Every argument clarity score on this site is built from rows on this page. Each
question and answer was assessed with names hidden, the host's own answers included, on
four things from 1 to 5:
directness (does it answer the question asked), coherence (do the ideas follow),
precision (concrete details and clear references), compression (says a lot per word). The weighted
mix (30/30/25/15) is the exchange score. A person's published score averages their exchange
scores on raw tape only, at least 8 of them, shrunk toward the cohort mean.
Full method →
Answered raw tape
D 5 · C 5 · P 5 · Cm 4 4.85
Q Have you ever felt richer than that first relief of being like out of the mess?
A No, I say it in my book, in the, uh, the offers book, the last, the last chapters, uh, the first 100,000. When we had our first 100,000, which was like four or six weeks after that, I showed it to Layla on the phone, and I was like, we did it. And she was like, what do you mean? And I was like, look, and I like pulled it up, and it wasn't like in the business account, because I'd had that in like business, you know, but it was like, But that's like operating expensive and earmark for other stuff. But like, this was like in the personal account. And I was like, we can, we can screw up for like three years and we're going to be fine. Like we could do, we could just do, we could take off for three years and be fine. And, uh, to this day is, it is a hundred percent the richest I've ever felt. And I think it's because of relative change in wealth. Cause I have thought about it. Cause it's like, if you go from a thousand dollars to a 100,000 dollars, it's a, it's a hundred X increase in wealth in a month.
AI assessment note: “to this day is, it is a hundred percent the richest I've ever felt.”
Answered raw tape
D 5 · C 5 · P 5 · Cm 4 4.85
Q By the way, the, the end of that story is, like, within the first 12 months, there's some, like, ridiculous benchmark that you guys hit, right? So from that brink of failure to, what was it at the end of the year?
A Yeah, so, so we did the, so, December 26th, the, of, of 2016, uh, processor shuts me down, and I make the big bet, and Layla says, I'll go with you under a bridge, and it's 3300 a day. It takes four or five months for me to realize the new model Where I fly out to gyms has this big refund problem. And so now we're into May of 17. Uh, I flipped, I flipped during that kind of like April, May ish, the model, uh, and we started doing the, the licensing model and it goes like 407 hundred, uh, a 1,000,001, two, one, five, like into the end of the year. So we ended up with like 6.8 million top line. And I think we did three million in profit. And then the full next calendar year, we did, uh, twenty-six million and, uh, sixteen million in EBITDA.
AI assessment note: “we ended up with like 6.8 million top line. And I think we did three million”
Answered raw tape
D 5 · C 5 · P 5 · Cm 4 4.85
Q Do you want this to grow or like, what's going on here, right?
A So it went from, it went from, uh, two million to did sixteen million to, uh, 50, then 70, then this year we'll do one 10. And so, We hired 40 sales guys so that we could do, we could add that back end in. We added a CMO. We added a CPO and a whole product team to help the, the chief product officer out. We added in a controller. And so one of the things acquisition.com, what we do is that we recruit. And so, because we have a lot of inbound, we have a lot of talent that is in my audience. And so I, I might not endorse the company publicly, But from a private perspective, we'll endorse, we'll, we'll recruit at Holdco, get usually higher quality talent than a portfolio can get, place the high quality talent, and then they just grow way faster.
AI assessment note: “So it went from, it went from, uh, two million to did sixteen million”
Answered raw tape
D 5 · C 4 · P 4 · Cm 4 4.30
Q Does every business and product offering have a killer offer inside of them?
A I do think so. I think that sometimes you have like the big part with the offer is you have to operationalize it. And so if you're Ogilvy, it's like, okay, well, how can I write all these split test? Like, it's like how, if I'm going to have all these bonuses that I have to add in in order to make the thing more valuable, I have to operationalize that part. And so, yes, I do think so. It's just like, usually you might sometimes have to put like terms around that. Like if I was an accounting firm, something boring. It's like, I can guarantee that I will get you more than you pay me by just auditing your back taxes and saving that money today.
AI assessment note: “I do think so. I think that sometimes you have like the big part”
Answered raw tape
D 5 · C 4 · P 4 · Cm 4 4.30
Q Can, can you say category, like e-comm, licensing, just like a general architect?
A Publishing. Yeah, it's publishing business. And so, They were, they were getting like three to one upfront LTV to CAC. And so I was like, Hey man, wouldn't it be cool if we sold our customers something else? And, uh, this is actually a really funny story if you guys want to hear it. So we're negotiating this deal and we're like right near the end. And they, we all agreed we need to have some sort of second upsell, some sort of backend that's going to build some sort of continuity, whatever. And so they were like, we've already got it. We've already built it all out. We're super passionate about it. We want to show people how to build a business like this. And I was like, That's not, it was a B to C business. It's, it's like a publisher, like it helps you publish books, like things like that.
AI assessment note: “Publishing. Yeah, it's publishing business.”
Answered raw tape
D 5 · C 4 · P 4 · Cm 4 4.30
Q What's an example of a bet you made a year and a half or two years ago?
A The software component for the publishing business. So it was not that. It was basically a consumer service business, fundamentally, like education and service, whatever. And it was, I think the revenue is fifty-fifty split between the two. And so I was like, we have to put some sort of software thing in here that we can facilitate. So either we get a tech-enabled service multiple, or we just get a pure SaaS multiple. Um, and so it was a year and a half ago, um, and we started putting a few million dollars into developing the software That now has just had a tremendous uptake rate, has improved conversion rates, improved client success scores, all of these things. Um, and that was a bet, you know. I mean, to be fair, for a company of that size, even when we made the bet, I think we were doing somewhere like, twenty million in EBITDA when we made the bet, something like that. Um, so, you know, betting 10% or 15% of net free cash is not like a massive bet, but from a resources perspective of the attention of the leadership team, That was where the big bet was. And so kind of like the point with the brand versus the cash, like, if I'm going to do a deal and I promote it, the biggest, the biggest slice that I'm giving is, is the audience and the attention, not the cash.
AI assessment note: “The software component for the publishing business.”
