The Exchanges

Q I, you know, how to create a balance sheet. Um, and then people consume those videos and then they're like, okay, let me subscribe to this person or let me go buy his or her product. Like that's the other, that's the other bet I think that you're making. Cause you're not really doing when people, when people hear podcasts, they think audio, but it's really video first podcast, right?

A Yes. Yes. And, and they're just a special relationship. You, you know, this is someone who hosts a podcast that you get from, from running a podcast that you don't get, uh, in the same way. From, from other, other mediums because there's audio, because there's video. Um, and, and just to put some numbers on it, we're, we're doing about 350,000 downloads a month across 13 shows, which is, which is not huge. Like some shows, you know, my first million does is bigger than all of our shows put together probably, but we're at about two million run rate probably, um, because the shows monetize pretty well. Like each, each show, you know, we were talking earlier, like 30 K a month or something like that. Like no show is huge, But it's, it's, um, it's kind of like the eighty-twenty where it's just, it's really hard to build a, you know, mainstream podcast today, um, from, from a standing start, but to get it to a show of 30 K, 40 K a month, you know, in a, in a strong niche, it's not that hard. And so if you, if you can get a critical mass of them, you could start to build a real business. Uh, and then of course you could build all the other mediums on, on top of them. Um, and one, one thing that people don't realize, uh, as, as much as that, When you look at media businesses in the last 15 years, one of the most valuable media businesses is this business called Industry Dive, which so…

AI assessment note: “Yes. Yes. And, and they're just a special relationship.”

Q And a faceless YouTube channel. Does that just mean it's just around topics?

A There's no, uh, sort of talking face to it, or there technically could be a talking face the way if you've seen, uh, I think it's Synthesia. You have these, like, avatars. A lot of face, faceless YouTube channels that I'm talking about, they don't even have that. They're using animations or even B-roll, whether it's, uh, sort of static images or, uh, like, B-roll videos, or sometimes they'll insert, uh, sort of interview clips, and there are huge channels out there, like Finematics, uh, Real Engineering is another one. Real Life Lore is a huge channel. There's some AI Explained. There are a lot of AI YouTube channels that are popping up, and I can't get enough of them. Two Minute Papers is another one.

AI assessment note: “There's no, uh, sort of talking face to it”

Q Can you talk more about 11 Labs? Cause I'm sure Not everyone knows what they do.

A It's voice cloning software, and it's very good. So I started messing around with 11 Labs maybe like a year ago, and you give it a three minute sample of your voice, and then it does a pretty good representation of your voice. So let's talk about a simple workflow. Uh, you go to GPT-IV, you say, hey, give me a video script on the history of semiconductors. Then you go to 11 Labs and you Read out a prompt that they give you so they can sort of build a model of your voice. You take the script from GPT-IV, you add that to 11 Labs, and now you're reading this script that you use GPT-IV to create. And if it doesn't sound enough like you, uh, they have different tunes or different ways that you can tune the voice. It's very powerful. You know, 1:02 you only know English, the next second you can be speaking Spanish or Japanese or whatever.

AI assessment note: “It's voice cloning software, and it's very good.”

Q Do faceless YouTube channels all get commoditized at a certain point? Like if everyone has the ability to use chat GPT, 11 Labs, access to YouTube, basically information becomes pretty commoditized. And the production of the information becomes pretty commoditized. Yeah. Where's the moat? Like why even do it?

A Okay. It seems like faceless YouTube channels. I still think there's a significant moat when it comes to editing. There are, let's go to economics explain, for example, they've been putting out videos for years and you can look at the style of the video and the style of the animations until they're pulling from a stock library in terms of assets that they've built up over time. They, they're, they come from a certain angle when it comes to their brand using certain colors. Uh, the best example of this might be a YouTube channel called the Operations Room. There are other channels that have popped up, uh, going after a similar market, but they still haven't sort of reached that, that quality of editing that the Operations Room has.

AI assessment note: “I still think there's a significant moat when it comes to editing.”

Q newsletter and do it one by one. It's, it's a line. It's one by one. Like I call it the multi-preneurship where multi-preneurship works is when you have some dots and you connect it one at a time where it doesn't work is like when you're creating like a circle and you're kind of just like Trying to do everything at the same time. What do you think of that?

