The Exchanges

Q Yeah. So I wanted to bring you on the show because you're, you're the shrink for entrepreneurs. And I feel like I've got a few stories with you, but I feel like you've got just 100,000 of stories because you're working with a lot of some of the most well-known people. Um, but before we get into that, how do you define what a shrink for entrepreneur is?

A Yeah. Well, thanks for having me. I'm excited to be chatting. Um, shrink for entrepreneurs is, you know, my, my background, I'm a psychotherapist by training. My, and I am an entrepreneur, sort of. My first, well, I am an entrepreneur. When I started, I wasn't. My first business was a brick and mortar therapy practice. Um, and so what, what I did was, was kind of long, very long story short, build a specialty and working with founders, a lot of, uh, a lot of founders in tech, a lot of venture backed founders, helping them with, with psychology, with therapy. And then, uh, as you and I have discussed, You know, what I kind of ended up doing was taking the world's greatest lifelong MBA program, because by working with these people, I got to learn as much from them as I was helping them with their psychology. So I've been at this for the best part of 14 years now, and it's been the world's greatest MBA that I was paid to take. And so now I get to talk to my clients, not only about psychology, but business strategy as well. And literally every single entrepreneur I work with Has the same story about what happened right before they met me, which is, oh, I went looking for a therapist. I knew I wanted to do, you know, some therapy, some coaching. I knew I wanted to optimize my thinking and behavior. And, um, and then they just have this weird experience of talking to someone who just…

AI assessment note: “build a specialty and working with founders... helping them with, with psychology”

Q your business to be in one of those spaces. So I just wanted to like, that's just an observation I've had. Curious your thoughts on that. And then my other, my, my question to you is. Like what percentage of your, the people you work with are bootstrap versus VC? And how did those, like, are those similar entrepreneurs? Do they have similar challenges? Can you talk more about that?

A Yeah, I, I'd say about maybe third, a third, maybe 40% of the clients I work with in general are bootstrappers. Um, I love them. I think that, um, like there's some bootstrappers out there that'll, that'll turn you green with them, right? Like the, the, the types of businesses they've built, the lifestyles that they enable. Um, it's, you know, it's incredible and it's a lot, you front load the effort. It's a lot harder when you start a bootstrap company and you're not getting No one's offering you awards. You're not getting written up in tech crunch. No one knows you exist, right? That those early years are like all grind. Whereas, and I think this is what is so compelling and what was so compelling about the last decade of like crazy venture capital, like froth and growth is that, yeah, like you start feeling like a winner as soon as you get a meeting at like a major fund, right? There's all these from a psychological point of view, There's all of these proxies for success that are immediately accessible or short-term accessible along the path, which is like a really long path to building a successful business that actually makes money, right? That like creates value in the world that convinces strangers to pay money at a, at a good margin for that value being created. That journey could be like five, 10 years long, but when you go down the VC route, you can immediately start …

AI assessment note: “I'd say about maybe third, a third, maybe 40% of the clients I work with”

Q How much have you, I mean, you, how much have you optimized marketing and marketing channels? You know, cause we've talked a little bit about optimizing retention and the product itself, but how much of, how much are you doing like R and D essentially marketing R and D in terms of new channels to, to bring customers in?

A A little bit. My, as a, like, as a kind of a bootstrapper, my tendency is always to focus on the product first and foremost, right? Like that's, That's really what I've been getting after. So I will say like, I'm, I'm better at building an accountability, coaching, methodology, technology, et cetera, than I am as a marketer. Like I've got a lot to learn, um, when it comes to marketing, but we did have some wins. I mean, we've built, we've built marketing channels that have like a sub-thirty-day payback on customer acquisition cost, which is like a super awesome key to, you know, to scale. So we, you know, we figured that out a couple of years ago, which enabled us to ramp up We're always looking for new stuff right now. I'm, um, in the very early stages of experimenting with organic content. You know, it's something that I tactically decided to ignore for many, many years because I was building, you know, I wanted to build something bigger than me and I had built a sort of a personal brand, not that I was famous on the internet, but I was pretty well known within certain circles in the entrepreneurship world. So for me, commit action was a journey of like focusing on product at the expense of I've kind of let this organic audience building thing pass me by, and now I'm putting some more focus on it. Now that the commit actions like up and running and, you know, pretty much runs…

AI assessment note: “A little bit. My, as a, like, as a kind of a bootstrapper”

Q Before we head out, what's, uh, what's the biggest tip you can give to folks around productivity?

A Biggest tip around productivity is you're crazy to do it alone, right? Like, like I said, we're social primates. We're hardwired to perform at our best. Hundreds of millions of years of evolution have optimized human beings to be at their best when they're working together in groups. And one of the really dangerous things for, you know, entrepreneurs, for creators, for creators out there in today's world is that we are really socially isolated, right? These parasocial relationships behind, through the screen, they don't do to our monkey mind, to our animal brain, what actual social connection does. So the first basic tip for improving productivity and focus is to have people in your life who care who you talk to about your goals and you talk to about your implementation intentions. If you've got friends that you're discussing, you know, mutually with where and when am I going to work on my biggest ideas? And then they're checking back in with you. You're simulating what we do like at a professional level at commit action and it works. That, you know, the, the science on it is like case closed, overwhelming evidence, just even the anticipation of social accountability that it might happen is shown to improve people's follow through on goals by up to a hundred percent. Right? Like there's some wild studies out there about how this stuff is effective. So I think the tendency for a…

AI assessment note: “Biggest tip around productivity is you're crazy to do it alone”

Q And from a size perspective, could you share a little bit about like scale, like how many customers or like how big is the business?

A Yeah, we've worked with. We've worked with thousands of customers. We've, um, we've scaled it up to, you know, close to about that five million dollar mark at this point. So it's kind of funny because yeah, you were right. Like when you thought about that idea, I mean, I'd kill to get it to forty million and I think we will. Um, but that's kind of where we're at in terms of annual revenue. And what's amazing about that is that we make a profit every single month where, you know, we're growing. And, um, there's like a crazy economic model attached to the business because we create a ton of value in the world. So the secret to our, if you want to like pop the hood, the secret to our business model is that the service really works, right? Like if you want to check out, we, we get, um, third party verified reviews on Trustpilot. People describe the experience of having a personal trainer for productivity is like life changing. The copy is so exuberant in the Testimonials. People just write themselves that we, we can't use them in marketing sometimes because they're so over the top. It's almost cringeworthy. It's like kind of frustrating. I'd kill for like a four star, like this was pretty great to just like make us look human, um, make us look normal. So it, it really, really works. And the secret is customer retention, right? That we have these clients who start the service and re…

AI assessment note: “We've worked with thousands of customers. We've scaled it up to close to five million”