Justin Welsh - Learn the art of solopreneurship from a mastermind!

real life, I'm pretty high-strung. I worry a lot. You know, my business requires net new sales on a regular basis. So when a day is slow or 2 days in a row are slow, I start to worry, oh my gosh, well, maybe I'm— maybe this is the end, right? Maybe no one cares about what I have to say anymore. In a weird twist, that's sort of what drives me too, right? It's sort of that double-edged sword where it's anxiety-inducing, but it also helps you be driven. The way that I generally deal with those things, there's sort of 2 ways. One is to be really objective about what I'm seeing. So I often ask myself, all right, so this week hasn't been as good as a normal week. Let's take all the numbers and put 'em on a piece of paper and let's pretend that your name isn't on this piece of paper. If somebody handed this piece of paper to you, would you think this is a good business? And the answer is usually, yeah, I think this is a great business. And sure, this week wasn't as good as last week, but like in the knowledge entrepreneurship space, weeks ebb and flow very much, and there's not a lot of predictability. So you have to be ready for that.

Hello, hello, everybody, boys and girls, ladies and gentlemen. Today I have an unbelievable guest. I actually admire this person for many reasons personally and as a viewer on Twitter, as a content consumer. Well, first of all, welcome to the show, The Undefeated Underdogs. I'm kind of nervous to talk to this person because it's been some time. I'll give you a backstory about it. Justin Welsh, welcome to the podcast. I'm so stoked to have you here.

Thanks, man. I'm really glad to be here. And if it makes you any less nervous, I just spilled water all over my desk. So we're both stumbling around in the beginning. So all is good, man. How are

you? Awesome. I think that's how you start a good conversation. You get blended into like nice feel and flow. Let me introduce Justin for folks who don't know the man. Justin is an incredible— he's a machine. Overall, he's a content machine. He's an incredible entrepreneur, founder, investor. He's built like 2 $50 million+ ARR+ companies before. He has his newsletter called Saturday Solopreneur. He kind of gave a rebirth to the term solopreneurship. I would say he's the— I think he's the modern father of solopreneurship because he's, he's, he teaches so many people. He runs this newsletter with over 90K subscribers. He's built a couple of courses, LinkedIn OS, which will help you ramp up your LinkedIn presence, and Content OS, which will streamline your whole content management. So I'm stoked to have this conversation. Welcome, welcome again, Justin. Right off the bat, Why solopreneurship? What is something for someone who's like you, who invested in yourself as a founder who built these massive companies before and you've raised millions of dollars. If I'm not wrong, it's $300+ million for both companies you worked before. Why go solo? When you know how to build a team?

Yeah, solopreneurship is a lifestyle. It's less about being a business model and it's more about being a life model. So, the way that I think about it is I did 7 or 8 years in sales when I came out of school and then I got into technology and I worked for 2 companies, startups that would both become unicorn companies. One, I was a director-level employee and the second one, I was an executive and then part of the C-suite. And those were really cool learning experiences and built really massive companies and was a big part of those things. But after being in tech for 10 years, especially on the executive front or the C-level side, it gets very, very tiring and very, very stressful and anxiety-inducing. And when I wanted to reinvent sort of my career, I asked myself, what kind of life do I want to build? Not what kind of career do I want to build? And then, I built my business around my lifestyle. And my lifestyle was really I want to spend as much time doing as many things that I enjoy like traveling, spending time with my wife. I want to do it with people that I love being around, my family, my friends. And I want to try and do as few things as possible that I hate doing. And to me, that's like long meetings, board meetings, reporting to somebody else, having to work on the weekends. Solopreneurship is just a model that allows you to build your life first and your business second. So I don't want to bring anyone else into the mix right now because it takes away from the lifestyle that I'm trying to build. So, so that's why.

I love that. I love the way you treat it as a lifestyle more of— more than anything else, because you become your own boss. And I want to also understand The transition, because it's not like, I assume it's not like a light switch where overnight you just became like, oh, you know what, I'm a solopreneur. It takes some process, right? So curious about the transition. Like, I do know that you went through a burnout, which I want to also cover later in the episode, but is that the first fundamental reason that pushed you towards Okay, I have to make this as a conscious, intentional decision towards building my own lifestyle where I become my own boss. I spend my time with my family.

I think that was part of what had an impact. But I think the core reason was that things that I wanted to do had been taken away from me in other roles. So, if I look back on my time, and by the way, I loved both of my jobs at Zocdoc and PatientBot. I loved them. They were amazing and amazing companies.

Right.

But there were times during working for those companies where vacations had to get canceled, where my wife and I went on our honeymoon and we got a lot of flak for taking a long honeymoon. And to me, these are very, very specific life experiences that I want to be able to enjoy with no strings attached. And the way that our careers were going, both me and my wife, is there were always strings attached to everything. And yes, the burnout that eventually would happen in early 2019 would play a big role in why I wanted to design my life this way. But, to me, I didn't want to miss any more big milestones. I didn't want to have to report back to the CEO or go through a massive transition or a piece of technology breaks on our 10th wedding anniversary or anything like that. To me, it's all about— I'm 41, so I'm probably in the back half of my life. Yeah,

right.

And so, to me, it's just like recognizing that time is finite and starting to reprioritize what's important to

me.

So, that's sort of, I think, the biggest driver of the behavior change or the model change.

