The Exchanges

Q Okay, let's go. We have two more. Terrence J asks, what's your ultimate goal with StoryArb? You probably touched upon this a little bit already.

A Yeah, I would say there's three ultimate goals. One personal, two professional. Personal, very, very honestly, it's, you know, at some point in the future, I don't know when it'll be, when I'm no longer at Morning Brew, I will no longer be making a salary from Morning Brew. I think at a personal level, as how can StoryArb be a lifestyle business, That cash flows off enough money for me to provide for my family and supplement the salary that I get from Morning Brew. There's two professional goals. The first professional goal is I just deeply believe that audience is like one of the greatest untapped assets for people on the internet. I have seen the value it's given to me, and I know it can bring value to so many subject matter experts online. From a mission perspective, I feel very excited about the idea Of untapping the potential for tons of really smart executives to have this asset, to build this asset online. The second professional goal is I actually see StoryArb as the foundation for other businesses, and what I mean by that is, let's just use an example. We have 12 clients right now for StoryArb who are subject matter experts in different industries. One in self-storage, one in buying agency and content businesses, One in CPG and product development. The way I think about it is they are paying us to help them build authority within their niche online. Let's say we get th…

AI assessment note: “I would say there's three ultimate goals. One personal, two professional.”

Q So Alex, is this live right now? I say we do something that's present right now.

A Yes, it is present. It's going to provide a little bit of backstory and then come right into the present of like a present question I'm asking myself. So October of 2020, we sell the majority of Morning Brew to Axel Springer. April of 2021, I step out of the CEO role out of being, after being in the role for, it's called five and a half years. The moments after stepping out of that role were some of, I would, I would say the most difficult times of my life. I felt purposeless. I felt directionless. I didn't know what I was going to do with my time. I felt like a lot of the things that had motivated me prior for Morning Brew, namely money being, I would say, 70% of what contributed to my drive of Morning Brew was no longer there. And I also had a lot of guilt of feeling like I was inadequate in the CEO role. Uh, I told myself the story of that is why I'm no longer in the role because I wasn't good enough to scale with the business. Uh, I told myself that I was only good in zero to one. But I didn't have enough focus, uh, in order to like actually continue to build out as an operational CEO versus just a builder in chief. And I had the story of myself that it was a lot of luck and my co-founder just kind of pulled me along for the ride. And so then push the story forward. Uh, you know, I am basically staring at the sky for six months straight, reading a lot of books on stoicism, …

AI assessment note: “Yes, it is present. It's going to provide a little bit of backstory”

Q this. And then by the end of the day, go, oh no, let's do something different tomorrow. Most of the time that doesn't work. I mean, There's certain examples where it might, but generally that you need some period of time of activity, and then some period of time to kind of zoom up for a second and go, did that, did that work, or should we make a change?

A Yeah, I mean, the, it's like, I, I think the There, the answer is there's no right answer, but there's the, probably like the wrong answer is not having any mechanism that allows you to, to step back and reflect. And so for me, I mean, we do something very simple with the plunge where it's just my partner and I just have a weekly meeting. We have a weekly one-on-one right now, uh, Thursdays at four o'clock and we answer the same exact questions every time. It's what worked this week? What did not work this week? And what are our priorities next week? And at the very top of this doc, it has what are our goals, which is VIP reservations is, is the, the goal that matters right now. And it's like a template we have on Google docs. Like I'm even happy to attach it to the show notes just to have that template for weekly meetings. But for me, it's, it is just a force function where I have to go through now and set aside time for a 30 minutes or an hour to say, What worked this week? What didn't work this week? And, um, what am I going to spend time on next week? So just to give you an example, like what, when we did this last week, I wrote like, what worked is that we are now fully running our ambassador program, which by the way, we could talk about that more. Cause I think ambassador programs are not used nearly enough. Ambassador programs have to be kind of like this, like cheap, v…

AI assessment note: “wrong answer is not having any mechanism that allows you to, to step back”

Q write that one up. And then that, like, I started a series of it. By the way, the other thing I'll throw out, and this will happen, I'm sure you've seen it too, is like, now I post them and people aren't that interested in them anymore. It's kind of been played out, right? And I'm sure your second startup is going to have the same issue at some point.

