life. Turn it into an infographic, please. And that's what we did. We had infographics. It could have been a blog blog post, which is what I used to do. We this time we made infographics and it worked quite well. And it was basically um I read the book, made to stick, and I just copied that. So I took uh information about their company and I made it really easy to understand. So for example, Pandora streams uh this amount of music

Per hour. Which is the equivalent of X, Y, and Z. Uh, they the reason why they were able to do that is they were one of the first people to launch on the iPhone. Um, and then I like I just tell that story. Pretty simple. I thought it was simple, very effective. Now that's how we got our initial sales. Now the thing about sales for events. It's incredibly stressful. The reason it's stressful is typically

Twenty percent of your sales come in the first five to seven days. And then twenty percent, sometimes more, thirty percent of your sales comes in the last like four or five days, which means that dead time. So you're you you won't you have to kill you got to kick ass right out of the right out of the gate. So your first launch series, you need to kick ass, your first email launch series, you need to do really well. Then there's a fair bit of dead time and it feels we're failing. We're failing, we're failing. And then the last 10 days or so, you get a wave of sales and it all comes down to the last minute. And it is incredibly nerve wracking and anything can ruin it. For example, a pandemic, or if there was like a terrorist attack, if there was um

Um Um bad weather. As simple as bad weather, you're fucked. And so you've been working for seven weeks. Now eventually, in our case, a whole year on this event. And you're screwed. So it's very stressful. But

The way that you can actually make more money and this is a uh something that I didn't learn until later on For the tickets, you actually want to charge higher than you than so let's say you want to make a hundred thousand dollars and you want to get uh thousand people to pay you a hundred dollars, you always charge two fifty, and then you uh give more you give discounts in order to get to a hundred average sale price. And so you want to, in my opinion, you wanna be very generous with discounts. But you want to charge a lot of money. So it anchors that at a high At a high value. Yeah. Correct.

And you well, another thing that you want to do is you want to run this like an ecom site. So for an ecom site, you say, Well, I want to make a hundred grand this month, therefore I need to get Um Um you know, a hundred thousand people to my uh a a hundred thousand high quality people to my website, of which three percent are gonna convert. I know three percent are gonna convert because I'm constantly tinkering with my landing page. The average sale value is gonna be X dollars. Therefore, this is how you do it. No, I just need to get people to my website. That's what a lot of conference people don't do. That's what you should do.

Um and it works quite well. Um And then finally, time is one of the best ways to create sales. So You have to give discounts early on. Um and at the end, and you and the goal is you want to have five, three to five tiers of pricing. So you want to have early, early bird.

And then early bird. And then Middlebird. And then You're late. Okay, seriously, this is the last reminder in late like you Because

If you actually look So can you actually see um If you log into that doc, I actually put a chart of my very first event uh uh from July of twenty fourth, you're gonna see big spikes. Every single one of those big spikes was a new ticket tier ending.

And there's a direct correlation between the amount of revenue that I made that day And the amount of Like the tier ending. And um me sending an email blast reminding people and I would email some two or three times a day.

In order to remind them. Wow. And so So when you were going to hacker news for traffic, were you going anywhere else? And is that where you would go today if you were doing it again? Well if I was doing a tech event If I was doing a tech event, yes. Okay.

I will go to Hacker News. And what's the secret because a lot of people will say, um, like, you know You know, when I post on hacker news, you know, I get, you know, no traffic, I get downvoted, I get what you know, I get removed because it's like Well, I would say the obvious or not the obvious, but c maybe the obvious is well, your content might suck. Um But I would say you I would actually write

uh content or invite speakers. Who's who I knew I could write about. That would go viral on Hacker News. And also if you post ten times, only three times it will it go viral, but those three times you'll get like on hacker news like a hundred thousand views. And so that it's like a hits driven business. So you gotta post a ton actually for it to work.

And so you, I remember when you were doing your events, so okay, go sixty thousand, hundred fifty thousand. I remember you were basically like, Yeah. HustleCon brings in five hundred thousand dollars. Of revenue and like Three hundred thousand of that is profit or even more sometimes, you know, if if I recall correctly. So Is that typical that it was so profitable, or were you doing something different than the average event host?