A This is where we've had some, uh, difficulties. We're figuring out exactly what you're saying. We launched everything too soon. So like the newsletter, now we went to this like daily newsletter, which I think is awesome, but it's also distracting. Cause it takes say just like at least an hour or like a couple hours of mind space, um, a day or a week. We have that thing running and you have like the shorts content and then you're like trying to get to the 16 month, uh, Clips customer retention. Um, so we just have like a lot of different ball and the podcast we're shooting daily. So just like a lot of balls were juggling and I'm kind of in the mindset of like. Okay, just put newsletter on pause. Don't focus on growing it or it's just like focus on the business. But Henry's really good at doing multiple things at once. So we kind of like get by with just me focusing on one thing and then him kind of keeping everything alive. But I don't like that because I'd rather we just both nail one thing because we have a lot of things that could go well, but, uh, we're doing none of them exceptionally well.

AI assessment note: “We're figuring out exactly what you're saying. We launched everything too soon.”

Q terms of audience building Is there's a lot of folks who are basically copying other people's content on X. Sometimes that works, but my thesis is that that's going to be less and less of a thing over time as AI helps automate a lot of that. So the people that are going to win are going to be sharing unique perspectives and stories. What are your thoughts on that?

A There was a time on X that you could just copy and paste anything from Wikipedia and that would get traction. So long as you drop some images in a smart way and had a decent hook, especially with writing being done by AI right now, a filter that I like to use is if I'm writing something, could AI have written this? If yes, it's probably not worth me publishing. If no, all right, what do I have here? There's this guy years ago, his name is call us to Eden, and he founded a company called Envato and they built marketplaces, basically a big tech company out of Australia. And he had this line that he said, maybe two dozen, 10, that just stuck with me. And he basically said, if you want to be interesting on the internet, First, be interesting off the internet. And I think that's what is so interesting about Siva compared to someone who is just, you know, copying content or theorizing on stuff. Siva's like, I bought this business. Here's what I learned. Here's where it worked. Here's where I went wrong. Here's my, or here's my thesis on investing. Follow me as I actually put it into practice. I think the best content comes from a story that only you can tell. It's a unique point of view that you have. Someone else that I love to follow is Dan Runcie, who runs a blog called Trapital, and he has this like deep inside look into the music business. And so his newsletter is read by a lot …

AI assessment note: “I think the best content comes from a story that only you can tell.”

Q This leads me to another one of my spicy takes, which is open rate. Doesn't matter to me. Open rate is like when you think of valuing a company, open rate is revenue. I don't care what your open rate is. I care about clicks percent because that shows me how engaged it is. What do you think about that?

A It depends on what your business model is. Email specifically, if you are doing Brand awareness ad campaigns. That's your model for monetization. You don't need anyone to click. All you need is people to open and look at the ad. It is increasingly harder to do that as advertisers get more data-driven and direct response oriented. If you have direct response advertisers, then you absolutely need clicks. The whole point is how do you drive the ROI? A lot of people talk about founder market fit or product market fit. I think about content advertiser fit. An audience advertiser fit. If you look at Bay Area Times or any of our other media properties, we turn away advertisers all the time. I sent an email this morning. Somebody wanted to offer us a ton of money for a media property as an advertiser. And I just said to him, look, I don't think this is going to convert. It's more important to build a long-term relationship with the right people. And for word to spread throughout an industry that every time I advertise in that specific newsletter, it works. That is way more valuable to me than a single ad campaign that might be worth, you know, 10, 20,000 dollars. And so I think it's, it's really just asking yourself, based on content audience and the business model I'm pursuing, what is my metric? Who's the best in the game? I don't know, maybe Agora. Like they didn't even care about c…

AI assessment note: “It depends on what your business model is.”

Q So who are you looking up to these days in the high leverage, high revenue, uh, world?

A I don't really look up to anyone in that world. The people I spend the most time studying are like the goats of, uh, you know, last 50 years who did it in the legacy world. What lessons can I learn from the deal that they did, the strategies they pursued, et cetera. And then how do I morph those for the modern world? Look at Rupert Murdoch, built a massive business. News Corp. If you are in the media world and you don't understand how news corp works, if you don't know the story of how Rupert was able to go from basically owning a newspaper in Australia to literally owning Fox news, like go study, right? You haven't done the work yet to really understand how that game got played. And so the way he did it is not the way to do it today. But a lot of the lessons, a lot of the insights he had can be applied today. For example, when he went and acquired some of these, uh, less journalistic publications that were more like the tabloid type stuff, he understood eyeballs pay the bills. He understood where the eyeballs were. Doesn't mean that you or I or anyone else should go out and buy tabloids, but you know, it'd be really simple takeaway. Where are the eyeballs today? And maybe you should go try to either build or buy those types of properties. Too many people that they're a student of now, and you can learn a hell of a lot by going back and looking at people over time.

AI assessment note: “I don't really look up to anyone in that world.”