A That's the huge thing is these platforms move so quickly that even if you get a great concept, you have to change it after some period of time. So like, if I look at my TikTok right now, My last three, 62nd startups got 2000 views, a thousand views, and 3800 views. And just for context, like my most watched 62nd startup had 600,000 or 700,000 views. And so, again, like the, the, the issue with content is you just never know, is it not getting a lot of views because it wasn't an interesting story that was told by the founder, or is it because This is just now a tired format and you need to evolve it. And so I think one of the ways I think about it is how do I keep doing 62nd startup and find ways to up the stakes of it? So for example, I mean, I think I told you this, like one of the ways I'm trying to up the stakes is literally have founders pitch their businesses in absurd ways. So I have a guy who's set up to go skydiving while pitching his business. But on the other hand, how do I try a format that's totally different from that? That basically is almost like my R&D in the event. This is just a tired format and I do need to pivot it. And so, for most of the content journey, you feel like you're in this, like, purgatory, where you're just trying to figure things out, and I think my formula has always been continue to stick with it, continue to put, continue to put content out,…

AI assessment note: “these platforms move so quickly that even if you get a great concept, you have”

Q So let's talk about how did that end up happening? I don't know if you paid attention to it, but you can take it on because I've been talking a while.

A Well, yeah, yeah. So like, basically, just, just to sum up what you said, basically, Silicon Valley Bank Their deposits grew threefold over the course of three years. There was only so much that they could do with their increase in deposits. There weren't that many, there weren't three X the number of startups that they could lend money to. So they had to invest in something to get their yield so that they were making more yield than the, uh, basically the, the, uh, yield that they were giving to their depositors. Those were mortgage backed securities. The rates of mortgage-backed securities moved up a ton, which basically means the value of eighty billion dollars worth of mortgages went down significantly. They sold those mortgages or twenty-something billion of them at a, I believe, a two billion dollar loss. And, but, but my understanding here, and correct me if I'm wrong, is that actually isn't what created this whole issue.

AI assessment note: “Silicon Valley Bank Their deposits grew threefold over the course of three years.”

Q OK, let's talk about what what are your top marketing initiatives? Like, how are you going to go out and market this thing?

A Yeah, so there's a few things I'm doing. One is I'm planning on creating basically a daily TikTok or vertical video content that's going to drop. It's going to be people playing the game. It's also going to be a lot of competition type content where I sit outside in Hoboken with a board, and it says hit a bullseye, win a hundred or a thousand bucks. I'm going to do, like, head-to-head videos where I'll get two friends. They'll bet each other Either money or, like, an act, and the, the winner gets to do something to the loser. So that's, like, the organic content I'm creating. Now, bringing in the creator piece of this, I'm talking to a few big-time creators, and I'm trying to decide if it makes sense to work with them. So I'm talking to some- It feels premature to me.

AI assessment note: “there's a few things I'm doing. One is I'm planning on creating basically a daily TikTok”

Q really engineering that kind of, uh, activity and, you know, they're talking about people who are good looking and crushes, and so it's not just like, wow, this person's good at sports or, you know, love their backpack. It's like, she has pretty eyes, and it's kind of like a low-key way of flirting, which I haven't seen anywhere and is really exciting. It's like passing notes in class, right?

A Yeah. I mean, I love it. I think, first of all, I think, first of all, like, uh, the fact that he's going after high schoolers, there's two things that come to mind for me. One is the point you made, Sophia, which is that it's probably not an audience that he is personally super passionate about, and I've always wondered to myself, how can entrepreneurs build businesses around problems they're not experiencing, but, like, Nikita, in my mind, is, like, the exception to the rule. He has figured out how to do that, but I think from a business perspective, it is That's probably the best demographic to build a social network around because I can't think of a time in your life that is filled with more, like, gossip culture, the, the desire to feel a part of a group, FOMO if you don't feel a part of it, and so unfortunately, you know, when you're in high school, so much of your identity is dictated by what others think of you, um, and that's not a positive, but I think what they've done is they've spun it into a really good thing where, um, You get notified when people are saying that, you know, you're going to be most popular. You have the best eyes. And so I think what Nikita has done is amazing. And just to give people some background, because they didn't talk about it in the interview, Nikita basically built the same exact product in 2017. So Nikita founded an app called TBH and h…

AI assessment note: “Yeah. I mean, I love it. I think, first of all”

Q Is that that one you showed me in Jersey?