So, in a way, you want to become free. You want to become free of strings and free of all these external responsibilities that comes with a job, 9-to-5 job, because you have to report and whatnot. And I spoke about freedom with Jack Butcher as well. He's the first guest on my show. He gave a brilliant answer about freedom, the way he thinks, and he prioritizes freedom over everything. That's his number one motivator. I want to understand, After seeing both worlds, and for people who are listening, who you want to give a reason for, like freedom is, I think, fundamental reason, in my opinion, right? How do you define freedom in your words? And how important it became right now after you saw the whole transition and becoming such a successful person? You've built a million-dollar business by yourself now. So how do you define freedom and how should people view freedom when they do such transitions?

Yeah. I don't know that I'm in a position to tell anyone else how to view their personal freedom, but mine is pretty simple. I want to do all the things I want to do with whomever I want to do them with whenever I want to do them and do very little of what I don't like to do. That's like my business model, my life model, my mantra that I try and live by. And when I share that, There's always a lot of pushback on that. People think that sounds very childlike. They described it as fantastical. But to me, it's like, if you're in a position to do that, if you can build a business and a lifestyle that allows you to just spend your time how you want, with whom you want, when you want, and doing very little of what you don't, why not make that the ultimate goal? I mean, no business that you build has total freedom regardless of what anyone says, right? Like, I have customers, I have customer service, I have content that's due, I have a newsletter that I have to write. So, there's certainly deliverables.

Right.

But those deliverables can be created anytime, anywhere, ahead of time. I can go on vacation for a week and do nothing online and my business doesn't fail, right? So, to me, freedom is really about Choosing what you want your life to be and then crafting a business that allows you to get as close to that lifestyle as possible. To me, that's freedom. I don't know if I recommend it to someone else because I can't, again, recommend how everyone should design their life. But that to me covers a pretty broad spectrum of, I think, what would make most people happy.

Nice. I love that. I love your modesty there. I see you're in a position where you can actually recommend, but I'll take your answer there. But so you have this intention. I want to also dive into a little deeper into your mindset about going from 0 to 1. Like, you've made up your mind as a solopreneur. What is something that triggered you? like, okay, this is the path I want to go? Is it content creation or is it like YouTube, the video format, or what enticed you to like, okay, now I have made my mind, this is the path I want to pursue?

Yeah, it's interesting. It's not one particular moment. It's an aggregate total of many moments over time. So I'll give you an example. I never really intended to do what I do today or to trumpet solopreneurship. That wasn't my intention when I got started. My intention was to take a break from work, traditional 9-to-5 work. So, when I burned out in 2019, I had this idea that I would do what a lot of former executives do when they quit. You consult and advise and invest and do a bunch of things like that. Right, right. And so, I started doing that. I think where I got lucky or maybe I was fortunate enough to make a good decision here was I created content to land consulting clients and advising clients. I had a good name in the industry. So, that came from content. It came from introductions. It came from having a good name. There are a bunch of ways I got clients. But after creating content, I got the bug. I got the itch to write. I actually really enjoyed the content creation side of it. It wasn't like, oh, I have to get up and create content to try and get leads. It was like, oh, this is fun and enjoyable. Right. And so, because it was fun and enjoyable, I think that showed and a lot of people saw that. And so, the questions went from being like, hey, can you help me build my SaaS company? To, well, tell me a little bit more about content creation. How do you thrive on social media? How should my profile— like all these random questions that I hadn't anticipated And so, I saw that signal amongst a bunch of other noise and started to sort of lean into that. And over time, it took me down this path of just curiosity, just something I was interested in. I was like, oh, how do you build an online business? What if I didn't want to do consulting? What if I wanted to build a product instead? What does that look like? How do I do it? And so, I just read a bunch of books and I did a bunch of things and I failed a bunch of times and I iterated and tried again until I finally got it right. And I think 0 to 1, people often describe as like a step, right? Because 1 and 0 are one number apart from each other.

Right, right.

But in between 0 and 1 is a lot of shit, right? It's like a lot of stuff. And so, getting from 0 to 1 was a 2-year journey for me of like trying a bunch of things that didn't work, figuring out what did, not doing the things that didn't work, and doing a ton of the things that did work. And so, that's like my 0 to 1 journey. And when people try and make it this really clean journey, I just, I just don't think that's the way it goes. I think it's a messy, muddy, crappy path.

It just, it feels like a script when you say, hey, I went from 0 to 1, right? Like, you know, it's definitely not scripted. There are some surprises that you need to face, some obstacles you need to like, you know, overcome and whatnot. I want to also quickly ask this question, the follow-up question to your journey bit, the zero-to-one messy piece, because many people remember successes. They all remember triumphs. They all remember the wins. They ignore intentionally the losses, right? I want to become successful. Sure. So you mentioned you failed a couple of times. Do you want to talk about or give like a debrief, the things you tried and why did you fail and what are some things that you learned quickly to overcome? And you said, put your focus fully on the things that worked.

Yeah. There are 2 failures that stand out. And again, I don't consider them like failures. They're learning, they're lessons, right? They're really good lessons to learn, which was when I came out of my executive role and I first started consulting, I didn't know how to price myself. So, I took my salary and overall total earnings as an executive and divided it by 2,080. That's 52 weeks times 40 hours a week. And so, what I essentially arrived at was an already hourly rate that I was making at work. And I was like, cool, I can go out and make this hourly rate, only to find out that in order to make what I used to make, I still had to work 40 hours a week. So, I found myself overwhelmed with customers in the beginning. Right. And I went through a secondary burnout. because I was really, really bad at both pricing myself, feeling confident in my pricing, managing my time effectively. There were a bunch of ways early on in my service business that I just got trounced by the number of things that I had to do. And so, learning how to price yourself, learning how to bring on some folks that can help you in delegating some lower-level work so that you can be more strategic in your consulting business, those were all things that took like 18 to 24 months to learn. That was like something that I got eaten alive by in the very beginning. Another area that I failed, and like, you could probably find it online somewhere, is like, I tried a bunch of content stuff that no one's probably ever seen. So like, I had like a YouTube series and like Instagram videos and like—

Really?

