The Exchanges

Q Okay. So you decide to go and basically start over, build a totally different business. Why'd you decide to build a SaaS business?

A The first reason was that as I started to learn more about SaaS, I predicted that if I had just built my SaaS business on the back of my personal brand and me telling my own fans to buy it, it wouldn't survive in the wild. When I say wild, I mean in the market and Among the competition of other SaaS companies that would build similar products as mine. And I also saw that other influencers that started SaaS businesses, you know, they come and go. I wanted to prevent that and avoid that if I could. And I thought that building this product in the wild and creating something that was truly good enough for people to adopt and pay for naturally and share with their friends naturally, and to get people talking about it without me convincing them to, I thought that was a better strategy. The second reason why is because Honestly, I wanted to prove it to myself. People always saw me as this business guy and I had influencer businesses, but I never truly felt like a good competitive player in the space. So part of me was just like, you know what? I'm going to do this. Like I know I can do it. I can do anything I want. So I went all in literally all chips on the table, which was super risky, um, into a new area, but it works. I mean, we hit 250 K in June a couple months ago. Now the business is on a, on a growing and sustainable path.

AI assessment note: “The first reason was... The second reason why is because Honestly, I wanted to prove”

Q On that same note, let's talk about validating those ideas. Once you've come up with an idea and even potentially launched or thinking about launching it, how do you know if that idea is validated? What's your approach to that?

A Yeah, for new ideas, I usually first look if there is something that already exists that is similar or the same. Is this an enterprise solution? Is this for small businesses? Is this for, for individuals? You can check the existing pricings to To see what's the potential for, for that idea. That's kind of the first step. Then if I'm going to continue building, I need to know that I'm going to be able to have something that differentiates me from the rest of the products that already exist. If I can't find that angle, I maybe look for something else, because if you are not able to differentiate yourself, it's going to be hard to enter into the market. And then, yeah, try to find your first five users willing to try it out, right? Use Reddit, use X, use Facebook groups, LinkedIn groups as well. Having those users Using the app while you are building it is amazing. Like it's really like the insights and all the validation that you get that you're building exactly what they need is super important.

AI assessment note: “try to find your first five users willing to try it out”

Q I love that. Let's talk about ideas. How do you go about finding ideas that can make money?

A Yeah, I'm not the kind of guy that go looking for ideas. I usually, I read a lot, blog posts, eggs, YouTube videos. Ideas spark in my mind, and I just write them down. I have a huge list of ideas. And it's funny when the same idea pops up different times. Those are the kind of ideas that you work on. But if I were to look for ideas, I would use, I think, Upwork would be a great place to find ideas, because you can go there and see what people are looking for to build. And maybe if you can translate that Into a known solution to offer to other users. I think there could be some really good insights in there.

AI assessment note: “Upwork would be a great place to find ideas, because you can go there”

Q You built this website to almost a million dollars a month. There's a lot of coding courses and a lot of stuff out there. What did you do differently? What is your secret ingredient for this business?

A In this market, online learning, you've got to differentiate pretty hard because there's a lot of competition in the space. We kind of had different differentiators along the way as we grew the business over the last four years. The first was a content differentiation. So we're serving this Market of people that want to learn back-end technologies and just aren't finding the resources because front-end is so dominant in the online learning space. The next differentiator was you should make your thing feel totally different, totally unique. And I really was inspired by Seth Godin's book, The Purple Cow. Fantastic marketing book. But the basic idea is when someone lands on your site, as a new entrepreneur, it can be really tempting to go look at a bunch of competitors' websites and like, oh man, they're so beautiful. They're so well-designed. I should make my website look like theirs. Absolutely. You should not do that.

AI assessment note: “The first was a content differentiation. So we're serving this Market of people”

Q That's great. Let's talk about, uh, monetization. Um, what I think is cool about your site is that you kind of give away your stuff for free, and then you charge a small percentage of people who want that extra feature. Can you walk through how your business is monetized and what the, uh, customer journey typically looks like?