A Uh, no, this is in, uh, Arkansas. And here, let me, I'll give you the numbers. So basically, this business, 2016, did 818,000 dollars in revenue, 160,000 in EBITDA. 2017, 985,000 in revenue, 283,000 in EBITDA. What's really interesting, again, just as a frame of reference, one data point about potentially mini golf And activities like this being recession resistant in 2020. So thick of the pandemic with everything really closing down in March. I don't know what specific laws were in Arkansas. Revenue was 878,000 dollars. EBITDA was 242,000 and 20 21. The most recent financials I saw were as of July of 2021. They'd already done a million dollars in revenue. Uh, 450,000 dollars in EBITDA. And I do know about this location also a few things, not just mini golf. It's like a, uh, activity center, right? That has like bumper cars and arcade games and batting cages. So that's like an interesting consideration. I don't know if I like that or I don't. And then the other is they do own the land. So this person has seven acres of land and they were open to selling the land, but I don't know what, like that To me is a totally different calculus of like, how do you then you're not just valuing a business now. You have to become like a land valuation person as well.

AI assessment note: “Uh, no, this is in, uh, Arkansas.”

Q is you can probably go, especially from, like, And DM a bunch of these founders and indie hackers that have basically given up on these projects and be like, hey, I'll buy your, your, your startup for, you know, zero dollars or five percent of equity in my new thing, and let me go find a creator and attach it to this particular business. What do you think of that?

A I think it's really interesting. It's funny because I literally, I literally was going through the launch archive today looking at, because it's kind of like a daily ritual for me to go on Product Hunt, and whenever I miss days, I go back to look at the days that I missed, and, um, I think it's basically what you're saying is there are many reasons that people decide not to pursue businesses that are dip, that are not necessarily related to the business, not being a viable business. And so your view is like, if you can find patterns that clearly there's consumer demand and you find one of these ideas that are in line with one of those patterns that for whatever reason, the person who built it, found a new job, started a new company. And they're just sitting on this code base for a piece of software that does something that you think actually be very valuable for yourself and for others. Maybe there's a really interesting way where you could be a better, uh, operator of this business because of either your unfair advantages in terms of your audience or your connection to people with audience, or just having the time and the dedication to put into it. And you can probably get it for a very reasonable price.

AI assessment note: “I think it's really interesting. It's funny because I literally was going through”

Q take further, there are never thoughts that it could fall through and be a waste of your valuable time and potential resources? It's kind of a long question. Or, If an idea has gone this far conceptually, is it always the case of trying it to at least attempt to find market fit and learn what the customers truly want? Said simply, how do you test a new business idea?

A Yeah, I take this as like, how do you test a new business idea and how do you think about whether to increase the amount of time you spend on your business idea? So the way that I think about this is the time that you spend on a business Looks more like a staircase rather than an escalator, meaning if a business goes well, you will hit certain milestones that cause your baseline of mental and physical involvement to move up stepwise versus linearly, and so I kind of jotted down what I believe those milestones are roughly. First milestone is I'm experiencing or I identified a problem, and maybe I look into that problem more, but more likely I don't because most people Don't pursue a business idea the first time they experience a problem. What ends up happening is you hit the second milestone, which is my brain thinks about this problem for the 10th time. I can't shake my interest in solving it, so I start learning more. I talk to friends about the problem. I do research on Reddit and Quora and Twitter about the problem. I Google other businesses solving this problem because 80% of the time, there's already someone who is solving this problem, and the question becomes, are the people out there solving the problem in the way you want it to be solved? The next milestone is, I think there's a way to solve the problem better than how it's being solved, so now I want to run a test to …

AI assessment note: “time that you spend on a business Looks more like a staircase rather than an escalator”

Q Both examples seem to rely heavily on years or decades of experience slash success. Can you imagine a version of your agency being built by someone that hasn't already acquired the high quality talent and has a large network that you have?