Yeah. So when we would uh towards the third, fourth event, we could easily make seven hundred thousand dollars, I think. Maybe si let's just say easily five hundred thousand. I forget the exact but we are making seven figures a year from events. And yeah, we could do fifty percent margins, but the margins get smaller as we actually grew. And so it was actually more profitable to do some of these smaller events. But we did a few things that made us profitable. The first I paid um Well f I'll say it. It's against the contract, but I'm gonna say it. I paid Casey Dystat.

money to speak at HustleCon, which is no surprise. Like you could just Google what a speaking bee is but Besides that, I've had uh probably three, four, five hundred people speak. Not once did I ever pay for another speaker. Not one time. Now what I think I did do a few times is I would pay for their flight. But I I would pay economy. I had Sam Yeagan, who's the CEO of match dot com or was who's

very wealthy. I paid a three hundred and fifty dollar flight from Chicago to San Francisco. And then maybe I think we got him a hotel, but I think it was just a three fifty flight. And he actually we reimbursed him for that and he e would email me to remind him, Oh, you guys still me owe me a three fifty. So We didn't pay for any speakers other than Casey Nistat. The second I use a shit ton of volunteers.

Because there's these kids so and not necessarily kids, but uh people who will email you once you have an event to volunteer. There's a whole crew of them. One of them And they wanna be around you and uh They do the work. They do the work and it's fun for them. It's a lot of fun to be part of something. The we would schedule it so they could go see some talks, but they didn't really even care about the talks. They just wanted to be in the mix. It was exciting for them. And so these k these people love doing that. I use volunteers for everything. Now the third part is actually important, and this might get some flack.

But I would never work with or I would try my hardest to avoid union venues. You want to avoid union venues and ticketmaster venues. Because if you work at a a lot of venues, sign contracts with Ticketmaster or something like that, and you have to work with Ticketmaster. F that. Sorry, Ticketmaster, you guys, I don't want to work with you. Um, and so the goal is to work with in a some place that isn't bogged down by that or bogged down by a union, because there were some places where I would say, All right, I want my volunteers to be at the door and they would say, Nope, you have to have our union guy do it. We charge fifty dollars an hour. You have to have 10 of them. So yeah, I remember you had the sickest venue in Oakland. Um so right outside of San Francisco.

And it's the Oakland whatever the theater what's the theater called? This thing, it looks so grand. And I remember you were like, dude, guess how much this cost us? I don't know if you could say, but it was amazingly affordable like to to rent. Ten or fifteen grand. Ten or fifteen grand to for the two days. Including all the people. Yeah. Yeah. And um and so, you know, when you're doing an event that's bringing in seven hundred grand, like And you won you needed a a kind of like a notable, nice big venue. I thought that was ch I I I thought that thing would be a hundred thousand dollars, right? Like my wedding venue cost that much, you know, and it was like

Just for me to get married. It wasn't even like a business, you know, it wasn't like it couldn't host thousands of people. And there's a few things, which is we I preferred hosting conferences in places that typically aren't used to hosting conferences. So I would do it there. I did it at the Brava Theater in uh San Francisco, which I think I don't remember exactly. I'm pretty sure that was three thousand dollars to host an event there and I made a hundred grand there. So I would do it in uh venues that typically weren't meant for conferences. And the reason why is if you go to a hotel or if you go to a conference center, they're gonna charge you for the union stuff, which is gonna add up really fast, which is actually gonna be probably 2x the price of the hard cost of the venue, and they're gonna charge you something like fifty dollars ahead for meals because you have to use their caterer. And that's something I would avoid like crazy. Instead, I would find local mom and pop places and I would call them and I would say Uh eight dollars a meal. I need'em prepped and ready to roll in in a box. Can you do that?

Um and I would get loads of cool people to do that. Now the thing is is that in my opinion, the food not really that important when it comes to a conference. Some people will debate me and say, Oh, it's actually really important. I got the cheapest shit I possibly could. And I thought it was fun enough. And then that morning or that night, or the night before, we would go to Costco and we would buy every single Danish that they had and we would rent a truck and bring it there. And that's how we did stuff. I did it on uh really cheaply. You don't always have to do that, but if you want to make a lot of profit early on in your career, it's a great way to do it. You also had vendors that were like, uh like I I make a keto breakfast ball. You're like, Great, you're providing breakfast for everybody. You know, that's your you're paying me for marketing and you're giving away free goods to my you know, oh, you make vitamin water or whatever, like some You're the you're the startup that wants to be the next vitamin water? Well, you need to be here. And uh now that's the third that's the fourth point, which is the way to make money is. You get stuff for free. So

