He Sold His First Software Business For Millions with No Experience - Brett Malinowski

0:00Flowing ad-bunch it on metrics that look great, till the CFO sees them, that's Bullspend. And marketers are calling it out in dashboard confessions. I remember telling my boss, it'll be good for the brand when leads were slow. Yeah, it wasn't. Cut the Bullspend. LinkedIn lets you target by company, job title, and more. Advertise on LinkedIn. Spend $250 on your first campaign and get a $250 credit go to LinkedIn.com slash campaign term secretions apply. College football is back. So, Hilton called to me the superstition concierge to make your fan rituals a reality. Need a room to match your lucky number? We got you. Want to make sure our team doesn't wash your lucky jersey? Oh, that smells lucky. Hilton's unmatched hospitality can keep up with any superstition. Even a marching bandwick up call it 555 and 55 seconds. Hit it! When you need a team that will do whatever it takes on game day, it matters where you stay. Hilton, for this day.

1:00This episode is brought to you by PayPal. Holiday Rush? Skip the mall traffic and shop online with PayPal. Shop your favorite online stores like eBay, Fanatics, Walmart, Sephora, Target, and TikTok shop. And choose to pay now or pay later at checkout. Plus, pay in four with no interest and no late fees. Shop now with PayPal. Pay in four subject to approval. Learn more at PayPal.com slash pay in four. PayPal Incorporated NMLS 910457. You try to build software where you don't deeply understand the problem or you don't deeply understand the customer. You're never going to succeed because you'll always be one step behind a competitor that does. I didn't want to just be like a Facebook ads monkey anymore. If I can just stack up enough money to start a software company, I think that's where I'll make the real money. All three of my software companies have just been productized APIs. I always knew that I wanted to do something in software. That's where the highest leverage is.

2:01You can sell the same thing over and over and over again. You get 10, 15x multiples on the value of your company. Building no code software companies or just productizing API, selling them on acquire.com. They're making millions of dollars here. It's not hard to start a software company in this day and age. These large language models have APIs. If I were to start a SaaS company for the very first time in 2023, I would... Welcome to the We're Going to Make It podcast. We're talking about the nitty gritty tactics that underground entrepreneurs are using to build their businesses to the seven and eight figures. The goal of this podcast is to go into excruciating detail on the tactics and strategies that they're using right now. So hopefully you can implement it into your business and see more success. If you like tips like this, you can always subscribe to our free newsletter. But other than that, please enjoy the episode. Kieran, I guess Kieran O'Brien, my long-time friend, I said those at this point. But brother, you have sold two software companies in what, the last 18 months?

3:02Yeah, roughly 18 months. Incredible. And it's cool because you've done two different kinds of software. You have a typical software company and then you have a micro SaaS. And Emon got what? Emon actually ended up buying micro SaaS. Yeah, he did. So that's a cool story I want to get into later in the podcast. Sure. Let's start with media kits because that was the big one for you. Now for legal reasons, guys, I love to ask how much money people make right out the gate. But Kieran signed a contract. He can't talk about it. But he's doing well. Let's just say that. And he had tens of thousands of users. So do the math. But basically, what was media kits? How did you come up with the idea and just tell me all about that? Yeah, so mediakits.com was basically like, it was a SaaS platform for data analytics for influencers and online creators. And so basically it would take all the APIs of the popular social platforms. And it would put all your analytics into like a one-pager that you would then use to connect with brands. So we had some of the biggest influencers in the world. Celebrities using our product and they would basically take their their link with all their analytics. And you know, when an influencer goes to a brand and they want to do, they want to promote the brand. They want to do a shout out or get paid for something like that.

4:03Typically, they would always go to their analytics and take screenshots. And so we kind of saw that that was an outdated process. And it wasn't very scalable and the analytics always get outdated. And so we basically just built like a really clean UX around some APIs and turned it into a product that ended up going really viral on TikTok and Twitter and some other places. So basically people like influencers would try to get sponsors to make money to monetize their own. Exactly. Yeah. So they had a really hard time. Sponsors would want to know how many views do you typically get? How many followers do you have? Comments, engagement, all that. Agent gender breakdown, geographical occasion of your followers, all of that. And there's really no easy way to find that information. There's a bunch of tools online that scrape that information and guess it. But nobody knows that information accurately other than the platforms themselves. And so you kind of have to go to the source. And then the next issue beyond that is it's on a per platform basis. So if you're a brand and you want to pay an influencer for a shout out on TikTok, Twitter, Instagram, and YouTube, those are all different companies that don't talk to each other, that don't share data between each other. Yes. And so you'd have to go and screenshot your analytics on each of those platforms one by one

5:08to be able to give the brand a view into that. And that makes a lot of sense because they don't only want a video on maybe TikTok for this specific campaign. Right. Yeah. And then another thing you mentioned when I was watching your video, guys, check out his channel. He makes a lot of great YouTube content on this Kierno Brian. But in that video, you're talking about not only were they struggling to even get it, but it constantly is changing because every one of your views are different. Exactly. So you guys kept it live updated with the APIs. Exactly. Every day, every week, people were going in and updating their media kits previously. Like before our product, people would use Photoshop or Canva or something like that. And they would be going in there updating it every single day, every single week in a lot of cases. Graphics, owners, full-time job, right? Exactly. So they would have graphic designers on staff, a lot of the talent agencies that we work to us. So we had a B2B model too, or we'd sell, yeah, we'd sell bulk seats to talent agencies. That's actually where we made most of our revenue. And so like they would have full-time graphic designers on staff just updating media kits, like changing ones to twos and threes to fours and it was just ridiculous. And then the individual creators, they would have freelancers that they had hired to do,

6:10like graphic designed to update their media kits or they'd be doing it themselves and it would take them hours and hours every single week. So I mean, ultimately the product just solved the problem that was painful enough for people to be willing to pay for it. Okay, so two things I want to point out here. One, you're just referencing that you're using APIs. So I feel like a lot of people over-complicate software. Can you just explain what an API is and how you can wrap that into a software company? Yeah, absolutely. So an API is basically data structures that a company will make public to their own platform. So most large technology companies have APIs where sometimes they're gated, you have to apply for them, but sometimes they're public. And basically you can tap into these endpoints in these APIs and you can pull valuable data. So for example, Meta's API, which we used for media kits, had things like, you know, follower count and gender breakdown and geographic breakdown and, you know, follower growth over time and all these things. And so we would use those APIs. We'd make API calls through our application

7:11to grab that data and use it in our product. And so, you know, same thing with the company that I sold to Iman, it was just an API that we put into a really nice user experience from a CRM product that didn't have a very good reporting dashboard. And so we built a reporting dashboard for this CRM and product. Flowing ad bunched on metrics that look great, till the CFO sees them, that's bullspend. And marketers are calling it out in dashboard confessions. I remember telling my boss, it'll be good for the brand when leads were slow. Yeah, it wasn't. Cut the bullspend. LinkedIn lets you target by company, job title and more. Advertise on LinkedIn. Spend $250 on your first campaign and get a $250 credit go to LinkedIn.com slash campaign Terms and Ketitions Apply. College football is back. So Hilton called to me the superstition concierge to make your fan rituals a reality. Need a room to match your lucky number? We got you. Want to make sure our team doesn't wash your lucky jersey?

8:12Oh, that smells lucky. Hilton's unmatched hospitality can keep up with any superstition. Even a marching bandwinkup call at 555 and 55 seconds. Hit it! When you need a team that will do whatever it takes on game day, it matters where you stay. Hilton, for this day. This episode is brought to you by PayPal. Holiday rush. Skip the mall traffic and shop online with PayPal. Shop your favorite online stores like eBay, Fanatics, Walmart, Sephora, Target and Tiktok shop, and choose to pay now or pay later at checkout. Plus pay in four with no interest in no late fees. Shop now with PayPal. Pay in four subject to approval. Learn more at paypal.com slash pay in four. PayPal Incorporated NMLS 910457. Paised it and then my new SaaS company too. We're taking APIs and productizing it. So, you know, I always tell people starting a SaaS company, starting a software company, you do not need to know how to code. You do not need to come up with the next Facebook.

9:14It can be something as simple as a no-code simple clean UX that just takes an API and productizes it. You said endpoints and data structures. I just want to clarify for everybody. Basically, if you have a Twitter API and you tweet, you can connect the API to your own software and the tweet on Twitter will show up in your software. Exactly. Yeah, that's super simple. Yeah, that's one example of it. And so all you have to do is find like a specific use case of that information and then brand it and market it towards that demographic that has that problem. Yeah. And you can sell your company for a lot of money essentially. Exactly. And I get another simple way to break it down would be like companies have APIs to make the user experience for their users better. And so we'll use the Twitter example that you just gave. So Twitter has all this data, but they're not using it in every single possible way that you can use that data. Twitter is using it to create a social platform. And so making their API public allows developers and people like us to go and build software companies that solve more niche problems around that same data. So let's say Twitter is really focused on just building a

10:17social platform and they're not as focused on helping creators get brand deals. So somebody like me can come along and build media kits.com and take the Twitter API and use that data to extrapolate even more data and like make inferences and create different data based off of the parent data if that makes sense. So we'll find trends in the data that Twitter doesn't even like hyper-specialty. Exactly. And then we'll use that to build a product that allows Twitter influencers to get brand deals. Right. And that's not something that Twitter is going to build themselves. But they give all that data away to the public to make life easier for their users. Like why wouldn't they want somebody who's a Twitter influencer to be making money? It'll keep them on the platform longer. So you know these platforms that have APIs are incentivized to open source them to developers and entrepreneurs to make even more specific products around them. It sounds really complicated, but it's truly really simple. Yeah. And the APIs exist for that reason. Exactly. Like make them publicly available so people like you can use them for your own software or your news case because

11:20it makes their platform better. Exactly. It's called an API key. You just have to go to their website, apply for one, copy paste, just like that. You have API. So you know these APIs exist. But how did you come up with this idea? Like you don't just know that you need media kits if you've never been in the industry. So how did you come up with the idea in general? Yeah. So the crazy story about media kits is I came up with the idea when I was 17 when I was in high school and then I did not actually start the company until almost four years later. And so yeah, that's a lot of people think that like you know that we just came up with this idea and then we built out the idea four years before you like started it. Yeah. And so I'll give you I'll tell you why. Okay. There's actually two reasons. So the first reason is basically I just didn't know what I was doing and I knew that and I was like I'm not going to start a software company because I don't have enough money and I have no idea what I'm doing. I don't even know where to start. And that's totally totally a valid thing. And you know maybe I could have started and who knows what would have happened if I started the company back in 2017. But the other reason is that I just felt like the market wasn't ready. So influencer marketing kind of blew up in like 2015-16 with the rise of Instagram.

12:24And then there was kind of this lull from like 2017-2018 and what really brought back the creator economy and kind of created this new resurgence of you know of activity in that industry was TikTok. And so I noticed that and that's that's why we launched media kits kind of at the at the very early stages of 2020 like during COVID everyone's locked locked down at home. They're on their phones. TikTok blows up. That's when you know like Charlie DiMillio, Addison Ray, all these TikTok influencers kind of blew up. And that's when we started media kits because we kind of saw that trend and we're like okay the influencer economy is back. We have an idea for a tool. Now we have you know the resources and the connections to actually make this work. So let's do it. So that's where you saw the timing. Which is super important because there's so many stories. I know there's a company that had like a almost like an iPhone S level phone in the early 2000s. And they invested millions of dollars into it but it was just too early. The apps, the ecosystem, internet, mobile internet was horrible. So it didn't work. But 10 years later when Steve Jobs rolls

13:25it out it's a hit even though the technology really wasn't much different. So that's a really interesting insight and I loved hearing that. But how did you actually come up with the idea? How did you identify that problem? Because with influencer marketing there's like 20 different steps that go into it. And I think you did a really good job of identifying like one clunky pain point and then hyper focusing on that. So do you want to go into how you identified that? Yeah absolutely. So when I was 17 I was running a marketing agency and I was I was helping and when I say that I don't want that to sound intimidating to anybody because it was literally just a glorified freelance business. Like I was running Facebook and Google ads and helping with influencer marketing for like three three businesses. And so one of them was a company that sold auto parts online. And so they had a budget for influencers and they wanted to try to you know to spend this budget on some on some influencers. And one of my best friends, J.R. Garage has a big automotive YouTube channel. And so yeah he's right down the street. And I was basically connecting my client with him to do this brand deal. And they were like, what can we see his insights? Can we see his data? And

14:29they actually specifically asked for a media kit. And when they said that I'm like, I have no idea what a media kit is. Like let me just Google this real quick. I'm like, what is a media kit? It's like oh it's like a it's like a page like a one-pager with all of your analytics and data. And media kits actually before the whole influencer marketing thing existed even before social media media. Media kits have been used for decades in the journalism space. So newspapers, print magazines, traditional media. They've always used media kits to showcase like their monthly readers and stuff like that. And so media kit was a very popular. Are your ad campaigns lighting up the dashboard? But not the pipeline. That's bullspend. And marketers are calling it out in dashboard confessions. My boss asked for results. So I opened my dashboard for the only positive sounding metric I had. Impressions. Cut the bullspend. See revenue? Not just reach. LinkedIn delivers the highest return on ad spend of major ad networks. Advertise on LinkedIn. Spend $250 on your first campaign and get a $25 credit go to LinkedIn.com slash campaign turn