A It was really kind of experiment at first of like, Could we just, like, make all the content free? And you lose interactivity after a certain point if you're not a paying member. It worked. And I think the right business takeaway was let people really understand the product before we ask them to pay for it. It was resonating enough with them. So that's, again, comes back to the, like, you do need to spend all this time iterating on the product and making sure that you're actually solving the problem. And you need to be able to convince people that your product solves the problem before the purchasing decision happens, which just So happens in our case to be a longer free trial or free demo of the interactive features.

AI assessment note: “make all the content free? And you lose interactivity after a certain point if you're not a paying member.”

Q head to the first link in the description To download it for free. This guide was made by HubSpot, which is today's video sponsor. A big shout out to them for putting together this free resource. All right. Let's talk about the early days. How did you set up this business? How did you get your first customer? How'd you get your first 10 customers? What did that look like?

A So at this point we hadn't raised any money. It was totally me. I own a hundred percent of the business. I knew nothing about this space, nothing at all. And I thought, okay, if we're going to be doing VAs, we probably should train them to be great. VAs. So there was a lot of training built into our model. I hired someone, someone who has been an EA for 10 years to make me a training course, and then we just hired three people that I had sort of gotten connected to through my time in Sri Lanka to do our first cohort. Just three people, and I was like, we're just gonna test this out with some friends. So I gave the pitch to some friends, and I gave much reduced pricing, so we didn't make any money on, um, our first three customers, but I just wanted to put this in someone's hands and see what happens. For me, it was all about if I make this business, can I call someone tomorrow and they'll buy it from me? And I think that's really important. Don't go into business being like, oh, I'm going to buy Facebook ads and sell it to some stranger in Arkansas. It's got to be something that you can not just give people to test, but will someone give you money for this thing within, you know, however many days of launching it?

AI assessment note: “I gave the pitch to some friends, and I gave much reduced pricing”

Q Yeah. Before the success, I understand you had a bunch of different roles and you had a bunch of different things. Can you tell me a little bit more about that And how that led to building this huge business?

A Yeah. Well, first I thought I wanted to be an academic. So I was like getting my PhD in international policy, security policy. That was like really intellectually fascinating, but I didn't want to live in my car, which a lot of my colleagues were doing after they graduated. So I was like, oh, let's change course here. Went into finance, was working like at fund investing. So we're investing in venture funds, private equity funds, stuff like that. And so I was working with all these entrepreneurs. I was talking to all, they were all They were getting up out of bed every day, like, really excited about their idea. They just wanted to build something, do something, and at some point you're like, you know what, I want to do that. Decided to start my own company. The first one we took investment. It was venture backed. It was an app. I'm not really app guy, but I was somehow like had started an app company and found myself there and we eventually sold it. But I realized if you go that route, you're not really working for yourself. You're like, okay, I want to build something. I want to own something. I want to do something. But the second you raise money, your board's telling you what metrics you got to hit. You're sort of like on this treadmill of raising the next round. And so I got on that path and I got on that treadmill. But very quickly, I was like, No, this is not for me. And…

AI assessment note: “And that's what led me to profitable services businesses”

Q That's, that's really good advice. After you guys built Sheets resume, how did you launch it and make that 1000 dollars in its first week?

A So initially we launched it for free. We just wanted to see if people would use it. I edited it into my, my post. I said, hey, there's this new builder we built and I'm really proud of it. And we were blown the fuck away by the usage statistics. I think we built in the first like week, I don't even know how many thousands of resumes for people for totally for free. And it was like this huge boost of word of mouth where people were just like immediately, this is amazing. I gotta tell everybody about this. We turned on pricing, I think a weekly, a weekend, 99 for lifetime access seems to be the sweet spot for people. And then we have a 29 dollar one week option for people that are just like, hey, I just need this as I'm starting my job search. But we also don't want to do monthly subscriptions because I do find that predatory. And we want to make sure that we're not taking advantage of anyone during a, you know, a hard time in their life.

AI assessment note: “initially we launched it for free... We turned on pricing, I think a weekend”

Q Okay, since you've built not one, but two successful projects, can you tell us a little bit more about your process for how to find winning ideas?