Me standing in front of a whiteboard breaking down sales tips and things that they've probably never seen it. And it, looking back, it's like cringe, cringeworthy. And the thing that I learned from this experience was that I love writing. And so getting up and writing on Twitter or LinkedIn or whatever platform that I write on each morning is really simple for me. I don't love turning the camera around to myself, and that's really difficult for me. And I was trying to force myself to do these things that I thought had to be done because I saw other people doing them instead of leaning into what I'm really good at, but also what I enjoy. Right. And as soon as I cleared all that shit away and decided to say, there's no perfect path, the path that you take is like, whatever you like doing, make it your best path and double down on that. I was a lot more free to create things that I think were successful versus things that nobody ever saw or paid attention to.

Oh, man, there are like so many things I want to unpack there. First of all, I really like your honesty about your pricing. You know, many, many people won't reveal that. It's, you know, thanks for being so transparent about such a sensitive piece. We still want more people to talk about, like, you know, the hourly rate or anything. So talking about the pricing, what is your blueprint that you want to share with others? Like, if they're like consultants listening to this,

yeah,

this is how you price.

Yeah, there's no, like, I don't have a great blueprint, but here's some things that I think about when it comes to pricing. So, let's say you take your overall total earnings, whatever that is at work, and you divide it by 2,080. That's generally your hourly rate that your employer pays you. Nobody thinks about their employer rate as hourly, but generally, it is. You work 2,080 hours a year and that's what you get paid. Exactly. So, let's say that comes out to $100, right? Well, if you— $100 an hour. If you charge as a freelancer $100 an hour, you're always going to have to work 40 hours a week to recoup what you made. Right. So, my sort of rule of thumb is try and charge 2 to 2.5x what you make in your 9-to-5 job. It's not perfect, right? It's just like back-of-napkin math. So, if your hourly rate's $100 an hour, you charge $200, $250 an hour as a freelance worker. What you're trying to do is you're trying to buy back a little bit of your time, right? Because, okay, great. So, if I charge twice, I can work 20 hours a week. And I can make the same amount of money as I did as a 9-to-5 employee, or I can work 40 hours a week and make twice as much as what I did as a 9-to-5 employee. I recommend the former. To me, my favorite thing is to make the same and work less because with the additional time that you have that's granted to you, you can figure out ways to make money in a more efficient manner, right? So, there's a couple of things I might think of from that. After you have set your rate, you're probably going to start figuring out what customers you like working with. Customers are— you're going to figure out what problems you like solving. And your customers are going to tell you some of the things they like that you do. And what you really want to find is the intersection of all those things. And once you find the intersection of all those things, you have a very specific customer. So, for example, I went servicing, I started servicing all SaaS companies that wanted to grow, pretty broad. And by the time I was done, 18 months later, I was servicing early-stage healthcare companies in Series A that were looking to go from $1 to $10 million in annual recurring revenue. When I became really specific, because of my experience, I was a tough guy to beat. In that, in that sector, right? I had that experience times two in that niche, right? And so, rather than charge two fifty or five hundred, I charge a thousand dollars an hour or fifteen hundred dollars an hour, and still have enough for my deals. I had an upper hand, right?

Right.

So, like I started charging more and more and more and more and more, and then the people who either A couldn't afford me or B weren't in my niche, I built products for those people so I could still collect income. Without trading my time while I was raising my rates in my niche service sector. So that's like sort of a couple of different concepts around pricing and packaging that I think about when I'm, when I'm building service businesses.

I really like that. I like that mindset of going after a niche, at the same time, taking care of the people you leave behind or the, or the opportunities you leave behind by productizing yourself. So let's talk about that. Like, I think most of the people who interviewed you, they unpacked how you went through a niche, become like this tough guy to beat. I want to touch about— this is something new to me as well— is when you go after a niche, you don't have to leave behind other opportunities and you have to prioritize. So how did you find that find that rhythm there? Because it requires your attention, your time as well, while you're actually focusing on consulting and putting your time spending with your clients. So how efficient you got building those products?

Yeah. So I'll give you a couple of examples. So products don't always have to be products in a box. So let me give you, let me show you what I mean. So, I had a pretty lengthy friction-filled process to work with me after 2 years. And what I mean by that is like, you couldn't just like book time on my calendar and we have a discovery call. It was like a 15 or 12-question form that you had to fill out if you wanted to have a conversation. And those forms got vetted by me before discovery call was booked because I couldn't just afford to take a discovery call from every single person that came my way.

Right.

And so, there's sort of 3 things that happened. One is someone filled out the information and it was an immediate poor fit. When that happens, I can use automation, I can use email, I can use drips to say, hey, thanks but no thanks, like in obviously much nicer language. But here are a few things that I recommend. I recommend like here's a product that I recommend that I've built that I think would be really helpful given the stage that you're at. Here's another person that I recommend working with. They're much better in your industry, whatever, right? I could use different triggers to sort of fire off different emails. The second thing that happened was it looked good, but we jumped on a call and after doing some discovery, it wasn't a good fit. This is an opportunity within 30 minutes for me to do some pretty quick selling, right? So, it's like, hey, this isn't a great fit, or the customer doesn't think it's a great fit. And we're like, listen, I've got 2 products that I think would be really great for you at your stage. You know, they'll handle your problems, but I don't think a one-on-one relationship is great. Or I've got 6 people in my ecosystem that are perfect for you, right? And then what I would do with those folks is I would essentially create a revenue share agreement where like, if I was going to be their, you know, person sourcing their leads for them, then they would cut me off a part of revenue.