15:29sick edition supply. College football is back. So Hilton called to me the superstition concierge to make your fan rituals a reality. Need a room to match your lucky number? We got you. Wanna make sure our team doesn't wash your lucky jersey? Oh that smells lucky. Hilton's unmatched hospitality can keep up with any superstition. Even a marching bandwinkup call it 555 and 55 seconds. Hit it! When you need a team that will do whatever it takes on game day, it matters where you stay. Hilton for this day. This episode is brought to you by PayPal. Holiday Rush. Skip the mall traffic and shop online with PayPal. Shop your favorite online stores like eBay, Fanatics, Walmart, Sephora, Target and TikTok shop and choose to pay now or pay later at checkout. Plus pay in four with no interest to no late fees. Shop now with PayPal. Pay in four subject to approval. Learn more at PayPal.com slash Pay in four. PayPal Incorporated NMLS 910457. Term in the journalism space and it started getting

16:33adopted in the influencer space at the time. And so I'm online. I'm like oh cool like yeah let me just go make a media kit for JR real quick. There's got to be a website that just does this for you. Like of course duh. It's like the most obvious thing ever. I'm like looking around like there isn't. Like why why does this not exist? And so you know that's I actually did kind of start media kits back then. Like I got the domain. I actually even did some. Yeah I did some mock ups. I got the Instagram handle got the the web domain. I did some initial UI mock ups and then I got a quote from a from a web development agency that was going to build it for me. And I'm like 17 at the time I'm making like a couple grand a month like running this freelance marketing business. And they quoted me like $25,000 to build this software. And I'm like that's the most amount of money I've ever heard in a sentence before. I'm like I don't have $25,000 like I barely have $25,000. So I'm like well that's that like let me just you know keep doing these marketing services. And so I kind of just

17:37shelved the idea. I always knew that it was a good idea. I always thought like maybe one day I'll build it. But again like the market timing wasn't right. I didn't have the the resources or the know how at the time to do it. And back then you know for everybody listening I didn't know about no code. I didn't know you know about like building an MVP and doing something kind of like really like low or no code and then you know building something bigger later. I didn't understand these concepts. I did I knew nothing about software. I didn't even understand the concept of fundraising that I could go out and get other people to give me money to build this thing. So kind of just continued on with life. I built I built that marketing agency into a seven figure company and I did really well with it. And that's actually how I made like my first kind of like real money which I then used to start media kits you know four years later. You hear that story a lot the agency cash flows and then you dump that into like a higher leverage opportunity. Absolutely. But you actually ended up raising money for media kits. So that's really interesting. First off how did you have one more

18:40backtrack? How did you have the self-awareness not to start it or to wait? So I'd love to sit here and tell you that I'm super self-aware and then it was like but dude honestly it was the fact that if I had 25 grand when I probably would have done it and I probably would have ended up broke with nothing to show for it because looking back at that development agency probably would not have been we spent hundreds of thousands of dollars building media kits. So knowing what it takes now like 25 grand no way we would have had anything that actually worked. It's safe I would 100% say with confidence that software is the best business like the best business model. Absolutely. As far as like just objectively high leverage for current revenue and your ability to exit. Yep. And some of people don't think that it's like beginner friendly. So now that you've gone through it because you kind of said you didn't start it at the beginning because you weren't. It's too hard. There's too high a barrier to entry in mind. But do you think that's true now? No. I think software people should like if you're going to start a business objectively you want to start the best business. And so if software is the best business is there anything holding back a beginner from just

19:40jumping straight into software? It's never been a better time to start a software business. There are so many resources out there. There's so many ways to to build a software business both conceptually and tactically that it's just kind of leveled the playing field. Like it's really a game distribution of marketing now at this point. Did you study like Y-combinator on YouTube or how did you end up getting those skills? You know what? Not really. Like I didn't even know about like the whole VC world until we started raising for media kits. Like I didn't even know that it existed quite frankly. Like I was like I was in this world with with like Emon and these guys like in like the digital marketing space. Like that was my world from 2016 to 2019. I didn't know anything about like Silicon Valley. Like of course like I knew that it existed but I didn't know any of the intricacies about like how to fundraise and how to you know take an MVP to market or like join Y-combinator any of these things. Didn't know they existed until I started raising for media kits. So you did raise money for media kits. What was that experience like? I don't want to really go

20:42into like how to do it necessarily because we'll talk about that later. But in general obviously it worked out. You sold the company. But I've always been like I feel like that adds another level of pressure to you. Yeah. So is that if you had the choice again. Would you do it again? It's a complicated question for a couple of reasons but what I will say I want to preface this by saying that we boot strapped media kits first. So by like by 2019 when we were kind of thinking about starting it I'd saved up like a couple hundred grand and that was from my marketing agency. And I started spending it on on media kits. So I was paying for everything out of pocket. So we hired two engineers and a software designer and I was spending like 15 to $18,000 a month of my own money when I only had a I only had a couple hundred grand in a bank and I was spending like almost 20 grand a month just to build the software. I almost ran out of money. Like I was two developers in a designer. Yeah. They were all about like five six thousand bucks a month each and then you have server costs and you have all these other things on top of it. And yeah I just started to run

21:45out of money. And so out of desperation I started to learn how to fundraise. And so I guess to answer your question if I had like millions of millions of dollars back you know in 2019 probably wouldn't have fundraised. But I'm glad that we did looking back the only reason that we had the success that we did with it was because our investors opened so many doors to us. You know we had Wiz Khalifa we had the guys from Fuck Jerry we had you know so many influential people in the space that just opened doors to us whether that was to our B2B customers talent agencies getting some of the biggest influencers in in the space on board getting some of the biggest music labels. You know we we sign contracts with a couple of the I can't talk about it but a couple of the biggest music labels in in the world because of the people that we had on. Flowing ad bunched it on metrics that look great till the CFO sees them that's bullspin and marketers are calling it out in dashboard confessions. I remember telling my boss it'll be good for the brand when leads were slow yeah it wasn't. Cut the bull spend LinkedIn lets you target by company

22:50job title and more advertise on LinkedIn. Spend $250 on your first campaign and get a $250 credit go to LinkedIn.com slash campaign Terms and Ketitions Apply. College football is back so Hilton called to me the superstition concierge to make your fan rituals a reality. Need a room to match your lucky number we got you want to make sure our team doesn't want your lucky Jersey. Oh that smells lucky. Hilton's unmatched hospitality can keep up with any superstition even a marching band wake up call it 555 and 55 seconds hit it when you need a team to do whatever it takes on game day it matters where you stay Hilton for this day.

23:54Learn more at paypal.com slash payin 4 paypal incorporated NMLS 910457 our cap table the people that we had as investors so as i'm hearing you say that's i'm like damn this guy's like connected out the ass he's got it all it's like no wonder he's successful but i really like want to focus on like the time when you were bootstrapping like yeah the amount of time you had to spend waiting i'm sure because you're not are you technical yourself no so you can't code nope did your partner code at all nope it was okay yeah a case he couldn't either both of you are non-technical so you got to hire the technical team yep i only have one quick interruption for the podcast today guys we're in the future and right now you can actually build software with no code on a platform called bubble not only that you can actually plug AI into bubble to build any AI software tool you want very quickly we actually figured out how to build a AI tool to help students with their homework in just a few weeks and we actually made a free course showing exactly how we did everything from plugging in the AI building the actual app itself and even connecting stripe to accept payments and again that's a completely free course

24:56that you can find in the link in the description below other than that guys enjoy the podcast share with your friend if you're learning something this has been a really good one so far and it only gets better you're spending 15 to 20k a month to get it built by these developers yep but really you're just kind of telling them the general idea and you have to wait like a week or two for them to build it yeah it's like first off that's stressful as shit super stressful when you're making no money to and you don't even know if the idea is really validated so did you have any form of validating the idea and what were you doing in the meantime while the developers were just working yeah great question so you're trying to start a software company this is something that we did at media kits we did this kind of well um but my my next two software companies after that we did we've like obsessed over this and that is um basically going out to your to your target audience and surveying them and getting feedback on on a concept or an MVP so MVP stands for minimum viable product that's like that should be like your north star if you're thinking about starting a software company define what your MVP is going to be so what is the least features the the basically

26:02the most stripped down version of the perfect product that you have in your head that you can build for the cheapest amount of money in the quickest amount of time get it to market stress test it see if people would pay for it it's like one core function that is like the main driver and it doesn't even have to be software yeah it can be a clickable prototype it can be a it can be a wicks website that has a couple hyperlinks on it like literally our first media kit that was like our you know our MVP was literally just a big ma prototype like we put a couple screens in figma and you can like link things in figma to make it in a prototype to make it look like it's a real app and we just had a clickable prototype and we would send this to influencers be like hey if this existed would you use it yes great how much would you pay for it so you would send them like a landing page explaining what it is yeah and then just say hey is this something that you would use if it actually worked right now exactly they couldn't get any output yep exactly so so you put your verbally asking them were or we were in DMs we were DMing people cold DMing people we were reaching out to friends who were influencers and having them message their influencer friends

27:02and just like network effect we put out a type form that I think got like three or four hundred responses cool so even like down to our price point like we charged twenty nine bucks a month for media kits our price point was determined by surveys that we sent out to our users so sorry you know I was just going to say we're we're we were very data focused and again in retrospect we didn't even do it to the extent that I would have wanted to like it was kind of an afterthought it was like holy shit I'm spending twenty grand a month let me let me make sure people would use this so it was a few months into that that I was like let me just go ask people if they would actually use this yeah so we did it retroactively but you know I think anybody out there who's thinking about starting a software company if you can come up with an MVP it could be no code it could be just a clickable prototype you don't have to know how to code the barrier to entry really is that low it's so exciting creating an MVP get out there talk to your customers everyone says that but until you're like in that moment it's kind of hard to like consider it so what what did like what did the survey say and how did you incentivize people to fill it out yeah so it would be so to

28:05incentivize them to fill it out they would basically we'd promise them that they would get like early access and that they would get like a discount on it when it eventually came out so that was pretty easy and like there's plenty of ways to incentivize people to do things right so yeah but the the main thing is it was like a logic based survey so we use the type form so it was like if somebody clicked something on that on page one it would take them to a different page than if they clicked something else right it was yeah so there's a bunch of logic built into it so it's like would you use this if yes then well why would you use it and it's like well I'd use it for this reason there's like a drop down with like four different things and it's like okay and then you know use it for that reason like well how often would you use it and how much would you pay for it and this is not it's like well if you wouldn't use this why okay for that reason okay well what would make you want to use it right so we just collected as much information from our target users as we could and that kind of helped us inform product decisions down the line okay so that's another interesting point because it's down the line yeah I'm like non-technical but we're building

29:05software right now and I have like a million different feature ideas that I want done but I'm getting so ahead of myself because like we're just not getting the MVP done yeah every idea I have could add two three four weeks of an expensive developer absolutely what like first off how did you choose what's implement what not obviously it's probably just like a risk reward yeah but like tell me more about what you were doing in that meantime while you were waiting so there's there's concept called call to control point so it's like you want to create something that becomes like the control point for the rest of your products so what is like that core product like for us it was the media kit at media kits right and then we can expand from there okay okay so if we can build the best simplest easiest to use media kit product out there then eventually we can go build a marketplace or we can build a B2B off-frame for talent agencies we can do this this in that right and even so to give further context on that our MVP was just Twitter are your ad campaigns lighting up the dashboard but not the pipeline that's bullspend and marketers

30:06are calling it out in dashboard confessions my boss asks for results so I open my dashboard for the only positive sounding metric I add impressions cut the bullspend see revenue not just reach LinkedIn delivers the highest return on ad spend of major ad networks advertise on LinkedIn spend $250 on your first campaign and get a $25 credit go to LinkedIn.com slash campaign turns the conditions apply college footballers back so Hilton called me the superstition concierge to make your fan rituals a reality need a room to match your lucky number we got you want to make sure our team doesn't wash your lucky jersey oh that smells lucky Hilton's unmatched hospitality can keep up with any superstition even a marching band wake up call it 555 and 55 seconds hit it when you need a team that will do whatever it takes on game day it matters where you stay Hilton for this day this episode is brought to you by PayPal holiday rush skip the mall traffic and shop online with PayPal shop your favorite online stores like eBay fanatics Walmart Sephora target and

31:12TikTok shop and choose to pay now or pay later at checkout plus pay in four with no interest and no late fees shop now with PayPal pay in four subject to approval learn more at PayPal.com slash pay in four PayPal incorporated NMLS 910457 Instagram and Facebook we didn't even have TikTok or YouTube when we launched so that's another example of how you can do an MVP like yeah limit integrations limit the amount of UI that you're building limit the amount of functionality and so the idea the goal of your user interviews when you're early when you're when you're building your MVP should be to find out what is the one thing that would make them use it what is the one thing that's non-negotiable right and then from there you can build the rest of the features but you've got to get their attention you got to get them in first and so what is that thing that's going to get them in and what you'll find this goes for anybody building any kind of software whether it's a no-code like bubble software or something really complex doesn't matter what it is what you're going to find is your early adopters your early users are are going to use just a couple core

32:18functionalities and they don't care about everything else all the cool feature ideas you have in your head there are definitely people out there that would use that and that that would also think it's cool but in the beginning there are plenty of users out there that would use and pay for just the very very simple version of you know just your core functionality and so that's kind of what the goal of the survey is yeah to see what most people are trying to use it for exactly and you might find out I'm sure you didn't but I'm you might find out that like almost everybody's using it for a complete different reason than why you make it so you might have an idea to pivot but exactly was it pretty consistent it was pretty consistent I think we did a good job at collecting the feedback and understanding what people were saying you know the old saying is like if you try to please everyone you'll please no one yeah that goes for all areas of life but especially in software like if you it's called feature brain if you're two feature brain and you're thinking and this is this is both on the product and the sales side if your product is two feature heavy and not not outcome or solution heavy then it's not going to work and on conversely on the sales side if you're selling software even for anybody listening if you're