A I always find it easier to scratch my own itch. When I see something that I know that it can be time consuming, I thought it could be, could be a great idea. Why not creating something that simplifies this, something that solves this problem specifically, instead of having multiple features like Canva, Envato. Most users are not pro users. They just want the simplest way to achieve something. That's the advantage of being a solo entrepreneur. Canva cannot afford to go For very, very specific solution because they need to target a wider audience. So I think that's where solo entrepreneurs can try to niche down as much as possible, find the portion of a huge market that they can serve better than these big companies with accurate results. It's only me. I don't have a co-founder. I don't have employees. I only need 0.1% of the market and I'm good. I think there's very fertile ground for indie hackers or entrepreneurs to create Solutions that are laser focused and solve one specific issue.

AI assessment note: “I always find it easier to scratch my own itch.”

Q Alright, so your approach is to take these big markets and niche it down and build one simple solution for users. But how do you look at validating these ideas and how do you know that it's something worth building?

A I go after markers that are already validated, but I try to be just a little bit different, take a new approach. With ResumeMaker.online, all these resume builders were really bloated. You needed to sign up for before even seeing how the resume is going to look like. I took a completely different approach. You just press one button. You're right there. You can see how good it's looking already. And I think people really resonated with that. That's my philosophy. I think that's going to be my philosophy going forward. Let's take Validated market, niche down, and find a way to save people time. I always say that I don't, I don't sell design. I sell time. That's, that's the value that I provide. I help you to get you to a good enough point and that's smart enough sometimes.

AI assessment note: “I go after markers that are already validated, but I try to be just a little bit different”

Q Okay, cool. You got customers, but how about keeping them? How do you deal with churn?

A Of course, I'm asking customers when they cancel subscription, they have pop-up and they can choose reason and write their reason. But it didn't help because somebody answers, we don't need this product anymore, something like that, you know. So I started reaching out through emails. I was checking their profile, their company, what was their use case? What was the reason they specified? And then I was like, Trying to guess why they churned. And then I was like saying, you know, one yes, no question. Did you churn because of, uh, let's say pricing and people started to answer, you know, like, yes, yes, I did it because of that and so on. And I almost got a 100% success rate of getting these answers. It's a lot of manual work, but this is good because it was building mental model in me. Why, how people use my product, why they churn and what happens. You need to talk In support to people, you need to talk off the charm because sometimes you just realize somebody came and they're not your customer. And one of the ways to fix this is to change your marketing, you know, to change your copy. For example, I was getting some people who were expecting my product to be like no code. So I emphasized that it's for developers, you know, it's like, you need to write code to integrate my product. For me, it was like, let's 11 person per month. Now it's close to seven. I want to get it down l…

AI assessment note: “I started reaching out through emails. I was checking their profile, their company”

Q Okay, so you've already built a couple profitable projects now. Are there any other methods you have to finding winning ideas?

A Yeah, I think the easiest way to find ideas is try to solve your own problems. If you're your own user, then it's definitely easier to build a great product. If you use it, you get to see the flaws and the issues and improve on them. The drawback of this is that sometimes you can have a problem and think it's great to build a tool for this, but then you realize you're the only person with that problem. Because of that, I think it's important to ship fast and try and put it in front of other people to get some feedback early. Other ways to get some ideas , I guess it's just to be curious, talk to people. For instance, I really love, you know, talking with my friends that have totally different career paths and talk about like the way they work, their process, their daily lives. And it's always amazing to me, uh, with a technical background to hear that, you know, sometimes they spend one, 2:03 hours every day doing something that could easily be automated. Also being on social medias like Twitter, I think it's really a great way. You hear about new tech, you hear about new opportunities, you discover new things that later you can apply to new problems. I think that's also a great way.

AI assessment note: “the easiest way to find ideas is try to solve your own problems”

Q How did you get users for your app and what are the best places right now for people to find customers?