Q How do you think about building on other people's platforms, like on, on Instagram versus, you know, a newsletter where you own the relationship?

A Man, it's tough, man. That's been the, the, the great conversation in the past. It's a double-edged like sword where it, On one end, it's really positive because, like, Instagram, you know, X, um, threads, like, these places will be, you know, beautiful avenues that make it really easy to connect with other people, but then at the end of the day, you have no idea how the algorithm works, and because it, you have no control over it, and you have no control over how these companies change, then those changes may not always benefit you. In the past, like, three years, I've been really focusing on just building a newsletter, um, and I've found a home on Substack because I've become friends with the people who, um, who have built Substack and have seen the depth of their commitment to how they're always going to keep that, like, that nexus of Substack where you have direct connection with your audience, where, you know, you send something to them and they all receive it via email. And there's no algorithm between you and another person. And to me, that's like so critical. And I think, looking back, I feel like if I would have done things differently, I would have definitely put a lot more emphasis on building a newsletter, um, in like starting in 2016, as opposed to starting in 2020.

AI assessment note: “In the past, like, three years, I've been really focusing on just building a newsletter”

Q I want to end up on meditation because I know that's, that's core to, to who you are. And I honestly don't know what meditation really is. Can you define what meditation is?

A I can define it in the terms that I know. Um, so there's a lot, and different meditation styles will have different goals, especially the Vipassana meditation that I do. It's, it's definitely a high spiritual path that's supposed to lead out of suffering. To get there, it's really just a mental gym. There, there are qualities that your mind has, specifically qualities of awareness, non-reactiveness, and Um, compassion that are ingrained in your mind, but they're not strong. They're, they're quite weak, and when you go to these silent ten-day meditation courses, um, and I'm talking about the ones in the SN Goenka tradition, uh, you spend three days just building your awareness, and that's, you do that by being aware of the natural breath, just to just stay with the natural breath and be with it, and, um, and that will help calm and concentrate the mind, and that really will strengthen your awareness. The next part is where, for the next seven days, you start being aware of the truth that exists in the body by literally paying attention to all the sensations that are happening in you, and that will help, uh, build this quality of equanimity, which I'm using the synonym non-reactiveness, uh, really balance of mind, and ultimately that helps not only purify the mind, but it helps just clear the mind incredibly well so that You know, whatever situation comes up, you will know what t…

AI assessment note: “To get there, it's really just a mental gym.”

Q Yeah, I would also, I would also argue that, and I wish Rick would, would have said this in the book, but it's often not about distributing to what people want, but it's distributing what the algorithm wants, right? So you're not just trying to please people, you're trying to please an algorithm.

A Well, and that's, That's if your strategy really weighs on the discovery platform side, right? Um, for a long time, I just didn't do discovery platforms at all. To my detriment. Like it, it took me way too long to realize, ah, I should actually prioritize more time creating on social media instead of just doing email. Because the best way to grow an email list is not by writing great emails, unfortunately. Like it's by getting top of funnel elsewhere, introducing them to the point, to the fact that you have, have email. Um, because if you are really predicated on the discovery platforms, you do have to play towards what's working there. You know, what, how is the game being played? You're just not gonna win on Instagram if you're not doing reels right now, you know.

AI assessment note: “That's if your strategy really weighs on the discovery platform side, right?”

Q I like it. And last thing before, before we leave, what's this, what's this chili thing? Like where, where does this connection with Chili's come from? And basically for, for the folks who don't know, Michael Girdley is a must follow on Twitter, but just so you know, you're getting 10 or 15% of his tweets to be Chili Chili's related tweets.

A I, I need to cut down that. Look, for me, um, for me, I, I have some views of the world that I think are important and, and Chili's like, yeah, it's kind of goofy and I'm a pretty goofy guy and I'm happy to be out there as a goofy guy. But I think also there's this idea of how I feel about Chili's that, how I kind of feel about the part of America that I live in. And I think America to some extent is so focused on a number of things, but one of them is like, I've always felt kind of a resentment To thinking that, you know, this idea that everything has to be special. It has to be like a Michelin star to be beautiful, right? Or it has to be handcrafted in downtown LA for it to be great, right? Or it has to be this extreme thing. And, you know, you got to go to Burning Man to find peace. Like that to me is just like, you know, there's joy to be found in many places. And I think all those things are beautiful. And I think all those things are great. But when I like think about Chili's or I joke about it, it's really that feeling like, I, if I go into a Chili's, like there are people who are nowhere near Twitter, nowhere near the world you and I live in, and they're just there with their family, like enjoying a beer or like relaxing over lunch or spending time with a colleague after, you know, after hours. And to me, like just normal people and fly over America, like just living li…

AI assessment note: “when I like think about Chili's or I joke about it, it's really”

Q Yeah. Well, well, usually I like to introduce people. Your, your title is insert very important title here at Vayner fund. What does, what does that mean?