33:18maybe working for a software company you're selling software for a living if you're just selling the features all day like no no one buys features people buy outcomes people buy solutions to problems right and so if you can think about that from a product perspective and build software that solves problems then the features will come because all people are thinking about how does it how does it benefit me directly absolutely and they're not thinking about the technical API connection there's one no I can use this to make my life better yeah and there's so many rabbit holes we can go down here but like what I'll say is like if you go to media kits.com and like you look at our all like our website I don't obviously I don't own the company anymore but it's still there you can go to our website all the copy on the website it's not it's not you know come and you know show all your analytics it's like get more brand deals right it's like the end result exactly it's the outcome like make yourself look more professional right impress brands like this is the type of copy that we used on our on our website because that's what the product does product gets you to an outcome

34:20gets you to finding a solution for this really annoying problem that you've been having and a lot of a lot of software companies and quite frankly any kind of company like if you don't know what your customers are looking for in terms of outcomes and solutions to their problems then you're never going to build a good product it's like that's such a good point it's like why does this exist because you could say two different things in your landing page get all of your social media statistics in one place yeah that could be your landing page copy or get more brand deals yep exact same product but that one actually resonates with people much more strongly exactly why they sign up it that's really cool outcome based outcome based selling outcome based copy that's a great one okay thank you for that that's really clear inside now okay cool so is there anything else during that like to optimize your time in that building phase when you're just sinking the money in that you decided to do that was like helpful anyway uh freak out worry about that's I totally get that um you know honestly man that that part of my life was like a blur like it was just so

35:21are you still doing agency work on the side yeah oh for sure yeah I was just like barely like I was just trying to break even every month like yeah I was like if I can make like like because my agency at the time I was doing like maybe 50 60 grand a month in in top line revenue so I was taking home like 20 or 30 and I was spending all of it on software and then everything personal for me like yeah that's all net negative at that point so I'm like freaking out and um we were trying to figure out like how like how do we get this to market like you know just like how do we put this out there so that people can start using it and hopefully pay for it and when it became obvious that we were too far away from that I was just kind of doing the math I'm like all right I've got this much like dry powder left dry powder is another word for like money in the bank like I've got this much money left and I'm spending this much and we need this many more months before the product is in a place where we can sell it which by the way in retrospect totally flawed thinking I could have I could have shipped the product way earlier than we did and started generating revenue and that's

36:22one of the biggest mistakes looking back we focus too much on like the design how yeah totally yeah and that's every first time founder every first time software company makes that mistake they think the product needs to be perfect before they launch it so yeah in retrospect should have launched way sooner but hindsight's 2020 yeah at the time I'm like we don't have enough money to get this to a place where it's sellable and so that's ultimately why we decided to go out and try to fund raise and that's what I did with a lot of my free time is okay so I have been I think this is a good time to go into it so sure first off why did you even decide to fund raise and go through with it instead of just saying I wasn't over my head I'm just gonna stick with my agency I'm making 20k a month yeah I'm killing it I'm only what 21 oh 20 like I'm killing it making 20k a month what made you like take that challenge head on I wanted change so like like you kind of mentioned I knew that there was a that there was a glass ceiling on agency work it was it was basically just my face yeah like I had like a one-to-one relationship with all my clients I had a team but like it was me like I was basically a freelancer with a team at that point and I wanted more

37:27I wanted to I didn't want to just be like a Facebook ads monkey anymore are your ad campaigns lighting up the dashboard but not the pipeline that's bullspin and marketers are calling it out in dashboard confessions my boss asked for results so I opened my dashboard for the only positive sounding metric I had impressions cut the bullspend see revenue not just reach LinkedIn delivers the highest return on ad spend of major ad networks advertise on LinkedIn spend $250 on your first campaign and get a $25 cried I go to LinkedIn.com slash campaign turn sick edition apply stay cozy and look cool with up to 60% off cold weather gear at Nordstrom Rack safe on cashmere out of where boots and more from brands like Ugg vents Cole Han and Hunter join the Nordy Club for free to unlock exclusive discounts shop clearance and new arrivals first and more plus buy online and pick up at your favorite rack store for free great brands great prices that's why you rack low energy unfocused foggy you might be dehydrated

38:35Gatorade zero powders have been scientifically designed to help improve hydration balance in the body with a clinically proven electrolyte blend and no artificial colors or flavors great tasting hydration no matter where you're going shop now online or at retailers nationwide Gatorade hydrates better than water is it in you symptoms noted are signs of mild to moderate dehydration consult a healthcare professional if symptoms persist or like I was literally like every day I was just in Facebook ads just like tweaking campaigns and I'm just like I wasn't finding fulfillment with that and I'm like I'd put away a decent amount of money I'd made a lot a lot of great friends in the industry and I just wanted to do something different and I always knew that I wanted to do something in software because to the point we made early in this podcast it's like that's what the highest leverage is yeah you can sell the same thing over and over and over again you get 10 15x multiples on you know the value of your company and so it just made sense to me logically I'm like if I can just stack up enough money to start a software company I think that's where I'll make the real money and so that's kind of how I was thinking about it and then you know my

39:39my business partner Casey Adams he had a podcast where he interviewed like a couple dozen billionaires a bunch of yeah a bunch of really successful people a bunch of venture capitalists and so we're just kind of sitting one day and at this point you know we become co-founders of media kits and we're just again self-funding it he comes to me one day he's like hey Karen like what if we ask some of my podcast guests to like invest in media kits and that literally it broke my brain it was like a it was like a whole new frame a whole new way of thinking and I'm like wait a minute like you're telling me that there's like wealthy people that would give us their money to build this and I'm like of course I know that that exists like I know that venture capital is a thing but I just couldn't wrap my head around why someone would want to give us their money to build this thing it was just it was just like a foreign concept to me and so sure enough like a couple weeks later we put a little pitch deck together and we went out and we started talking to some some of these people that Casey Adams podcasts over the years and we start we got a 25,000-dollar check and then we

40:42got a 50,000-dollar check and then we got a hundred thousand and then a hundred fifty thousand dollar check and these investors like these wealthy people are friends with guess what other wealthy people and they would tell their friends that they just invested in media kits and then they'd be like well I want to invest in media kits too and then they would write a check to us and before you know it we had a million and a half dollars in our in our checking account for this business oh my god I didn't even raise that much wow yeah wow is there like a first off is there like a standard for how much equity you give away per round because it's like your angel round right you see around what is it yeah it was like it was a seed round yeah yeah typically you want to give away like 10 to 20 percent but there's so much nuance to it I mean it depends on I mean the type of business you're just making it up at that point though right you're totally pulling out of you yeah I'm going to guess my company could potentially be worth 10 million dollars so well it's it's just like anything else it's whatever people are willing to pay yeah right and so it's like I don't I can talk about this number we raised our first round at a at a five million dollar evaluation okay and that's like a relatively standard seed round like even like a lot of YC

41:44companies they'll raise their first round of funding at a five million dollar evaluation did you have any customers no no customers no right available no it was it was mock ups and clickable printable prototypes yeah and so yeah I mean ultimately like the fundraising process again it's a game of of describing your vision and helping other people see your vision and it's also a game of phomo like when a bunch of really notable investors put money into something you know just like any other market oh yeah whether it's stocks or crypto or whatever else it's like other people want in right right and so it's it's the same thing but you just you have to manufacture it on like a grassroots level which is the hardest part but yeah I had no clue what I was doing and just to be clear I don't want to make it sound like this was super easy or anything we fundraised that that million and a half dollars took us over nine months to raise from start to finish how many people do you talk to oh the great I have those numbers I actually have the old like fundraise CRM from media kits still on my computer because it's like motivation for me we talked over 350 people and we raised

42:48money from 30 and those are all like one-on-one calls pretty one-on-one calls usually 30 minutes to 45 you talked to 350 people and only 30 people only's a lot but that's so many calls like yeah like that's so much time yeah so I mean the typical role I always tell whenever a founder asks me for fundraising advice I'm like talk to about 10 times as many people as you think you need to talk to how do you even find that many just friends like referral referral referral yeah friends of other investors that's that's the biggest one Twitter is amazing for for finding investors there's a whole dude yeah there's a whole VC community on Twitter a lot of like early stage venture funds will even have like public links where you can apply and send your pitch deck in I guess their job is literally yeah give money so that's one of the biggest let me let me talk about that for a second that's one of the biggest paradigm shifts for anybody listening that's thinking about raising money whether it's for a software company or a consumer package use company or you know even like a real estate project whatever it is if you're thinking about raising money from investors you've got to understand how investors think investors are literally capital allocators for a living their job

43:54is to put money somewhere and it might as well be with you because you're building the next big thing and the other paradigm shift that I had and this has been so helpful you know for fundraising even like for my new venture is if you are 100% certain that whatever your building is going to be successful which of course statistically not everything's going to be successful but if you're not 100% sure and 100% confident in yourself then you probably shouldn't be starting a business anyway yeah but if you are absolutely certain that you have an idea that's going to change the world or that's going to change in industry or that's just simply going to make money and be successful it doesn't even have to change the world if you're so confident that it's going to do that then it should it's a privilege that somebody is allowed to invest in my company that definitely flip that like that's the pair of founders a lot of founders feel like feel like they are like begging for money from investors and as soon as you feel that way or that you position it that way or you give off that energy you're you're you're gonna lose when you come into a call it's like all right this investor

44:59I might give them the opportunity to invest in in my company because my company is going to make them so much money and it's an opportunity that they that they would be stupid to pass on well you cannot say that you can't say that you just have to be thinking about of course that's 100% true because you can only raise a million dollars for two million dollars that's just for simple math 100,000 each yeah they get one percent each only 10 investors can do that and if you're right that could turn into millions of dollars for them absolutely and so then all these investors start pho-mo again like exactly three friends here said I invested in this company 50 grand then he starts my other friend invests 50,000 dollars I want to be like oh shit I'm gonna miss out there's something here so you can definitely create that pho-mo from investors 100% I never thought about like that yeah no it's literally their job and all you really have to do is like you don't have to be qualified you don't need a degree of college degree to raise money no the only type to have you just have to convince a rich person to give you money is that yes for sure and I want to I want to bring this back down to for you know any of the any of the younger guys or the beginners that are listening to this it's like you were 20 I what yeah but I want to say like

46:02it's not as intimidating as it might seem once you start to understand the intricacies and I will say there's a book out there that really helped me with fundraising it's called fundraising by Ryan Brezlow he's the founder of Bolt like the one-click checkout company they're like a $10 billion dollar company or something if anybody's thinking about fundraising go buy that book on Amazon and read it it's like the best book for for founders to read about fundraising but the next thing that I'll say is you don't have to know wealthy people to to raise money from you know from somebody right you can crowdfund there's platforms out there like republic.com for example that you know where you can crowdfund investment investment you know again you can go and you can just cold outreach to to VCs on Twitter like there's so many ways if you're scrappy if you're a hustler if you truly believe in what you're building that you can go and find money there's there is such abundance in this world and there's so much money out there that's looking for your home that's looking to be allocated somewhere and all you got to do is find it yeah because I mean people have tens of millions of dollars they want their money to do the work for them and if they

47:06can find some smart person with a good idea to do all the work and they just have to fund it absolutely no brainer and even if they lose a few million dollars that won't hit they make their money back. Well yeah that's that's the thing like that makes sense again a venture capitalist if they invest you know if they if they have ten million dollars and they invest in 10 companies a million dollars each and you know five of them go to zero it's like yeah they lost five million dollars but if one of those ten becomes a billion dollar company then you know they they just you know at ten or hundred extra money or whatever in terms of like dilution and everything else that might have happened in the meantime but you know they made all their their losses back and then some and so these investors are also playing a game too they're playing a numbers game yeah and so again you just have to believe in yourself and be confident enough to to know that you're going to do whatever it takes to make the successful yeah and if an investor can see that in you if they know that you're going to do whatever it takes to make it successful then they're going to invest in you every time okay that's really good advice I do want to take the conversation a little different way because I know a lot of people out there are going to be like still like even though we're saying that still intimidated scary they just don't want to do yet yeah so but

48:10just to wrap this topic up if you had one point five million dollars liquid at that time or maybe in your future ventures would you still choose to raise money knowing that you could like there's a pressure that you're losing somebody else's money like me as a person I would rather lose my own money than someone else's even though that's probably not the best business choice so if you had one point five million would you do it yourself and bootstrap it or would you have investors neither I would do a hybrid okay so the reason that again a risk tolerance balance basically not risk opportunity okay so a big reason why people raise money from what we call strategic investors is because they can open doors that you can't buy yourself so I would raise way less maybe only like a couple hundred grand but if an investor that has a crazy network or access to certain things inside of your industry that are very specialized and they can open doors to that they're much more inclined to open doors to that if they're if they have skinned again that's why wisk leaf it makes sense exactly gotcha yeah cool so wisk leaf was one of his investors initially and so

49:10you got the money it was pretty much already built almost kind of pretty much yeah and then that just kind of gave you the peace of mind and you can start planning so how much got devoted to like marketing and growth and how much got allocated towards the building product yeah so this is where we can really get into tactics we spent $40,000 on marketing the lifetime of the business wow yeah on on paid marketing so that's the theory that if you make a good product that people want they're going to share it and where to mouth will take it absolutely so if you take make a good product you don't really need to market even though you were a marketer so you could have if you wanted oh we still we still marketed I just said we didn't spend a ton of money on it okay we absolutely market it yeah well and that's like in terms of like really tactical stuff yeah to get a consumer product to go viral I mean I don't think anybody does it better than than Hunter Isaacson good buddy of mine who's behind ngl app I'm gonna happen on here soon you got to he's oh my god he's gonna he's gonna dunk on anything that I'm about to say in terms of in terms of product led growth but you definitely hold back his opinions oh man he's great I love Hunter but yeah I mean the big reason like we got to 30,000 users in like under six months because we went viral on