Usually when I f or when I first started I only h typically had revenue from ticket sales. That's actually foolish. As you grow, usually fifty fifty ticket and sponsors is your revenue. Early on I didn't charge people that much in sponsor money. Instead, anyone that emailed me that had free stuff uh they would say, Hey, we wanna sponsor you or Um, I would email people and say, Hey, um, instead of sponsoring us, just bring your stuff. I've got three hundred great people who are gonna be there.

Will you come and bring six hundred bottles of vitamin water or whatever it is? And they would say, Absolutely, I'm there and I would say, Awesome, I'm not charging you any money. I just want you to provide free stuff. And people did that. We got someone to pay seventeen thousand dollars for the lunches because all they did was hand out free stuff. And they would just get a little bit of business from it and it would be worth it. So we got tons and tons and tons of free stuff. So the point of I actually didn't provide anything. Um And that is actually quite effective. And then a few more points.

Um A lot of times your sponsorship money is gonna come in the second year, because the first year you wanna just invite the sponsors there and they're gonna see that it provides value and that you're the real deal and you'll follow through and they'll sponsor you the second year. You have to sell the second year sponsorships and sometimes the second year tickets. Immediately, like the day of or f or twenty four hours after when you're in the moment and they're seeing everything, wow, this is great. Oh, people are loving us. Next year. Are you in?

Title Sponsorship. Exactly. And you want to do that right away. And the big guys, like the Intuits and the Microsoft of the world, everyone's plan that cycle actually. They'll plan that cycle two years out. So you can actually book your two, three, four. Sometimes it's it's that crazy. And you could get hundreds of thousands or even millions of dollars from them. Um and so if you're gonna do so don't worry about getting not getting sponsors the first time. You'll get'em uh the second time if you do well. And finally, a few points on speakers. So for content.

I didn't pay anyone. But what I would do is I would try to land the I would put all my work in early on to get the biggest speaker I possibly could right away. For example, I I convinced the founder of Pandora, Tim Westergen, to speak. And he was one of the first people I had. The truth is I kinda lied about who else was coming. I said all these people were all these other peop people were coming to speak. None of them had had actually committed, but once Tim said yes, then I went to all those other people and I told Tim was coming. And they again said yes, and it was way easier to land bigger name speakers because I got the whale. Yeah. So so and you've actually published your cold emails that you sent to speakers. I think on either your blog or Neville's blog. So if people search what do they search for to go find those. I've I've copy pasted those many times already.

Um because I'm like this is great how how Sam did this. Yeah, just um Sam Parr, Neville, Colby Milling. Yeah. Uh the the yeah and you'll see it. And that stuff worked well. And I don't want to hear this nonsense if you're starting to if you're gonna start a vet, well, you already knew everyone. Uh no, I know everyone because I hosted the of these events. That's why I have a huge network, not because uh I had them before I started this event. Yeah. Um And So so I think what you just said is like a mountain of gold. I think people would pay you thousands of dollars to hear that. How do you do this? Uh, you know, as a consultant or a course or something like that. I think you

You you gave him the goods for free on this pod, which I think is is amazing and it's what we're all about. The other thing I would say is I think there's It's not just about making money doing this. The way I look at this. If I'm if I'm twenty two years old and I don't want to have like the traditional career.

This is how you bring luck to yourself. You go host the party. You go host the host the event. That's how Sam built his world class network. That's how Sam made a bunch of friends. That's how we met. You know, like that's that's how these things happen. You bring luck to you. By going and taking a bunch of action and all you have to do is be the hustler who connects a bunch of dots. And do it in a topic area that you're interested in. So if you're super interested in like

Biohacking. Then you create the biohacker cons conference. You don't need to know anyone. You just go figure out who are all the biohackers that I need to speak here. How do I get in front of biohackers? Well, I need to create content about Yeah. Biohacking and I need to get that. in front of people using Reddit or Hacker News or some other source.

I need to collect emails, then I need to keep telling great stories. And at the end of each of those stories I need to say, Hey If you like this kind of stuff, there's a thousand people like you, including these big names. At this event. come, you know, like buy your ticket now to join. I think you one hundred percent should do that.