A That's, that is accurate. It is, it's not really important what the title is, uh, in our little fund, I guess. Um, it could be partner, it could be janitor, it could be anything, but whatever it is, it is very important, and I want people to know that. That I am very, very important at Vayner Fund, but it's actually just a litmus test because one of my life mottos is don't take life too seriously. You'll never get out alive. And I think that being the marquee title on my LinkedIn, uh, stresses that. So I, I truly don't take it that seriously. I don't care how important anyone thinks I am, but if you can't take the joke and you scoff at that title, we're probably not gonna work well together.

AI assessment note: “it's actually just a litmus test because one of my life mottos”

Q she was saying that that's like probably one of the most valuable investments that you can make because like, you can throw like, what was it? Michael Rubin, you saw you through the white party. Uh, that was crazy. Tell people, tell people, I know you know what that event was. Tell people what that event was, who Michael Rubin is. And why that was the event of the year.

A Michael Rubin is a wildly successful businessman that has catapulted in popularity in the past few years, despite him being a wildly successful businessman for decades now, uh, I'd say, um, he's done an absolutely incredible job of tapping into Culture as a whole and making sure that he is top of mind culturally hanging out with The most interesting rappers, up and coming rappers, musicians, television stars surrounding himself with key people and seemingly doing it in an authentic way. Um, where he has established this, this white party that he does in July, uh, every year now as the, the event of the year for the most part, it's the who's who of relevant folks held at his house in the Hamptons. Um, The, the video that was cut up this year from this white party essentially looked like a Hollywood trailer for the most part. Like it was wild. Um, I was super jealous that Gary got to go, um, and has gotten to go to everyone. Still don't have that plus one, but that's okay. Um, that's, that's on me for not being relevant enough, but that's fine. Uh, but another point to Michael Rubin and his strategy, it's not just him kind of swagger jacking. Well, that's a terrible term. It's not just him trying to commandeer culture and inauthentically just post selfies with famous people. Like, sure, he posts that, but he did, uh, have a pretty interesting soundbite where somebody's like, well…

AI assessment note: “Michael Rubin is a wildly successful businessman that has catapulted in popularity”

Q about it as like a pizza, it's just like you're cutting You know, you're cutting it in another slice, and another slice, and another slice, and another slice, and it's a bit of mental overload. So sometimes, you know, I look at what you're doing, and I'm like, whoa, this guy's like working on a lot of projects. Um, is that just me, or how do you feel about it?

A Yeah, I, I'm an over-delegator to the extreme, meaning I'm not going to interact with any of the customers. I'm not going to have an email address from, for the company. I'm not going to have a job in the company or I'm pissed off. And that's a blessing and a curse. It's a curse because, you know, it's 80% as good as it would be if I were doing it myself. Like I could do it myself better, but it's a blessing because I can take more shots and I can Invest in an operator who I know is awesome. I mean, an example is my property and casualty insurance company, which could be the biggest of all my businesses in, in 10 years. I have my, my, the CEO of that company is, is my business partner, Dan Hagberg, who I went to college with and founded the storage company with and owns half my real estate portfolio. And I know he's a killer. I have not been on one meeting. I have not done anything at all for that company, except ask him on the fourth hole of a golf course. Oh, Hey, by the way, how's, how's Titan risk going? Other companies are different. Like not, not all operators are as competent as Dan, but in a way, like they're, they're impressing me. Like these people that own these, that are running these companies, they're impressing me. Like I don't, I don't need to talk to the guy who runs my recruiting company, but once a month and he, we've done 76,000 dollars of revenue in the fir…

AI assessment note: “I'm an over-delegator to the extreme, meaning I'm not going to interact”

Q So how do you get good at sales? Like if, if sales is important and we all could use it as a secret weapon, Is there a framework for being a pro at sales?