50:13TikTok and so I know you had all of our on who talked about the same thing he's he has a CPG company but this just goes to show like we had a software product he has a you know a physical goods product and both of us basically built our businesses on the back of TikTok organic virality but I want to understand it because his makes sense to me because it's sure sex chocolate controversial yeah yeah yeah catch your eye media kits I'm not necessarily gonna naturally send this to my girlfriend or send this to the beach out of the boys I mean yeah and just apples to apples like we probably didn't have nearly as many like views or impressions or anything like that all of her does because he can sell to literally anybody anybody with a credit card can buy his product versus like media kits you kind of have to be like a social media influencer to do it so the key for us was we went kind of like niche viral inside of a couple key communities so we went viral first and foremost in like the TikTok influencer space so there was a TikToker named Josh Richards who was also an investor in our company yeah and we basically we literally posted a video you can still find it on our on our

51:15media kits TikTok if you scroll down enough but it got like 1.5 million or like almost 2 million views in like a week and it was literally like this is the media kit that Josh Richards uses to get brand deals with like that robotic voice from TikTok like that was literally all it was and it got like 200 or 300 thousand views overnight and we went from we launched we had like 2000 users and it was literally like our launch party in August was like a big spike and then September October we're getting like five six sign ups a day it was just dead for like two months we were freaking out yeah and then this video I think we posted it in November so you posted it I think Casey posted it okay did you have like a company TikTok or was it yeah we had a company TikTok okay yep and it looks like that's how media kits yeah oh yeah media media kits yeah my business partner made it media kits account posted it and it went viral in November I think it was like the first week in November and it just went through the roof we went from getting like five six sign ups a day to like

52:19500 sign ups a day so like borderline major company that one like that like one TikTok that one TikTok and then well the and the second wave of virality that we had that really that really helped was in the twitch streamer community so I don't know if you know this I didn't even know this until until this happened but the twitch streamer community is like massive and like they there's like this crazy crazy community of twitch streamers and they only have like a few thousand followers each but the influence they have because it's long form it's like a TikTok or a friend at that point exactly a TikTok or with two million followers in my opinion has less influence than a twitch streamer with 10,000. TikTokers have the least influence exactly you don't even like search for their content yeah you don't even know who they are you don't know their names you don't know what their voice sounds like yeah exactly so these twitch streamers have these cult followings yeah and they're also another thing about them is they're all friends with each other yeah and so we then after going viral on TikTok we went viral on Twitter which is where all the twitch streamers hang out when they're not streaming and that sent us through the roof again and we actually

53:23we we didn't even have a twitch integration at the time but we had a couple twitch streamers that were using it for their other social platforms yeah and then we built a twitch integration and then they started talking about it and it just boom another viral hit and it just went crazy that just makes so much sense because at that point you like want your friends to also succeed and if this helps you make more money you instantly tell your friends about it exactly that's really important with any SaaS and now you're going to be to be SaaS so that absolutely same concept B2B or B2C there is something called product led growth so the terminal it's PLG if you ever hear PLG in a software space that means product led growth and that means that the product is the marketing for you and so you know you don't put money into ads you don't do any of this because the product will market itself for you and one of the ways that we had PLG at media kits is when you signed up you would get your link and you're kind of inherently you inherently you want to share your link because you want to get brand deals right so guess what people started putting it in their link trees they started tweeting about it they started posting on Instagram they started posting it

54:26on Twitter they started pulling it up in the middle of their twitch streams and so it's basically just free distribution free marketing for us as a company and that was how we hit product led growth and and specifically in the twitch streamer community like we had these twitch streamers that would sign up for the product and then immediately post their link on Twitter and then their friends would see that and they would sign up and post their link and it was just this viral like network effect because they don't have like tweeted so hey check out my media kit but it's there and then other people that are like kind of looking at what are they doing what can I add to my yeah they see that and like look into it and then they make their own account so it has like an organic ability that's really smart so I was going to ask you that's like what that tick talk is what made it go big yeah kind of like your moment but you did have an interesting strategy with your launch party and you launch time product time so can you explain it real quick yeah so product time for those that don't know is basically a platform that allows people to like crowd vote on certain product ideas so it literally anything like there's there's B2B stuff on there it's mainly like B2C stuff

55:27but there's some B2B products on there and it's everything from like little tiny like micro sass apps all the way up to like proper companies like companies that you that are like household names that you and I would know have been launched on product time and so yeah basically like you go on there and you just vote on your favorite products and we posted media kits on there the day after we launched and we got second highest vote of product of the day which is annoying I wish we got first we we too is good yeah now it is what it is but yeah the product before us was super sick so can't complain but but yeah it's great exposure product time combined with our launch party got us our first couple thousand users and yeah product time's great if you're thinking about launching a SaaS platform like launch on product time is a great way to get some initial exposure from you know mainly like the software in the development community and yeah our launch party was kind of it was it was very intentional so Casey and I before doing media kits we actually used to throw

56:29networking events in LA we would like rent these crazy houses and then I think that's how our network got connected yeah exactly yeah exactly so all of a lot of our mutual friends like that's how I met them I'd throw these parties in LA with Casey we'd sell tickets for like 50 bucks a piece we'd rent a house for a day up in like the Hollywood Hills for like six or seven thousand dollars which back then was like all the money Casey and I have like we're I'm talking like 17 18 years old we'd spend like all of our money on like renting this crazy house and then we'd sell tickets for like 50 or 100 bucks a pop and then we'd have speakers and then we'd have like a little party at the end we'd have catering and whatever we did this like four or five times was it profitable um no it never made money but it it in fact it lost money most of the time yeah open doors exactly and you know even a few people that we met at those parties like ended up investing in a media kit so it just goes to show that everything comes full circle but yeah basically like Casey and I had thrown these parties and we knew that it was just a great way to to bring people together and so we decided to throw one for media kits and basically we just like got this event space which is uh was owned by one of our investors again so there's another reason like why you want to

57:32bring in smart money um and strategic investors but yeah we got this event space um with Califa gave us like a massive discount on his appearance fee again because he was involved in media kits um and so yeah we had Wiz Khalifa come and perform and it was just like a great networking event and we threw it in LA too so of course um some of the biggest influencers in the world were there which also meant that pretty much everything at the event we got for free so all the drinks all the catering like all the stuff that was there for people all the products and uh beverages were all sponsored because all these beverage companies wanted their beverages to be in the hands of these big influencers that they knew were going to be in our party yeah we kind of like game the system in that way and uh and then yeah it was a hit we got a couple thousand signups off of it was Khalifa got to meet him in person that was sick that's dope um but yeah I mean like I said from there we hadn't really figured out product-led growth yet so after the launch party the initial hype a couple thousand signups it just flatlined for about two months until that TikTok video went viral

58:33did you ever struggle with the turn after that of it um not really um we didn't even have our paid subscription out back then it was just free only um so no so no we did have a we did have some struggles with like product adoption so people would sign up they'd make an account and they wouldn't actually build a media kit because there's like two steps to using our platform free for that part yeah okay yeah it was always free it was a freemium product so it was free to make a media kit and then if you wanted like the bells and whistles like the upgraded stuff then you could pay for it what were some of the key upgrades white labeling it so like removing our logo um customizing it adding more than I think more than three platforms I think is where we limited it at so if you wanted if you had Instagram Facebook and Twitter and you wanted to add Twitch or YouTube or something you'd have to pay for the upgraded program um there was uh like like pro analytics we had additional analytics that we that we uh kept behind a paywall there was creating more than one media kit actually was a big one for us so like you know you might have one media kit that's specific to your Twitter and one that's specific to your YouTube um and so that was another big one so

59:34on our free plan you could only have one media kit so there's there's a bunch of stuff we put behind a paywall could you do you know the ratio between people who just use the freemium or can you not share that can you share that um I mean I'm sure people could like reverse engineer the numbers if I share that so probably not but yeah it was a pretty decent conversion rate okay yeah that makes sense the multiple media kit tied up on the YouTube so that makes sense okay cool so by the way the product launch was basically since you you live in LA right yeah he lived in LA influencers are your target demographic so to throw a party of influencers put media kits everywhere say media kits launch party and you have this core base it's gonna look into it and then you basically started you didn't have the product led growth but after that you learned you needed that figured it out yeah so the freemium version people could just use it if they wanted to put it into like their link tree and their bio people would initially find it yeah exactly so let me recap you had the idea in 2017 but it was too early you didn't have the knowledge or the resources then later around COVID you see this probably before COVID right right after COVID okay right around there you see your surgeons and tiktok influencers coming huge and so you're like hey that idea something I

1:00:34want to pursue you hired two developers and a designer you spend way too long designing it before launching it you have to figure out how to raise money you do it with your network and then from there you're able to get it done don't do a ton of marketing launch on product hunt you do the launch party get to enough users but then you find out the product led growth problem and you come up with that idea and then your strategic investor Josh Richards makes a tiktok that goes viral and that skyrocket to the growth of the software absolutely yeah and then six months later we got acquired six months later you got acquired and you chose to sell basically because you were pretty much out of that runway and so you could either raise another round you had a lot of users so you're making decent revenue and so but you still need to raise revenue to or raise money to continue that level of growth exactly we actually we literally had the acquisition offer and an offer to raise another round of funding at a pretty like a yeah like an eight-figure valuation both on our desk it really just comes down to how far did you want to take it yeah and then ultimately who's

1:01:37has who's in a position to actually make the successful yeah and you basically looked at the market and you saw a lot of competitors I'm again he made a whole video on this go watch his channel yeah yeah competitors that were like small companies like our size and then we also had meta rolling out a media kit tool and YouTube rolling out a media kit tool it's like and I can't help but think that maybe we influenced them a little bit definitely I mean it's like it's like Amazon you know like Amazon has all the data and so like they have Amazon basics and so they'll just like see which products are selling at a really high margin right now yeah all right let's just figure out and make that real quick yeah it's the same in software and like we can talk about this too like in software software software native itself is not IP anymore like it used to be because it was so hard to build but the the barrier to entry is so low now that like anybody out there listening if you build a great product and you start making a bunch of money someone is going to rip you off it's not if it's when exactly and so the way that you build defensibility and IP in software is brand and distribution and so with media kits we have brand nailed down pretty early

1:02:40like things like our domain and the people we had involved in stuff like that's brand right and then distribution would be things like product-led growth or channel partners or you know investors that are walking us into the you know the biggest music labels in the country to get us you know enterprise deals like that is how you build a moat and how you build IP and defensibility around a software product the code itself is never going to be defensible yeah there's always someone out there that's going to be able to take what you're doing and re-engineer it it's like your advantages that other people can't replicate exactly even though they're not like you don't create them it's just your relationships or something that you other people have built up for you yep you can find forces yep cool that makes a lot of sense but this kind of actually is a great segue into micro-sass because yeah that was something that most Facebook and YouTube have a broad product they were neglecting that but over time they're getting a lot of things done they're ready to tackle that because now they're seeing them to market because they can clearly see how successful yeah it is in all these link trees your competitors see that too and so you saw a lot of people kind of starting it you saw that you weren't you were self-aware to know that you probably couldn't

1:03:41compete with meta in a company that wanted to buy it was like actually had a lot of those advantages exactly and so you wanted to hand it off to them because you think they could do it well did you have to work there at all I did yeah worked there for a few months so did Casey and then I left because I want to start something new but you were allowed to leave like was there like contingencies yeah there was an urn out I left before it was like fully vested but it is what it is it's at that point it was an opportunity costing for me exactly it's like you know I made a little bit of money on the acquisition and then I could have made more by staying but I chose to I chose the bet on myself and start something new as opposed to waiting there okay so then let's just go straight into what you right when you left yeah I would do the same thing I don't think I could work or do like that I get it but next you went into what we're going to call the microsast phase you're like yeah did you sell everything moved a ballie then just make that no so so the crazy thing about that I don't even know if I went into this in the video but yeah basically the software company that I eventually sold the e-mon we built it so so keep in mind I had my marketing agency started media kits the marketing agency kept running and it was actually we never took a salary

1:04:43for media kits a case you never paid ourselves and one of the reasons I was able to do that is because I had this marketing agency that was still making money of course and so I had a business partner at the marketing agency Caden who was running it when I was running media kits so he was just keeping you know just basically maintaining it keeping keeping the client happy and we used this white labeled CRM and this white labeled CRM had a problem on a per client basis we could see everything like ad spend click-through rate like all these things that you need to know as a marketing agency like all your analytics but you could only see it per client and so you'd have to click into every account go to the analytics ironically very similar to the problem with media kits is like the analytics are there they're just dispersed in a way that like isn't easy to access and so I always joke that this company agency reporting dot com was like it's like media kits for marketing agencies it's like kind of the same concept is just taking analytics from an API that already exists and just centralizing them in a nice UI like that's basically what it was but anyway we had

1:05:43this problem where like we had we had over a hundred clients at one point and we just couldn't keep track of all the different metrics and like we we jump on a client call and it'd be like oh well how are the leads doing this week or where's the ad spend in relation to the monthly budget or where is the click-through rate where you know versus last month and like these are just basic answers that are basic questions that we couldn't answer as easily as if we had it all in one dashboard so what we did in the spirit of building an MVP we went and just basically pulled the API into a Google Sheets originally but it was a disaster like my my business partner cadence like a wizard on excel and Google Sheets and so he did it and it worked but it was just it was slow and it was like things would break all the time like you know the logic that connects everything would like break and like things would like error out like man what if we just built our own software to do this and so I found the domain agency reporting dot com bought it for a way less than you might think I bought it for and basically we went and we took all of the data from this white labeled CRM

