How to Start a Business With an Influencer - 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. Call us footballers 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.

1:00Oh, low energy, unfocused, foggy. You might be dehydrated. Whether it's hot yoga over 100 degree weather or too much sun. Gatorlight with a specialized blend of five electrolytes was scientifically designed to help move fluids into the body faster for rapid rehydration. Shop now at Retailer's Nationwide. Gatorlight hydrates faster than water. Is it in you? Symptoms noted are signs of mild to moderate dehydration, consult to healthcare professional if symptoms persist. So right now you're working with Ali Abdall. Do you have Sam Par, viral cuts? Do you have Dan Coe? Dan Coe, Cody Sanchez, Sahel. Some other creators that I'm not going to name right now. And then you're the background operator and manage the team basically. So they're the distribution, you're the fulfillment. That's right. In theory, okay, cool. You have ran agencies. I've ever was doing, you had one client, I think was paying you seven million dollars a year. So you have a very high level agency. But now the productized agency model is very popular. I'm curious to see why is that so appealing

2:02with why you're using the productized service into your brand all different kinds. It's just fucking easy. Like, end of story. Like, if you've gone and you've negotiated like multi-million dollar like SOW's with like Fortune 100 companies and dealt with procurement and like grown teams, you know, at the rate that I have like going in and doing a productized service business, it's just easy. And so we just saw it as an opportunity to go and do three things. One was build, in most cases, the best brand in the category. The second was the highest quality team in the category. And the third was to have the most distribution. And for me, it's just, it's a formula. If I have those three things, I'm going to win. And it's worked. I think, you know, obviously there are some variances, if you look at like SuperSide or like Design Pickle, like the OGs. But for the most part, I think each of the businesses we have is the biggest and its category at this point. But really, we just saw like an Arbitrage opportunity. We just saw something towards like, with zero capital raised or invested,

3:04we could just go and build a bunch of these really quickly, have a massive advantage with distribution, takeover in most cases, like the majority of the brand focus in each of those little industries. And use all that free cash flow to go and just do whatever we want without having to ever sell a piece of the business. It's interesting that you have to explain it, but creator led, it kind of seems like common sense, like why it makes sense. But do you want to explain like how that observation came to be for you and how you guys are going to about that? Yeah, I think about it a lot, because most of the time when somebody says creator led, what they really mean is endorsement deal with the celebrity. Right? And that I don't think is that exciting. Now there are some cases of it to where like they're crushing it. Obviously like Prime, I think is a great example. Schemes with Kim Kardashian's great example. And behind the scenes, you have an amazing operator that's growing the shit out of those businesses. I don't know how much Logan Paul and the other guy have.

4:05I think it's rumored to be like 10% each or maybe even less. That to me though isn't creator led, right? That is the idea to where somebody just has an audience that's so big, you can almost sell anything to it, right? If you think about like Mr. Beast and Feastables, how many times in a Mr. Beast video these days do you see Feastables? That we're having to go to market with that product, non-stop. And the same way that you would any traditional CPG brand, you're advertising constantly. With us, what I think is really unique about what we're doing and more so like the opportunities that exist in B2B for creator led stuff is that you can go to market minimally, right? We launched Hey Friends, our done for you YouTube agency with Ali Abdel. We launched it on July 31st. Ali has like five million subscribers on YouTube. Really captive audience. He's really known as like the YouTube guy and the most followed productivity

5:08expert in the world. He's awesome. He is awesome. I love all of your deaf. He is a savage in his own way. And he has like 200,000 followers on Twitter, right? We didn't launch Hey Friends on YouTube. We launched it on Twitter with one tweet from Ali. That's all the promotion we've ever done for that business. In five days off of that one tweet, it got, I think it was over like 550 individual leads, amounting to like 2.5 million in MRR interest. Right? Like to this day, we're still very carefully going through that wait list and scaling that business. Based on who we think the right that is. So for us, what we look for is like not this idea that there's some creator that's constantly talking about the business. But as we've evolved, because we've launched six, well, we've launched five of these. We're getting ready to launch six. As we've evolved launching one each month, we've really honed in on what we call product audience fed. So who is the creator? What are they known for? Right? Like for example, we talked about you,

6:09it might be like podcasting, right? Just run that out there, right? So if you were to come and build a business that was focused on like how to help other, like let's say like nascent creators, 10 to 50k subscribers, whatever, build a really successful podcast, and then handle everything into end, there's a good chance that a huge portion of your audience would respond to that, right? And so there's other ways to measure it. There's ways to get like more granular about it. But that's what we look at. It's like audience density. And 100% and the congruence between what they're actually watching and if they also need a service like that. And so I've always wondered if like one creator could have like a flywheel of these productized agencies. Yeah. Like could Ali have not only just a YouTube one, have you ever considered doing multiple different agencies? Or do you think it's more important just to nail that one that they're like most known for? I think that with the right creator, there are opportunities for a ton of businesses to exist in the ecosystem. And we're exploring that.

7:11But the difficulty there is how many times a creator takes something to market before they saturate their brand. Yeah. Right? And so that's something that we want to be really careful with. It's also something that's really interesting like in this space that we're in. Like my buddy Nick Cuber, like Nick has several businesses. And a lot of 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 bullspin. 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. Caws 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 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. Low energy, unfocused, foggy, you might be dehydrated. Gatorade 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. This content these days is hem tweeting like this business, that business, that business, whatever. And Nick does a really good job of driving those leads. But for us, it's not a strategy that is interesting. Instead of using one audience of a few hundred thousand,

9:13I want to use multiple audiences, millions. So it gives us a much broader appeal. And I think a little bit more longevity in terms of how we take things to market. Okay, so have you seen different productized agency models work better than others? And you have insights because you've done multiple. And you said you're canceling this one, it's $2,000 per month. So I'd love to hear your thoughts that just come in your mind and still be on that. Different productized agencies. It's tough to say we obviously have an explored development for good reason. Explain that because I have one. And we just started three months ago. So let's turn this around. Yeah, tell me how your development agency works. And then I'll tell you the pros and cons. Okay, so productized, dev agency, it's no code. Okay, we use bubble. And so the angle is that you get like three full time employees for the price of one. And we can do things faster because we're using no code. We have development like full stack developers, but that's the angle that no code is better. And so from there they can sign up directly on our website. They get automatically onboarded with an email automation to a trello board.

10:16They put their features list and then they immediately get on a call with a project manager. And we start sketching out the Figma design with our design team. And so instead of just having people think that you can just hire one developer. And that's all you need. But you really need a Figma designer, a developer, and a project manager so you know you're not getting screwed. Yep. And so they can do all of that through a trello board. List out the features. And we do all the project management design development. So that's the product they can sign up on our website. Or they can take a discovery call if they want questions first. So from there, it's $6,000 a month. We can develop pretty much anything. And so in theory, they're always going to need a developer. So for our side, the churn is really low. And the retention is great. And then if they just have a finished product and they just want maintenance, they can down sell. Very rarely will they ever cancel. So that's the plus side in our opinion. So when you think about scale is where it gets difficult. Because it becomes a question of like, OK, right now, churn is low. Well, if you lost customers in three months, I'd be really happy. So churn is going to be low. But the question is like, A, what's the average LTV?

11:18Or contract value. But in this case, you don't have a contract. So we're just going to go LTV. So it's the lifetime value of your customer over time. And then what do you have to do to retain a customer to make that LTV, like really meaningful against your costs of acquisition, right? Which in this case, is it just like your creator led? I made one single video. And that drove and I've never talked about anywhere else. And how many like leads did that drive for you? 50 plus. 50 plus. OK, cool. And you guys, how many customers have you onboard at this point? 39 KMRR. 39 KMRR. I think that's seven. So when you think about scaling that business, what you're going to have to do is a handful of things. You're going to need to understand what is my op-x look like at scale to get more and more talent that is really high quality. And that's one of the things that I think a lot of people make about these productized businesses where they screw up is they like, it's a race to the bottom. They try and offshore. They try and get the like cheapest sound that they can to increase the margins.

12:18The quality of the tips retention increases and things go bad. You look at what happens at design pick one on the layoffs that they had to do. What happened? They did it shit to the layoffs a while ago. Because we hired some of their people and then there were a couple of them that we hired really quickly in our need to like scale up service. And I was like, oh, these people aren't good. They don't let them go. Anyways, so you have to find the blended rate of, you know, basically if we know that each customer requires service from like these people and over time depending on, you know, the projects that we're taking on, you're going to see how that fluctuates up and down based on like time investment from the project manager or the Figma designer based on the revisions or the developer, whatever it is. You'll come up with a really good blended rate, you know, that like on average, we need to be getting paid this amount of money per hour that we're actually putting into the project, which might seem unconventional. They're not charging by the hour. Right. But you know the day you are. You are. Like people are spending time. You're constraint. Yeah, you're trading time for money.

13:19You have to figure that out. And then you have to look at how that scales to get to like your goal revenue, right? And that's just like a really important piece of it. And so what we look at in terms of like how we look at cost, how we look at, you know, what our margins need to be. So the $2,000 monthly. That requires 0.3 percent, well, not percent, excuse me, but 0.3 capacity. And so what do you mean by that? Let's use viral cuts. So for 40, I don't know how much it is, $4,400 a month, you get a one-to-one. So you just get a dedicated, a dedicated animator, right? They're on your stuff full time. So we know in our model, it's one-to-one. So our margin obviously is like, you know, what do we pay them versus what are we getting paid? Yes. If you look at the $2,000 offering, which is part timer, that actually is six videos a month, which is two high five, which takes us an average about two days, two and a half days, and then four low five, which takes us somewhere between four and eight hours, depending on like,

14:22a handful of factors. That requires 0.3 of an animator's entire capacity. So in theory, you've got three clients. Each animator could do three clients. So if I look at that and I say, well, I can have one-to-one at $4,400 a month or I could have three customers paying me $6,000 and have technically like point one left over. Although that's whatever. Well, I should do that. That's more profitable, right? But then what we've learned is that those customers, those part-time customers, 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.