A Yeah, there are a lot of frameworks. Um, my TikTok algorithm shows me a lot of different people telling me their framework for sales. Uh, my framework is to own what you can control in the, in the process that there's so much in a process of convincing somebody of something or convincing them to join your team or buy your product or think your ideas is worth another piece of the conversation. To just own the part of it that you can control. So my first job out of college was selling life insurance, and I have to tell you that life insurance is one of the least sexy things you can possibly sell, because the opening part of the conversation begins, have you recently thought about your death? And then you have to recover from that. And I ended up being the number one life insurance salesman in America in the rookie class when I was 23 years old, because I learned how to own what I could control. And the only thing that I could control in the process was it wasn't who said yes, because One out of three people would say yes. So there's two people that I had no control over. Their no's. And to get to three pitches, I had to start with 10 leads. So there were seven people who were leads that were not going to ever let me pitch. And so I said, I want X number of sales. So I multiplied the number of pitches I needed to do by three, and I multiplied that number by 10 to get how many lead…

AI assessment note: “my framework is to own what you can control in the, in the process”

Q And you, from your podcast, are you driving people somewhere?

A I mean, so now, yeah, I always drive to newmindsetwhodist.com, which links all my journals, all my books, uh, different products that I'm involved in. Obviously when I first started, um, it was just one journal, the new mindset journal, which I, I created in January, 20, 20. I launched at Indiegogo in 20, 20, January, 20. Raised 37, 39,000. Did not do well. I actually lost money on that between agency expenses. I hired an agency to help me, uh, three PL expenses, manufacturing expenses. Just didn't really know what I was doing. It is what it is. So I lost, you know, a couple grand on it. Then COVID hit and I had fulfilled the initial cohort of people who bought it on Indiegogo. And I had like 2000 journals left over. I was like, oh man, these are burning a hole in my pocket with my, my three PL and Cicero Illinois. I've got to get rid of these. So I started posting on Instagram just, you know, and then at that time I had, I don't know, maybe 50,000 followers or something. Um, and it's luck, randomness, timing, positioning, something happened where they just started to sell. And I remember at that point having Shopify notifications turned on on my phone was getting a little ping. I was like, oh, this is, this is crazy. People are actually buying this. And then I started to run ads and ads were, uh, Really still cruising. And especially during, during COVID, the early part of COV…

AI assessment note: “now, yeah, I always drive to newmindsetwhodist.com”

Q They buy, they buy the journal. Sorry, not the book. They buy the journal. They make that a part of their habit. How do they hear about the podcast? Like what's that flow look like?

A Yeah, twofold. For one, there's a page in the journal that actually promotes the podcast and drives people there. Um, so you're actually going to be reminded of it in the book. Uh, the second of course is the fulfillment process and the, and the drip flow through, I use Klaviyo, um, through, through the, um, actual fulfillment process itself. The first email you'll get when you confirm your journal is, hey, while you wait, why don't you get ready with some mindset, and it points to the, points to the, the podcast. I've also, in the past, I've also been somewhat clever, I suppose, by, I, I dripped some affiliate emails, affiliate links into the email, specifically with some of the, um, the online therapy groups that pay pretty large CPAs there. So also, while you wait, why don't you start with therapy? So that's also worked pretty well, but, um, Yeah, but email, email has been a big, ah, way to, way to promote it.

AI assessment note: “For one, there's a page in the journal that actually promotes the podcast”

Q Um, do you, have you started any paid ads or any marketing or just sort of testing the business out now?

A I'm testing the waters for the vulnerable answer of, I don't know what I'm doing in apparel. Like I know how to manufacture a journal. I know exactly who to go to. I know my cogs. I know exactly how to make it real sweet and nice. I don't know the first thing about building an apparel brand. What I should be paying. I'm drop shipping it right now. And I'm fine with that because I didn't want to drop a hundred grand on something that might not do well that, you know, I just don't know what I'm doing. So, uh, it's kind of a wait and see reaction. I've got a phase two drop coming with new designs, which I want to, I want two or three drops under my belt before I decide that I really want to go scale at it, um, with talking to manufacturers and everything. So that's the real answer. So no paid ads or anything like that behind it now.

AI assessment note: “I'm testing the waters... So no paid ads or anything like that behind it now.”

Q Post-its. Exactly. And everyone would wear their heart on their sleeve and say what's going well with their business. What's not going well. Um, and some people even just didn't even have a business, but wanted to start something. Uh, why do you think that format works so well?