A So it's a great question by Tanner P and Brian B. The short answer is yes. Like, I think there are some businesses that not anyone who is interested in building a business can build. Like when I think about Brett Adcock, who I interviewed, and he's building a deep hardware and software company, right? He's, like, literally creating humanoid robots. He wants to have a million of these humanoid robots by, I can't remember what year, like, by twenty-thirty or something. Like, no, not anyone can build that business, because there's such a cross-disciplinary wealth of knowledge you need. Like, you, you need to basically be able to go, like, not just an inch Deep and a mile wide or an inch wide and a mile deep. You have to literally be able to go like a mile deep, a mile wide. And so I think there are just certain people in the world, a very select few that are built to build that type of business. But for something like a service business or like the ghostwriting agency, I really believe that this is actually a great entry business for entrepreneurs because it doesn't require a lot of cash up front. It's an agency. So you can find Your first client, and then go source someone you need to pay to service your client once you have the client in mind. Like, basically, your job, your only job that exists with this business, if you don't have a built-in network, is one person. You just ne…

AI assessment note: “The short answer is yes... for something like a service business or like the ghostwriting agency”

Q Right. Do you internalize it, or do you just not feel it? Do you know?

A I'm not sure if I Feel it, but like it so quickly gets put into my subconscious that I don't have the consciousness to be aware of it, or if I literally don't feel it. Um, and so yeah, it's something, you know, I, I haven't seen a therapist in a while because it's one of those things where it's so easy to go to therapy when something's wrong, but when things are like fine, you end up getting out of the habit, and that's like the mode I'm in right now, but this is When I was last with my therapist, like, this is something we spoke about all the time, was like, how can I start getting more in touch with having an awareness of, like, what I'm actually feeling? And one of the things she always told me to do is, like, when I was feeling any emotion, sit for a second, like, pause, stop what I'm doing, and spend, like, 30 seconds or a minute just describing to myself what I am feeling, because it builds up that muscle of awareness.

AI assessment note: “I'm not sure if I Feel it, but like it so quickly gets put”

Q And so how'd you change that to self-love?

A Yeah. So the way that I've thought about it or reframed it is I'm open-minded and that actually is a huge benefit because it creates safety for others. People know when they talk to me that I'm not going to judge what they're going to say. I'm not going to say it's wrong up front. I'm going to try to think through with them and that I have the capability of taking bets once I'm informed and they're needed and I don't have to have a strong view on everything. And, and what I'll say is like, this plays into like a broader framework that I think of. That I think there's this kind of like x-axis and y-axis. I think there's a y-axis of you're either highly opinionated at the top or weakly opinionated at the bottom. And then the x-axis is on the far right, you're closed-minded, and on the far left, you're open-minded. And so I think most people fall into two of these, whatever you want to call quadrants. I can't remember geometry or math or whatever. Um, first, I think people are either very close-minded and strongly opinionated or open-minded and weakly opinionated. And my view is the sweet spot is kind of the old adage of strong opinions loosely held, but I think it's very hard to achieve. And I felt self-conscious that I sit in the open-minded, weakly opinionated quadrant.

AI assessment note: “the way that I've thought about it or reframed it is I'm open-minded”

Q Do you think it should come from what people think right now, or do you think it should be intentional and you should pick what the value of listening to this is?

A I think it's a combination. I think what we should be doing is asking our listeners, why do you decide to listen to this? What, like, you say it's valuable, why is it valuable to you? And just see thematically, Like directionally, why are people deciding to listen to this over everything else that they could be listening to? And also understanding when, in what form do they like consuming it best? Do they like the live recordings on LinkedIn? Cause they like this feeling of tune in and engagement, or they like the podcast format because they can do it on their own time. I don't know any of the answers to that, but I would say that we should at least know these things to inform whether we agree with it to chart the content strategy moving forward.

AI assessment note: “I think it's a combination. I think what we should be doing is asking our listeners”

Q All right. Next question is from Jessie P. Uh, she asks, what's it like launching a new business and being the chairman from day one?