1:06:45across all of all of our clients and we basically built a dashboard the way that we wanted to see that data and we built it for ourselves and we never we never even thought that we would sell this to anyone else we just built it for our own agency and we use our own profit from our agency to pay for it and uh and then once it was built we shared it with a couple buddies that were using the same white labeled software and they were like yo okay like can I use that like sure yeah how how difficult was it to transition from internal use to productized I mean in terms of like you know productized I guess yeah kind of like we built it in a way that it was scalable um we just didn't have like a way to take payment so it was basically yeah I was just creating a new user account or like okay yeah just put like a put a stripe paywall on this thing and see if people will buy it this kind of their account interesting so yeah I mean basically what we did is like this this white labeled CRM company has like Facebook groups with like tens of thousands of people in them that are all like agency owners like we were and uh I went in there and again just like media kits I was like hey guys

1:07:46like if something like this existed like would you use it and then I went and everybody that said yes I just PM them on Facebook I'd be like hey check this out and send the link they go sign up and they originally it was a wait list and then eventually we started taking taking payment um yeah we had like 400 agency owners that signed up for the wait list oh my god um in like a day holy shit and so we're like wow well this is a very clear product market fit um that's another term in software that's used very often PMF product market fit it means that your product actually resonates with your target market um and validate that they want it exactly yeah so yeah that's that's how we uh that's how we got our first customers for that and um yeah we're like okay cool well we're we're selling this now we got it up to a decent like MRR run rate um but it wasn't something that like we wanted to do long term and when we launched it was right around the time that I sold media kits like we're kind of like working on this just like in our free time yeah and um it was like making decent money and I was like I have I want to build something else like

1:08:47I already knew like the next like big company that I wanted to build and like this is just going to be like a distraction it's like I don't want to have a side hustle I don't want to be distracted by this thing and there's a whole market out there for micro acquisitions there's even um there's even a company called acquire.com that's literally built around Andrew Guazdecki he's amazing if you if you guys want to follow someone in the software space on twitter follow Andrew he's amazing but yeah he literally has a marketplace that's for this for these like 10 to 100 000 dollar acquisitions of just like these software companies that are pretty basic that just solve one problem really well and uh anyway so there's a whole market for that and we actually listed on micro acquire and we got some increase but then I was like hmm like who has like a large following of agency owners that like might get value from the software and uh yeah and I was like iman like let me let me just text iman and like iman iman and iman and I've been friends for years like we we connected in 2017

1:09:48we hung out in London a couple years back so we've always stayed in touch so I shot him a text and I'm like hey bro like I've got this software that does this and it's like built for agency owners to like consolidate their data and we're doing this much in revenue and I just want to get rid of it because I'm building something else I don't want like I don't want to be distracted by it like do you want it and he goes yeah bro I'll buy it like name your price I'm like okay well like here's my price this is like this is like how much we put in and like I want to make a little bit of profit obviously so like this is what I'm willing to sell it to you for he's like cool yeah let's just jump on a zoom call and figure out the details we jump on a zoom call it's like 30 minutes we're just like shooting the shit I'm just giving him like the rundown on the numbers and then he's like all right cool like yeah just let me know like sent like semi-wire info like I'll send the money and then yeah like a week later he sent the money and we just transferred him the domain and the the database and how's it super simple yeah it makes sense it could be if at his user base exactly yeah you didn't need it anymore yeah that makes a lot of sense and I love the story about both your

1:10:51ideas because they both came from firsthand experiencing the problem that is the biggest thing in software if you try to build software where you don't deeply understand the problem or you don't deeply understand the customer you're never going to succeed because you'll always be one step behind a competitor that does I think that's a lot of like people don't understand the big companies like the ones in the hundreds of millions or billions are the ones who have just built these softwares for their company yeah and that's why they're able to scale because they have advantages or they have better information or they can communicate more quickly so they save times they can talk to 20% more customers a day yeah and so these internal softwares for companies are what make them great and so if you have the problem firsthand you work at a company and your job is something and then you have the problem that's a huge opportunity for you to just go build an MVP on the side and then start trying to use it at your company or sell it to other companies like yeah that's just trying to try and try and try. And I think this is one of the biggest points like we were talking about before the podcast like this is one of the things that I want to drive home. It's not hard to start a software company in this day and age all you have to do is find a product with an

1:11:56API, a software with an API that has an underserved segment of the market so with media kits we found that analytics were convoluted and they didn't talk to each other across platforms so we took all all these social media APIs, we built a really nice UI on top of it. And the show, like a UI is just the analytical dashboard. Exactly. It means user interface. It means what you can see. So there's the front end and back end and software. The front end is what you can see the back end is the code that makes it all appear on the screen. And so yeah, basically, if you find an API and productize it, you can sell that and you've got a software business. And that's literally what I've done. All three of my software companies have just been productized APIs. With media kits, it was social media APIs. With agency reporting, it was the API of this CRM platform. And then with my newest company, it's APIs of these small business point of sale softwares. Have you been plugging in AI APIs? Of course. We can talk about that. I'll hold on to the end.

1:12:57But I think this is the biggest generation for our age. Absolutely. Our parents or the generation of force at the internet, we have AI. Every software is going to use AI. No software has AI. Just a big opportunity. There's no way to do it. And no code, APIs, no code, SAS builders like Bubble, it's never been easier. And so I think the reason most people say that software's not for beginners is because it's only not for beginners who have no experience working anywhere. Because you don't know the problems that exist. You have to have a job or be working on something every day to see a problem. But now with the no code tools that you mentioned earlier, if you see a problem, you can build it without knowing how to code. There's API no code, like make.com or Zapier. And then you can literally just start bringing it to market without having to put any money into it. So now, the best business model is beginner friendly. You just have to find an idea and then validate it by taking surveys. Yeah. Fun fact, my business partner, Cadence on make.com's homepage, because he's a power user of make.com.

1:13:57We've been doing exactly this. That's what we're doing. Exactly what your new business is. Let's just go ahead and go into that. So you sold the Microsofts, the agency software. Because you saw one micro problem on Go High Level. And they don't show one aspect of the analytics. So you just made this for yourself. You realize hundreds of other people could benefit from it. And then you sold it to someone that serves those people. Super straightforward. And again, you just happened to know Emon personally, but you could have sold it on acquired. Yeah, no. I want to say that too. We had offers on acquired.com. Emon was just willing to do the deal faster. Of course. And easier. Like there's a lot of paperwork involved. You have a commission in no fee. Exactly. Yeah, no commission, et cetera. acquired.com is an incredible platform. And if Emon had said no to buying agency reporting, I can guarantee it would have sold on acquired.com, for sure. I mean, do you see sales all the time on there? Like I know someone who literally just makes the same CRM every single month, he makes one a month,

1:14:58makes the same CRM and just sells it on there for 30. There are people that make millions of dollars a year, just building software companies, building no code software or just productizing API, selling them on acquired.com. They're making millions of dollars a year. Yeah, it's literally just like this guy makes, he just connects the analytics and makes a CRM for one specific industry and then just sells it to one company and then plugs in their actual API keys. Exactly. So they get their analytics. He could make it and then productize it, but then you have to like, he just doesn't want to do it. So he just likes making it, selling it. It's kind of like an agency almost. Like an internal dashboard agency. Yeah. It's cool. So this product had product market fit, your Microsoft's and it was clearly working and you could have scaled it. So why, but you saw a bigger opportunity. So even without that validation, you still chose to pursue this one. They didn't have validation on. First off, how did you find this problem? Yeah. And then tell me if you want to go into it. Yeah, sure. So I'll talk about it at a high level, but we did have validation on this one because I've been doing this. So it might seem like on this podcast,

1:15:59like I've kind of all over the place, but I've kind of, I've always done one thing. And for a long time, like when I was 16 years old, my very first job in high school was working at an auto repair shop. So I've always been a car guy. I've always been in the automotive industry. So my first agency was first. That's how you got with JR, which is really good. Yeah, exactly. So yeah, media kits was like a weird tangent. Like it was like a consumer SaaS company in like the influencer marketing space, which is so foreign to what I was used to. Like my first two businesses were both in automotive. And so, and even like agency reporting, we built that for my automotive marketing agency. So everything like the non-sexy stuff in my career has always been in the auto repair industry, which is kind of crazy because it's like one of the most unsexy industries ever. But it's an underserved industry. And it's an industry that I know very intimately and that I've been involved in for like a long time. And yeah, basically we're building kind of an AI-powered vertical SaaS company for the auto repair industry.

1:17:02And that's my new venture. I'm telling you, I'm gonna scream and on my YouTube channel for the last four or five months. And I really feel like people aren't grasping first how important his speed is, but how big of an opportunity this is right now. Like this is like dropshipping in 2014, 2015, Espan may at 2016. Like you can scale it to the highest level and you don't even have to make the product anymore. You just plug in an API, it's fucking crazy. Yeah. And to your point, so OpenAI went viral back in November, for launching Chat GPT. The irony about that is, so GPT-3 has been around for years. And there's actually a bunch of companies that are multi-million dollar companies that started, Jasper is a great example, that started back in 2016, 17, 18, just productizing GPT-3 and then Chat GPT for some reason is probably just the UI. Ironically, I didn't even really think about that until just now, but like literally Chat GPT

1:18:03was an internal tool that was just a productized API of something that already existed at OpenAI. So if you think about it that way, that is the epitome of what we're talking about is what OpenAI did with Chat GPT. But furthermore, these large language models have APIs. So a lot of these AI startups that you're seeing out there, all they are is OpenAI's API with a wrapper around it that's geared towards a specific industry. And like, you can build a big business doing that. Like that's specifically why they released the API, because they don't have like, there's only a hundred people there. They don't have the creativity or knowledge in these industries to know all the different ways it can be used. Since it's such a broad thing, so they open it up and give these people access to the APIs, then collect all the data on who's actually using it, and then they'll make better decisions from there. And there's also this concept of guardrails. So GPT 3.5, like these large language models, they have access to all of the information on the internet.

1:19:03But they don't have the context to put guardrails up around what's important and not important in a certain context. So to make that even simpler, for a dentist office, like, sure, you could just use the raw API from OpenAI to respond to somebody who wants to book an appointment at your dentist office. But what would be even more important is if you can provide context and guardrails, almost like at a bowling alley, like the little things that pop up on the side, that is what the big opportunity is. Because if you're a dentist, or you own a dentist marketing agency, and you can go and say, all right, I have all of this data from previous customers or from their point of sale software or whatever it might be. And I know x, y, z needs to happen before they can make their appointment. Or I know that they were supposed to get braces last time and they didn't. Now I can build that into my product.

1:20:04And it's going to inform this OpenAI endpoint to say something with more context. So instead of being kind of this very generic text generation, you can actually make it industry-specific by giving it more data that's contextual to that specific use case. And so yeah, we can dive into that if we want to get more tactical fit. I think that's all when people say they're training AI, that's all they're doing. It's like say you're a dentist, and you recommend one type of toothpaste. And so, and then they want to ask, what's the best toothpaste? You don't want them to answer your competitors' toothpaste. You want them to answer exactly what you recommend. You did a much better job at using simple, fine-ringed. Yeah. So that's kind of like the private data. That's what stable-to-fusions whole business model is. Exactly. They give everyone access to the large language model, but then they go ahead and train private companies' private data for their own use case. Exactly. Exactly. Every company needs that. Every company. Yeah. So it's massive. If I were to start a bootstrapped SaaS company

1:21:08for the very first time in 2023, I would take a large language model API, like OpenAI, I would take a no-code platform-like bubble, and then I would go find a really niche, very unobvious problem in a specific industry. And I would solve it using contextual data combined with, so contextual data from an API from something that's already in that industry, combined with the large language model from OpenAI. And I would use that to create a product that solved that problem really, really well. And then I would sell it on acquire.com for 500 grand. Pause the video. Go back 30 seconds. Watch that three times until you exactly understand what he means, because that is exactly what me and my partner are doing, and I have not told him that. Word for word. What me and my partner are doing. Out of all opportunities we could do with our network and everything, that's what we're doing. And he said that without knowing that I'm doing that. I did not. And if you think he's a smart person, if you think maybe I'm a smart person, rewatch that and really internalize what he just said.

1:22:11You're doing it. You want to share the industry overall? Yeah. We're doing it in the auto repair industry. Because you're only solely really because you're a car guy, I would say. Yeah, car guy and just happen to have a lot of cool knowledge and connections in that industry. And so it's just something that I'm very familiar with. That's another really important thing. We're doing it in the real estate industry. Neither me and my partner have any experience in the real estate industry, but we have a friend here who is killing it in the real estate industry, and that's such a big market. So it's like choose the big market, find a specific non-sexy problem, make the UI better and add AI anywhere you can. First want to do it. There's just like a no brainer playbook in my opinion. You know, the less sexy the problem is the better. There's somebody on Twitter called Cody Sanchez. She's, yeah, so she's an investor in my new company. Boring business. Oh, really? Yep. That's cool. And she talked about boring businesses. And that's literally, she buys laundromats for living. It's the most unsexy thing ever. But if you can build. And car washes too. And car washes too. You can build software for laundromats or car washes or dentists or whatever it is.

1:23:12And do exactly what I just said. Like there's a big business opportunity there. Again, it's like the mobile app change. Like every company already had a website, but now it's mobile app. So you can, that's an opportunity. Make them their mobile app. And now every company will need AI. So you just make them their AI version. Most of them aren't going to figure it out internally. And so if you just make it for the industry you're in, then you can sell that to other people. You know the unfortunate part, Brett? This video is going to get, I don't know, tens, hundreds of thousands of views. And 99% of the people listening are not going to do anything about it. I can't. It's not complicated. Like we are, we have four developers on our team. Yeah. And we're choosing bubble and make.com. We're choosing both no code to learn it. I'm going to look in the camera right now. And I'm going to say, if you are listening to this podcast, and you are one of the people that actually takes action on things, and that actually listens and applies the information that you're finding on the internet like this video, like you did not end up watching this long into this video for no reason. Go and actually make an effort to do what we're talking about.