A I published the projects and then I just spam all the notion related communities I could find online. Obviously there is Reddit, which is always a big one for this kind of products. Usually they have, you know, like a subreddit dedicated to it with people that are really fond of the product. So they're curious about discovering new things around it. Usually people on Reddit and this kind of communities that really don't like people putting links there, trying to get some new users, but because it was so new and because The product was entirely free. There was not even monetization in it. I feel like they were kind of okay with me doing that. And that really helped, you know, like I was able to get quite a lot of users pretty fast thanks to this. But also another platform I found to be super useful are Facebook groups. There are many people using Facebook and Facebook groups are super alive. There are Facebook groups for everything, like for your city, for sports, for apps, for whatever. And that was super useful as well. Twitter. I mean, it's great. The only thing with Twitter is there is a cold start issue. When you start tweeting, you're basically on your own. Something really important into getting started on Twitter is to find the people that you relate to. So the people that inspire you and to try and interact with them genuinely. With times they're going to start, you kno…

AI assessment note: “I published the projects and then I just spam all the notion related communities”

Q All right. So once you have an idea in mind, what's your process for validating the idea and know that it's something that's actually worth building?

A Yeah. So my way of doing things is just to actually build a product or at least an MVP for it, and then share it to as many people as I can and get instantly some feedback from the users. Focusing on a project for a small, short amount of time really helps you get a sense of whether this is valuable or not. Of course, it's hard to apply to many projects, you know, like there are things that you cannot just build in one week. As I'm a solopreneur, you know, like I try to avoid this and focus on things that I can build by myself and quickly. The more you build, I think the faster it is to build. Now, you know, like every time I'm starting a new project, I can just copy the code base from the previous project, keep all the UI and that kind of things. And I can just focus on the core logic and the value that I want to bring to the users. So you get faster every time.

AI assessment note: “actually build a product or at least an MVP for it, and then share it”

Q And how do we trust the developer? What if they steal the idea for our app?

A It's never been a problem for me. And also your ideas are worth absolutely nothing. And more likely than not, the idea that you have for this app already exists. So like the idea is out there. You just have to trust someone. I always take like a 15 minute interview call with, with the people that I like from the applicants on Upwork. I get their vibe. I see, are they coming to the table with more ideas for my app? Do they seem excited about it? How do they present? But you have to get past that fear of hiring someone online that you don't really know. Like that's part of being a founder is finding great talent, trusting them. And iterating as you go.

AI assessment note: “your ideas are worth absolutely nothing... I always take like a 15 minute interview call”

Q Got it. Okay. Let's talk about how you can actually build something like this step-by-step. Everything starts with an idea, right? Can you share your ideation process?

A I take mental notes of problems that I experience in my day to day life. If you're building an app from the position of solving a problem for yourself, you become the ideal user, and that makes you so much better at creating the product and making it useful for the people you're trying to reach. If you can solve a problem for someone and you can kind of take them through this transformation, whether it be weight loss, dieting, quitting vaping, if you can improve someone's life, they are going to love your product. And the marketing becomes much easier as well, right? Because you can be like, Hey, you have XYZ problem. Here's the solution. So everything becomes easy if you're solving a problem for someone.

AI assessment note: “I take mental notes of problems that I experience in my day to day life.”

Q For anyone looking for ideas, I want to ask, what do you think is the most lucrative niche to build an app in right now?

A When I look at like the most profitable niches in mobile apps, I think a lot of them do have to do with helping people be better, lose weight, quit vaping, quit drinking, anything in the health space, I think will absolutely crush. And of course, like there are already apps that are doing really well. Like in fitness, you have like my fitness pal and you have all these weight training apps, but it comes down to the marketing. Can you get in front of people at a cheaper cost in these mobile apps, right? Being a young founder, you truly do have an advantage. Because all these old heads in the industry, these big, slow moving companies that never iterate on their idea, a small, nimble entrepreneur can take them out. All it takes is one viral TikTok.

AI assessment note: “anything in the health space, I think will absolutely crush”

Q For anyone looking for ideas, I want to ask, what do you think is the most lucrative niche to build an app in right now?

A When I look at like the most profitable niches in mobile apps, I think a lot of them do have to do with helping people be better, lose weight, quit vaping, quit drinking, anything in the health space, I think will absolutely crush. And of course, like there are already apps that are doing really well. Like in fitness, you have like my fitness pal and you have all these weight training apps, but it comes down to the marketing. Can you get in front of people at a cheaper cost in these mobile apps, right? Being a young founder, you truly do have an advantage. Because all these old heads in the industry, these big, slow moving companies that never iterate on their idea, a small, nimble entrepreneur can take them out. All it takes is one viral TikTok.