A I think to answer this question, I first need to provide context on like why I wanted to be a chairman day one and not be a CEO again, at least for now. And the reason is, is first of all, spending five years as the CEO of morning brew and eight years on the business. I would say I had a pretty good perspective on just the amount of time and effort it takes to run a business and the amount of trade-offs that you have to make in your life in order to do that, and I think where I'm at in my life today as, you know, someone who's married and I guess settled down in Hoboken with a dog, it looks very different than my willingness to make trade-offs for the other things in life when I was a senior in college, so that's one piece of it. The other piece of it is After stepping out of the CEO role of Morning Brew and reflecting on how I wanted to spend my time, I generally got a sense of the buckets that I want to spend most of my time on. I wanted to spend time starting or operating businesses at just the early stages and then getting hands off. I wanted to spend my time talking to founders and potential founders. I wanted to spend my time consuming content and creating content to build up my distribution online. And I think the only way To actually do those things well is to not run the day-to-day of a business full-time. So that's the first piece. The second piece is, as I've become …

AI assessment note: “as I've become chairman for StoryArb, it has made me start to think”

Q What are the signals you have to yourself?

A For me, well, when I, like, really feel anxious, I, I actually feel a weight. Like, I, I feel pressure on my chest. I wouldn't say that I'm actually there. I actually, what's creating stress for me, and we've talked about this in previous episodes, is that I like Feeling like I'm in a routine where the day before, or the night before a work day, I've like listed out what I'm gonna do, I have my full schedule, I do the things I say I'm gonna do, and I feel like I haven't had the ability to really do that in two or three weeks, which feels really shitty, because I, almost like the feeling of disorganization, when I feel disorganized, I don't feel good.

AI assessment note: “when I, like, really feel anxious, I, I actually feel a weight.”

Q And how does that work, by the way? How do you actually get organic traffic from their audience?

A Yeah, so like this is the whole game. I would say it's very similar to like the Product Hunt game or, you know, there's probably other analogies for where you, for, uh, Hacker News, etc. So the whole idea is, and I'm actually, I decided to work with an agency that is like a Kickstarter agency. Uh, it's, uh, they're 8800 bucks that I'm paying them. Uh, for the next four months. And basically the, the whole trick is building up an email list. So you want to build up a really qualified email list before you launch your campaign. And what they actually have you do, this agency, is they have you build a landing page where you send people to your landing, the landing page with your product. They first put their email address in, and after putting their email address in, it prompts them to ask if they want to reserve a spot to get their Kickstarter product, your, like the Kickstarter product, At the biggest discount possible.

AI assessment note: “basically the, the whole trick is building up an email list.”

Q So I think you're spot on. And the interesting part is that those are all celebrities. You know what I haven't seen yet, which seems like it's your thesis, but maybe to push back on it is We haven't actually seen pure creators, like not celebrities, but creators do this yet. Like we've seen Mr. Beast, but like, is anybody still buying Beast burgers? Is that like still a thing?

A It's a great question. You know, I invested in Feastables, which is Mr. Beast's chocolate brand. And I think the whole thesis is that they'll go from chocolate into literally becoming, you know, the next Hershey, like hold co of candy. I know that the business absolutely crushed it. In the early days, in the first few days, they sold a shit ton of chocolate. Um, I don't know recently, but I also think this comes down to a question of, one, are you finding the, the right creator product fit? Meaning, is it a product that the creator's audience naturally is looking for and wants? And second, and I think this is the biggest risk, some creators, especially really big ones, they have so much shit going on, and they like the idea of building a business. And making money off that business more than the actual work that it takes to build that business. And so that's why I think at the end of the day, something like Terramana has been so successful because the business has been out, you know, now for over two years and still religiously, the rock is posting videos while sipping his tequila in his house every single week, multiple times a week. And I think that's actually the biggest risk in this model is you're putting a ton of faith in someone that could decide that A month into doing this, there's the next cool, hot thing that they're going to go jump on.

AI assessment note: “I invested in Feastables, which is Mr. Beast's chocolate brand.”