Like,

that was the second thing that might happen. And the third thing is like, we were a great fit and I would move them into a service business. But the way that the products came out were like commonalities. So, okay, what were the top 5 reasons that I didn't want to work with people or problems that I didn't want to solve or things like that? Those became products. All the things that I wanted to do, that I wanted to spend my time on, that became me accepting a service offer from a customer. So, that's sort of how I think about mixing, matching, selling, referring, and still being relatively efficient, especially early on in the service business.

I like that. It's so smart the way you handle things. When did the Saturday Solopreneur, the quite popular newsletter, born? Like, is it in somewhere like you identified these signals? How do you basically identify these signals? Like, what's your radar look like?

Yeah, there's a big gap between— so like, To give you a sense, when I was servicing customers, I was during the days before I was doing a lot of creating. But, if you fast forward and I had shut my service business off, I became more of a content creator. I was selling a lot of digital products that were completely unfocused on sales and marketing and SaaS and my sort of old life. But, I saw the Saturday Solopreneur. it started last January. So, it's 15 months old as of this recording. I just simply saw an opportunity to develop, do 2 things, develop more expertise and authority with my audience. So, show them a little bit more behind the curtains, right? A little bit more than you're going to get from a tweet or a LinkedIn post. I saw that as an opportunity. And for my audience, I saw an opportunity to give them more than I was giving them on social media so they could learn more, so they could build a better business without buying a product or paying for a coaching call or things like that. And I was also just looking for maybe a creative, a different creative outlet and process than writing social media content. Writing newsletters and writing social media content are very different. And so, I said to myself, I'm going to do this. I got to process this. Like, I got to have a system behind this because I had tried a newsletter before and failed. to continue to write. This will be my 66th, I think, issue coming up this coming Saturday. So, the process and system that I have down is pretty awesome. I can write anywhere from 3 to 4 newsletters per week if I really have the time. And, I just am getting faster and better at it over time, which I love.

I really like that. So, in a way, I think if someone is listening to this or even observe From a bird's eye view, writing is your strength in a way. I think you build like even the courses, the LinkedIn Content OS, both are like writing-focused. The newsletter itself is, and you're pretty active on LinkedIn and Twitter. If you want, if you were to do something differently like a year ago and you become a better you now, of course, obviously, What is something that you recommend for people, especially to writers, especially to people who are still like on the fence of, you know what, I tweet, but I don't stretch myself, I don't challenge myself?

Yeah, well, it's a really good question. One thing that I talk about a lot that I think a lot of people don't talk about is publish everything. So, like, I think it's kind of a funny thing to talk about on Twitter when people are like, oh, my draft tweets are like, oh, I have so many great ideas in my draft tweets. I don't have any draft tweets.

Really?

None.

No, you're kidding me.

I'm not kidding.

Wow.

Yeah, I have no draft tweets. Like, I have things that are— I have things that are loaded up to be published in the future. Right? Like, when I have an idea—

Those are not drafts to me.

Drafts

are some unfinished Business like

yeah, and like and like just to just to be clear, like I might write something and say like oh I want to work on this a little bit harder, and so maybe it sits in the draft for like 24 hours. But like I don't have like 100 drafts. Wow, that's impressive. Because what everything that I that comes to my mind, either I publish it right away or the next day or two days from now or whatever, or I delete it, or I just say like this isn't interesting, it's a bad idea. But generally, I'm like pretty binary in terms of action. So, it's like either that idea sucks and I don't want to tweet it. But most of the time, I'd say 90% of the time, everything that I write gets published. And I don't understand. I get the hesitation when you think something might suck, but we live in like— it used to be a 24-hour news cycle. Now, it's kind of like a 4-hour news cycle where it's like everyone's attention is so— It's shifting so fast. So, if you write a shitty tweet, who cares? 3 hours later, nobody remembers it. They're on to your next tweet. And I tweet a lot. So, everything that I put out there, in my opinion, is a data point. And so, rather than trying to make everything perfect, it's just like push, push, push, push, push, and look at the data because I'll give you an example of why I publish every I wrote this tweet the other day about Tom from MySpace, and I said something like, Tom from MySpace sold MySpace for $580 million and then retired in his 30s to take up photography. That's the energy I'm after. I wrote that tweet and I thought, this tweet sucks. Like, this is not interesting. Nobody's going to like this. And unbelievably, it's probably one of my best tweets engagement and impression-wise from like the last 45 days. So that just goes to show you, you never know what's going to resonate. So if I hadn't pushed it out there, I would have missed a major opportunity to learn something. And so I just always about pushing and publishing. That's something that I wish I would have done as much when I was getting started.

Wow. First of all, it's so impressive that you're so binary. And because a lot, a lot of us, including myself, when we create content, we just dwell, right? Like there is this teasing habit that we form over time, which is, hey, this idea can be a little better, so let me sit on it for a while. And listening to you after that, especially in writing, I'm not talking about other things, because if you take the get-quick-ship mentality, I'm good at product building. Like, okay, let me actually build an idea quickly. I don't dwell on it. But when it comes to writing, for some of us, that's so impressive. How do you build that mindset? I'm just curious about the thought process that goes through. Because once you have that teasing habit, okay, let me tinker this a little bit. Maybe this will embarrass me. Let me not do it. What goes into your mind? Like, I know you just ship it, but just deep down core level, how do you think? How do you process?

