The Exchanges

Q You were born and raised in the same city and even stayed there for college. Can you talk a little bit about that?

A Yeah. So I grew up in Boise, Idaho, actually about 45 minutes outside of town, up in the mountains. Uh, I was homeschooled Graduated super early. Uh, went to college when I was 15 at Boise State. Dropped out when I was 17. Started my first business. I expanded from there. I've traveled a bunch. I think I've probably gone to 25, 30 countries, somewhere in there. Um, but I have never been away from Boise for more than six weeks at a time. I got, you know, I've done a bunch of, like, five weeks in South Africa, four weeks in Europe, five weeks in Thailand, like some of those things. But it's always been with the home base in Boise, and so now I have a little farm here, and yeah, my wife and three kids, and you know, we live like 10 minutes from downtown. You know, I'll be on the road tomorrow and, ah, all next week, but it's always back to Boise.

AI assessment note: “I grew up in Boise, Idaho... went to college when I was 15 at Boise State”

Q to this idea of accelerating your career, or accelerating your business, and the fact that you've done it without being in a massive hub, and having not come from law, You didn't raise capital for a long time. You built a lot of the business yourself. You kind of did it all the quote unquote harder way. So what other frameworks do you think would be relevant to people listening?

A Yeah, I have this one, uh, called the ladders of wealth creation, and it's my attempt at breaking down All the things I observed to be true about making money and building wealth, and then try to explain it systematically. And so basically takes you through these ladders of first trading time for money, and then like basically first having a job and then having a services business where you're still trading time for money, but you have to learn these new skills and then productize services and then ultimately into, uh, products. And I try to teach through Basically, there's a thousand skills to making money and building wealth, and if you try to learn them all at once, you're going to fail, or it's going to take an absurdly long time without any positive feedback along the way. Like, it's just going to be depressing. And so instead, if you break it down and you move between ladders and you learn, you know, these small skills, right? Like you and I forget this now. Uh, cause we're like, if, if we say, Hey, let's start a new business, form an LLC done next move on. But you don't realize that the first time you form an LLC, that's actually really hard. You know, because you just, you don't know what you don't know, and you're like the secretary of state, and what phone number should I put on this, and a registered agent, what is that, you know, that sounds so official. And so you …

AI assessment note: “I have this one, uh, called the ladders of wealth creation”

Q two million in revenue. And that really means not a lot. And so the real question should be like, you know, what's your, what's your net profit? Or what's your margin in your business? And what can you sell your business for? Or even better, is your business sellable at all? If you're a creator, do you have thoughts on either of those before I let you out of here?

A Yeah, the first thing is that creators are the best in the world at capturing attention. And on one hand, they're great at monetizing it, right? We talk about the creator who makes a million dollars a year and that that's insane, right? They're making more than most doctors who went to school for eight years for this one thing and worked their way all the way up the ladder. And a creator is like, yeah, I've been doing this for three or four years and there's a million bucks, you know, at a high margin with good tax incentives as a small business owner and all that. But I see audience after audience that is under monetized, making a million dollars a year and crazy under monetized. One of my favorite examples is Mark Sisson, who, he had a blog called Mark's Daily Apple. It's still around, but in 2014, I think he had about a 150,000 subscribers on his email list, and I estimate he was doing between one and two million dollars a year in revenue. So, amazing business, wildly successful, And he is monetizing through, ah, some digital product sales, advertising, affiliates, that kind of thing. Pretty traditional playbook. And if you think, okay, a 100,000 subscribers, a 150,000 monetized to a million or two million, that's pretty good. But what he ended up doing is saying in his audience, they kept saying to him like, Hey, we want paleo friendly, uh, not just recipes, but we want to …

AI assessment note: “he sells it to Kraft Foods for two hundred million dollars”

Q So you obviously don't think you need to leave your hometown to grow. You stayed there. Do you think it would have been easier if you had gone to college somewhere else, another big city? Like, were there any detriments? Do you stay in local for most of your life professionally?

A You know, it's hard to say. I grew up in a time when everything was going online, right? So I graduated high school in, uh, The web design community was exploding and you could connect with and learn from so many people. It was really the time that it felt like remote work was starting to be a thing. You know, I was starting to meaningfully be in my career, into my career in doesn't 10, 2011. And remote was just starting to be a thing. There's companies like GitHub and Automatic and Basecamp that were doing that well. So I think that I think travel is really, really important. I don't know that you have to live somewhere else. I don't have an opinion on it in the sense of, like, it's important to stay in your hometown, or it's important to leave. I think it's really nuanced. Like, I was jumping ahead in, I was in a hurry to grow up, and so, for me at 15 to finish high school and be going to college, that wouldn't really work if I wasn't in my hometown, right? And so, I jumped my career ahead in a number of years, which required me to stay in my hometown, rather than going to college at 18 years old, 19, and going to an out of state school.

AI assessment note: “I don't know that you have to live somewhere else. I think it's really nuanced.”

Q of this, like, layering of humans with intention. A lot of times it's just like, whoever do you think of is the person that you reach out with. Tactically, what database do you use? Does ConvertKit have like a, a friend CRM? I know there's always so many of these. I always want one. I never liked the ones that exist. What do you use technically to actually do that?

A Yeah. It's not as sexy as I wish it was. Uh, I use, so our sales team, I make them track a location for every person they're talking to. Cause the number of times you're doing a deal and it's like, yeah, we're back and forth over zoom calls and emails for three months. And I'm like, What city are they in? And it's like, San Diego. And it's like, cool. I'm going to happen to be in San Diego in three days. And they're like, really? And you're like, no, I'm just, I'm booking a flight because why not? You know, like I'm going to make that happen. I've made so many great relationships by just being willing to jump on a direct flight somewhere and line it up, spend a day doing that. Same thing with closing talent, right? If you're trying to land a new head of ops or sales leader or something, like get on a plane and do that. We track that in our sales CRM. And then for Twitter, I can't remember the name of it, but there is an app that I use That tells me all my top followers by city. And then it will also tell me top followers by, like I can search bios or anything like that. So I can search for anyone who has newsletter in their bio and more than 20,000 subscribers or followers on Twitter. And that would, that gives me a list. So like, who are my top followers in, uh, Austin or New York? And then also the ConvertKit database of like, where are our customers?

AI assessment note: “We track that in our sales CRM. And then for Twitter, I can't remember the name”

Q Yeah, that's a good point. What do you think you'll do with your kids? Do you want your kids to stay local and build? Do you want them to have those out-of-state experiences? Does it matter?

A I think they need to have totally different experiences, but how they go about it, there's a huge amount of flexibility in that. So we're at the point, I grew up in a family where money was very, very scarce, and I learned early on that making money is a skill, and I'm like, okay, I'm gonna get as good as possible at this skill, you know, really a combination of a thousand skills. And so, in the quest to do that, I, I learned all kinds of things, but When we got to the point that, you know, now we're making a lot of money and there's no shortage. I was talking to a friend and he was saying, you know, about this problem, like, okay, we're traveling. Should we book economy or first class? Should we charter a private jet or, you know, some of these things, four seasons, you know, or the Hilton, right? Where should you stay? And a friend of mine just said to me, it was like, you know, you're worried about the example you're setting for your kids of whether like being in the 92nd percentile of wealth, Versus the 99th percentile of global wealth. And like, is that enough of a contrast? And what he said is, you should be, like, for them, help them compare to the 50th percentile of global wealth. Right? If you want to get them, it's not that by staying at a Motel Six or, you know, a Holiday Inn versus the Four Seasons, that's what's going to make them grateful for what they have in the…

AI assessment note: “I think they need to have totally different experiences”