Q Alex, how does that make it any different than any other beverage business? Like, vitamin water is just water with some colors and a cool, you know, Coca-Cola. Like, the story of Coca-Cola is literally water with some, a few additional ingredients and then marketing.

A Yeah, but there's at least, you know, there's some differentiation to the taste. There is literal zero differentiation here, yet somehow people still think the taste is different, and I will go to the grave believing that every water tastes the exact same. Before we hop into the actual show, this is like the prelude. Two unbelievable marketing campaigns that Liquid Death has done recently, and they've done dozens of these. First was, in the last few days, Uh, they partnered with Martha Stewart. I don't know if you guys saw this, and they went and they created, uh, great, we got it on cam, a severed hand holding a liquid death as a candle. Just the most random thing ever. If you were to ask me to drop, who would the, the ideal collaboration be? It would not be Martha Stewart, but it's great. The second one, and this was a little while ago, is rather than going to athletes or celebrities to do endorsements, I don't know if you guys ever saw this, they went to Waterboy's, So they did a 100,000 dollar endorsement with a professional, uh, team's water boy, and then they created a YouTube video of water boys and water girls running 40 yard dashes with liquid death in hand. So is this company worth seven hundred million? I personally don't think so. Is it gonna have the staying power, uh, the brand staying power given it is so sexy and cool right now? I don't know, but I think it is a…

AI assessment note: “There is literal zero differentiation here, yet somehow people still think the taste is different”

Q power in starting something, you know, operating it as a different, different sort of animal, which I think is part of the question here, which is, do you have to, do you, can you sell it? Do you, can you sell entrepreneur it? Do you find other people to run it? Like there's all these other questions, but there is a distinction between getting that thing going versus operating it.

A Yeah. And I think the biggest thing is just realizing there is no right or wrong choice here. For the longest time I was in this mental loop of there is There was one definition of success in entrepreneurship, even though it sounds so ridiculous and irrational to say, like, my subconscious guided me to make decisions based on this idea that I would not be a successful entrepreneur unless I ran my business forever. I stayed in the CEO role forever. I took my business public, and anything short of that would not be a success. And I, I think just to use the example of Pieter Levels again, like, There's a lot of hard stuff about him being a solopreneur. Like, he had posted, or he had tweeted that he's started a bunch of business now, and his hit rate's five percent. So like, it takes a ton of at-bats, and it's exhausting. This guy's coding all of his apps. But on the other side of it, it's like, I think this deserves airtime, because I think if people just have this perception that Elon, this incredible guy who owns Twitter, and Tesla, and SpaceX, is The North Star for everyone. It's not realistic, and unfortunately, I think it'll disappoint people when they realize that their body's at odds with kind of that dream in their head.

AI assessment note: “realizing there is no right or wrong choice here. For the longest time I”

Q Yeah. Well, so what are you going to integrate AI with the business?

A Yes, I want to. Well, so this goes down to, I tweeted this yesterday, and then you replied to my tweet about, like, what the priorities of the agency are right now. So basically, just, just for full transparency, this is basically a business that is as close to being not a business as it is a business. We have revenue. There's, The company hasn't been incorporated. There's no logo. There's no process. Uh, the, the initial ghostwriters, like I wasn't even taking a profit for the first two clients. I just wanted to learn the process. So I connected the ghostwriter with the client and the ghostwriter individually invoiced the client. So I was just brokering this. So now I like, I have to create some structure. So I was writing down priorities. One was like, have some structure so this can actually be an agency. Uh, two was, um, find more ghost writers so that I can scale outside of this one ghost writer I'm working with, and the third was find an operator to run this business, and your reply was-

AI assessment note: “Yes, I want to. Well, so this goes down to”

Q No. Um, I mean, these businesses make a lot of money too. I think that's part of one of the, for the organizers, right? Because they bring these people together.