A Well, one, it was intimate first and foremost, uh, to that format work extremely well because in some shape or form trust had been established. Not everyone in that room had, had met one another at the previously. So they had trust because Greg knows this person or Dario knows this person, et cetera. But also it was very clear what the intention was. I think a lot of times the reason why masterminds and these type of group things, they don't succeed or people don't get value out of them. Is because there aren't clear intentions. There aren't clear metrics, KPIs, why we are here. You know, we, we, before we even sat down and started breaking down business ideas, we asked some key questions. We asked questions like, what does success look like? When we're checking out of this, this mansion in a few days for you to say this investment from a dollars and cents perspective, from a time perspective, et cetera, what is it going to tell you that this was successful? So we established that not only that we did some intentional grounding. I'm not sure if you recall, Greg, we went around the room. We talked about how do you like to receive feedback? Do you want to blunt? Do you want to direct? Or do you like to receive it a little bit differently? Because one thing we didn't want to create was, uh, an environment of posturing or creating people who are starting to get defensive. You know,…

AI assessment note: “Well, one, it was intimate first and foremost, uh, to that format work extremely well”

Q On the affiliate side of things, what, what does like an Uber pay for a referral to, you know, for a driver? Just to give people a sense of like,

A So probably one to 200 dollars. I mean, in the heyday, they were paying 500 to a thousand dollars. And that's sort of where, like, I kind of feel like I had a little bit of a cheat code in the first few years. Like I shouldn't have been making, I ended up quitting my day job within about nine months of starting the rideshare guy. And in a normal situation, I probably shouldn't have been able to do that. Uber was kind of like a once in a generation kind of company where they were growing so fast and raising so much money that they were just paying literally 500 to a thousand dollars for driver referrals. And they were double sided. The new driver signing up was getting money. I was getting a lot of money. Um, and so we kind of monetized off of that. So these days it's come down quite a bit and maybe more in the one to 200 dollars range for delivery services. It might be 25 to a hundred, maybe up to 200 and some of the top markets, but sort of ride share delivery. And then, you know, all of our other affiliates might be more in like the five to 50 dollar range. You know, if it's a free mileage tracking app, you know, that might be Maybe two to five dollars per download. If it's more of a bank account, you know, that might be more than the 50 to 100 dollar, uh, kind of range.

AI assessment note: “So probably one to 200 dollars. I mean, in the heyday, they were paying”

Q So, love that, and maybe let's start with YouTube. Um, if you're trying to build an audience on YouTube, how do you think about that?

A I, I think, like, in, in my opinion, YouTube is the best place for people to Start building an audience outside of also having an email newsletter, um, or a way that they can capture people's emails and information and be able to contact them on a regular basis. Um, why do I think YouTube is the best place to do that? Because it's, they've, they've got a massive, a massive audience, hundreds of millions of people, if not over a billion people, um, on YouTube over the course of a month. And There's, uh, literally nothing stopping you from, from getting started. They have amazing analytics, so you can, you can see the results of what you're doing. Um, and it's automatic monetization. So, um, once you reach the YouTube partner program, which is, I think it's a thousand, um, subscribers and 4000 watch hours, which feels like a lot, you automatically start getting paid for your videos. You don't have to have any relationships with, um, getting your own, Um, advertising or finding your own brands and sponsors. You can do that in addition to the automatic ad census you get paid from YouTube. Um, and, and then in addition to that, every single video you can in, in the description and on your channel, you can link to, um, the digital product that you're selling, the course that you might sell your email newsletter, which is, which is what I do. Um, and affiliate links in the description…

AI assessment note: “in my opinion, YouTube is the best place for people to Start building an audience”

Q walk into the grocery store and you're like, wow, I wish this product would exist. Oh, it doesn't. I'm going to go and create it. And then there's another way, which is I'm going to like look at trends and competitive analysis and a bunch of other ways to figure out if there's a market need, which way do you recommend going? And yeah, just share some light on that.

A I think it depends where your strength is. So a lot of founders who start these businesses, um, you know, like very little, uh, a small percentage of people actually raise money. I'd imagine a lot of people who listen to this probably bootstrap or maybe have raised a very small round, but you know, very few people raise 10, 20, thirty million dollars to build a business. And as a result, like if you're starting a direct to consumer brand or a CPG brand or a retail brand, You sort of have to understand what you're good at. Are you good at branding? Are you good at storytelling? Are you good at sourcing? Are you good at financial operations and cashflow management? Uh, or are you good at like performance marketing? Are you really good at, you know, the creative side, the business side, the analytic side? And, um, I think depending on what you're good at, you will find One of these paths to discover what that product is. Somebody who has mass distribution can take the first route of walking into the grocery store and saying, damn, I wish I had a chocolate bar with four ingredients in it, six ingredients in it. And then, you know, you're, you're competing with the biggest companies in the world. Um, you know, you're basically neck and neck against Hershey's and Mondelez and all these other companies. Uh, that would not work for the average person who's bootstrapped and starting, bu…

AI assessment note: “I think it depends where your strength is.”

Q Okay, well, we'll take the other side of the spectrum. What's a, what's a DTC company that's doing a really good job? And, and why are they doing a good job?