Well, I think of it, I think it all starts with recognizing that it's a really long game, right? So like, for example, I wrote something today and I published it right away. Could it have been better? Sure. Will I re-edit it and publish it again 6 months from now? Yes. So like, I don't need to make it perfect today because I can see if my audience will love it today, much like the Tom from MySpace tweet. Like maybe I push it out there and I'm shocked by its performance today. That wasn't the case. I wrote something, I was like, oh, it's pretty good. And I pushed it out and it was like mediocre response, but I thought the idea was good. So I'll get another swing at that. I'll get another at-bat with that piece of content 6 months from now because I'll I keep a running tally of everything I've ever written. And I have this system that I've created where whatever I write today will be resurfaced to me 6 months from now to the day with some notes about it and its performance. And I'll get to tinker with that idea 6 months from now. And then I'll get to tinker with that idea again 6 months from then and then 6 months again. And like, it's every piece of content always has multiple lives, right? So like, knowing that this content has multiple lives, I don't need to get it right in the first time. Like, I don't need to say something— I don't want to say something stupid,

or of

course mean, or divisive, or talk poorly about anyone, which I don't generally do at all. But like, that content will live 6 times, I'd rather just push it out there and start getting some data on it.

That is so true in a way. You tinker in the long run. You don't tinker in the moment. You know, I think it's a good way of putting crisply in a short way. Basically, like, shoot it out, look back 6 months from the downline and say, hey, you know what, let me make this a little bit better based on the engagement or not. Oh man, you know, you're a machine. Like I said, I think— So you talked about multiple times in the last 30 minutes about building systems, building systems, building systems. And what's the most efficient way that you recommend in terms of building a system for solopreneurs if they want to become like, they want to build like million-dollar businesses? What do you recommend?

Yeah, to me it's called being friction cognizant. So, it's just being super cognizant of every point of friction that comes up during your week. My wife and I were just talking prior to this and I shared a post today and a lot of people were asking me about discipline. And, my wife said something to the effect of, you're certainly a really disciplined person. And, I am. I look for opportunities during my week, Monday through Sunday, where I feel friction about something, whether it's about writing my newsletter or creating a piece of content or building a new product or interacting with my audience. There are points where I'm like, oh, this is harder than it should be. And so, rather than just steamroll through because I'm always focused on trying to do the next thing, I try and stop and say, how do I remove that friction? How do I make that process simpler, right? Because to me, working as a one-person business, the most important thing is to wake up each day and know exactly what it is that you need to do to be successful.

Hmm.

And the more you remove friction, the more that what's left on your plate is creative work, work that, you know, you enjoy doing. The friction has been removed. And I use simple processes like eliminate, simplify, automate, delegate. So, I'll go through my calendar and say like, what actually doesn't need to be on here that is on here, right? Simplify. What process is really complicated that could be a lot more simple? Automate. Where could I use Zapier or other tools to make a lot of this friction go away? And then delegate. Like, where could I delegate to Elizabeth, my VA, and make this a lot easier? So, those are just some simple ways that I think about it.

Yeah. I think I was just going through your tweets about VA. I think hiring a VA removes a lot of friction in a way. And when did you realize that? And do you have any tips that you want to share? Like, okay, I have to really hire a VA and streamline the whole process. And because I think a dedicated person taking care of such a system is really important, right? So do you want to share your two cents on You just shared a tweet, but maybe you want to elaborate on that.

Yeah, I think when you find yourself bogged down by working in the business instead of on the business, it's time for a VA, which means like at one point I was spending an hour to an hour and a half a day doing things like creating invoices, helping people find their password, getting people— they bought the wrong course and they want to get switched into a new one. They can't find an email that they were supposed to get. Like, all this very— like, this work that I just wasn't creative work. And because of the fact that I had to constantly go back and forth from creative work to administrative tasks, context switching is a huge killer. And so, to me, it's just like being cognizant again of like, how much time are you spending doing things you shouldn't be doing? And so, when I went to hire my first VA, I used a service called Zirtual. And I had read this book a long time ago. I don't remember what book it was, but some guy had talked about the Starbucks test. And again, I apologize to whoever wrote the book. I can't remember what it was, but they basically said, write out a document that teaches someone how to do something and then take it down to Starbucks and tell someone you'll buy them a coffee if they can go through the document and not make any errors and see how clear it is. Because we forget, we've all got this knowledge up here where things seem so clear and easy to us. But when we hand it over to somebody with no context, it becomes really challenging. So, like, my instructions are so clear and easy that, you know, a kindergartner could understand them. Love it. And to me, that's like the easiest way to get started is, you know, make sure that there are no— there's no way possible to misinterpret your instructions and give your VA everything that they need, email templates, brand guides, tone of voice guides, instructions, video instructions, like everything they need to be successful. And then meet with them on a weekly basis to see where the broken points are and then correct those things.

Yeah, I think that's so smart again. And if you want to 10x, right, like your business and again, the things you do in a creative space, I feel like VA is a great solution. I love the Starbucks method. Okay. You're hitting it for the first time. So Let's switch gears a little bit. And let's talk about your— the Justin Welsh as we speak right now, not the Justin Welsh, like, you know, in the making 3, 4 years ago, right? Do you ever feel anxious? Or do you ever feel like nervous about your next day? And if you do, how do you deal with it?