And I think if you're gonna do it, start planning now and it will change your life. Um and it's actually not that hard. Yeah. Now last thing before Rob I'll wrap I'll wrap up with this. We've had Ryan Beagelman on the podcast. I actually did you see that email I sent you, Sean Alley? So in two thousand and seventeen, I called people who worked at Ryan's company. Ryan's company was I mean, I guess it was the other way around. My company was basically Ryan Biegelman's company for tech and business and entrepreneurship new news. Uh Ryan Biegelman ran this thing and started a thing called Biz Now Media, which was basically what my company is for real is the hustle, but For real estate. And so they did about$18 million in revenue the year they sold, and which they sold for about fifty, sixty million dollars, seventy five employees. The revenue was made up a third from media, so a third from advertising, a third from event ticket sales, a third from sponsorships. The uh average revenue per event.

uh team member was around three hundred thousand dollars. They did two hundred and fifty events around uh the year before they sold, with the average ticket price being eighty thousand uh eighty dollars. And they wouldn't do an event unless they could make eight thousand uh ten thousand dollars in revenue. Most of the venues that they got were free. And A lot of times programming was very short. So an event would start at 7 a.m. It would kick off for an hour of breakfast schmoozing, followed by a 90 minute session for panels and discussion, and then hanging out and talking, and then you'd be back in your office by 10 30. And it was very effective. And that's my final point about events, which is uh the content actually not that important. All the speakers do and all the content that you're you're gonna have all it does is it brings the uh a particular like minded person and the value is from that.

people or those people being there. And the content is basically just a way to as marketing to get the right people. And the way you know that that's true, if you go on YouTube, you can go watch all the talks from HustleCon like all the years. They're all on YouTube. And they'll have like Two thousand views, three thousand views. You would think, Oh, if people are coming to hear these great speakers They're willing to fly and pay, you know, basically it's a thousand dollars all in to go have this experience if you're out from out of s out of town.

Um, which I think a lot of people are. Then wow, you know. Ten times more people should be just consuming the content for free from the comfort of their own home. Nope. It's not what happens. People don't actually take the the like it's just like same thing with Coursera. They have Harvard's

all of Harvard's courses online. If you want the Harvard education, you can go get it for free right now online. Turns out people don't want the Harvard education. They want the Harvard label. In the same way, people don't want the content from HustleCon. They want the experience and the network and the kind of serendipity that can happen by going out there and getting amongst it with a bunch of other people And like putting yourself in that position. Peep that's really the value that you get.

Uh sorry, that's what I should say. That's the value you're providing. to the per person who's deciding to come. Don't fool yourself into thinking they're coming to hear this mind blowing content. Although there is this like charade you put up where You say that's why you're coming and they say that's why they're going, but that's not really what they're getting out of it.

That is that is absolutely correct. And Uh I'm showing I I actually if you put this thing up if you pull this thing up, Sean, called I don't really want to share this publicly, but you can look at it. It's called event metrics all time. I've listed Forty six events. that we've done. Uh, and I I list out how many people showed up, how much revenue came from tickets, and how much revenue came from sponsorships. There's this one event series that we came up with called two X. It stands for like two X chromosomes, meaning women have two X chromosomes. And it was an evening event that we would host from nine PM until uh

I don't know. uh whenever it ended, or sorry, seven PM to nine PM and we would get a sponsor to pay for it and we would invite these people to come. The first one had four hundred people. I'm pretty sure towards the end Um, we would get a thousand people. So here's one. This one had 982 people coming. We did twenty four thousand dollars in revenue, seven thousand dollars in sponsors. thirty one thousand dollars in uh total revenue. And then it looks like sixteen thousand dollars in cost. Frankly, we probably didn't even need to spend that much. Uh, and we made fifteen grand in profit.