15:23Advertise on LinkedIn. Spend $250 on your first campaign and get a $25 cried at go to LinkedIn.com slash campaign, turn sick edition supply. College football is back. So Hilton called on 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 bandwicker 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. Low energy, unfocused, foggy, you might be dehydrated. Gatorade 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.

16:23Is it in you? Symptoms noted are signs of mild to moderate dehydration, consult a healthcare professional if symptoms persist. They have a higher likelihood of churn. They are harder to work with and require more time from our project manager. So then you have to start changing that model of how profitable is this really fine. And so when you look at an inspecite, it's really simple. When you don't know the numbers long term. Over time, as you develop more data points, you have a better understanding of who that customer is and how you have to work with them. You learn that it's actually not that sexy. Like we should get rid of this and just focus on the one to one because it's less headache. Then you go into the whole thing of why the blended rate, why the blended model of cost is important to understand. You have to begin to understand the cognitive overhead that comes with the customer. Right. We just went in such a rabbit hole about this. No, that's important. This is what my podcast is supposed to be. It's very interesting. Like how you actually work the business. So basically you're saying that since we're going to have a developer, a figment designer, and a project manager on each project,

17:26but each one of those people is only allocating 10 to 20 hours per client. They can each have like, basically each developer works on three clients at a time. Each designer can work on like five because it's much quicker. Different. Yeah. So you have to find that perfect ratio. So if they can work on five, it's 0.2, basically. Cool. Yeah. So see like off menu. It's 15,000 hours a month. And let's say that we pay a designer 150,000 year. On average, each off menu designer should work on about four projects in a month. Right. So basically I'm getting 60 grand from my 15 and cost. Yes. Now obviously I have a project manager that's involved too. Because the way off menu works, a customer doesn't make requests. Okay. You come and you tell us what you want. And then we handle everything. It just happens. This outcome. Yeah. It's just outcome base. So we run that whole project to linear. A project manager is running it, making sure that everything's organized. We're getting the details from the customer. They have a good brief. We're sending great updates.

18:26Whatever. And then the majority of the work is just facilitated to be a loom. Every two days, one of our design team records a loom video. It's like, hey, here's where I'm at, whatever it is. Maybe I'm delivering new work, whatever. And then we ask customers to send us a loom video back. Right. So it's a fairly low overhead business in terms of like our extra op-x. Right. So things that are not just based on the servicing. So extra project management or account management, whatever you're going to call it. So then if I know that I'm getting paid 60,000 a month and the designer cost me 5th, like, you know, let's say, 15,000. Yeah, that's not. Okay. But whatever. We'll use 15,000. Okay. So 15,000. My profit, right, is 45k. So look at that over the year. I mean, it's for every 150,000 revenue. Or in op-x, I'm doing 720,000 revenue. It's a pretty good deal. Yeah. Right. So that business is super sexy. But then if you look at Hey Friends, that's 10k a month for six videos, it's not like here's a designer that's handling four projects

19:32at the time. It's okay. Are you ready? It's a lot. I already know. Here is the producer. Here's the strategist, the writer, the principal animator editor. And then it goes into the variance of like, do you have somebody that's just editing air roll and then passing it to an animator or not? I try to. How much script rolls involved or script writing is involved in the process. Like if you're a studio customer, which is like 14,000 above, you get script writing, right? You know, how much work is going into like the title and the thumbnails? So much. It's all that, right? So there's a whole team. So a whole pod of people and a pod for Hey Friends would be producer, strategist, in some cases, it's strategist slash writer. So there's two team members. And then you have a thumbnail designer. And then you have a principal animator, a roll, and then sub animators, right? So you're talking about some around eight people per pod. You're 10 clients right now. That's insane to me. Yeah. So 10 people per pod, then each pod is going to do some around like,

20:34let's call it like six to eight customers. You're still trying to find a great number. That's impressive. Yeah, that's really you must be a it's because we batch. Gotcha. So what we encourage customers to do is to batch record. So like we'll sit down. We'll do the idea generation. We end up picking the best ideas. Obviously like following all these frameworks. If we can't figure out the right thumbnail and the right title, we just want to do the video, right? And then it goes into the hive framework. So how do you structure the video and all that stuff? And then we ask the customer to sit down and just record six videos at a time, right? So they'll sit down and do a day or two of filming, send us that stuff, and then we go through the process and make sure that they come out like one a day, right? Or I mean, it's going to be one a week, roughly. Yeah. And that six makes that interesting now. Yeah, because you're buying time in a way with the lead time with editors. Yeah, it's a great deal. Oh my god. I actually think it's an incredible fucking value. For sure. We'll charge more for it later.

21:35It's tough because like every customer is like, how many views am I going to get? It's like we can't guarantee that, right? Like that is all we can guarantee. Subjective is that we're going to help you make the best video that you can, right? Now if you throw a patty gallery in the mix and patty's like, oh no, like I'm not going to try and do a Zaire Shaxon. But if patty's like, dude, like these are the videos that this person should be making, whatever, maybe that changes, but that's a whole different ballgame. Hey, friends is not too strategy, right? Today, we do some competitive analysis to understand like, for example, if you're a Hey, friends customer, we'd look at other people in your space. So we'd see what's working for them, what videos are popped off, like how they're averaging views, brow, or all that stuff, and then come up with some ideas, right? As you're well aware, that's how the YouTube game works. And then you'd pick the best ideas. We'd help you create the like structure of the script, right? Mm-hmm. Flowing ad bunched on metrics that look great, till the CFO sees them, that's Bullsbend. And marketers are calling it out in dashboard confessions.

22:39I remember telling my boss, it'll be good for the brand when leads were slow. Yeah, it wasn't. Cut the Bullsbend. 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. Low energy, unfocused, foggy, you might be dehydrated. Gatorade 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. This episode is brought to you by Born in Roma fragrances by Valentino Beauty, the iconic fragrance duo. Donna Born in Roma, O. Depart Fum is a feminine fragrance featuring juicy black

23:42current central jasmine, woody cashmurin, and warm vanilla. Its masculine counterpart, Womow Born in Roma, O. Depart has notes of fresh violet leaf, aromatic sage, green vetiver, spicy ginger, and mineral salt. Shop at macy's.com But then the script is really up to you, because obviously we encourage that you don't write a script, right? You have talking points and use go. 100% And then we'll edit the arrow. So yeah, that's how it works and I think it's a steal. I like how you said the batches though, because for me it's at least 40 to 50, everything you just listen is a solid 40 to 50 hours of work and I'm sitting down like hours, like what is the idea? What are my competitors making? What works? Then title. The most stressful part of my job is coming up with the fucking title and then the thumbnails. I need five thumbnails per video. It's so much work. So I see that that makes sense that because once, so if you can have five clients per team, right? So five YouTube channels. The person that's doing the research can just go all in on one person one day and then give you

24:43all the ideas on one day since they're in that hole. You had to just like skipping across back and forth. And so it's almost like they're going through those problems day by day. That's really smart. That makes me a lot of sense. Yeah, it's tough though. I can imagine. That's a lot of talent to back into one team and also making sure that everybody has a strong YouTube background and like, it was their shit. It gets really tough. It's a skill. You can't just throw that shit to the Philippines. You know what I mean? It's really tough. And so we've intentionally scaled that business more slowly to make sure that A, the team is right and B, the process is right. But if you get it right, these people will be like, they'll never turn in a way. Because one YouTube is a great business model. We're almost there. So if you're like me, you have a software idea and you want to get it started, but you're just intimidated. You don't know how to hire developers. You don't know how to manage a project. Getting it designed, you're just unfamiliar with the process. So that's why I actually had my partner start our agency, WGMI Labs, so we could help you bring your software to life. To develop an agency where you get a full team dedicated to your project,

25:45so you'll get a designer, a developer, and a project manager. So all you have to do is list the features you want and kind of tell us how you want it laid out and then watch it get built week after week. So if you have a software idea and you're ready to get started on it, go to WGMILabs.com and we're happy to help. I think it's just the async communication. That has made it the most beneficial where it's like instead of hopping on meetings three times a week, having to be like holding these agency clients, it's more so like hands off. Each company has a different level of high touch, right? So biocuts, for example, is a really low touch. You just make requests, we handle it. There is slack about refazing it out. As you go up kind of the food chain of price point, it's much more high touch. But the difference is that we don't create variants in how we service. So we like to be really on top of communication. I have an expectation with our team that a customer hears from us every single fucking day.

26:45Even if we're not sharing new work because we have a 48 hour grace period, I still want somebody sending a message and saying, okay, here's where we're at. Does it email? Slack or email? Okay. We're just updating like in a son of ticket. Are you guys using the con bond trello boards to communicate tasks like Brett or? No, we do for viral cuts. I don't know how much longer that's going to last. We're currently building our own tool internally. Everything internal for us is powered by linear. Is there any motive to make a product as agency due to the MRR and ability to exit with higher multiples than a typical agency? It's certainly a benefit, right? If you can keep reasonably low-chern or a productized agency, I think you're definitely going to earn higher multiples in a traditional SOW based agency. But for us, I don't really have intentions of selling any of the businesses. We are structured in a way that would allow us to sell off pieces of them if we wanted to. But we really intend on just leveraging the free cash flow and holding them long term.