AI assessment note: “anything in the health space, I think will absolutely crush”

Q You launched this agency, and then you launched this coaching program. How does that lead you to building a SaaS business?

A Yeah, so SaaS is really interesting, right? Because again, it takes a lot of startup capital to start. So I think the approach is the only way To go about it. If you don't have startup capital and if you don't want to go the venture capital route and what that is, is starting with a productized service. So on the front end, it looks and feels like a SaaS where you go on the website and you order something and on the back end, it's fulfilled manually by people. When we were selling a productized service, you had to go through a manual onboarding process. So you just tell us how many leads you're looking for a hundred leads, a thousand leads, 10,000 leads, and that submits an onboarding form to our team. Then within 24 hours, it's being fulfilled behind the scenes, and then it gets manually delivered to the customers. Because again, it's low cost. We didn't have to have any development fees. All we had to do was single out what we were already doing within our agency to build leads lists for our agency clients, and just do that with a really fast turnaround time for our SaaS customers. And number two, it allows you to prove your idea out. We didn't necessarily know that if we built a SaaS that someone could go to and self-serve, that they'd actually Want it that way, or how they would want it, or if the turnaround time mattered, or if the cost mattered as much. So we gathered mar…

AI assessment note: “single out what we were already doing within our agency to build leads lists”

Q So you launched, you had this massive launch. Then how do you get to one million a month? What's the special sauce of marketing?

A Things that work are like, I think everyone's, you know, it works, right? Facebook, Instagram, Google, Amazon ads, all that has worked for years, and it continues to work. And then the ones that have worked that have surprised me have been the podcast channels. I sponsor podcasts that I love, and I sponsor YouTube channels that I watch. If you are the founder of your company, and you love something, you love a radio station, you love a podcast, you love a YouTuber, odds are the people who also like them are like you. They're gonna resonate with your personality, and a lot of your personality is gonna come out in your brand. So it all lines up. You have viewers of people who are like you, who are going to resonate with a brand that's like them, that watch a channel that you speak the language of, that you can make inside jokes for, that you can write compelling copy with, that you can build a whole landing page in that brand voice. The conversion rate on that is insane versus every other page on our website. And same with the content. Make sure the content makes you laugh. Make sure the content's interesting to you.

AI assessment note: “I sponsor podcasts that I love, and I sponsor YouTube channels that I watch.”

Q So you're a terrible writer, but you have the self-proclaimed, but you have the confidence that you can put this blog out into the world and build a business out of it. Where does this come from?

A I was confident in website building and design. So like I could open up notepad and build a website in pure HTML. And I, you know, I did graphic design. I was an, you know, as a kid, I, Drew a lot. So like I had that. I could make something look like a legit website. If you have read it, it was really bad. Like really, really bad. There was no periods, nothing, no commas. Like it was just poorly written from someone who like knows how to talk right, but doesn't know how to stop. It's kind of like written by a third grader, but visually I can make it look great. And I knew how to get it online.

AI assessment note: “I was confident in website building and design.”

Q Can you tell me about your backstory and how, how do you become an entrepreneur?

A So I just had a job like every other kid had a summer job. I stayed at that company for a while. I got, I went to another pool company. I went to another pool company. I moved up in marketing. And then in that moment, I'm like, okay, so they're coming in, I'm testing their water. They're asking me for advice. I'm handing them chemicals. I'm like, you need to buy this. You need to buy this. You need to buy this. And here's the steps in which you need to add those things. I thought I could do this at scale. If I just wrote this as a blog post or made a video about this and then say, Hey, if you want to, you know, get rid of algae, you want to clear up your Pool or whatever. Here are the four products we recommend to do what I just told you to do. But I know I'm not good at English. I knew, I knew I was like, my grammar was terrible. So I worked so hard to get good at it. I was working at this company as a marketing director, as a pool company. I would go home. I would work on the site at home. My boss found out about that. And fired me. And so I was like, oh, ok, I'm gonna put everything I have into making this work, and I made 20,000 dollars that year on the site, and I used the rest of that time to do website design to kind of supplement it. The next year I made 40,000 dollars, and then I was like, I have a real business, and then from there it just kept going up.