Yeah, I feel anxious every day. I feel nervous every single day. I worry about my business every day. And there's not a single day that doesn't go by where I don't get panic-stricken, I guess. That's probably an exaggeration, but panic-stricken is an exaggeration. But I would say I definitely feel a lot of anxiety. And I think that just happens to be who I am as a person. So, I'm a very high-strung person. I'm relatively calm on things like podcasts and interviews and things like that. But in my real life, I'm pretty high-strung. I worry a lot. My business requires net new sales on a regular basis. So, when a day is slow or 2 days in a row are slow, I start to worry, oh my gosh, well, maybe this is the end, right? Maybe no one cares about what I have to say anymore. Yeah. In a weird twist, that's sort of what drives me too, right? It's sort of that double-edged sword where it's anxiety-inducing, but it also helps you be driven. The way that I generally deal with those things, there's sort of 2 ways. One is to be really objective about what I'm seeing. So, I often ask myself, all right, so this week hasn't been as good as a normal week. let's take all the numbers and put them on a piece of paper and let's pretend that your name isn't on this piece of paper. If somebody handed this piece of paper to you, would you think this is a good business? And the answer is usually, yeah, I think this is a great business. And sure, this week wasn't as good as last week, but in the knowledge entrepreneurship space, weeks ebb and flow very much and there's not a lot of predictability. So, you have to be ready for that variable. The second thing, or that variability, excuse me. The second thing that I do is I see a therapist on a regular basis every Thursday. So, I have an entrepreneur's therapist named Megan. And this is super helpful. Like, I don't think anybody should be an entrepreneur and not have mental health coaching and therapy. I think it's just really important. I know too many entrepreneurs who, if you look at their Twitter profile or their LinkedIn profile or whatever, either YouTube videos, everything seems great. Totally not the true story. Right? Like, everybody's struggling behind the scenes. Everybody has mental health issues. Everybody is nervous and worried and anxious and facing fears that they don't talk about. I'm in a lot of groups with solopreneurs and entrepreneurs where facing our fears and our purpose and our anxieties is a regular talking point. So, having someone to talk to on a regular basis is really, really important. It doesn't make you any less of an entrepreneur or solopreneur, it makes you more of one, in my opinion.

No, I appreciate you being so transparent. I think we need more people like you talk about the behind the scenes, right? Like you said, everything we see on the surface level seems like crystal clear and it's so well written. Everybody's leading a great life, but of course everybody has their own issues. It can be personal, it can be like business-induced, like you said. So those are all, I think, mental challenges, right? But when you— do you ever face self-doubt? Because all the things that you said are controlled by others. Business is a two-way street. You have to get sales. That means other people should buy, which involves a secondary entity. Do you have battles in your own mind, like self-doubt? And like you said, this is the end. Oh my God, I don't have another idea tomorrow. What would I do? Because I have like 380K+ people following me overall. I have like 500K+ people like looking at me, like, you know, the pressure, or like, how do you handle such— do you have one in the first place? And if you have one, How do you go by and get through that?

Yeah, yeah, I have self-doubt every day, man. I'm very, very binary in my emotions as well. I'm much like my mother where it's like things are one way or the other. And so, to give you an example, often, at least every day I'd probably say, yeah, probably every day, I both find myself to be— I find myself doubting myself, right? So, heavy self-doubt at some point during the day. And then, there are other moments during the day where I think, well, I'm great. I'm going to do great today. I'm going

to

kick ass and

tomorrow's

going to be great and the business is going to 10x and all this different thing. I vacillate between those 2 emotions on a daily basis. In terms of how I deal with it, it's it's definitely a dual approach, right? So there's lots of different ways in which I approach it. Number one is I have a great sounding board. I have my therapist I talked about. I have my wife, and so I work at home, and so I'm always with my wife. And my wife is much more practical than I am. So she's able to take me when I'm at the. depths of my lowest lows and the highest highs and sort of recenter me into being more realistic. She's really good at that, thank God. I think the other thing— Shout out to her. Yeah, she's really good at those things. The other thing is I spend a lot of time in nature outside. So, my wife and I live 2 hours north of New York City up in the Catskill Mountains and we have a bunch of acreage and we live in a town of That's very, very small, 500 people,

and

live in the woods basically. And so, every day, we go down to the city center, which is the city center of a few thousand people, another city, and go to the gym and then we go for a walk outside and then we go to a local restaurant, which are basically all big fields where you're cooking pizzas on and going to the bonfires. And so, I get to experience a lot of being outdoors, I think, which is really calming. And then, we've got a really great friend group here in Hudson Valley, New York. We're really well connected. That's maybe another way. And then, the last way is I'm part of those solopreneur groups that I told you about. So, 2 private groups, one for solopreneurs, one for entrepreneurs that are high-performance folks, both men's groups for me. And they really work for me. I feel comfortable and confident being transparent with these groups of people to say, here's where I'm struggling, here's where I'm down on myself, and like without being judged at all. And given the fact that like in these groups are people who are 10 times more successful than me, and they're also that transparent, it makes it really easy for me to be the same way.

Yeah, a good friend, you know, changes and makes a massive impact and a community, you know, elevates, right? I'm so glad you have surrounded yourself with the best of the best 5. Usually, like, that's the saying, right? You just mentioned that you live in a 500-people town. That is a surprise to me. So how do you come out of that world? Because it's such a different thing. The things you talk about, the things you tweet, write, they're pretty extroverted, right? Like they're not introverted like how you mentioned. Like they're cutting edge, they're the next thing. How do you go from your physical location, like the reality, to the things you talk about? What is like the bridge? I'm just curious about that.

Yeah, it's a good question. It's pretty easy because I live in 2 different worlds, right? So, I have this online world of Twitter and LinkedIn and these Slack groups that I'm a part of where people are generally forward-thinking, thinking about the next big trend, trying to build the next big business, whatever you want to call it, right? And I spend a good amount of time on that every day, interacting with people who are really big thinkers. There's also really big thinkers here in my small town, just different thinkers. They think differently about— they're not on Twitter talking about AI, but they're building the local restaurant or they're building a community center or they're trying to figure out how to get people more involved in politics. And it's just a different kind of sort of of thing. But one thing I really love is the juxtaposition, like, maybe that's not the right word, but like being able to be online for 4 hours or so interacting with really smart people that are tech-forward and all that jazz. And then like logging off and getting in my car and driving down to a restaurant where nobody has any idea that I'm on Twitter. They don't know what AI is. Nobody's talking about ChatGPT. They're not talking about NFTs or cryptocurrency. It's just regular folks just having a beer, eating pizza. And I love that break. I would hate to get off the internet and go to a meeting where people wanted to talk about how to write better tweets all day long. I'm not super interested in having that be the the continuity of like my day. So for me, it's pretty easy. I like it.