27:48So for you, this is kind of like a private equity vision in a way. And so you had this term that I liked earned advantages. And this is something that I think people kind of discount or feel entitled to. But in business, it's all about having your advantages. And you became very aware of that over the last decade in your career. And so that's why you see the creator let opportunity is so important. And your operating ability. And so I'm curious. I've just like want to know how you've came to this conclusion. And what you think the next 20 years? You're a red Titan Rockefeller's biography. I'm not comparing myself to Rockefeller. We're not even close. But when you read Titan, or you learn a lot about Rockefeller, you learn just how much he had the entire world by the balls. I mean, everything from like they went and negotiated bulk shipping contracts with the railroads. And then they go to their competitors because they weren't supplying enough oil, right? At the time to actually handle the capacity that they were trying to ship.

28:52So they'd go to the railroads and say, hey, we're going to ship a thousand barrels a week or whatever it is, right? But maybe they're only producing a hundred. So they go to all the competitors and say, okay, you're going to ship with us because we're going to give you better rates. And then things are going to move smoothly. You're going to have higher profit margins, whatever it is. Over time, as he grew his business, he was able to manipulate that because he'd say, okay, well, you're kind of shipping through our deal. So I know exactly how much oil you're producing. As my output increases and I need less of your oil on my trains to get this rate, I can now squeeze you. Because if I take away these discounted shipping rates, your margins get hit. I know that's going to happen. And now I have an advantage to come and just like buy you. So they did this thing called the Southern Improvement. And basically like over the span of like a week, Rockefeller bought basically every oil refinery in Cleveland. And then we're not going to get into it, but like back out to solve because there's going to be

29:52this huge issue with anti-tras, they had to scrap it, but the damage was done. And then you went to Pennsylvania did the same thing like, hey, you saw what happened over there. Flowing ad budget 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. Unmatch hospitality can keep up with any superstition. Even a marching bandwreck up call it 555 and 55 seconds. Hit it!

30:52When you need a team that will do whatever it takes on game day, it matters where you stay. Hilton, for this day. Low energy, unfocused, foggy, you might be dehydrated. Gatorade 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. I'm going to do this. His entire career, he just stacked up unfair advantage after unfair advantage, even going to the points where he had like the railroads, like, totally by the balls. And then they came with the idea that we're not going to put them on drums and then load them onto trains. We're just going to have the modern oil container. We're going to ship with that on the train. He produced them all. And then the ones that were in the market, he bought them all.

31:53So the railroads had to get them from him. And then the pipelines. Like, it's one thing after another. And when you read that, you're like, this guy was able to win so like, the advantage he had over his competitors, over the market was so insane because he stacked up every unfair advantage that he possibly could. And if you look at that in business, it's like, why wouldn't you want to do that? If every person is trying to launch an agency by like, having a flashy website and like, getting some cool case studies and like, 100 agencies are chasing Apple to get scraps when the majority of the budget's going to Accenture. Right? Like, it's not a game on a play. So why wouldn't I just take as much distribution as I could? Right? And throw that. That'll problem. And then just profit. Right? So, I mean, I'm trying to play the game to win as much as possible. And one of the best ways for us to do that is to just continue stacking up those unfair

32:56advantages. And what I get upset about is when people are like, oh, you're cheating. It's like, well, yeah, I am. But I earn it. Right? Like, I'm not doing anything that anybody else couldn't do. I'm just doing what like, my career is like me too. It's just the lessons that I've learned over 15 years of doing this. And like, my particular set of experiences where I was like, this makes sense for me to do, I wouldn't. You have like, killer energy. Like, I can just like sense it right now. And I'm so impressed by it. And so I really want to understand like, the long term strategy. Because I feel like you're at the point where you're thinking like, three to five, 10 years out, especially that Rockefeller example. When you're most people just think I need to make more oil and try to sell it. We're in that lead time for him before he can actually do that. He's like making other strategic deals. And so I would love to hear how you see these things playing out. And how is this going to be your ship squeezing moment? Yeah. Dude, you know what's funny? When it comes to the long term, I triffly, yeah, I want to make a lot of money.

33:59I think it's cool. But I really just want to work with people that inspire me. And then I get energy from and I want to do whatever the fuck I want to do every day. Right? Like that's it. And for me right now, that's building things. I love building something from zero to one, and scaling it. Like nothing excites me more than just being like, we should build that business because we see an opportunity. And then 30 days later, it's in market. And you know, within 30 days after that, it's doing, you know, 83 kmr or whatever. That's insane. Like why wouldn't I do that as much as I can? So today, like that's what I'm focused on. Long term, I just want to, there's so many things that excite me. Like so many businesses that excite me. And I used to have this idea to where I was like, oh, I don't know when I'm in a build because I don't have like the big idea. Mm-hmm. Right? And I got to a point where I was like, fuck it, dude, I don't need a big idea. Like, I'm good at building businesses. I'm good at building a network just based on like authenticity. Why don't I just put those two things together and just go and like acquire anything

35:03that I think is making a dollar today and I can turn that into five. Right? And so, you know, that's our plan. Really, like, saw how spent years in PE. You know, it's way more about that world than I do. But together with like his kind of background there, his network and then like our operational ability, just use the free cash flow. So, invest in, build or buy businesses that excite us and plan to grow and hold them long term and own 100% of it as we do it. It's interesting that this tide is turning. I feel like the glorified raising 20 million then have a billion dollar exit or whatever is like really fantasized in our era. And now it seems like it's shifting because I'm consuming some of those content as well. It makes way more sense to just make a lot of profitable, cash-selling businesses with the goal to hold and you probably make better decisions along the way. Yeah. Like, I'm a fucking idiot. Like, I feel like I have a far greater chance of taking my time in compounding assets over time.

36:07If I just making smart decisions to buy businesses that I understand. And again, like, I'm not trying to go from one to a billion. I'm just trying to turn a dollar into five. If I can do that time and time again for 10 years, I think I'll be in a good spot. And so productizing agencies have just been like, that's your game at this point. Get the unfair edge. You know, you're a good operator. Get the distribution with these people and they have an audience that's much more dense so the leads are going to be way more qualified. I just knew that there was one thing that was like really central to me. Whatever I did next, I didn't want to be sysophous. I didn't want to like push the boulder of customer acquisition up the hill for alternative. I wanted to make that easy. And my theory was like, if I could solve distribution, I could do anything. But it was either a great decision or a stupid one. When Silent I ever talked about starting this business, it was like, well, how much money should we invest? Should we invest a 100,000 each or a quarter million each or whatever? And I was like, let's invest a zero. I was like, you know, we had been kicking around the idea of taking our design team

37:10and doing like our product test offering with our design team. And I was like, let's just go build productize services. Because my bet is that if we have more distribution than anybody else in that market, we could probably make a decent amount of money pretty quickly. And we started doing the math here like, look, if we can get 0.001%. 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.

38:15Unmatch hospitality can keep up with any superstition. Even a marching bandwicker 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. Low energy, unfocused, foggy, you might be dehydrated. Gatorade zero powders have been scientifically designed to help improve hydration balance in the body with a clinically proven electrolyte plant 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. Of a creator's audience to convert. Probably make a fair amount of money, right? And so we ran that at scale and was like, oh, we could get to 25 million an ARR in 18 months if we did X, Y and Z. And so that was the path that we went down. And five months in, we launched five businesses.

39:16We're doing about, we're doing a little north now of five million revenue. It literally is going like perfectly to plan, which is kind of terrifying. It's like, yeah, I know. It's going to blow up my body face. But so far so good. It's a compounding of like sharp decisions now. So hopefully that is based on from your experience. But we've had to intentionally slow growth too. That's what I was going to ask you about next. You have to be, I'm sure you're sending more time qualifying the right customers and the sense of just accepting everybody. And it's more so they fit this model. And you can be more selective since you have that consistent lead flow now. Is that kind of helped clean things up? Or what do you mean by slowing down? Yeah, I mean, that's a piece of it. Everybody in business talks about your ICP. Like, who's your ideal customer from all of them? Like, what's your avatar? All this stuff. And it's like, yeah, that's a great thing to have. Right? You need that to scale a business long term. But if your business is five months old, like, Hey friends, you're like, don't know.

40:16Is two months old? Yeah, I don't know. Like, you know how much data I would have to collect? How many customers we would have to work with to figure that out? So I think for us, like, slowing down growth means intentionally just not onboarding customers. So we'll artificially limit a company's growth. Like, Hey friends, for example, again, like, I think there's about 2.5 million right now of MRR. That's still a lot of people. It's a lot just sitting on the wait list. And if you look through that wait list, you'd be shocked. And you'd be like, Oh, I know this person. You know, 10 million subscribers. I know this person. Whatever. Like, there's a lot of demand for that business. But we've intentionally kept it small. Like, today it does about 100K MRR or ramp it up to 200K by the end of the year. And the reason why is that we have to maintain quality. Yeah, it's like, that's 10 customers, right? Pretty much 10 at 10. It's basically 10 customers. Yeah. I can't see. That's like, I do YouTube and there's so much to it. And so much. And like, I am not an operator. And so I don't understand how you can even handle 10. I can barely handle myself over here.

41:17That's 60 videos a month. So I was curious. Like, is that our all? Because all of your agencies are like top tier quality. The design agencies insane. The animations are like, you just just looks and feels professional as fuck. Yeah. But mainly I want to ask you. So assembly is the main company. Yeah. Assembly is the holding company. Holding company. Yeah. And so you have these different productized agencies. I was curious. How is it like one group of people that you can use in different places or is it like very segmented? Good question. So assembly is the holding company. We'll talk to you actually real quick. So assembly is an LLC that's soil on I own. And then assembly ventures own C-corp's. Yes. So there's like an assembly. Decorps. Yes. So there's an assembly video C-corp that then owns LLCs that are treated as disregarded entities. So for example, hey friends is an LLC, viral cuts is an LLC, keyframes an LLC that are all owned by assembly.