And then we would host that. almost monthly in a variety of cities. We would do LA, Chicago, yada, yada, yada. One night. could make you fifteen grand, do that twelve times a year. Then you launch a paid community on top of that. You're you got yourself a multi million dollar business inside eighteen months if you just rinse and repeat this. It works very well. While building a great network

Um and being kind of the hub in between all these different people. The downside of course is that Event planning fucking sucks. Events are stressful and um like you know, it takes years off my life every time I have to do an event. So I hate events, but I love this. business model. I love that you laid it out for the person who gets energy and like

wants to do this, right? Like for me, the nightmare job would be wedding. Um, but for some people, they dream of being a wedding planner. And so for people who find that fun, they they they like that version of stress, that flavor of stress. I think you just laid out a pretty amazing playbook. Uh okay. Yes. Uh hopefully it's a good plan. Uh someone can go do it. And by the way, if you just Google the hustle two X, literally like the number two and then the word And then the letter X. I think what's it say? We did

We did uh In two thousand eighteen from that event series, which is just I think we only want we did about two hundred thousand dollars in revenue and a hundred and ten thousand dollars in profit in twelve months. From launch to the first year. It's pretty good. Anyway, that's that. That's that's information on paid events. Do you want to do one idea before we go? Uh I'm kind of excited about this one.

So yeah. Okay, have you heard of this company Future Fitness? Future fit. Yes, I have. Uh I was I I tried it. I was one of the I I think I was one of their early users and they did a good job of Onboarding me, hand onboarding me, you know, nicely, but the product didn't stick with me. But I do think it's a good idea.

Well, so I don't know exactly how it ended up being, but when I first signed up It wasn't that unique, but it was slick. It was just you have a personal trainer. So I would pay them a hundred dollars a month. A personal trainer made a plan for me and I would tell them what sports I cared about, what I wanted to be good at, and I would talk to them, I think weekly about my athletic or about my progress. That's what it was when I first signed up, but it was all tracked via watch. And they would send you an Apple watch. Yeah, so okay, so I think uh I think it's evolved a little bit. So Basically what Future Fit is is it's your

It's a personal trainer, it's really like an accountability coach. And that's what I'll call this bucket of ideas I want to brainstorm within of accountability coaching. So Future fit basically says, Hey, okay, a personal trainer is like a hundred dollars per session. You know, so so let's say it's a hundred fifty dollars per session in in big cities like New York or SF. And then you know, a gym membership is like fifteen dollars a month. Right. So y you have this like big discrepancy there where one is like

one session is over a hundred dollars and the other one A whole month is fifteen dollars. Yeah. But then there's something in between. And what these guys did was they said, Well look For a hundred fifty dollars a month.

You're gonna get a fitness coach. And they're not gonna come, you know, they're not gonna be with you, you know, like sort of spotting you while you do your bench press. they're gonna be spotting the accountability of you actually working out. So what they would do, they would Ask you about your goals.

Then they would send you a customized workout plan based on your goals. And in reality, they just have a huge library of workouts that's like, oh, guys who want to build muscle. Here's a bunch of workouts to choose from. You know. A woman who wants to have tone butt. Okay, you know, here's a bunch of workouts to to to use. So the trainer sends you a workout that's, you know, for you based on your goals.

And then they'll kinda text you and be like, Hey, did you get that workout in? And uh they also connect to Apple Watch so they can kinda see if you did it and they can say, Hey, great job or they can be like, Hey, what's up, man? Like don't don't let go of the rope. Like keep Keep going. Like we said we wanted to do this. Keep keep keep doing this. And so I think this is a a very smart idea and a very smart business model, which is basically

The core thing that stops most people from being fit is the habit. Oh. Fitness, the habit of exercise. Yes, if you work out with a trainer, you can get more out of every workout. But for most people, the bigger problem is just sticking to the workout. like schedule and routine and actually like not Just feeling lazy and not going to the gym, you know?

And so I like that they have basically accountability is the primary feature of this app. And so I I like that. There is knowledge, there is tact technique, but it's packaged around accountability. So I was talking to Uh Ben And um my right hand man Ben and he was like you just had a kid I'll say, How's it going? How's how's baby life? You know, you sleep getting any sleep.

He's like actually we hired um A sleepcoach. Same model. Oh woman woman in Texas and she basically What's it called? So she's just like an independent person. There's not even like a service. So we talked to before about Battle, which is like uh my friend Damian who's who's starting this company to do this. So he just used, you know, somebody he found that's like known to do this in Texas.