That's a good differentiator. You have the best of both worlds. What's the source of inspiration for Justin Welsh? Where do Justin Welsh go and see, okay, it can be like a person, like maybe I'm assuming your wife or your mother or your family member or It can be a book. Where does Justin look for inspiration?

It comes from a bunch of different places. I've been fortunate enough to meet some really cool people through social media. So, I'm inspired by people I meet every day on social media. Writing and publishing my thoughts onto the internet has just opened this world that I could have never imagined, meeting Some of the some of my heroes, and that's one way to get inspired. Another way that I get inspired is through travel. So I love traveling, and I'm my wife and I go to Europe a lot. We go to Japan. We go to you know New Zealand, and we we love Mexico. We love we love these different places, and I always meet like the most creative and interesting people doing totally different things than what I do. But a lot of what they do there is relevance in what they do to what I do. And like, I might take a nugget of how they design clothes, or I like, I might watch someone tell me about how they promote their documentary. And I'm like, oh, that's actually like that, that, that might resonate with my audience. That's kind of relevant to my business in a weird way. And I do the same thing watching documentaries. So I watch a lot of food documentaries. I like, my wife and I are big foodies. Nice. And so we watch a lot of like Chef's Table on Netflix and things like that. Every time I watch a high-performance chef, a lot of what they do resonates with me. It translates. And so, I might get inspired from watching things like that. I almost never get inspired by other Twitter creators, interestingly enough. Sometimes I do, but for the most part, inspiration comes in things that are not related, at least first-degree connection at first glance related. And so that makes it more fun for me.

I like that. We've covered like wide variety of topics and I want to like ask a couple of questions about technicality, especially in terms of solopreneurship. And you are heavily someone who builds in public, like extensively. You're very transparent, you know, the way you handle things. Any tips regarding the journey of being transparent? Like what steps solopreneurs should take that benefit them, right? Or any methods that are battlefield successful for you?

Yeah. I mean, I think a lot of— here's one that I think a lot of people people mess up. By the way, just because I say it doesn't make it right, but a lot of people get this idea that everything they put out on social media should be the how and the what or the— excuse me, the what and the why, but all the how should be gated like a paid product or something. I feel differently. I feel like everything that I do and everything that I figure out should be shared openly and freely. And if I do that, I think I build a lot of trust. So, if I figure something out, I don't like, oh, new product. I go on, I just talk about it on Twitter, right? And then people will write like, oh, I'm so glad this is free. And maybe like 10 of those things that are free might at some point make up a paid product and you're paying for aggregation, efficiency, time, access, all those different things. But don't hold back, especially when you're growing in the beginning. Be the resource that your audience wants. Don't be the quasi resource. Don't be the the guy or gal who gets everyone like sixty percent there and hides the other forty percent. Just just be open and transparent when you learn things, and I think you'll see faster growth. Someone who's doing that right now really well—a quick shout out to her—is a girl named Chanel Basilio.

Okay,

and like she's she writes a newsletter called. I think it's called Growth in Reverse. Sorry if I mess it up, but like Growth in Reverse. And she's like breaking down big creators and how they grow their newsletter or their social media audience or whatever. And rather than being like, oh, here's a little tidbit, and then like, you have to do something friction-filled or pay me or whatever to get the rest, she's just openly sharing and she's growing really fast on Twitter and she'll continue to do so.

Yeah, I like those 2. And we'll definitely give the shout out to the person you mentioned and the work, this newsletter she writes. Quick last question before I do this round called Rapid Fire 5, where I just quickly ask like 5 questions. But before we dive in there, we live, like you said, the attention span of people really went from big to small, like really small. And we live in a world where Every now and then we see creators pop up with their own essence, right? It can be TikTok, YouTube, newsletters, writers. And what advice do you give for people who are just getting started? Either they're just getting started or they're in the business of creating. How do you tell them to be different and how do you suggest them to separate themselves? From others?

Yeah. I think what people don't realize is that everyone is naturally different. So, let me give you an example. You mentioned you had Jack Butcher on before. Jack had a course, Build Once, Sell Twice, about how to build internet businesses. I'll probably release a course about how to build internet businesses. There's a million courses on how to build internet businesses. There's a million courses on how to write. There's a million courses on LinkedIn, a million courses on Twitter. And There are so many people that want this information that you have an opportunity to take part of the pie simply because someone likes you for your style for some reason, right? So like, what I try and always tell people is this is not a zero-sum game. There is room for everybody here. So don't try and be the next Jack Butcher or try and be the next Sam Parr or try and copy what I'm doing. Go out and be yourself, but your journey is your sort of secret sauce. And so, if you want to go learn SEO and share everything that you learn, the way that you share it will be different than somebody else who has shared information about SEO. Just make sure that you're sharing it. You want to learn how to do copywriting? Go learn everything that you can. Self-educate, document everything, share everything you can do. Oh, but haven't, haven't a million people written about copywriting? Yes, but something about the way that you do it will be different and resonate with someone where it didn't resonate with another person who talks about copywriting. Really what it is, is so many people out there come on to Twitter or LinkedIn and they write a bunch of platitudes. or they try and copy something that I'm doing or that Sahil Bloom is doing or that somebody with 500,000 followers is doing. And they don't recognize that all the equity was put in 4 years ago. And you got to go figure out what those things were, right? And I'll save you the suspense. Those things are teaching people how to do things and adding a tremendous amount of value, right? And I know that's cliché to say, but like, you got to teach people how to do things,

right?