42:21Video. Right. So assembly video is the C-corp. Is the C-corp? The ventures is the whole co. The ventures is the whole co. All of the team members for each of those companies work for the C-corp. Gotcha. So they're all on payroll through the C-corp, all like the op-ex runs through the C-corp at the aggregate level. Why we do that is that I want optionality in the future. So saw hill like from his PE days likes to say that assembly is, what does he say? He says it's a bond with a call option. Meaning it's earning, right? It's earning money, whatever. But there's a call option to like exit or do something bigger in the future, right? Which is it's so PE. Anyways. So for example, if I ever wanted to look at our video businesses alone, which I mean together just our video businesses, that's a really great business. It's very profitable. When you say video, do you mean like the YouTube and viral cuts? So keyframe viral cuts YouTube. Gotcha. There's going to be a couple more. But if I looked at that business alone, like what if somebody came and they're like,

43:21we love what you're doing in a video, we want to buy it. Well, I could just sell them the C-corp. Nice. Right. Or if I had, for example, Hey, friends, I keep talking about it because it's on my mind because we're growing it now, it's going to be a big risk. Hey, friends is going to be a big business probably within 12 months. If I wanted to raise capital to accelerate that business or if I wanted to bring on other partners or other creators, I have the option on how to do that at the LLC level while protecting the C-corp group. Gotcha. But if I ever wanted to do something with the C-corp, like just raise a deal just for that. Say, hey, this is going great. We're going to accelerate these companies to, let's say 15 mill and maybe buy other video businesses to accelerate the flywheel there. We're going to sell shares as a private C-corp valuing it based on X. I can do that. And I've never touched the ownership structure of the holding company. Right. And then our design is the same way. So we have a C-corp for the design group that owns bite size off menu. And then some other agencies that we're looking at acquiring now

44:22they'll be on by a C-corp. And we'll keep doing that pattern. And then what makes us also, if I can call me again too, is that the C-corp or the LLC at the very top is actually owned by two S-corp's. No way. It's a whole thing. Okay. So sawhill has an S-corp. I have an S-corp that owns a for tax efficiency reasons obviously. So like side S-corp's that are kind of like your own pass-through entities? Yeah, instead of like Hunter Hammond's owning. Yes. That's how many of my partner have R-corp too. It makes sense. Yeah. Okay, cool. But so there's fluidity between the video team. There's fluidity between the design team but not really across C-corp's. Correct. Okay. Yeah, so like if an editor works for viral cuts but we think they're like going to be better for long form we can move them to hay friends without having to change any paperwork. Gotcha. That makes our lives super easy. Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. So you're like categorizing them but still fluidity in between the category. Exactly. Okay, awesome. Basically your hold co. Then you have C-corp's underneath. Then each C-corp is like a category so video design.

45:22Yeah. Then you have LLCs within each of those that people can be fluid through. Now my question is, now since you have creators involved so like Dan, Ali, all these people do they have equity or is it rev share? I'm going to tell you. Okay. Deal. Okay. Then are they... I say that. Let me... So let's talk about it real quick. We have confidence in shallow agreements so we just won't say. I understand. Yeah, but what I will say is for people looking at how can I work with a creator? So I gave a talk yesterday and basically our whole playbook. Cody was hosting the super cool conference in Austin. I was lucky to have speak at it, talked about it. And then somebody asked a really interesting question. Yeah, and they're like, obviously everybody asked, how would... How can I partner with a creator? Because everybody was like, how can I get saw hill to be my partner? He's like, well, you can. Right? A, I'll kill you. No, but like, you can't, right? Kill our energy, dude. I'm telling you. But there is...

46:24We're talking about density, right? There is a ton of great creators that might have like 25,000 followers on Twitter or something or a small YouTube channel, but it's a super dense audience. And they're known for a particular topic, whether it's like Webflow or what's getting big these days. Like Framer, for example, or No Code, Bubble. It doesn't matter what it is, right? There are so many small creators that have a super dense audience that looks at them as an expert on that topic. You can go build businesses with them. You don't need to go build a business with a saw hill bloom or a sand par, for example. You want to look at product audience fit. And if they have really meaningful product audience fit with like where your skill sets are, it doesn't really matter if their audiences isn't in the millions. You can build a good cash-selling business there. And if you do that, I think there are three levers that you can pull. You can pull equity, right? Which is fine. But it's slow. It might not incentivize a creator that much.

47:25Right. Because where are the odds that you actually exit the business? You can pull the lever of revenue share, which is more meaningful, right? Sharing revenue. But then like, what's the right amount to be get interesting? And then what does that do to your margins? And then the third, obviously, is like affiliate deals. Putting together really great affiliate deals is a no-brainer. I think if you're interested in this space. So what we have as a model, I think is like, it's like, it's like the Godfather. It's like, I made him an offer I can't refuse. Right. Or they can't refuse whatever. It's an offer that's just so simple and so directed, so good that creators are like, okay. Because it's basically passive income, right? The very meaningful passive income because of the scale that we're working at. But the other thing too is like, in our position, and A, like, make no mistake, all of our creative relationships stem from saw how. Creators are like a very peer-to-peer, like, game. Oh, 100%. It is an insular community. It is like a no-new friends, like a deal.

48:28Yeah. It honestly, like, I feel very naive, not knowing that going into it. Like, six months ago, I didn't know like how insular, maybe insular is the wrong word, but I didn't realize like how connected it was, right? And it's deeply, deeply connected. But that is also interesting because, again, in this whole thing of like, I want to build a career-led business. If I fuck up, like, for example, if I fuck up with Sam Parr, everyone knows. Everyone knows. Like, the repercussions are huge. If we let a creator's reputation be diminished, just an Iota of a percent, it's a big, big deal. So there's a lot of work that we have to do to like, maintain the integrity of our work, maintain their reputation. If you know how many shitty customers we've had over the past five months, because we've had a lot, right? Especially for like, viral cuts, for example. You might have a shitty customer that's like, oh, this sucks. I want to refund. It's like, why does it suck? Well, I didn't get a million views in this video. It's like, dude, you have 10,000 followers.

49:29Like, you're not going to get a million views in the video. And we have appalled, it's like, no refunds. Good. But you know what I have to do? I have to give a refund. I hope people don't exploit this, because we just changed our policy. We will not give you a refund now. But I have to give a refund, because like, I don't want to damage. I don't want reputational risk. Right, right? So we've done a lot of that stuff. But anyways, so like, the point of this is that we'd go originally, saw Hill talk to friends, and they'd be like, oh, who's going to run this business? Maybe like Hunter. I vouch for him, he's 12 out of 10, like, let's do it. And then I talk to them, and they're like, it's like dude, I've had two exits, like, built big businesses, I've just done it privately. Right, which is the biggest make of sticking my career by none. And now it's different. It's where we've built in public. It's so obvious the things that we've done, because like, our creator partners are like, oh, this is great. I get a wire, or you know, I get hooked up on equity, or whatever it is. Like, things are great.

50:30But now creators come to us. Like, I had a guy with a million followers on Twitter, just called DM me like two days ago, being like, let's build something. Right? So they just come to us now. Yeah, it works really well. It's powerful. And so that's my advice. If you want to do, if you're an operator in your world class, first off, you have to be world class, because nothing that we care more than our reputations, we have to publicly say this, and we get the, like, if you fuck up, you don't really deal with the fallback as much as the creator does on outward, facing. So if you are trying to get in this, it's really key that you do have a creator friend that can like vouch for you within this community, because it's almost like the whole outside world, like, parasitic. Like everyone's trying to sponsor our channel. Everyone's trying to like use our audience in a way. And so that's why it's so like, we're not very trusting, because I think a lot of creators have been abused by that. So I have wondering on this, have you ever considered, we were talking about info products being a good business model before this podcast? Of course. Yeah. So have you ever considered, have you ever thought about, that's kind of how Ali's works, right? He has the YouTube, part time YouTuber academy, which is great.

51:30So many big YouTubers have come out of that. And so is that something that you've seen work better? Like people are going through that academy. That's almost doing a lot of the educational process for you. They know everything that goes into it. And then you guys just like the handoff. Is that more effective of a funnel than like say, maybe the animations who just like see a YouTuber and they want animations? How have you thought about info products and courses being looped into agencies? Because I see that being, I feel like they can go hand in hand. Yeah, we've thought about courses, like not mere style making them, but courses as a business. And it's really really interesting. I know a couple guys that own like basic ghost course building businesses, 60 million year in revenue. I've thought about this, explain that. Yeah, I mean, it is what it is. Like they partnered with a couple of creators. But now granted like for this, it's more like cringe. So like, you know, like,

52:32they want to be behind the scenes. Yeah, like financial courses where like all they do is like, hawk the idea of like, you know, here's how you like, burrr. You know, that's called. Yeah, that's shit. What is it? Buy, remodel, refinance, repeat, like burr. Anyways, I've never heard that. That's interesting. It's for real estate. But I like courses. I think that like a great example of courses is what Brett from Design Joys done. Yeah. Like Design Joys, you know, you can top line whatever. And then you built the course for like, productize yourself. I think that's cool, right? So I think there's a lot of instances like that. That's really interesting. Or the way you guys do it. Or the way Justin Welsh does it. What's crazy to me is like, Justin, it's weird that like people like in a business setting, will come out and be like, I bought your course. I loved it. Like you'll hear that multiple times today if you think I was Justin. It's pretty neat. But for us courses,

53:33we think there is a business to be built around building courses. But at the highest level. Like we're talking like master class level of course building. But an intimate, authentic way with creators. I just wonder if people come into like your YouTube agency and they like getting traction. They're very popular. Then like you could like almost like partner in the back and then we'll shoot your course videos. We'll make the platform for you to push people too. We'll send it to everything. It goes back to the vertical integration. Right. Like if I have the ability to essentially like super charge the growth of E1's brand and then all the creative power behind it to like do that, why wouldn't I? Right. You have to have the expert in the field to sell the course. So it has to be like some sort of partnership. But this is like, we look at it as the same way that we build businesses. Interesting. Like I might bundle. So part of the idea of the way we work. Maybe I'm going to give this away. But like somebody wants to do this and compete with us. Bring it on. Bring it on. So like Michael Ovid's started CAA.