And so he just said, uh great like You know, here's kind of what we're doing today. Here's my here's my current like routine. You know, we'd like to be getting some sleep. And here's my rough schedule. Here's my wife's, you know, rough schedule. So we'd like to make it work. We don't want to have the baby it out. So that's like our constraints. So they, you know, your coach basically downloads your goals and your kind of like your limitations, your constraints. I said, Great, I got a program for you.

And he I was like, Oh wow, what's her technique? He's like, Honestly, it's like not that Much he's like, you know, just He needs snap at this time specifically and like During these times he needs to stay awake. So make sure you're playing with him or you're feeding him, you're doing something then, don't let him fall asleep. And then like at this time you're gonna put'em to bed every single night and like

You know, when he cries, you're gonna go in for this many minutes and whatever. It's like a little bit of a coaching on the technique. He's like, honestly, it's not the technique. He's like, it's just the accountability of like She asks us, okay, what time did he nap? What time did he wake up today? What time how did he sleep last night? And because we keep having to report to this lady.

It forces us to not like throw in the towel and just be like, Oh man, like I don't know, I give up. Just let him sleep if he wants to sleep right now. It's like no. Our coach told us he needs to stay awake during these daytime hours so that he's gonna sleep well at night. He's like, dude, it's amazing. He's now sleeping eight hours a night. He's two months old, like life.

Like the first month was so rough and the second month is so much better. Just with this coach, he's like, and it's not even like anything that we couldn't have just Googled a schedule. He's like, it's how having this woman who we're accountable to to maintain the schedule is much more important than like just taking a schedule off the internet of a In the same way, like you can go download a workout off the internet. But this coach helps you stay accountable to actually doing those workouts. So I thought so Okay. Yeah.

Let's break this down a little bit. Let's talk about what this could work. So I actually use a service called uh do you have your phone on you? Yeah. Okay, go to mybody tutor dot com. My body tutor. Like a tutor like a like a you know, like a Co coach, tutor. Right. Look at that website. How ugly is that? Oh my god. I saw it. I'm on a nineteen ninety I'll just describe this. I'm on a what looks like a nineteen nineties website. It says

At the very top, it's like this awful logo and then it says celebrating two thousand and seven to two thousand twenty one, fourteen years. So that you know, th this has been around for a while. It looks like it's two thousand and seven. Yeah. And so what it is, it's a guy named Adam Gilbert. And he's got a variety of people who are on the um on the payroll and you pay I was paying five hundred dollars a month. And all I would do, it was very simple. I w every time I ate a meal, I would take a picture and he would comment on it.

Once a week I would do a twenty or ten minute phone call and they would say, How's it going? And the stress. That knowing I was being watched. made me change my habits and I got and I lost weight. It's almost like when you're writing in a Google Doc. That stress makes you do it. That's what this is. Right. Okay. So

So I just started using one because I was like, Oh, when I when we when you told me about this, I started looking into like okay. Where else could you do this? And I thought, Well, it's anywhere you have a goal. And that the goal like It's not that you need like some specific strategy that no one's ever heard of. It's like no, you kinda even even know what to do. It's just helpful to have somebody who's on your side in your corner. supporting you and keeping you focused, keeping you on track.

So Productivity. I think is a big one. So Uh you're probably like me. You know, you have like goals for what you want to do and probably everybody listening to this is like

You know, I wanna make five more sales this month. I wanna get five new clients, or I wanna grow twenty percent this month, or I wanna like grow my email list to five thousand people, or whatever. Doesn't matter what your goal is, you have a goal I wanna get promoted. Um So you you have a goal. And then

Like Your progress is basically like sometimes you need tactical help, like strategic advice, but really what I what I found for myself is that You just need pressure. I need accountability. I need to make each day count. And if I just get like

You know, like twenty five out of the thirty days a month to count. I'm gonna actually hit my goals, but if I'm like Uh, I kinda had a f off day there. I was distracted. I went down this rabbit hole of doing this other thing. Oh, I got stressed out or You know, like whatever if I lose four of those days of like I didn't actually like make the most of that day.

Now I'm down to like Twenty days out of the thirty. And I've like I'm off track. I didn't get my goal. And like, what's that difference of like Staying on track towards your thing and s and off is like for me, it's accountability. It's why I work well with a co-founder because a co-founder helps you like.