1:24:12Because if you just watch this video, and then you skip to the next video, and then the next one, and then eventually you forget about this video entirely, and you never take action on it, then, you know, there's nothing better I can do to help you. So. And we're not selling anything. No, we're just, we're just, we're just, what we're doing. We're just hanging out, man, we're just talking about life. I just don't know how to word it for people. Like, you don't need to have the problem yourself. Find a friend that's in a big industry and see what problems they have, and then just be the bubble person. Or if you don't want to start that business, just hit me up and come work for me and I'll teach you the ropes. Yeah, I already do these, I guess. Yeah, it's not, what, so, but how are you going about like actually building it out? Or hiring, like finding your developers, or what's your team structure? At this time around, we have a great development team. They're all in house. We're doing it right. We're doing it. We're doing it like the, I guess the more traditional way. But for us, it's like, you know, this is going to be a big business for us. This isn't like sell it on, like, on, on acquired.com or anything like this is like a proper,

1:25:14like multi eight, maybe nine figure business that, that we're building. And, you know, we want to have the proper infrastructure to do that. What do you think? Out of all the software companies you've started, like, what were problems you were going into that you didn't think would be problems? Or what was something that you basically like believed going into it that turned out to be completely untrue? Hmm. Um, build it and they will come is not true. Okay. It's true to an extent. Yeah. And it's, it's not that it's completely untrue. It's just not, uh, it's not like the most accurate description of how things actually work. You actually have to market your product, believe it or not. You actually have to get eyeballs on your product for it to work. That should be a core thought process before even choosing what product to make is your ability to get eyeballs on it in the first place in my opinion. Absolutely. A first time founder focuses more on product than they do on distribution. A second time founder focuses more on distribution than product. And I am even with product led growth.

1:26:15Absolutely. I am, I am a embodiment of that. We waited way too long to launch media kits. We even talked about that, right? Because I was too focused on product. I thought the product had to be perfect versus this time around. Our product has been launched for six months already in a beta. Like we've had paying users for six months. And we haven't even launched publicly yet. Has the course of the product changed? Absolutely. Your initial idea was. Yeah, absolutely. 100%. And this time around we focused on distribution through partnerships and through, um, you know, we own one of the largest Facebook groups in our industry. And like there's these other like, just built that first. Yeah. So we built the distribution channels before we even built the product versus at media kits. We built the product and then we were scrambling to figure out distribution. So go into the Facebook group. That's kind of interesting. I don't know a lot of people would think about that. I'm a huge community guy and I see the value of that. So explain your thought process. Yeah. Yeah, basically we, uh, we started a Facebook group that now has thousands of members in a very specific niche.

1:27:15Um, and we're just in there thought leadership. We don't even, we don't even sell our software in there. It's literally just for, um, business owners in this niche to connect with other business owners. And that's, that's literally all it's for. And they just kind of help each other out. They talk about certain things. And then the best part is we don't have to promote our software because our customers will promote our software for us in this Facebook group. And so all we have to do is just be the stewards of like good vibes and like, you know, good conversations like, you know, as long as, as long as nobody's in there selling or promoting anything, you know, as long as there's no spam, as long as there's no negativity or hate happening in the group, like that's all we're there for is to moderate that. Um, it just grows by word of mouth. You know, these people invite their friends. Yeah. And then our customers will go in there and talk about how amazing our software is without us even having to ask them to do it. Communities are probably the most valuable part of the internet. Absolutely. And all you have to do, like it sounds, it's not. You create a place and then you like, just maybe share some resources to start it off. And then you start telling people one by one, hey, there's this Facebook group where

1:28:19you can learn about this and we can share this interest and share our problems. Yeah. And then you get like 20 people in there. They start talking to each other and then someone else comes in and they're like, hey, welcome to the group and it just starts to like live. It's like a living, breathing organism. Do I think Facebook groups are the most underrated thing in 2023? Facebook specifically is online groups. Facebook groups. Specifically Facebook groups. I use circle so why Facebook or Discord so why Facebook? Well, so for me specifically, like because we're in like, we're selling the small business owners, like that's where they are. Like that's really the only place they're going to be. That's the only answer to that question. Yes. But no, but I see your point though. I think Discord communities are great. Discord for younger people. Absolutely. Circles if you want it proprietary. But Facebook is where if you are older demographic that are into cars, that's where they live, then you make Facebook group. Sure. You pick one bait, you need to be intentional, I guess. Yeah. If you can be, and this goes back to like, this is human nature in general. This goes back to like, casing, I throwing those parties in Hollywood Hills to network and meet people. Like if you can be the steward of like a good time or a positive environment for people to hang out and meet peers,

1:29:20like you will be seen as an authority in that industry. Right? And so it's like, I had no business. Like the founder of MySpace came to one of my parties in LA that Casey and I threw. And like, I have his cell phone number now because of that. And this is just, it's just one random example. But like, no 19 year old kid has enough, like, enough credibility to like hang out with the founder of MySpace for three hours at some crazy mansion in the Hollywood Hills. The only reason that that happened for me and for Casey is because we were the stewards of this events and he wanted to meet the people that put it on. And this same thing goes for online communities, right? It's like, if I can bring a bunch of like-minded people together on the internet or you on circle, if you can do that and bring people together and have them enjoy what they're doing and have a great time and talk and network, and you're the one that's facilitating it, like you're going to reap the rewards of being that facilitator.

1:30:24So, community is everything on the internet. And but the reason he does this for your SaaS and you're doing it preemptively, because this would have been a good answer. You didn't do it with me to kids, I guess, but when you're building the product, this is a perfect answer. Build a community of people that have that same problem preemptively. So then you have a group of 3,000 people that you can then be like, oh, and magically guys, out of nowhere, I found this. I thought it was hard to hold on. Exactly. But we created it, but I think it'll help you guys because it helped us a lot. So you fostered that, now you have your core user base, and there's a Facebook group for them to give you feedback and iterate, which you're already benefiting from. Yep, yep. It's genius. And so, same thing goes for like, that's why I have my YouTube channel. Like, I was talking about a way different subject a year and a half ago, then I make a video on AI when Chad's GPT came out. It's not when the API came out, but when Chad's GPT came out, I got popular, I understood the concept, made a video on it. Now I'm going to think I'm an AI guy. Yeah. So, some huge AI expert, I get how it's good for people and how it's going to benefit in business.

1:31:24Yeah, but like, on the internet, how do you perceive you? Yeah, and there's always like, there's always got to be somebody who can articulate information in a digestible way. Yeah. And even like the example earlier that you made where I tried to explain something and then you explained it way simpler than I did, it's like, that's a skill, like that's super power, and I think that's why your content does well. That is solely my intention. Yeah. So, I optimized for understanding in as few words as possible. Yeah. That's the goal of the channel. Yeah. So, I'm glad, I appreciate you saying that. Yeah, of course. But, brother, you are a super successful software and that's what we're tackling right now. So, this is something that I'm actually genuinely interested in. And so, have you found like any sort of like actual marketing channels outside of organic product-led growth that worked for you guys? Like, you said you used TikTok with Josh Richards, but he was an investor. Did you guys try Facebook ads? Anything you didn't see working? Yeah, we've done everything. We've done Facebook ads, TikTok ads, Snapchat ads. My new company is a lot of in-person trade shows and expos and stuff like that. But, yeah, I think it's different for every SaaS company.

1:32:26I think you just, the fundamental question you need to ask, because I don't want to go into a whole monologue about Facebook ads, even though we could, if it's not applicable for you. But, like, as a software founder, what you have to ask yourself is, where do my customers live? Where do they hang out? Where do they spend their time? And then, where are my competitors hanging out and spending their time? And that should lead you to the answer to that question of how do I market to these? But, you say competitors, you more or so mean, where are they like marketing to? If you take one of your customers and open up their credit card statement, all the other businesses that they're buying from, where do those businesses find your customer? So, how are they marketing? Yeah. And then, just do what they're doing, essentially. Yeah. Well, don't copy what they're doing, but understand that there are certain channels in certain ways, whether it's, you know, like, inbound, outbound, selling, like, you know, organic marketing, paid marketing, like whatever it might be.

1:33:27Like, there's so many different marketing avenues and strategies and channels that you can utilize. But, you have to first understand which ones your customers are actually on and where they spend their time and their attention. And odds are if they've, if they're marketing on those platforms, they've been in the business for years, they probably figured that one out. Yeah, exactly. Like, take an educated guess that they didn't. They know what they're doing. Yeah. Okay, so, who do you learn from? Because you found success really young. How old are you now? 23. Yeah, you're still really young. You're killing it. So, where did you learn this from? So, I think that I've always, I like to think that I'm like a student of life. Like, I just love, I love just digesting information. And it was a really weird pivot for me, like from like the internet marketing world to like the venture back, like, startup world. Those are two very different communities that very rarely overlap. Ironically, Jasper is a great example of one company that did overlap because those guys came from like the internet marketing world. And now they're like a big VC back SaaS company.

1:34:29But it's very rare. And so, yeah, I mean, I try to consume content kind of from all sides, whether it's like, you know, a keynote on venture capital by Sam Altman or something like that on YouTube or, you know, a video by Imann or by you. Like, I'm always trying to just kind of learn from everybody that has different perspectives on things and take the things that apply to my business and apply them. And I think that's one of, that's one of the skills that, that if people can learn that early is really powerful is understanding that not every piece of advice, even not every piece of advice that Brett and I are giving you in this video is going to be applicable to what you're doing. But there's at least something, I'm sure. And if you can identify what that is and then take it and actually take action on it, then, you know, that's the most important part. Again, software is like really honestly straightforward to see success with. If you can see a problem and you can fix the problem, it'll work for you, it'll work for somebody else. Now you just need to tell other people that this solution exists. It's simple, it's not easy. That's what I like to say.

1:35:30Why do you think, I guess the barriers to entry, you raised money for your new one? Yeah, I did. A little bit strategically. So you just found investors that you think could get you into those type of business. Exactly. You saw before. And so now you have the mindset of giving them the opportunity. And then it's a no-brainer because they know they have the connections. Yeah. And of course, like the second time around, once you have an exit under your belt, it instills a lot more confidence in investors. They're like, oh, he's done this before he knows what he's doing. And that's why I say that to say that it's really important in my opinion that everybody's first business is bootstrapped. I do not recommend raising money for your very first business. I do not recommend starting a software company as your very first business. I think if you can start a professional services business, a marketing agency, something similar to that. Emon talks about this all the time on his YouTube channel. If you can start as a freelancer, turn that into an agency, turn that into a cash-flowing business, have some cash, and then start something like, you know, even to use all of ours as an example again, like a CPG company that's selling physical goods.

1:36:31CPG and software are very similar in the fact that they have very high startup costs. You're not going to do that as a first-time entrepreneur. You have to sell something that's scalable that has low overhead, like marketing services or some sort of agency model, that you can do to stack some cash, get some experience, then you've kind of like earned the right to move into something like D2C or software. And I truly feel that way. And the cool thing is, you can start a services business that's in the same niche as the software company that you might want to eventually start. You were a marketing agency for car people. Exactly. Yes. So that's a great example. Like, if you can go and figure out the pain points of a certain industry by providing services to them, that something that's unscathedable, that's not sexy, that's not, you know, getting some crazy, multiple or some crazy acquisition. But purely just to learn about your target customer and to learn how to run a business and file your taxes and just the basic stuff, right? Then you can go and start a software business.

1:37:33I do believe that like your first business has to be a service agency business of some sort. It could be mowing lawns. You could have a lawn mowing business. And then the people that are booking your services don't like, they are just calling you on the phone. What if I just made a marketplace for people in my local area to find people to mow their lawn? Yeah. That's your software company. And you can build that unbubble with a template with no code. Absolute lawn mowers of Arizona, even though there's no grass here, you might not see that as a success. Yeah, maybe not here. But if that makes sense in your area, you just sell that as a service, then you see a problem that people are having a hard time booking people. And then you make a software company around that and you just use those people and they're like, oh, I don't like it. It's clunky, I'd rather just call you. And maybe you have a bad problem. You're making one of those start an artificial turf company here in Arizona. But a service is literally anything just so you can learn the problems with this. And then you can build a software out of that because objectively software is the best business model. But it's not maybe so it's good software is beginner friendly, but not first business.

1:38:33Not first time friendly, not first time. So you could it could be your first business if you understand a business. You need to have some conceptual understanding of how to run a business and at least some conceptual understanding of how software works and how it scales and how to get distribution. And if you've worked in a business, you understand how business works. For sure. Another great thing. I really like to push back against this idea on YouTube and this whole internet marketing, like kind of like self-help industry. I think pushes like the anti-college, anti-job kind of narrative. And I completely disagree with that. I push it hard. My next video is very anti-college, anti-job. So here's the thing. That's fine. That's fine. And for context, I've never had a job and I didn't go to college. We did it. Well, I did go to college. The point that I'm making though is I think sometimes for some people it might be good to go and get a job at a company that's similar to an industry that's similar to something that you want to start a business. And I think sometimes you might even learn more doing that than trying to start something from scratch and just failing over and over again.

1:39:39I am anti-college, 1000%. Not anti-job necessarily. I don't think I could ever do it. It must be for that specific reason. If I was so aware of what I wanted to do for a living so intentionally, then it would make sense to go work for a company to learn the industry, learn the tools they use, learn how they communicate and learn their problems. They didn't go do it myself, but it would have to be hyper intentional. I just don't think people that are just starting out at 18 are even close to knowing what industry they want to work in. So they don't do that. But that's a really good point. But going and just working for a business that's run by an entrepreneur that is like an entrepreneurial culture, it doesn't even matter what industry is in. You're going to learn so much about how to run a business, how to do customer service, how to take care of your employees. There are so many things that are intangible that you and I probably had to learn the hard way because we've never worked somewhere. Yeah, I think about this all the time. I'm like, damn, things like HR and payroll taxes and all these things that I don't know how they work because I've never been on the flip side.