54:37It was like the most powerful man in Hollywood. Talent agency. Yep. Talent agency. And what was so beautiful about their model is that they flipped the way Hollywood worked. So typically the studio would have all the power and they would put the creative together and figure this out and be the distribution. What CAA started doing is saying, look, we're going to package a deal. So like Jurassic Park, for example, Ovid's was like best friends with Michael Criton. And he wrote Jurassic Park and then he's like, oh, this is a movie. This is going to be like the big thing. So they went to Steven Spielberg. They're like, it has to be Steven Spielberg to direct this movie. Right? They got Steven Spielberg. And then they got the producer. And then they started lining up the talent. So by time they took this to the studio, it was done. It was a package deal. Like this is how the movie is going to work. This is how we're going to make it. We just need you to give us the money and be the distribution and you'll get all your profit and whatever. And here's how we've structured the deal. And so that's how he became so powerful. That's like how he flipped all you would on his head.

55:38And then who's the guy, are you manual like, ran with that and nuts and maybe is a billionaire? I don't know. We look at our business the same way. Gotcha. Right? So we're going to package the entire thing. And we're going to look at the creator as a partner, but also as the distribution. So they don't have to worry about much else. Right. They don't have to worry about building the business. They don't have to worry about recruiting the talent. They don't have to worry about any of that. They know that we got it. Right. And so I think you can do the same thing with courses. So you can package the right course. You can find the right talent to help build an amazing offering. And then all you really need the creator for is essentially to be like the voice of authority. Record the content. Be the distribution. They make hundreds of thousands. If not a million dollars off of selling it, they didn't have to do anything. It's a beautiful proposition. You're stacking the leverage on your end and just literally all you need is a green light. And then you get a higher percentage as well. Yeah. So instead of talent agents waiting for the producers and the movies to hope they pick your actor,

56:40you get the actor, get the director, get everything and say, hey, it's ready. Yeah. That's cymbled up. Gene, here we go. If you don't want it, I'm going to take it down to, I'm going to take it to them down the street. So you're going to lose this opportunity or you want to go? That's clever. Yeah. I've been using Dave Ramsey as an example a lot for what I see my creator business as becoming baller. Right? Yeah. And you look at his website and he has these verified agencies or verified like, like, Churchill mortgage. And he has back in deals with them. And it's like, wow, you really can have every possible service or vertical in your industry. You're just that one critical point in the middle and it all just springs out. And so it seems like you are like conglomerating a lot of those, which I think is really clever. Do you ever think of it like that? Not in the Dave Ramsey way. Why do you think he's a baller? Why do you like him? I just, he's like this, like, you know much about, like, I watch one podcast of him.

57:41In his websites, like, I feel really rusty on the details. Would he lives in like Chattanooga Tennessee or something like that? Started in radio. He owns like an incredible amount of commercial real estate. Right. And I think he's a billionaire. Pretty class, I'm sure. And has no debt because just stacked, just compounded it all over time. It's crazy that he seemingly has a career to show much net worth without really ever having to take on like a lot of leverage. And then I like that he's has this like super popular radio show. And like, just sits there and like writes on numbers and gives financial advice. Yeah, it's a baller. It's like the original creator, but he was on the radio. Yeah. And there wasn't a lot of options, you know? And so like looking at him like, well, this guy's had 30 years to really figure this out. He's like, everybody's financially wise grandpa. 100%. That's awesome. Okay. So you did make a difference between like an affiliate and a referral with these people, which is like a pretty important distinction because affiliate would mean it directly comes from their audience

58:42where a referral would mean or not referral, but revshare, sorry, revshare, my bad. Revshare an affiliate. Affiliate would be like, it comes directly from them through a specific link where revshare mean like no matter where the lead comes from. Like, I've heard of you just from your personal brand now. And if I need short form, I would go to viral cuts, not because I watched, even though I do watch Sam Park, but for that example, like I know who you are, I need short form. I could just come directly to you. Right. And if it was an affiliate deal, Sam wouldn't get a cut at that. Right. But if it's revshare, then he would because it's like a partnership. So very important distinction for anyone trying to do a creator led business to make sure you understand the incentive. And that's just a game of leverage based on the creator. It is a game of leverage. And it's a game of understanding like what is the lever that you have to pull as a business owner? Like if you already have a business and let's say it's profitable, right. And you're growing in a decent rate. Let's call it 10%. I don't know. If you want to work with a creator, maybe an affiliate deals better structure. Right. Especially a smaller creator. An affiliate deal might be better structure, because then it's one to one. Right.

59:42They're getting paid on deals that they've set up specifically. If it's revshare, yeah, you're basically, it doesn't matter where it came from. You're sharing that revenue. For us, what's interesting because again, the model for us have created a, like creator led in the product audience fit. I'm essentially betting that if I pick the right business and the right creator, I'm just creating money out of thin air. Right. I'm building a business that had no reason to exist other than that dynamic of like, here's the idea, here's the creator. So maybe revshare does make sense for me in that situation, because like, the business wouldn't have existed anyways. And I would guess, just from the inner workings, on average, the creator partnership accelerates the business by about three to four years. In terms of overall trajectory of like, how much lead acquisition can you have, how does it affect your recruiting, the general trust that gets attached to it? So like, if we launch a YouTube agency,

1:00:44you don't know me, right? Maybe I have 15,000 bars on Twitter, whatever it is. And I'm known as like a bad ass operator, whatever. But I don't have anything to do with YouTube, right? So you're going to be like, what case did he do? You have to, who have you worked with? What results do you have? Whatever. It's going to take me years to compound meaningful case studies or reputation around that business that makes us trustworthy for you to be like, yeah, let's do this. But the second it's all the odd dolls, YouTube agency, all that is built in, right? And so I think if you're going to go down this road, you just have to understand that leverage, you have to earn some weird applies to your business. And now you're responsible for all these reputation in a way as well, by delivering on that service. So trust is the biggest thing with agencies. And I understand what you mean by speed, like it fast tracks it by three or four years, because most agencies are going to grow by word of mouth as well. Yeah. So if you get an immediate injection and the trust is baked in, and then you operate, it's just like the perfect most well oiled machine. Yeah. That's genius. And then have you ever considered like, maybe if this guy, like his personality,

1:01:45you think he's all about it, he's serious that like almost taking equity in a channel. Like if you like a venture studio in a way, okay, actually, maybe you thought about it. Okay, cool. I think that, you have a newsletter. Mm-hmm. 80,000 people. 80,000? What, what, what platform do you know? Like, are you not killing? Yeah. Twitter. Twitter. Yeah. Do you think there is potential in your platform, your brand, to build a bigger media property on another channel or something like that, or expand from what you have? LinkedIn. Okay, cool. So to me, if you look at the flywheel of businesses that we have, right, our flywheel, we think of it in three parts. Strategy, execution, amplification. Mm-hmm. Right. Okay. Today, everything that we've been doing falls into execution. Right. We haven't done any like crazy strategy offerings. We haven't done anything around amplification.

1:02:45And so what we want to do is make sure that the next bit, so I say this whole thing of like 12 companies in 12 months, which is like crazy. Fuck, I don't know why I said that, but like whatever. I'm sticking to it. Um, I didn't launch anything in October. Uh-oh. You got to make up for last time here. I launched two in September. There you go. So you buy yourself a month. Yeah, we're going to make up some time. But anyways, um, most of those 12 companies are going to be companies that fit into that flywheel. Okay. Right. So strategy, execution, amplification. The reason why is I want the ability to, if you think about that is like, um, like an engine, right, or, or, I don't know, heat seeking missile, like I don't know, I want to be able to point that to whatever. And then there's so much energy and, um, just like absolute high quality execution focus on it that it's going to grow. So if it's a SaaS company, for example, I want everything in house to do the strategy. I want everything in house to do, um, that strategy for the business and the growth brand, right? I want to be able to do the brand in house.

1:03:46I want to be able to do the site in house. I want to be able to build a product in house. I want to be able to market the product in house. I want the creative talent. Either in our network or in house that we've invested in to help grow that business, right? So I'm trying to vertically integrate every business that we grow in the future by this foundation of services that we're building today. So I can start seeing this picture of like how they'll cross-pollinate. So if you get a business, business person who starts on YouTube and they see success with you guys, they have a good experience like, oh, by the way, we also have a design agency if you're company wants a rebrand. Oh, we have customers that are, uh, like, there are customers of ours that are customer of every business. So is that the, is that the reason or the strategic decision to do 12 companies in 12 months that you're almost building like these like, assembly, and you have 12 different sister agencies. And if someone comes into one, they can immediately lead. So they come in from one creator, Oli, they have YouTube down. You guys execute and then they could potentially bounce over to another one because they need that complimentary service.