Every day you're kind of focused on all right, what do I need to do today? Do I get it done at the end of the day, did I like make enough progress or not? Like that sort of thing. And so I found the service, so You could do this actually if you want. Uh, anybody who's listening to this, so you can basically go

And um it's called it's called we focus. And it's basically you and your coach, and it helps you focus on getting to your goals, uh, your professional goals. So anything you want to do with your work or your projects. And so you just text this number, right? It's like I'll I'll put in the description of it. It's four three four four three four five oh five. four seven six nine. I'll put it in the comments, but Basically it's uh four three four five oh five grow is the kind of like the the handle of it. And you pay a hundred fifty bucks a month and

You basically get a coach and the coach basically just text you like at first, it's like all right, what's your goals for the month? All right, it's It's uh it's April. What would make for a great April? And honestly, just that question is actually pretty powerful'cause you gotta like articulate it. You say something, but then you realize like Oh, I wanna really make progress on my book.

Well what does big progress mean? Like You wanna have a draft of that's like a hundred pages, would that be the goal? And so they help you like actually set a good goal. Then on a day to day basis, they sort of like It's kind of like the manager you need. It's like the kind of nag you enough to make you get it done.

But they're not annoying. And this is we focus dot app. There's no app. There's no there's no website. There's no app. No what's just a phone number. It's literally just a phone number you text. Um and so they they have these like coaches. Wow. Okay. So I can't google it. My friend was using it. And so so I was like, Okay, what's the number? So he just gave me four three four five oh five four seven six nine. And so anyways. Uh they have like a wait list, I think, but you I got let in recently.

So so basically you you pay hundred fifty bucks and then what happens is the coach will basically say in the morning, they'll be like, All right, great, like we said your goal was Let's say to you know Grow revenue by twenty percent this month. And you said you're gonna do that by um Like ramping up your sales efforts. So it's like all right, cool.

Hey hey, you know, it'll be like hey Sam, like Um Like let's get it today. Like you know, what what would make today a great day? Like how what would be really satisfying at the end of the day if you've done what? And you're like, Oh, I want to make like ten ten sales calls. Like all right, great.

And then like in the evening or in the afternoon, they'll check in, they'll be like, you know, like remember, keep the you know, keep the vision in mind. We want to get there, like Go for it. Make sure you get those ten in today. At the end of the day, they'll still text you something that'll be like, you know. Hey, did you get the ten calls in? You know, if not, you know, what do you think held you up today? Let's reflect on it.

Or if you got it, it's like awesome. Like You know, high five plus like Think back to one of those calls where you really kicked ass, like Like what made it kick ass. And so it just helps you, and you can put in as much or as little as you want. So if you just want it to be like, Just check in with me once a day or once a week.

It'll do that. But if you want it to be like more reflective, like I like it where it's like All right, let me let me think back on my day. Like what's what's something I could have done better today? So I actually disagree with you uh strongly on this one. This is far too broad. I would want to make it incredibly narrow. So For example. Uh

We guarantee you're gonna be a better writer. Or sorry, uh the service to make you write more. Right. And you have to log in every day. And if you don't get a thousand words, you get um You get your coach yells at you like, dude, what the fuck? Do you even want do you really actually want to be a good writer?'Cause you're not writing. Um, and so I actually would make it far more vertical specific. For yes. So relationship, I think could relationship work. You know what I would do another one? I would just call it gratitude. I'm gonna make you happier by so hey, why did you write. Why didn't you write here what you are thankful for this morning? What the hell.

Um You could so gratitude. Um what else? We said you said relationships. I actually don't know how you would do a relationship one. Well I think I think for I think for relationships it's like, you know People think relationship is when people say they need they want a better relationship, what they're really saying is Uh, fuck, if my partner does these things and it annoys me, why don't they just not do those things and not annoy me? And in reality, To make a better relationship, it's like you need to be the best version of yourself in the relationship. And if your partner agrees to do the same for themselves,

Uh you'll have an amazing relationship over time. And so uh in a s so what you would do for relationships is you would basically say Awesome. What is the best version of you you're gonna bring to your relationship? And it would just coach you on you doing your part and not doing tit for tat, measuring, oh, I'll behave if my I'll be great if they are great. It's like, well, that's a recipe for failure.