1:40:41So I'm like, oh man, if I had just worked a regular job for a year, I would probably know how these things work, but I don't. And so I have to figure it out on the fly. And you pay for that. Yeah, exactly. You literally pay for that. Yeah, that lack of knowledge. And typically you have to hire someone who then has done it before and then that's exactly the only way you do learn. Exactly. Interesting. So do you think that I just don't know like what age were you when you started consuming YouTube? Oh, like 15, 14. Because I feel like everyone I've had on this podcast, all of us in our circle all lived the same life. 14 to 15 years old. We were all watching the e-commerce, SMMA, YouTube, etc. Then we all kind of went to these networking events out in California. And then we all met and then now everyone's at this 22 to 25 range, making $100,000 if not millions of dollars. Dude, that's how that's how email an I met. I was making SMMA content on YouTube when like I had like a couple thousand subscribers and so did E-Mon. He had like a couple thousand subscribers. And this is back in like 2016, like late 2016.

1:41:41And he like shot me a DM. I still have it. I went back and like read it the other day because I was like, I was like looking to his channel. I'm like, damn, I'm so proud of this guy because it's crazy. But like he resets me and he's like, hey, Karen, like, you know, great to connect. Like I like your SMMA content on YouTube is cool. And like we just kind of hit it off and we've stayed in touch ever since. And now he's like the biggest creator on the platform. Oh, his growth in that industry. It's like it's so impressive. Yeah. He just takes everything so serious and it's just becomes such quality. So he deserves everything. Absolutely. But it's also interesting to me to see. And he's so young, dude. He's just been in the games, he's 14. It's so cool. It's cool for me to see also come a little older. I'm 26. And so I'm starting to see like this like, because I was watching Emon when I was like five years ago in my SMMA. But now we're seeing like these new wave of like a new generation of influencers all in the same coming up with no code SAS AI. The new like generation businesses of the futures, what I call. And so it's really cool to see that it's like it works. We kind of laid that framework down. Yeah.

1:42:41One of the first iterations of like internet money kids running Facebook ads. Did I? The gurus abused everybody. Yeah. We just went through it. I love, I love Bia Hazer. Yeah, he's like one of my favorites. And then there's this kid called Caden Booth. I don't know if you've seen him on TikTok. Right. If you've got to check it out, he's hilarious. He'll take like these, these like super basic concepts like like mowing lawns and stuff like that. And he'll just go out and like make a bunch of money doing it. But he has like this comedic effect to it. And the videos are hilarious. Kids like 17 or 16. He's just the angles because it's easy. He's just showing people how easy it is to go out and make money doing stuff. Almost everyone's just like in their mind. Yeah, but he makes it into like a skit. So it's hilarious. But anyway, yeah, like there's so many kids doing this. And it's incredible to see. So I also find it so interesting of like the influencer dynamic of like growing a following. Then do you start the business or start the business then grow following? And so I do want to ask you because you made YouTube videos like way back on the day. And you have like over like probably 11 to 12 kids. Yeah, but you have videos with hundreds of thousands of views.

1:43:42But you took a when you started media kits, you stopped. Yeah. So and I still I I've been like basically not on the internet for like the last six months because I've been building my new business. You sold everything. I I did. I'm of the opinion that like so my new business, my new business does not benefit from my personal brand at all. Right. It's just not like my my my personal brand is like in the same space. It's like younger guys that are like up and coming in business. And like I'm selling to brick and mortar small business owners with my new company. So I just kind of made the decision like my personal brand has been amazing to me over the last six years. It's allowed me to connect with guys like you and Imon and Casey and J.R. and all these guys. And it's amazing. But for me like I've just recognized that I've picked a lane that doesn't require me to be like on the internet. And so I've kind of taken a step back. Do you prefer that? I do. I think it's more peaceful. And I don't want my business to be dependent on me because it's less sellable.

1:44:43And so I think there are people that do it really well. Like there's plenty of people that have a personal brand that's really big and also a business that's unrelated that makes a bunch of money. And that's great. But if if somebody's business relies on their personal brand, that's just that's not for me. It's not something that I want to do because I don't see it. I don't see it as having longevity. I prefer to talk to people who don't have personal brands because even though I'm in this group too, like a lot of the success of your business if you term a personal brand is solely because of your personal brand. And that actually almost is the business. You know what I'm saying? And that's why you're successful. So when I can talk to people who don't have a huge falling but their business is making millions of like you know it's because their tactics and their product was so good. Yeah. And everybody realizes this eventually. Like you see all these influencers launching product lines that are like branded separately and like all these things. And even Eman like his software company. It's like yeah it benefits from his personal brand but like hopefully they'll be able to keep that separate. So it's like you know people realize this eventually and you know I think for me it's like maybe I'll come back on YouTube and Instagram one day and like try to grow my personal brand in the next few years.

1:45:52But for now kind of just keeping a low profile. I mean I guess that's why it's why Alex and Mozie came back like so heavy for sure for sure because he saw how powerful like Kylie Jenner and Mr. Beast were. But he also sold his business and it was it was like that's it and he was doing something different now. So now he has a really cool model. Yeah. The acquisition dot com models really cool. Why'd you sell everything mood to balling? You know you don't know how many times I fantasized about that. Dude I haven't texted you. Dude dude dude I know I know like yeah it's uh it was amazing. Yeah so for context I lived in Bali for four months. And it was it was a few things. So selling media kits was like it's a big thing for me because it was like my identity. Like it's all I did for two and a half three years. It's all I was focused on. And so having that weight off my shoulders like you know investors employees like you know a month like issues with the software bugs. I asked you about that one. What was it like was having investors really stressful? It wasn't stressful like on a day to day basis but like on a macro level yeah because like you owe people money and you got to make sure you got to get that.

1:46:57I thought I could have a really impact me. Yeah so it was you know it was the first time in my life where I had no responsibilities or obligation. Like when I sold media kits I stayed at the company for a little while and then I left. And I had no responsibilities. I had gotten rid of my apartment. I had I had sold all my cars. I had sold media kits. And I literally just had zero obligation. I had no employees. I had no investors. I had nothing. I was just free. And I was like I knew I wanted to build my next SaaS company. And you know my so my business partner Caden and I were like all right where can we go for like 90 days to just lock in and be focused. Timezone doesn't matter. You know distance doesn't matter. You know price to a certain extent doesn't really matter because like we're just going to go somewhere nice. And just enjoy it. And like especially like in your early 20s like having like basically no responsibilities. I don't have a dog or anything like I don't have a girlfriend. You're a car guy I was surprised to see the RA.

1:47:57Yeah you know I had owned it for like two and a half years so I was kind of ready for the next thing. But yeah man it was just great like being able to go there and just live out of suitcase for four months and just do whatever I wanted. Was there an intention? Like was there like a clear goal like an outcome you wanted or like to build my next company to build. Was it a side of what it was or you already had the idea? We already had the idea. It was to build the MVP. Gotcha. And also that was on like the business side it was to build the MVP for my next business. And then on the personal side it was to kind of like just like this sounds super cliché but like rediscover myself. Like what are my core values and beliefs? What do I want the next three to five years of my life to look like? How am I going to kind of like reinvent myself after media kits because so much of my personal brand and my like reputation was wrapped up in media kits and I wanted to pivot away from that. You know, Hormosi even talked about this recently. He uses the example with who's the actor from Wolf of Wall Street? No. No the other guy. Jonahill. The... Oh yeah. Matthew McConaughey. Matthew McConaughey. Yeah. And Hormosi made a video about this.

1:48:57It's like Matthew McConaughey used to do like ROM comms and then he disappeared for a couple of years and came back to like you know more serious characters. Like I kind of went through the same thing. It's like you go through these ebbs and flows in your life and your career. Like almost like these character arcs where it's like Kirin O'Brien the marketer, like the internet marketer guy. And then it's like Kirin O'Brien the sass founder in like the influencer space. And so you know 23 years old now having gone through the kind of those two phases. Like this next one is a whole different identity. It's a whole different kind of like like brand and it's a whole different way that of that I want people to think about me. And more importantly that I want to think about myself. And so it was kind of just like a reset. It was like I was off social media. I deleted everything off my phone. It was just like a cleanse. So it's almost like people are the world's always trying to put you in a box to like categorize you know understand you. Yeah. I love the fact that people like Kanye West was like the best one. Yeah. Like really re-adventures this update. Yeah. Because he used to be the shutter shades guy when I was at school.

1:49:59And he went to Yeez's which was completely op- Now he's a fashion brand like now he's crazy. Sometimes you just got to change your environment to be able to see things like from a different perspective. So I highly recommend. Oh yeah. You know if any like young people are watching like go out and see the world. Like you don't have to have a bunch of money to do it either. Like you know you can these businesses we're talking about starting you could do that from your laptop from anywhere. You like evolve as a person if you go to like a third world country or like not necessarily third world. Like I went to the country Columbia by myself. Oh yeah. Like traveled there by myself or one of my agency clients. And trying to just communicate with people who don't speak English and then like a meals two dollars like. You're a whole world you shifted. Yeah traveling to a third world country and then more importantly what you just mentioned solo travel. Is so important like I think everybody should do a multiple week if not multiple month long solo trip somewhere with no friends. Because it's 100% on you to figure out install every problem you're facing. Exactly. And then you don't have Wi-Fi half the time. Yeah it's such a paradigm shift and it's just like a different perspective on life. And yeah I recommend it to everybody.

1:51:00Yeah. So what have you thought about like as you come back from that. Have you like tried to like I feel like there's a huge shift in like team size going down. Are you like optimizing for like the most lean team possible or do you like view this as like I want to make this a thousand person company. No headcount is not a measure of success. And that one of the things in Silicon Valley it always used to be raising money how many raising money and how many employees you have. Like those are stupid metrics. No what's your EBITDA what's your revenue. You know what's your net retention. What's your what's your revenue per employee. Like those are the things that I care about. And yeah for this new venture like I'm focusing on quality of people way more than quantity of people. And one a player is worth five C players. How have you gone about finding them. I think it's just intuition man and like this is one of the things like. It's all this stuff when I was coming up when I was like basically like a freelance or running my agency. I always thought stuff like.

1:52:01Stuff like culture and stuff like. You know your values and your mission statement and all this stuff. I thought it was like cliche and kind of stupid but. If you actually do it right and you actually like do it in a way that's that's profound and that. That people can get behind and like turn it into like a real movement. Then you know the results of that are like crazy. So there's more fulfillment that people can get out of like working on a problem that feels important. Yeah absolutely. Then just money. Yeah especially people who aren't naturally entrepreneurs. They want to feel like they are important at the job. They're playing a big role in their working on something that's actually making the world a better place. Yeah 100% and you have to be you have to evolve so much as a leader to attract. And a lot of it like the law of attraction is very real in every aspect of life. And to attract a player talent you have to be an a play and like an a plus leader. And not saying that I am I'm working towards it every single day. I don't think anybody is a perfect leader but like I've been like another thing I did in Bali as I studied leadership a lot.

1:53:05And I read a lot of books and really went down like this rabbit hole of like human psychology and how that like relates to leadership. And so you know for people that are watching if you're thinking about you're starting like an AI start up or starting like a no code like a bubble company or starting a lawnmowing business doesn't really matter what you're doing. Eventually you'll get to a point where you need to start hiring employees and building a team. And understanding how to do that in a way that builds real culture and that actually gets buy in from your team members. And like truly does that right not just you know like the facade of doing it where people stick around for six months and then they leave. Like if you can really nail that like business at a high level is a people game. And that's it like product IP patents trademarks you know all that stuff it doesn't matter you're in the people business. If you can't nail that then none of the rest of the stuff I just listed really matters too much because it'll just implode.

1:54:05Yeah it's like human capital your your company is the average value of the average IQ your company in a way. Yeah so like if you have a really high quality people you're going to take away further. Absolutely. I really do you like go for all full time employees or do you lean towards contractors more. We're very contractor heavy. Yeah so there's no right answer. Everybody on our team right now except for like one person I think is full time. And that's very intentional because we want to build the culture in that way. I think sorry is it because sorry you finished. No no you're good I think a hybrid is the right approach in the beginning even like this new business that we started we were a hybrid approach in the beginning. But like the status of an employee being a 1099 or W2 isn't what makes them a contractor right. It's about how and grand they are in your culture and so you can make like someone who's technically like on paper a contractor. You can make them a part of your culture and then you know eventually transition them over to like a full time position when you're when you're able to.

1:55:08So that's all semantics it doesn't matter. Is it more sort of sell your company though? Yeah I'm not I'm not worried about that it's it's like it's more just like building building a team that actually cares about what you're doing. Right. Like a freelancer is not going to care about what you're doing. So I think there's like there's different types of tools in the toolbox right. It's like you've got like your exacto knives and you've got like your machetes. It's like you you can hire and the the verbiage that I like to use is like missionaries versus mercenaries. So your mercenaries like your I know this one. Yeah exactly. Yeah your mercenaries like your machete and your missionaries like your exacto knife. It's like they're for different purposes and so your your mercenaries are the freelancers. The guys that are just going to come in they're going to get shit done and they're just going to do it because they're getting paid to do it. And there is a time and a place for that in every business. Sometimes there's a time and a place for that in you know in a business for a very long time. Even once you have an amazing culture there's still a place for outside consultants you know mercenaries to come in and just and just do one task really well and then leave.

1:56:14Like there's absolutely a place for that. But the core of your team should be missionaries. There should be people that are there for the mission that you're on that are marching with you that are like side by side like shoulder to shoulder with you in combat. So to speak like those are the people that you want their gain and day out and every now and then you might have to bring in a mercenary to get something really specific done. Do you try to optimize everyone to work in person? We're balancing that. We're about to open an in-person office here. But yeah, we do have employees that are in other cities that are in the same city as each other and they'll work in person together at like we work or something. Yeah, okay cool. So you were able to achieve a lot of success very young like you're still young. But even before your software companies you were successful. And like what do you attribute that to? What do you think it was in you that like because so many people like can't ever wrap their head around making $10,000 a month or can't ever wrap their head around even starting their own company.