1:04:47Is that part of the strategy in a way? That's not no. That's not the reason why. It's a wonderful second order effect. Right. But it's not the reason why. I think the reason why is that I didn't want to do something small. Right. Like I turned down a big number to go and do this. And so part of the deal to myself was like, I need to make sure that I can get back to where I was or bigger within less than three years. And then I think too, it's just this notion of having like ambitious fucking goals. Right. Like, what is it? Like Sean and Sam say, like no small boy stuff. Right. Like, it's just the idea, like you and I were juking around before we started taping this about private jets. Right. Like, I want a fucking jet, dude. No, no. Yeah. And I'm not going to get, I'm cool the next. But I'm not going to get there by running like a productized service. Right. I'm going to get there by compounding value over time. And so when we look at trying to own every ounce of what we're doing and not really raising capital,

1:05:48I need a lot of free cash flow to go and take really big bets that can compound quickly. Right. And so the whole 12 companies in 12 months, a, I don't know, it just flows really well. It does. Right. It's good to have. But it also seemed like this audacious idea of like, if we commit to launching 12 companies in 12 months, we know that we have to maintain a pace that's fucking crazy. And what are the second order effects? If that's the forcing function to know that like we're going to move really, really hard, what does that really do to the business overall? What does that do to our mindset? What does that do to the way that we build the business the way we think about business? We'd be thinking about stacking leverage and unfair advantages. It has like, I don't know, due to six steroids. Right. And so it's like business steroids literally. It's the whole idea that like, where's the whole thing that Admiral Raven or Mick Raven or whatever's name is says about making your bed in the morning. Right. Like if you make your bed in the morning, you've conquered like a mundane born task, but you've pulled yourself that you can like keep doing that all day.

1:06:49I think it's the same thing about building businesses. If we know that we're going to launch a business in the next 30 days, like we're in that mindset of creation, we're in that mindset of like hustle of going from zero to one. It keeps us scrappy. That's important. It's so important. And it allows us to just move really quickly. But yeah, underneath it all, it allows us to accelerate that flywheel to begin to stack up leverage and very clintegrate and do bigger, bigger things. So with each one of these, can they, you're scaling slow, but do you see a cap to how far they can scale? Because I'm assuming that's what design pickle ran into. And why they like had some quality issues or they hired some not so competent designers. Maybe that's tough word, but do you understand what I'm saying? Like is there a, since you're scaling slow, do you think that means you can scale further just in general? Because you're focused on process or do you think there is like a cap to each one of these? So I think it's one cap. Tell me like where do you think that would be and why? I don't know where it is yet. Like we're too young. Like viral cuts, for example,

1:07:50maybe the cap is like, maybe the cap is like 5 million. Right? I don't know. Does it make sense to me with like how prevalent AI is getting that a short front video editing company can like grow past 5 or 6 million? It's possible. We're certainly continuing to grow. Like obviously like this was the best month the business ever had. Right? Like everything's growing. But inherently there's going to be a ceiling for some of these businesses and I'm okay with that. What do you think that is though? Like is it just like you cannot manage enough people to get quality assurance? Like there isn't that much talent out there. I do have a question on viral cuts is how do you even compete? Because there's so many people doing short form agencies and there's so many shit ones. Name them. Name them. Yeah. Interesting. What do you mean? Name them. Like does name the short form agencies? Yeah. Like how do you people are doing it? Are you asking me? Are you saying? I'm asking you. Like how I'm sure there are. I don't know a single I could say media scaling. .com. Sorry for promoting competitors.

1:08:51But you asked me to. I don't know. I'm getting media scaling. Clipco. That's the only two I know. And then viral cuts. So you just said there's so many. Well I get at million DMs. Yeah. Okay, but you just said there's so many. You can only name two. Yeah. One of them I've heard of. Off many you actually designed the clip site. Long story there. But like I think if somebody's looking at a short form video, viral cuts is the biggest. Right. So I think that, you know, if we continue at the rate we're going with that business, I'm sure it's the biggest short form video editing agency there is right now. But the question is just like how much demand can that market support? Like for example, I think Clip is doing some around like, I don't know, 1.5 to 2 million revenue. Yeah. Like how much of their revenue do I have to take for viral cuts in order to keep growing in that space? Right. You think it's a market share thing? No, I'm not saying it is. I'm saying is that is that a problem? Is that a problem? Right. And not that I want to do that.

1:09:51Like I just want to get customers coming for you guys. No, Henry and Dylan are super sweet guys. I don't know, I don't know Dylan that well, but Henry's a super sweet guy. And they're doing something else now anyways. And I think they use Clip to fund it. But like that's a different approach. Shoot. That's what we do with our dive agency. Yeah, use it to fund. That's a different approach. Like I think, make a mistake. Like I come into these markets and I'm like, yeah, I want to. You want to monopolize it. Like that is. Yeah, that is should be your mentality. It's a serious entrepreneur. Absolutely. So what's the point in business? Yeah, right. That's why we live in America, dude. I have people in my channel and be like, this isn't as easy as you say it is. I'm like there's no such thing as an easy business. Like you should even need to play to fucking win or you shouldn't play at all. Go work with somebody. So what do you think the design pickle problem was? I don't know much about this. Okay, just do you think that's just too big? Not enough quality. I don't think so. Very low quality. Yeah, they have low ticket clients. I'm going to say this and maybe I'm totally wrong, but I isn't it like just a few hundred bucks a month. Yeah, it's low quality. Like, it's like, super low quality. Low quality runs. Yeah.

1:10:52Not a good business to be. I mean, I'm sure it's a great business. They do a lot of revenue, but probably low margin. I think yeah, like here's the thing. Like if you know the day, like I don't know who runs design pickle, shout out to them here. They are like if you're running a profitable business, fucking you're winning. You're winning. Yeah, right. I'm obsessed with the way things look. I think if you run a service to where like you're producing low quality stuff that doesn't look good, then it doesn't interest me. If it's a good business for you, great. But if it's producing low quality stuff, whatever. That's why I had you on the podcast. Like that person you met told me who you were. I looked like, wow, like he's not only this is the best, literally the best design agency branding, slogan in your tweet, Twitter bio, like everything I've ever seen. He has four of these that are all equally the same quality. Five. Five. Sorry. At the time it was four of my bad. But my question is how are you, how do you think about differentiating yourself in such a competitive market as short form? Other than I know the creator led is like a huge because you get the trust. That makes a lot of sense. But even I can feel the quality. I don't. OK. I just think about having more evidently higher quality work

1:11:56and having more distribution. I don't need to differentiate myself. If I have wider distribution and the work is just like really good. So the work that's really good, I would love to hear you're here. Is your hiring just from network? Do you have a really strong network now? You've worked in the earned advantage that you have as you've worked in the space for 13 years. You know the big players. Yeah. And it's like accessible to you. For our higher end, like hiring and talent, yes. For like our short form video stuff. No, that's all referral driven based on our animators. And we're I'm pretty ruthless about like getting rid of low performing talent. Like there's there's no worse thing a boss can do than tolerate low performance. Right. And so I think last month, we probably churned out like seven or eight team members. Because like if you look at the pace we've moved, we've had to hire a lot. Like we've hired close to 70 people over the past like four

1:12:57months, I think. So there's a huge skill up the team. And like we're not playing some game. We're like, I'm interviewing everybody. I don't have time for that. So in evident like inevitably we're going to get some lower talent. That's going to like maybe just test really well, interview really well, whatever it is. But then maybe they are slow or they can't do creative that well or it takes them too long, whatever it is. So we'll get rid of them. But all of our best talent, especially in video, is come from referrals from us like incentivizing our team members to refer people. What is the incentive like a bonus? Well, there's actually two things. So we have a huge team in the Philippines. And they're awesome. The first thing is that we just pay more. Period. Yeah, right? A lot of our team members are probably making double with us than they were before. And the first thing is because like people treat that in a very predatory way. They're like, oh, fuck it. Like we're used to the bottom again. Like we'll pay these people at $800 a month, which is crazy to me.

1:13:59So if you're making $800 a month, I might look at you and say, hey, we're going to be way better about balance. And I'm going to pay double. It follows on me then. You just run a really good business. So I have a margin. And I'm willing to play that game. I think that's one of our modes, frankly. It's just like operational competency. Yeah. And so that's a big one. So they know that they're referring their friend to a place that's going to treat them better and pay them more. And then they get money on top of it. So it kind of is them doing a favor to their friend in a way once they've worked with someone who's so. And you want to work with your friends? 100%. Like if you like where you work, you want to work with your friends. How did you learn operational, not how did you learn? I don't hear like your origin story, but like, I learned the majority of what I know about operational competency from fighting with procurement. Or Curement is a bitch. We worked with, we tried to work with a Fortune 500 company. Oh my god, I'd never want to do that again.