A Um, all right, here's one that I think is doing a really good job. Um, simple, straight to the point. I'm gonna drop it in the chat for you. It's a brand called Cadence. Um, they are, they're basically these beautiful little travel capsules made of recycled plastic. You know, these guys, they haven't raised an absorbent amount of money, very little cash. They're profitable on every purchase. They have a healthy margin baked into their product. They produce their own product, which also helps with that. They fulfill their own product, which also helps with that. And, um, they're very good at showing you the light at the end of the tunnel from a marketing standpoint and how you're going to get to the light at the end of the tunnel. Um, and then, you know, tactically, if you go to their site, their photography is next level. Beautiful. Their use of product renders also very beautiful. The way that they incorporate existing customers into their sales process to sell new customers. Fantastic. Um, their site experience in terms of understanding what you're getting, how many you're getting, why you're paying what you're paying, um, what the benefit of having these are and what the alternative is for not using this product. Also very on point. This is, I think going to be a very clear a hundred million dollar brand very soon.

AI assessment note: “It's a brand called Cadence. Um, they are, they're basically these beautiful little travel”

Q Would you ever start a D to C company or do you prefer supporting the industry?

A Uh, for sure start a DTC company. Like there, you know, I think from a standpoint of opportunity, there's no better time to start a DTC company. Think about how easy it is now to use open AI's chat GPT and just build a module for something. Like if we need something and a developer's unavailable, we can just go to open AI and it'll write the code for us and we just copy paste it. Um, so from that standpoint, it's The barrier to entry has gotten lower from the standpoint of product sourcing and product development. I think the barrier to entry has gotten lower. The thing that has gotten really hard is cutting through the noise and finding something that actually has legs in today's market. And I think for that, you have to be super in tune with who's doing what and who's finding traction or who is just about to find traction or who's seeing hints of traction. Um, you also have to just solve something real. Like there was a huge era of D to C brands that happened during, um, probably like right before COVID and then definitely during COVID or brands that didn't deserve to exist. The 48th men's skincare brand, the 37th white labeled supplement for bloating. Um, you know, these things, these are not solving real problems. They're just trying to be like money grabs. Those don't really last because consumers today are pretty smart and they will see that from a mile away. Whereas a br…

AI assessment note: “for sure start a DTC company.”

Q So what advice do you have to people who, you know, have a target list of, of, of people who could be role models and mentors and like, like what, what do they need to type in the DM for, for someone like you to open it up and read it and reply?

A I, I, I find for some, um, the DM is really, really challenging sometimes because they have a lot of things coming in and a lot of people coming in, a lot of people messaging them. One, one other way that's super simple is almost everyone you want to meet has some sort of, um, not everyone, but most people will have some sort of philanthropic charity foundation they're connected to that means a lot to them. And if you do research on them, it is very obvious what that is. And if you make a donation, it can be literally 18 dollars, ok? Because I've tried this. 18 dollars, uh, to a, a charity or a foundation that they care about, and you put in the memo, like, I am donating this because I was inspired by this particular thing this particular person did, and I'm doing it in, in, in their honor. Um, and, and then you DM them. Now it's like, now you have two different touch points. Now all of a sudden they're like, I keep seeing this guy's name, like, like, who the fuck is Harley Finkelstein? He gave 18 dollars to this charity I really care about. He sent me a DM. He also bought something from my merch store. He bought, like, three t-shirts and left a really nice comment, a nice review. You can create something that is, number one, very lightweight, very inexpensive, that can give you a ridiculous amount of reach to the people that you want. And then, once you have those relationship…

AI assessment note: “make a donation, it can be literally 18 dollars... and then you DM them”

Q So what you're saying is. It's almost like ignore the trends for now. Just focus on writing really good stories. Start by writing. And then how do you think of, you know, once I've written several stories, how do you think about filming, et cetera?

A The way that I, the, the actual, like in the weeds, uh, process that I think everybody should try and do to make it the easiest on themselves is first write out what you're going to say. Then go and record it on your, like, voice notes. So go and do a, an audio only draft. Then once you have that audio draft, go and look at the words that you're saying in the video and think about is there any archival footage, any camera roll footage, any things that I have that are on Google, any articles that I was in, any footage that correlates to the words that I'm saying in this story. And then go and place it over it. Um, and then outside of that, so once you have that, that'll get you to probably, you probably have like, you know, 40% of the video will be archival footage, things from the past. And then you look at the other words that are like, that's a lot of filler content, like, I was sitting there. You don't have a, you might not have a video of you sitting in your camera roll, so you go and film those filler ones. And then that, at the end of you filling the, uh, filming those filler ones, now you have a compiled video that is completed with the audio only file, B roll, filler content, and then I go a step further and add text over top of it. That's not necessary. You could honestly do the auto text that's on TikTok and Instagram and all those, and that just works just fine. Uh, …

AI assessment note: “first write out what you're going to say. Then go and record it”

Q I want to end, uh, I want to end on, on this. Your, your four favorite creators, who are they and why?