AI assessment note: “I thought I could do this at scale. If I just wrote this as a blog post”

Q What are your thoughts for maybe someone who's watching this video on picking the right niche, picking the right business to work on?

A It's always been based on What I am interested in, so I have this, like, practice that someone gave me where it was like, walk around your house and just start writing down things in your room, and then you can find a niche that way. It's like, if you just walk around this room, there's so many things that I could write down and just be like, oh, wow, yeah, I guess I am interested in that. I wonder if people are talking about that, because I like that thing, and I would say pick something that you know and that you're least interested in, because when the going gets tough, when it's hard to, like, create content, at least You like the topic a little bit.

AI assessment note: “walk around your house and just start writing down things in your room”

Q So your goal is to build these self-sustaining businesses, and now you have a team. How was it going from just a solopreneur to building a team?

A I had access to a lot of young people that were just getting into recovery. I hired them like straight out of halfway houses, and we've all built this together over the last 10 years. So in terms of managing a team, read the E-Myth, Revisited. That book changed my life. I just realized that I am in the way of everything. I am literally the biggest problem in the company, and the best thing I can do for the company is document processes, be organized about it, teach, and then get the hell out of the way, because I don't do anything except mess things up when I get in the middle of it. So, read the E-Myth, and read it again, and then read it a third time, and take notes on it, and just do everything that book says, and you'll be fine.

AI assessment note: “I hired them like straight out of halfway houses, and we've all built this together”

Q Let's talk about YouTube. You're an experienced YouTuber. You've used YouTube to grow this business. What kind of What advice would you have for other people looking to start on YouTube?

A Essentially, when you're starting out, you need to get reps, you need to go through a feedback cycle where you learn, you try stuff out, and then you publish so you get feedback. What you basically gain when you do this, when you go through this process of publishing on a schedule and trying to improve something small every time, is you get a body of work that just slowly compounds your skills over time, and you wake up three years later and you're like, whoa, I know color grading, I know audio editing, I know how to build a set, I know animation, I can Speak to the camera a lot better. And I got to learn all that while I published content that got to grow my business and build an audience and all that kind of stuff. So do whatever you have to do to make sure you publish on the schedule and try to get just a little bit better at something interesting every single time you publish.

AI assessment note: “when you're starting out, you need to get reps”

Q So what's crazy about all this is you've invested in over 270 companies while part-time. How the hell did you do this?

A It's navigating what are the times that I can spend talking to the right founders, scheduling the right intro calls with them. For me, I'm a morning person. I get up Very early. And that's kind of my opportunity to get in a couple hours of work before kind of the day job hits. So a lot of times it's the early morning meetings. It's the late evening meetings. I meet founders for coffee all the time on the weekend. It's probably a 70, 30% split of 70 full-time job, 30% kind of the side hustle VC world. I also believe in kind of the long-term vision here. I think there's a bigger opportunity. This is a growing category. I want to be known as, you know, The syndicate lead there. A lot of that thinking and attitude I think has enabled me to go the extra mile, whether it's taking an hour out of the evening or the weekend or whatever, to meet the founders, build a relationship, make sure that if they are indeed the right company and the right time for us to invest, I'm going to be there to get that allocation.

AI assessment note: “a 70, 30% split of 70 full-time job, 30% kind of the side hustle”

Q Let's talk about the risks of a personal holding company. They're pretty sexy right now blowing up, but what do you think could be the downfall of that?