1:15:00So I think starting out of this, our first year, we did like 350K on revenue. And we knew how to design when you had a build. So we felt pretty competent about those things. But we didn't know how to sell to big companies. And we knew if we wanted to make a lot of money, we had to go get deals with big companies. So we recruited this guy named Matt Williams, who's a dear friend of mine to this day. He was the CEO of the, I don't even remember the name of the agency. But it was a big like $200 million for your agency that was owned by IPG. I don't know why the names went to me. But anyways, he came on as our executive chairman. And I wasn't going to him and saying, Matt, how do we get customers? Because it's a stupid question ask. I was going to him and I was saying, Matt, how do we work with procurement? Like teach me how big company works. It's my job as the entrepreneur, to hustle my fucking ass off, be resourceful, and find out how to get in the door. But you tell me, once I'm in that door, how do I navigate those hallways? And I think that's what a lot of people screw up

1:16:01that one would be entrepreneurs or want to build a service business or productize. How do I get my first customers? Dude, if you can't figure that out, you're fucked. Like, that's your job, dude. It's your job. And I hate to be harsh, but like, there's no answer. Just hustle, figure it out. I tell this to my kids all the time, I have two 14 year olds. And nothing they do, like if they are teenagers and they don't behave or they mouth off, that annoys me. But when they're not resourceful, it fucking makes me lose my mind. Like, I, like they're like a three year old baby. You're not a baby. I have a six month old baby. Okay. And when he, it's okay. Yeah. But if the six month old isn't resourceful, that's okay. Anyways, so I grew up, my mom was a method. She was a methodic. I moved everywhere when I was a kid. My dad is like the sweetest man in the world. He's super intelligent, way smarter than me. But never applied it. Right. He was like a service manager at a car dealership. And my dad's like kind of a dickhead.

1:17:02Like he's, he's one of those guys that like, just doesn't know how to bite back that last little bit of anger. And so like never made a bunch of money. So like growing up was just super hard. It sucked. I spent a couple of years in Juvie when I was a teenager. Like growing up was really tough. I had a kid when I was 18. I was gonna say you're not too old. You have 14 year olds. Yeah. I had a kid when I was 18. Also sort of my first business when I was 18. Statue of limitations. So here we go. Like I made like, you know, money selling pot when I was a like a shithead teenager. And I was like, okay, so I look 70 grand. What I do with it, I started team mobile store. Damn. Yeah. Yeah. Damn, you were selling it. Scale. Anyways. But I was the youngest person ever at the time at least to be like an authorized retailer for team mobile. That's so cool. And that's how I became an entrepreneur. And when I was 19, I got custody of my younger brother. I had assumed my grandparents for custody of my younger brother. Because like my grandma was like dying in my grandpa. Like wanted to go back to Appalachia

1:18:03where like total hillbillies. You had to grow up fast. I had to grow up real fucking fast. And so like my entire life has been the definition of like I have to be resourceful, right? So you know, sold my team mobile store, started my first agency in I was 20, hired my lead engineer. He was my age. We became friends. We started our first startup, figured out how to like, how to start our way into an accelerator. We went to the brandery because of the top 10 accelerator at the time. And since an addy, race VC, figured out how to company. We have a Chicago like consulted. Like you know, like it's just been resourcefulness. Like my entire life. And so there's nothing that drives me crazier than when somebody just can't do the work to figure something out. And so for me, that's my biggest thing. I don't know where we're going with this, but there's one. We're talking about resourcefulness. That's what it is. Getting that was getting your first customer. Yes, that's what it was. Yeah, if you can't figure that out, don't do it.

1:19:05Go get a job. Yeah, literally like there's only like four things you can do. You can do cold email. You can create content. You can get affiliates or you can go out in the world and try to knock on doors and do sales. Like how many good cold emails do you get? One a year? One a year? How many can cold Twitter DMs do you get? I don't check them. Zero. Is your assistant check one? Yeah. I haven't heard one this year or so. Yeah. I had to let my assistant go recently. I'm looking for a new one now. So that's going to happen. But now I'm checking my Twitter. The DM on Twitter, if you want to assist in job. Don't do it. Oh, yeah. If you want to assist in job, if you're awesome, like if you're a badass, maybe I'll hire a chief of staff. I don't know. But I get so many and I actually look at them because they crack me up. They're so bad. Oh, my favorite one. Short form. I see your building 12 companies in 12 months. Are you staying in shape? It's like people's right to sell. I got Brian Johnson brother, I'm good. Yeah. And I'm like, why would anybody ever respond to this?

1:20:07Or my favorite one, somebody reaches out and tries to be like, oh, like you're killing it on Twitter these days. Have you thought about short form video? The worst. And I'm like, dude, I literally on the short form video. You're like an inch of research. Those people will like insult me. They're like, you could be getting way more views. I'm like, dude, this is my job. But don't be telling me I could get more views. That's the one that they could just send me a short form example. Like if you are going to make short form, you can just send me a video. You don't even need to say it works. And if I like it, I'll use it. Yeah, I don't know, man. I think resourcefulness is underrated. And I think to like going back to what we've been talking about about like earned advantages. Part of the reason that I've been able to sack them up, it's because of like the way I grew up, like the adversity that I had to go through. And like nothing scares me. My wrist tolerance is like through the roof. And I'm willing to just eat whatever shit sandwich I have to to like go through the work of figuring something out and like trying to get better at a skill or better at, you know, some part of operations that I don't know or sales or whatever it is.

1:21:09Like I'm just like scrappy until I die. Resourcefulness and resilience. That's really like the name of the game. Have you back to going through your agencies if we have to do 12 and 12 months, I know you got assets in the last podcast, but do you know what the next ones are going to be? Like did you make a list of like 50 potential, and then they get a lot of 50 potential like lists? I know what the next like four businesses are going to be. Yeah, yeah. And so how do you scope out creators? Like is that like that's like literally the framework, like I know the industry, then I need to do creator research or is it saw heels like immediate, I'm sure if it's not an as network already, he can get it. So I'm sure that's not really a problem. Yeah. Well, for two of them, we already have creators. And then for the other two, one of them will not be creator led. Sort of. It will be creator led but by a lot of creators. Which is really exciting. What is it? Go keep going. I don't want to interrupt you.

1:22:09No, and then the other one, the other one will have to find the creator. So if you have multiple creators, is that going to be mainly affiliate driven? Nope. When you, as you're running these productized agencies, I'm curious, I always ask everybody, what are all the software tools they use internally to run them? And so these are little more technical questions, but I think it's interesting for people who might be a little newer. And so I was curious, A, what are the software tools you use? And B, how much they vary across, other than I assume like you would use frame.io. It's like little details like that would be really interesting for me to hear. So there's two levels. There's the tools that I use as CEO, and then the tools that the team uses. Let's go top down. Yeah, so for me, I pretty much live inside of Reflect. With that, I never heard of that. It's a note-taking tool. Okay. It's my favorite. I was with Obsidian, broke up with them for Reflect. I love Reflect. That's interesting. So I pretty much live inside of Reflect, Ray Cast, I use the shit out of.

1:23:12And then I will do, so I'll generally create things in Reflect for all my notes, and then I'll start a memo in Reflect, and then that gets moved over to Notion, to where we house all of our memos. Anything that's a document or an SOP or something that has to get delegated, lives inside of Notion, but we don't allow actions to live inside of Notion. I don't care what anybody says. I'm willing to die in this hill. Notion is dog shit for project management. I agree. So I think it's great for information. It's great for wikis, it's great for like, meeting notes and all that stuff. I think it's dog shit for information. You get lost. You get lost, you build some custom thing that works for you and only you and it can't scale. And the interface is a mix of sense. I agree. So everything action-based lives in linear for our team. They use frame.io. God, who knows how many subscription services we use to power creative assets

1:24:12that we pull from Slack. Obviously it's huge for us. I think those are the big ones. My toolkit is like, reflect, fathom for financials. Slack, Raycast. What's Raycast again? Raycast is a spotlight search replacement, but it's like incredibly powerful. I don't even know a spotlight search replacement. Man, to be as far. Oh, ho, ho, ho, ho, ho, keys. Yeah, okay, cool. But it has AI built-in. So at any point I can hit like, control command spacebar and then like, chat GPT just pops up. Nice. Or I can like, like, I'm adding a highlight text. And then I can highlight text and I can just command, like, command control J and it instantly, that's a shortcut for like, improve this writing. Right. And AI's already doing it. That's cool. I love that. Cool. Cool. If there's like a startup that I would invest in, I stopped investing startups. If there's one that I would invest in right now, I'd probably invest in Raycast.

1:25:13Raycast. Okay. That's awesome. Is it just like a, Chrome? Shout out to Raycast. If you're taking checks, let me in, we do a lot of image generation that then we then manipulate the shit out of. But we use AI to generate a lot of that stuff, like assets instead of like, instead of using unsplash, for example, right? We might generate something in AI that's a little bit more spoke. It fits the design. Adobe Firefly AI you're saying? Or like, Valley, Petter, our head of design, actually runs a custom model on his PC, has like a crazy PC, does some stuff there. I don't know a lot about it. So I can say anymore. But mid-Jerney, Valley 3, something like that. We use Blender. One for 3D. We create 3D scenes that we use as like image backgrounds, something like that. I mean, off-minu, the design team at off-minu is fucking insane. Oh, I can just tell in two seconds that you ever look at off-minu, it's mind blowing. It's all custom. Yeah, they're really, really great. They're, I mean, what's crazy about off-minu

1:26:14and not to like sell our own shit for a second? Sell it all the way. It's the best value in design period. 15 grand a month to work with that team to get the level of output that you do is insane. I mean, we could easily charge a quarter million for like a full branding and like site project. But you can go to off-minu and get it done, you know, for like, let's say 60 grand overall. And that churn is gonna be low because at that price point of real companies that are making real money and they're always gonna need assets or... Well, I think even though the team is really great, people love working with us. Churn inherently for something like that's gonna be high. Really? Yeah, project gets complete, right? So they're like, well, we don't need a $15,000 a month design subscription now. We got the brand, we got the site, we got the product, whatever. You know, they wanna spend a little less. So only if I had a cheaper design agency that they could funnel it to. Is that a wink? Are you a wink? That's why we have high-dives. Okay, okay. That's why we built all of them. That's why I was thinking. And so is there one out of all these services

1:27:15that you've seen as the stickiest? I think today, viral cuts has and readily strong LTV for certain customer profiles. Like the set it and forget it, kind of creators. Like Lewis House, for example, is one of our big creator customer survival cuts. It's great because the MCMT has to work with, I think I hear great things. And they use viral cuts to do all of their like podcast episode, openings and trailers and short form. And that's the thing to where that budget's committed. There's gonna be creating that content non-stop. Saho Blume, for example. So that is really good. It has low retention. But inherently, in any product of service, you're gonna have a decent amount of time. Okay. How much is viral cuts is that? I guess a public right? It starts at 4400. Starts. What are the 4400 or I think it's 7 grand? What is the difference in the service?