A Yeah, it's insane. And we'll talk about it in a second. Uh, you know, the only other thought from South by is I'm just trying to reflect on some of my most interesting experiences there. The first is I saw Terry Crews. Uh, he was, there's, there's some, uh, movie or show where I think he's like the president, his name's Camacho, and he was on the back of a pickup truck with a blonde wig You guys jacked out of his mind wearing a tank top and spandex. So I saw him driving down, uh, uh, Congress, the main street in South by that was interesting. Um, and then I, I will say it was not as a non operator right now. It was nice to meet people that I have met on Twitter over the last six years, but I've never met in person. So I met like Sam Parr, who I've never met in person. I met Nick Gray, who I've never met in person. Shout out Nick Gray, who he was doing free Tesla rides. From, uh, you'd pick people up from the airport for free and drive them to their destination. I got to meet him. He had a little sign that said the plumb.

AI assessment note: “Yeah, it's insane. And we'll talk about it in a second.”

Q to be honest. Like, I have a tendency to think, for example, like, I want to become a novelist. It's like, just freaking write for fun, dude. Just write, like, just write, you know. Uh, and it's like, no, I gotta, like, publish a book, and like, you know, make a movie out of it, and like, da-da-da-da. Like, and it's like, why? Why do I need to do that?

A Yeah, totally. I, yeah, I don't know. There's this part of me that definitely feels like, um, Uh, we associate value to, like, ambition and growth, and like, you know, it's parroted in society all the time, like, you know, you should never feel comfortable. It's like, what's wrong with feeling comfortable from time to time? Like, I, I think to your point, it's like, um, something feels wrong when you're just like, In kind of just like this linear progression. And then the, the interesting question asked is like, why, why, why is something wrong with that? Uh, what, one, one thing I'm wondering is like, okay, we talked a little bit about, uh, like kind of what Gumroad, um, meant to your identity and like the value you ascribe to yourself as a function of what Gumroad could become in chapter one. Let's say Chapter two, which is, like, Gumroad as lifestyle business, and it's funny, like, I was even reading through, you had shared, like, what the June, 2015, and June, 20 16 numbers looked like in the business, and I think anyone, if, like, they hadn't read any other part of your blog post, and just read those numbers, and you ask them, like, what's a better business, like, it's kind of obvious. For, for the listener, it was June, 2015, this is a few months before Gumroad layoffs, revenue was 89,000 dollars a month, Uh, net profit was 351,000, -351,000 dollars. They're burning 351,0…

AI assessment note: “we associate value to, like, ambition and growth, and like, you know, it's parroted”

Q Are you ready to come up with the policy for how dishes get cleaned in the office?

A It just reminded me, uh, uh, it's probably 20, 2018 or 20 19. We're at like Somewhere between 15 and 20 employees at this point, maybe a little bit more. And, you know, the early days of the brew were all, like, the first few people on the team, you know, we were very, very, um, homogeneous, like, twenty-two-year-old, like, white male Jewish team, and then over time, um, the, the team, uh, got more diverse in every sense. Gender, age, ethnicity, background, and I so vividly remember the first time that we hired a mom. We had never had a mom in the company, and then all of a sudden, you know, one day they asked us, because they had just had a child recently, and they had to pump milk. Austin and I were like, holy shit. Like, this is, this is the definition of, like, When, when you are just. Blind spots. Yeah, when you, when you have such a different life situation from other people, you have such blind spots to things you would never think about. So we literally, I remember at the time our HR person, person literally had to like put up a, a curtain on one of our conference rooms.

AI assessment note: “It just reminded me, uh, uh, it's probably 20, 2018 or 20 19.”

Q was so cool to be on a lot of these shows. But I, I think it's doing, moving in the forward, moving in the future, you know, it's probably just being more strategic. Which shows do you think will move the needle? It was hard to know that. And I asked people which ones did, and, um, it was still cool to be on a lot of shows to practice.

A Totally. Uh, I, I think to, to your point, and maybe, maybe the best way to talk through this is to just work through StoryArb. Um, but like, I think a lot of people will be listening to this and will be like, They'll be like, Noah, I'm, I'm listening. Like, I understand the, the method of how you do growth, and I understand how you did it for your book, but everything you listed out related to your book was based on having a massive audience or relationships that you've built up for 15 years. Like, if I'm, if, let's just, like, if it's someone who literally is reading your book, so it's like a first-time entrepreneur, where do they go if they want to get customers, but social is not Accessible to them.

AI assessment note: “maybe the best way to talk through this is to just work through StoryArb”