A Personal holding companies work well for people who understand what a personal holding company offers you, and it aligns with what you want to spend your time on. That's why I'm doing it. But the first big risk is dilution. It's lack of focus. Like, I want to get one business right before thinking about my next business. And so for Storyarb right now, We don't have product market fit in my mind. Until we have product market fit, I'm not going to launch another business. Once we have product market fit, I will launch a business. And so my whole thesis on this is go slow to be able to go fast. So launch a business, figure out how to hit product market fit. Hopefully that makes me better at launching a business and hitting product market fit faster the next time. And so each kind of iteration of launching and finding success with a business can happen faster and faster. But like, I don't also have a number in my head of like, oh, I need to be at 12 companies within the next three years. I would rather four successful businesses than 12 non-successful businesses. The second, when you have a personal holding company and you're the entrepreneur sitting at the top of it, you have to think of yourself as a product, meaning you are in service of the companies you launch and the CEOs that you bring on. And so, if you're a product, like any products, you have like value, you have value pr…

AI assessment note: “the first big risk is dilution. It's lack of focus.”

Q link in the description, and we're going to give you 52 micro SaaS ideas just like Steven's so you can get started on your journey right now. Ok, so scratching your own itch is definitely the way to go if you want to find a painful problem. But what do you do after you get the idea for your app? How do you actually validate it's an idea worth building?

A I did market research. I looked at sensor tower, looked at other, you know, quit drinking or quit smoking cigarettes apps. And I saw that they were crushing it, looked at Google trends, saw that vaping was on the rise. And then probably the most important part was I looked on Tik Tok. I saw that vape videos were going super viral on Tik Tok, but I think where a lot of young entrepreneurs, especially fall short is they They give up on the idea too quickly. If you have a good idea and it solves a problem for people, like, commit to it. Just like me for puff count. The first four to six months, I didn't make any money. It was only after I locked in the marketing. Like, marketing is 90% of being successful and validating an idea.

AI assessment note: “I did market research. I looked at sensor tower, looked at other”

Q So you build this agency, it's profitable, it's generating cash. Then you start buying businesses. Can you tell me more about what that looked like?

A The first one was a company called Moving Local. Again, like a lead generation site. People buy moving leads a lot. I built another one called Stem Cell Authority, which was lead generation for the stem cell industry. I've recently invested in a company called Kappa, which is an AI content creation tool. It's, it's mainly for SEO. It's an SEO tool. I was one of the founding investors in a company called Sparkloop. It's a way for people to build their email lists. It works with Beehive and it works with ConvertKit. There's a website called Your Boulder, which I bought, which is a newsletter that goes out to the people of Boulder, Colorado. There's another SEO agency called Digital Commerce. We saw a big opportunity to do SEO for people that want to build email lists and sell digital products or sell courses or sell eBooks or Subscriptions, whatever the case may be. So we have another agency, and then most recently, I just invested in a company called Hey Creator. So Hey Creator is kind of like a creator studio, you could call it, of people that are all trying to build these creator-driven businesses. And then, of course, I bought Copyblogger. That's going really well, but I'm still running Recovery Local, and I'm still running my agency, and that's really where I spend most of my time.

AI assessment note: “The first one was a company called Moving Local. Again, like a lead generation site.”

Q start posting stuff, creating stuff, which is a big learning curve for a lot of people, especially putting themselves out on short form video for the first time, what's the posting strategy of this? You mentioned you do videos one time a day. What would you do if you were starting today? What do you recommend, uh, is what time to post, how much to post and when to know

A The posting strategy. This is where I see a lot of people fail, right? Because in the beginning, it's going to be slow. In the beginning, it's going to be hard to get that first viral pop. But the most important thing is staying consistent. Whether you're posting, whether you're getting creators to post, you need to stay consistent with it, right? Don't worry about the time that you post the content, all the small little details of the content. Do not be a perfectionist. Your goal here is volume. Your goal here is knowing generally what direction your content should be going. You're just looking for that first Viral video. The way to get there is by posting volume. Volume negates luck, right? So you need to be posting as much as possible, and when you get a video that pops off, recreate that concept. If you look at the most viral people on TikTok, let's forget about businesses for a second, let's think about just creators, influencers. The most viral people on TikTok, on YouTube, they do the same style of video over and over and over again. There's a reason they do that, and we could take a page out of their playbook, and we could do the same thing for our app. The most important part is to stay consistent, post every single day, post based on your market research, It'll give you a much better chance of going viral, and then once you do find a video that pops off for you, conti…

AI assessment note: “Don't worry about the time that you post... Your goal here is volume.”