1:28:15Just like video planned? It's 40 hours a week and then it becomes 80 hours a week. So you charge by the hour of your team? Again, it's one to one. So we just like if you're a customer, if you're a creator customer, the plan is called creator, you just get somebody assigned to you. Mm. Yeah. And then you get either 40 hours or 80 hours for that. Yeah. So either one person assigned to you are two people. But if you are on the higher end, which is called the studio, where you're committing three months at a time. So in intervals. You get for three months and then you do it again. You do it again. Okay. Yeah. Interesting. Now we're about to do the same thing for HeyFrance. Really? Mm-hmm. We think about it differently. That's interesting. It's smart. Yeah. Thank you. Everything is like no contract. But I think having people commit is important. If it's something to where there might be preconceived notions that like, oh, I'm going to try this for a month and see if I grow. And that's not going to happen, right?

1:29:18So we set all kinds of expectations around like output is going to be lower your first month, your first few weeks while we generate like your style. Like obviously there's a ramp up period before we're like. The learning phase. Yeah, before there's a fire hose of content. So we're at the point now. It's where like our lead gen is so strong. The customer acquisition is so strong. Like why wouldn't we just say, no, you have to commit to the service for expiry of months. Interesting. Okay. And the last question I always ask people is really just what is like out of everything that you've learned in your life. Everyone takes a while to answer this. So take a time to think about it. But what is one thing that you used to think was like true in business, like you were like, that was your life philosophy, business philosophy. Now you have like a complete opposite belief. I mean, I really came up in my career like originally when in the tech crunch days, right? Like, first in raising money, persons doing this, like whatever. And like my first real company, like I raised the VC. And so I thought that's the way it was. And I just think it's total bullshit.

1:30:19Like now I have a lot of friends that are VCs and not saying like VC in general is bullshit. But the idea like that's going to be how you create wealth is needing to like raise capital and defer revenue just acquire a bunch of users and then figure it out later. It just doesn't make sense to me, right? Like it's funny that when I started to have real success in business, it's when I just stripped out all of these preconceived notions of how things had to be. And I just went down to first principles in common sense, right? Like, oh, if I want to run a business, I should probably get people to pay me money day one. And I should probably make sure that I'm turning a profit, right? That's the biggest thing is just like instead of focusing on these glamorous things, focus on ways to make money, right? That might be the best answer I've heard. Because VC is like the most extreme way to run a business. Like we're going to raise $10 million. We're not going to make any money. And then in five years, hopefully we can sell it to like a huge company or go public. Yeah. And maybe you go around that journey and you're successful.

1:31:21And like how much time did that shave off for you, really? Where you could have owned more, right? Or found other ways to get that capital instead of traditional venture investment. How helpful was your board, right? Where did they guide you? What path did they push you down that maybe it was right? Again, that's saying it's all bad. I know some great VCs. But I also knew a lot of really bad ones. So if you're going to do it, be very strategic and intentional. Yeah. OK, great advice. We're raised with leverage. Raise when you're already able to raise like fuck you terms. OK. So last last question is, now you've been talking. I've got a tweet about starting a YouTube channel. And you can now kind of, I mean, this is a good opportunity because you have these creator-led businesses. You might as well be a creator yourself too. So bring them in. It's not that I want to be a creator necessarily. But I see the power of having an audience, obviously, right? But for us, it's fucking crazy that I'm

1:32:23a nobody. I have, I think I have 14,000 followers on Twitter or something like that. But people will get on a sales call with our team. And they'll be like, oh, I heard about you guys through Sam, more Cody. And then I checked out your stuff, and I saw Hunter. And I love your companies. Love what you want to do, whatever. And they become a customer. And then, because they know my stuff, they see the other brands. And they become a customer of another brand. Or it is insanely helpful for recruiting. And plus, I just, I honestly just have a lot of fun doing it. I've had a lot of fun just like doing these podcasts, talking to people, sharing like what I know. I don't think I'm qualified to give advice. But I'm happy to talk about my experiences or what I might do in a given situation. And YouTube, I spend so much time thinking about it because we're building YouTube business. I think that 99% of entrepreneurial advice on YouTube is just dog shit. It's like, grifters. Under pressure. And I'm like, look, I would rather just go all fucking

1:33:24Sam's solo and just have some super raw as content. And just like, held the truth and try and be helpful. So it seems fun to me. So you said earlier in the podcast that it was something you really regretted not documenting. You're like, journeying 100%. Why? Is that why I'm in the year? The circle that I'm in now has convinced me that for some reason, I'm interesting. And I don't know if that's true. But if some people believe that, it tells me it's like, OK, I probably could have built an audience. And I just look at it. I'm like, OK, I know where I'm at today. Where could I have been today if I had built an audience along the way, like the extra leverage that I could have stacked up? And just being in the position that I'm in now, having the network that I have, the resources that I have, it just makes all the sense of the world. I'd be an idiot not to do it. Yeah, I think the things that you touched on on that answer are actually the important things. If you have content out there, then potential clients can go see what you're all about. And they might want to work with you now because they build trust watching that content with you.

1:34:25And recruiting, you can put your mission that can inspire talented people to come join the mission. Getting millions of views, that's cool too. But that what you're talking about, you can achieve that without a million subscribers. You could achieve that with just 1,000 subscribers in the right people. See it. So I'm excited to see your content. I'm going to learn a lot from you. I don't know, but I'm going to do my best. I learned a lot from you in this podcast. I appreciate it. Guys, Hunter Hammond, check him out. He has a good Twitter account, YouTube soon to come. Anything else you want to plug? No. I mean, check out our companies. Yeah. They can really find all of them in your bio on your account. Do you have them all for listed or simply? I think so. Yeah, off menu.design, bite size.design, Hey, friends.studio, our cutstick, co-efer. We'll assembly have a website with it has everything listed on it eventually. Or yeah, do that's such a good question. I got a link for your website. No. So we're going to launch the assembly brand when we have all the big pieces. So like when we have the fund, we have all the companies, when we have some of the other things that we're building out, we're going to be doing events, like really, really cool events. Oh, cool. I want to go. Yeah, they're going to be really good. I think we're going to test one in New York soon,

1:35:26all about the creator economy. All right, guys, so it'll be awesome. That's perfect, dude. You guys want to follow that journey? Follow him. But, dude, thank you so much. Appreciate it. Absolutely. Thanks for having me. This episode is brought to you by Born in Roma Fregrances by Valentino Beauty, the iconic fragrance duo. Donna Born in Roma, Ode to Parfum, is a feminine fragrance featuring juicy black current, central jasmine, woody cashmurren, and warm vanilla. Its masculine counterpart, Womow Born in Roma, Ode to Valet, has notes of fresh violet leaf, aromatic sage, green vetiver, spicy ginger, and mineral salt. Shop at macy's.com. Afternoon, glare totally ruined my watch party for the big game. That's when my buddy recommended Blinds.com. With custom window treatments made to fit your style, space, and budget, customers who shop at Blinds.com experienced overwhelming satisfaction. Side effects may include a fuller, deeper night sleep, and a sudden urge to host the watch party again. Blinds.com isn't a medication,

1:36:28but it can improve how you feel about your home. Visit Blinds.com now to save up to 50% off site-wide during our annual Fall Blowout sale. Fall has never looked or tasted this good. Sweet Greens Fall Harvest Menu is back with seasonal favorites dressed to impress and made to be devoured. Warm roasted sweet potatoes, crisp apples, maple glazed brussels, and crave worthy flavors in the autumn harvest bowl, maple glazed salmon plate, and roasted bacon brussels side. The season's most desirable menu has returned to sweet green. Featuring falls best dressed. Make your move, order on the sweet green app. Finding a doctor is hard enough. Finding the right doctor, even harder. Someone who takes your insurance has an available appointment when you need one and feels like someone you can actually open up to. That's where Zock.com's in. Download the Zock.com app to search and compare doctors by specialty, insurance, and availability. Read real-patient reviews, find the right fit for you, and book instantly, because getting seen

1:37:29by the right doctor matters. Zock.com, ready to be seen? Download the Zock.com app today. This week, it pays extra to be a MyLos Rewards member. Through October 14, members get $10 MyLos money. When you spend $200 or more on an eligible purchase during MyLos money days. Also, using your MyLos rewards credit card, even better. That's an additional $20 MyLos money. Use it to save on your next Loes haul. Exclusions, restrictions, and more terms apply. CLoes.com slash MyLos money days for details. MyLos money expires 30 days after issuance, subject to change, credit offers, subject to credit approval. Football is back, and prize picks is bringing out their best offer yet. On prize picks, you can make all the picks you want, all in the same app. And now, prize picks is available nationwide. Lock in for kickoff, because everyone and everything is on prize picks. What you want? Download the prize picks app today and use code Spotify to get $150 Installing and Lineups. If you win your first $5 lineup, prize picks, run your game.

1:38:33Plus, be present in certain states, visit prizepicks.com for restricting to send details.