A In terms of creators, I really think a good example that people need to look at is Tim Chiusano. Tim Chiusano is a dude that does, uh, everyday kind of Casey Neistat style vlogs on TikTok, um, and has built a big community through that, and is just a hell of a dude. Um, and I really like him. Um, Bro, the majority of them are, like, family creators. The next one I would say is, uh, Daniel Seong with his family. S-E-O-N-G. Life. L-I-F-E. Seong Life. It's literally him, his wife, and their kids in Irvine, California, a document just showing things that they do in their life and giving out tips about how they parent and what they do for their days and stuff like that. Um, I gravitate more towards feel-good content like those. Than, like, heavy hitter, uh, Mr. Beast style content that's, like, really entertaining and engaging and, like, fast paced. I gravitate more towards the content that I watch, and it makes me feel, like, the way I want to feel in my day, uh, or makes me feel like a better person. Um, so those two people I really like, um, Let's think of, let me try and think of a YouTube creator that I really like. Um, YouTube, I really like Colin and Samir. I think that they're great at what they do. Um, it's, I, I pull a lot of my own inspiration from their, uh, kind of educational, informational style of making information tangible and digestible and cool. Um, and they're b…

AI assessment note: “In terms of creators, I really think a good example that people need to look”

Q What, what do you wish, you know, GPT-IV had, but doesn't have? Like what would, what would, what would take it, you know, hustle GPT to the next level?

A Uh, the ability to take action on a human input, on a human user's behalf. That's to say, if I want it to, right now, for here's an example, it can, uh, code a pretty good landing page for something, or it can write a really, you know, solid API integration to What I used it recently to write a Spotify API integration to a Webflow website I was working on. Boom, boom, boom. It was done in 10 minutes. Amazing. Way better than like if I was just Google's like searching Stack Overflow or something like that. But what it can do is actually go log into my Webflow account, put that code in, run it, debug it, publish it live. Like, you know, like it can, it can give you the bones, but you've still got to go take that human action. I think that's the thing that I keep kind of running into. As soon as it can like, You know, if I say, you know, find me the, the, uh, plan, plan me a trip to Aruba next month. Um, I want, you know, the, the best airline deal and, uh, you know, cheapest, cheapest airfare, uh, with the shortest travel time, but I want to stay in the nicest hotel possible. You kind of like plan it out and then it can actually go and take that action on your behalf and say, okay, I found you this, I booked it. I have your card on file. I, I bought this, this, and the other thing. And I, and you have an open table reservation at this Cool restaurant for Tuesday night, like when …

AI assessment note: “the ability to take action on a human input, on a human user's behalf.”

Q Hustle GT, and I loved how you talked about your, like, as a branding designer, it's, it's taking everything in me not to tell it this is a bad idea, but here we are, and it produced this, like, Kind of like stock looking image. Yeah. Um, and it was like good enough to get going. Right. But like this was, you would never launch an MVP with that. Correct?

A No. And the other thing is, I think when I use, ah, Dali or Midjourney to generate ideas for actual projects that I'm, that I'm running for clients or personal projects or whatever, I think I take a different, more kind of targeted approach to the prompt engineering that goes on there as well. In this case for the hustle GPT, uh, green gadget guru website, I asked it to generate a prompt and put that in verbatim. And I just picked the first one that it made. So I, I tried to have as little, uh, human intervention as possible. I said, you make the prompt, you, uh, you know, are in control of saying what it should be. And it's generally things like, you know, A, a gear for gadgets and like a leaf for eco-friendliness and like green and blue and white colors. And so it's like, okay, you kind of have like a decent idea. The way it was phrased though, and this is funny, was totally not the way you would normally write at a Dolly prompt. It was verbose and it was long and I didn't want to correct it because Dolly is an open AI product that I feel like the GPT language models should understand how to talk to Dolly. And I guess that's just not here yet. Um, which, fine, it, it still generated something. Uh, it knew it wanted a logo, and it understood everything, but it was just too verbose, and it was a little too, like, you know, unnecessarily descriptive to get a concise, uh, concept…

AI assessment note: “No. And the other thing is, I think when I use, ah, Dali”