Uh, it's I'll be great because that's who I am. That's what works in in the context of being a great boyfriend, great girlfriend, great husband, whatever. Okay. So that could work for relationships. So we've uh diet. And fitness is easy. I think that's easy. You know, you have to run, you have to hit the smiley. You have a goal. So it could be like as narrow as people who are training for a triathlon. I know a lot of people hire like a marathon. They hire a marathon coach who helps them like structure their ramp up running and all that stuff. So it could be as narrow as any it's anything you have a goal on. So the reason I like this one is because My I have like goals when it comes to work.

Right, and I know that if I can just If I can be a little bit more productive every single day, if I could be a little bit better at my projects, make a little more progress every day. Hundred fifty dollars in a month is like z nothing compared to the value I create. by actually doing better at my project. So it's anywhere you have a goal, fitness, diet.

Relationships Um and so you know, whatever those goals are for people, I think that accountability coaching is gonna be a bigger thing because It's like Anywhere that there's a like so for example, relationships, you have a relationship therapist or a couple therapy, right? So you have this thing you could go pay.

Hundred fifty dollars an hour. Or you could read a ten dollar book. Well, now there's something in the middle. It's like a human on the other side. But you don't have to pay$150 an hour, you pay$150 a month because they're digital and they're managing multiple clients this way in a light touch model. Same thing with fitness, you can have a personal trainer. Or you can have a gym membership, or this is the thing in the middle, your accountability coach. So same thing with, you know, work. You can have an executive coach.

Who's like, you know, thousands of dollars as your as your CEO coach. uh or whatever your job is if you're not a CEO, but you can have an executive coach. Or you could go read a management book. Well, this is something in the middle. It's a way for you to be better at work with accountability code. So that's the model I see here. And I bet there's a bunch of areas where this can apply. Um How big do you think Future Fit is? So Future Fit says that they're they're trying to get to a thousand coaches this year. They've raised thirty five million dollars. Uh

um series B. So I think they're you know, they're probably doing fairly well. And they're kind of in that Peloton model, right? They just need like You know, if you're making a hundred fifty dollar subscription per month It doesn't take that much to be at fifteen million dollars, you know, a a a year of of revenue. It doesn't take that much to be at 150 million dollars a year. Um like it is an achiev these are achievable numbers as you get to like ten thousand subscribers. A hundred thousand subscribers type of thing.

I don't know what their subtraction is. The issue is of course churn. Yeah. Cause and I think that's why The harder the goal Um, the more the churn. This is the unfortunate part of this business is like fitness People fall off that horse and even if your product is great.

Sometimes they just stop wanting to work out, eat right, you know. So I think diet is gonna have a lot of turn. I think fitness is gonna have a lot of turn. Um work. I think we'll have a little bit less churn, but maybe st you know, still we'll have churn. Uh, relationships, I don't know where that would fall. But

I don't know, I find this pretty fascinating, so And I I I think it's now been trying it for a few days. I like it. Have you invested in Future Fit? No. I invested in fitness AI, which is an AI version of it. I wouldn't invest in future fit because of the churn. That was that would be something I'd be concerned about. Um

But I would love to own one of these companies. Yeah. Totally. I've I for sure would like to own it. Um Do we wanna do one more or no? No, I gotta run. Um, all right. Well

Did by the way, do you know that We get criticized for Irish goodbyes. We just end the podcast. It's our thing. I actually do the same thing with my family too. Like if I'm talking to my mom or my sister, like there's no like, Okay, well, you know, I'm gonna go run to the store now. So it's been great chatting. No, it's like Gotta go bite, or I'll just be like Bye. And I'll just hang up the phone. Yeah, I do the exact same thing whatever I've done. They know the deal and they can do the same right back to me. You don't even need to tell me why you need to leave. If you need to leave, you just yell bye and you hang up before I reply.

I do this at gatherings too. I don't I actually don't say goodbye. I just walk out. Um goodbyes are pointless. Like what's the point? It's just like I don't know. It's just a lot of effort for something that's uncomfortable for me to do. And like I just once I've decided I'm moving on to my next activity, like I've moved on already. It's too late. I'm here. I'm there. I'm not here anymore. I'm gone. Right. Like I gave you the beginning in the middle. I don't need an end. The ending's stupid. Uh you just need the uh it's it's pointless. Um all right, so that's the end of the podcast. Ha ha ha. Uh-huh.

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 the road less travel never looking back

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