1:57:16So what like what was it? How are you able to do that bro? I think about this a lot and I don't know like innately what it was like I always as a kid like I always wanted to do things like differently. I always had like this. Yeah, like I had this like I never did well with authority like coaches and teachers and stuff like that. I always wanted to kind of do things my own way. Lemonade stands flipping sneakers on eBay like I did all that stuff. And I don't know like innately what drove that but I always think that it was like kind of a fear of being average. Like I grew up in a like a middle class family like I wasn't I wasn't poor by any means like I never had to worry about where my next meal was coming from. But like you know I went on like a vacation like every other year maybe and like my dad drove a Honda cord and like we lived in a like a modest house in a modest neighborhood. And like there just wasn't anything crazy like I never I never saw. So I was like no no both neither my parents were entrepreneurs.

1:58:18So I didn't even know what the word entrepreneur was until I was like 17. And so I say all that to say that like I grew up in that like typical like white picket fence type you know type situation. And you know sometimes like a lot of people that grow up in very underprivileged situations they hustle because they want to get out of that. And I totally understand and empathize with that. For me it was more so like I see the people around me and they're kind of like they're just scraping by like they're they're fine like they're living for the weekend essentially. Exactly and. And the bare minimum to get my next to get off. Exactly. And I just didn't I didn't resonate with that I always knew from a young age I'm like I want to do I know there's something beyond this like I know there's another level above this that I can get to. And I just wanted that I didn't even know what it what it was necessarily I'm just like I want to do more with my life than than what I'm exposed to on a day today basis. I'm so fascinated by how many like pure quantity like 20 to 25 year old millionaires there were 20 years ago or 30 years ago before the internet.

1:59:23I know so many kids make it 100k a month so many people that have cracked the code with whether they're a go high level affiliate or they're running an smma or drop shipping whatever it is there's so many. And it's just because like if you just fill your mind with the right information on the internet like. Just got to do the work execution yeah like there's I don't I just don't get it. I've just always felt like an entrepreneur naturally so I've just always been watching these YouTube videos yeah and over time to start doing something one thing leads to the next one thing leads to the next you meet better people cooler people yeah slowly rise to the top feels really long in the time like when you're in it but. Dude I want to touch on that to man like the people you do it with is everything like everything like having a friend having a friend group and a network of people that are like killing it in their own respective ways and being able to be around them and spend time with them like that's why like Casey J R and I and a few other people like we all moved out here said to like we all moved out here to Scottsdale around the same time like when we're all like 17 18 years old you know and like that was I think I tribute a lot of my success to that just being around.

2:00:28Those guys like most important thing we weren't even doing the same stuff none of us are even in the same industry doing the same thing we're all doing like the stuff we're doing couldn't be more different in terms of how we make money but we were just around each other and like we go to dinners and we hang out and I think that's like a big big piece of it is just being around like minded people. I mean how much has been seeing e-shon success been motivating you from afar. Absolutely. I've served like I love that guy and so it's just like we're not even remotely in the same industry but just seeing that makes me want to be better and so that's so so critical and that's what I was seeking for a long time which is what online communities are also great for. Yeah, and the problem when everyone is young is I feel like they think money is the issue when that is like really not the issue from for go to 10 to 100 K really isn't money. No, it's just information and your tea like that you're who's who you're doing it with essentially. Yeah, have you been are you doing the next one KC? No, KC's KC's not involved in this one. He's he's doing his own thing also in the AI space.

2:01:28So if you're not doing something if you're not building AI no code SAS or AI SAS like I don't know why bro. Yeah, KC's got a really every one I know doing in AI SAS. KC's got a really cool product. It's basically like you could even use it for this episode. It's like AI for podcasts. So it does like show notes and and descriptions and titles for podcasts you just upload. Do my timestamps timestamps. Yeah, you got a customer bud. Yeah, I hate all of us do half of it and like loading. Yeah, but that's really cool. Okay, so but ultimately like you should be doing things for free for people like getting access to higher quality information, getting access to an industry, whatever it is do a favor for people. Show them you have a skill. Yeah, is there like any skills that you had or like what are like your most if you had to like flex right now and you're good at something like what are your hard skills like I can say for me video lighting. Oh, dude, oh by the way, yeah dude like your setup is crazy. I'm a nerd bro. Yeah, I love it. I'll talk about lighting for 10 hours if you want, but I need help with mine.

2:02:30This is my first I got you. Yeah, it do record. Yeah, I just in my apartment like I'm like I'm even using my zoom call setup. I'm coming over. I'll get you a nice ass webcam. The whole ship. Hell yeah. I think my skills are like product and marketing and when I say product specifically, I mean like understanding consumer psychology and why people want something like I can look at a software product or I mean to an extent like any kind of product, but software product specifically. And I can understand why people would want it, why why they maybe wouldn't want it and if I had that product like how to market to them. Did you choose that skill? You know to an extent, I think some of it is innate. Some of it is like just like Nate. It's like nature versus nurture type thing. Right. I think some of it is nature. But I also think that spending the first four or five years of my entrepreneurial career in marketing and having to think like a marketer has always made me now that I'm building software products makes me think about my software products through a marketer's lens. Like when I'm building a product, I'm thinking about how am I going to market and sell this once it's once it exists. And I think thinking about it through that lens kind of allows me like a unique perspective versus if I was like a software engineer by trade.

2:03:41You know, you might not be thinking through that same lens. And then what about marketing as far as like this itself? Yeah, I think marketing, I mean it's a very broad term, but like in software specifically, just understanding how and where and when to reach your target audience. Like how to do activations, which channels to pick, how much to spend on things. Like the little hacks, like hacking the organic TikTok algorithm for media kits or getting into Facebook groups and doing organic guerrilla marketing on Facebook groups for my new company. You know, understanding paid ads have spent like tens of millions of dollars on paid ads. As a marketing agency, I got to manage like almost a hundred million dollars worth of ad budgets. And that gave me like a plethora of knowledge about like things like paper click and Facebook ads. And so I'm always just trying to kind of expand my skill set in like the realm of marketing and understand the different types of marketing, the different channels, how it's done.

2:04:42But the most important thing is is human psychology. That's the one thing that's never going to change. Say a louder. Right. So it's like the channel might change, the strategy might change, the tactics might change. The one thing is never going to change is why does somebody buy something? 100%. If I started my YouTube channel when I was 20 would not be successful at all. But the fact that I was doing a marketing agency around 2122, that's where I learned to say, make like optimized for understanding. Yeah. A few words as possible. Guys, go go study. Breets thumbnails and titles go back and ask yourself, why did you click on this video? What made you click on this video? Like making thumbnails and titles on YouTube is a science and an art, but mainly a science. And it's like that's marketing. Like understanding, understanding what makes people want to click on a video in and of itself. I learned from Emon. Yeah. Emon is another the best. I hope he's washing this because we've shouted him out so many times, but he's the best. Every single person I tell. Absolutely. It's a clear point, you know, exactly who it's for and what you're getting out of it.

2:05:45Yeah. Seven words. It's so impressive. It's an art form. But that's what I was good at marketing, like messaging, making people understand something really quickly. But as far as like the tactics or the media buying or whatever, never my strong suit, but the language. So that's a skill that has now translated to every business I've ever done or every aspect of my life that I've gone through. Yeah. And I, psychology is like my most, I just watched psychology videos all the time. All the time. It's one of the most interesting things for me to learn about. I talked to Dan Kovie the other day and he said he told me about the nine stages of ego development. Watch that because you can like a really well. That sounds interesting. Actualized.org. It's really interesting. But this has been like a really like. I don't know how else to put it because this wasn't like one where we were like getting like all like excited and hype and how. Yeah. And like mind blown, but it's like. That should be why this podcast is so valuable for people because it is so straightforward on how to build a successful platform. We've talked about so much too. Like I feel like I feel like there's so many nuggets in this. And again, I truly hope that people watching this like take something from this video and apply it to their lives and their businesses and do something with it.

2:06:53Send us a message if you do like let us know that you know that you've taken it and applied it. So are there any YouTube channels that you're a big fan of right now? I mean, Hermosi, big one, Iman, of course, yours. That's probably not helpful because you're already here. But yeah, though I watch I watch those and then for SAS like Dan Martell makes good content. He's a good like like kind of SAS YouTube channel. So yeah. It seems pretty straightforward, dude. Understand of job or space. Find a problem. Try to fix it with software. How did your hire developers can ask that real quick? Sure, yeah. There's a bunch of great platforms of hire developers. You can find them on Upwork sometimes. You can find good ones. There's a platform called lemon.io that we've used in the past that's really good. If you can, like if you have the luxury of this, try to find them through your network. If you know anybody that has a software company or you like you know someone who's a software engineer, try to get them to send referrals your way.

2:07:55That's always going to be the best way. You know, just because they're going to be a little bit more vetted and you're not completely going into it dark. And then another piece of advice is like just try to have at least a baseline understanding about how software works. And like specifically like the types of languages that you're going to be building your product in. You need to have like at least a baseline understanding. There's plenty of YouTube videos out there to teach you how like react native works or how a Node.js works or whatever it is. Just have like a baseline understanding so that you're not completely like confused by what's happening when you eventually do hire a developer. Yeah, I think Brandon always says to hire like a technical advisor for someone to help you hire. Exactly. You can explain the idea to them and then they can explain it as like a translate from us. Yeah. Because I would be people would take advantage of me if I'd just start talking. It's happened in media cats man. We went through two engineers that that we burned so much money on and it didn't work out. I don't know if I ever met a developer who's told me they can't do what I'm asking for.

2:08:55Yeah. Just keep that in mind. They're all going to say they can do it better than the other guy. Yeah. And so you kind of have to really put those types of people to the test. Absolutely. But where you just learn bubble. But I just one thing I want to say. There's a really cool. I have a friend who literally started learning about bubble like right when I started talking about in January. Within two months had a good grasp on it. And within two months after that had 25k a month in bubble development agency clients. Wow. So not only can he use bubble to build his own sass. He can now cashflow a bubble dev agency. That's amazing. So I thought that was pretty interesting because that's a really fast come up. Yeah. And it's a good skill that's going to be relevant for a long time. But guys follow Kiran. This camera's dead. Follow Kiran on all social media platforms. Kiran O'Brien. What does your main your most active on? Dude, none. Honestly right now. Sorry to just point. Yeah, I mean like Instagram. I'll post stuff here and there. Yeah, I don't know. I think maybe the best way is to keep tabs on what I'm doing like with my companies. That's probably a better way to really learn versus like the content I put out. Because again, I'm kind of like kind of in like monk mode right now. Just kind of focus on the business.

2:09:59So do you put a lot of focus on health or like like are you not on social media specifically like dopamine reasons that and yeah, I mean, I'm doing 75 hard right now. It's my fourth time doing it. Good. Thank you. Yeah, I work out twice a day. So just don't have time to make content to be honest. Have you like consciously like put this is something actually doing talk about real quick. Yeah, we're not saying goodbye yet. It's like monk mode. You went to Bali for this. Like how much that is something that I actually neglected for a long time was like quality of food. I was eating how much dopamine can like using social media can affect your desire to do work. Is that something that you were big on at all or have you just been like to an extent. I so deleting social media off my phone has been a big one like the only. The only social media app I have my phone is Facebook because that's where my customers are. But like there's no Instagram. Like if you search Instagram on my phone like it doesn't exist. I think that's so yeah, I think the best advice I got from Alex Becker was don't put yourself in a position where you have to use well power. Yeah, just make it not an option. Yeah, you do the same thing like man if there's a if there's a box of Oreos in my in my pantry like I will eat it.

2:11:02If there's a if there's a tub of ice cream in my freezer, I will eat the whole thing in one night. Why don't why don't you have Oreos? Why don't you eat ice cream? That's the whole thing like I I just don't let myself have them like if I really have a craving for something like that like I'll get in my car and drive to like an ice cream shop and have like a little thing of ice cream. But like yeah, I just try to keep my environment like conducive with the type of life I want to live. So I keep healthy food in my fridge. I keep social media off my phone. I don't my phone is on my desk away from my bed like you know I just try to do what I can to control the controllables. Why is that important to control though? What if you didn't what would happen to you? I just notice like you just notice you're more distracted. You like you don't like you don't the dopamine hits kind of like you have to always search for more. So you spend way more time on these platforms like now when I do go on Instagram and like look at stuff or Twitter or whatever like I'm going there. I'm seeing like couple of my friends, couple things that I like and that's good enough for me like I don't need to keep like doom scrolling because I'm so used to not having it in my hand.

2:12:08It's just it's the design to add to you. Food social media, video games, everything. So I don't know do you feel like there's I feel like there's too much content on self help out there but it's just so like it's like a fundamental thing. Yeah, and I always just ask like I want to be a top performing person. So I if I'm like feeling tempted I'd be like what a top performing person do this. No, in that way you just optimize every aspect of your life to get the most things done. Absolutely. And it's all just noise. Okay, sorry side note. Yeah, everyone every one of our friend group like has an extreme emphasis on that. Yeah. And I just want to point that out. Yeah, it's it's a common denominator. I don't know a single person that is at our level. There's eating like shit doing all this. We have we have had our fair share of dopamine and you know nights out in Vegas but that's celebrate here in there. Yeah, yeah, here in there. But yeah, it is important to have fun is that it is 100% that's what we do it for. Yeah, I loved have fun. Yeah, but not in the work week or it's like phases dude. It's phases of life. We're dragging us goodbye. Okay guys. Karen. Thanks. See you later. Thanks for watching guys. Appreciate it. That was fun bro.

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