And if you can't, no platitudes are ever really going to grow your account unless you're Naval, right? Most people aren't.

Right. Even Naval, like, you know, he humbly said many times about how he started. And in the beginning of his journey, he said things that nobody cared about, which they care now, but he kept on saying those things. Eventually, like, you know, people will look into it because he said those things authentically. And I know, like you said, it's a cliché, but it's actually so true. Like, I've I've built my tiny audience by being very authentic to myself and not copying others and staying true to myself. So, love that advice. Let's start this rapid-fire questions. I'm going to shoot 5 questions to yours.

Cool.

What's your favorite product right now that you can recommend to others?

My favorite what?

Product. Product.

Yeah, my favorite product. Wow. I think my favorite product right now is not a software product of any kind. It's called an Ooni Koda 16.

Oh,

what is that? O-O-N-I-K-O-D-A 16. It is a portable pizza oven that I use. And so, I make my own pizza here at my house and it's an electric pizza oven that I use that I love.

Nice. We'll plug that. Any recent book that made you Rethink about your life or your business? Or—

Yeah, this one, this one right here, Die with Zero by Bill Perkins. Really like that. I really like 4,000 Weeks. I cannot think of who it's by right now. So, I'm sorry for that. But they're both basically the same premise where it's like, you're going to die. So, here's how you should probably start doing things.

Nice. If you want to give a shout-out to a solopreneur, Who deserves attention and recognition? Who would that be?

Dan Koe. I think Dan's really, really good at what he does. I think it's so funny because I think in a traditional sense of the word, you might think of Dan and I playing in the same pond. And I think other folks might consider us competitors, but Dan's my friend. And I think he is so unique and interesting and so good at what he does. I would recommend him to everybody.

Nice. Nice. We'll definitely mention him. Recent— you write threads and you're a thread master. What's one thread that you— what's your all-time favorite? Like, okay, this is something I pin on my wall. I go back and revisit all the time.

That I've written?

That you've written or You know, that you get inspired from as well?

Yeah. Yeah. Wow. That's a really great question. Boy, I don't know what my all-time favorite thread is. There's one. I mean, the cliché answer would be like how to get rich without getting lucky, right?

I knew it.

I knew it. It's very cliché. It's something that I have

Right.

But boy, I'm trying to think. Here's a funny secret. I don't read a lot of Threads.

Oh, okay.

I don't read a lot of social media for the most part, actually. I spend most of my time creating and then engaging. I don't do a lot of scrolling. I'll give a shout-out to somebody who I think has created a lot of really great content, which is one of the people that you had on previous to me, which is Jack But I think Jack's a really, really great creator. I like a lot of the things that Daniel Vassallo writes because I think his take on life is interesting, but I don't really have a favorite thread.

Yeah, we'll take How to Get Rich as your favorite thread.

Cool.

Last question. You're a systems person, you're a habits person, right? And which habit you recommend every solopreneur should form in the long run, in the long game? apart from writing? I know you'll say writing, but let's discard writing because we know that's a default. But apart from that, mental habit or meta habit that people should have?

Yeah, I think learning how to teach yourself is the best habit that you can ever fall into. It's called being autodidactic, which is like I just— there are so many people who ask everyone how to do things or ask their boss or ask their friend or ask their parents or ask their peers instead of just going out and learning through experience. And to give you an example, I mentioned an Ooni Koda pizza maker. Mm-hmm. I could go and ask every single person in the world how to make great pizza. But I'd much rather do a few things, self-educate through YouTube videos, read a bunch of books on how to make great dough, and then make a bunch of pizzas. And if you make a bunch of pizzas, you get to figure out whether the people that you're learning from are full of shit or not.

Right.

Right. That's the, that's the best way to learn is to do things on your own. And so I think this habit of like not asking your partner, not asking your family, not asking your friends, and always just being like Google, YouTube, wherever you go to get information, Self-educate. It is great whether you're a solopreneur, whether you have a job. It's a skill that I think is not talked about enough.

Oh, 100%. I think it also benefits you in many ways. One of the ways would be like you will develop skin in the game and you will master, like going back to what you said, you'll master a version of yourself which is completely unique from others, right? Anybody can make pizza, but the way you make pizza is completely different from others. So you develop that craft and you develop that skin in the game, which you know the ins and outs about. But Justin, oh my God, this has been such a blast talking to you and I really appreciate you. I want to give you a shout out for helping me figure out sales when I was building ShoutOut. You were the one who taught me, like, you know, how to do, how to talk to people, customers, and like, you know, get their attention. So I appreciate you for giving your time back then. This was like 3 years ago when I was like a baby figuring out things I'm still figuring out. But yeah, shout out to you and thanks for your time. And, you know, I'm rooting for you big time. I'm your biggest supporter. You can count on me. And I'm, you know, so fascinated by the fact that you do all these things And yet balance your personal life, you know, your mental health and everything. Yeah, you know, anything you want to plug in before we close the call?

Sure. And first of all, you're welcome. I remember doing that and that was, that was seems like a year ago, but it was probably three or four years ago. So that's that's pretty awesome. And congrats on shout out, by the way. And yeah, if people want to learn more about me, they can go to justinwelsch.me. That's justinwelsch.me. And they can subscribe to my newsletter. It's got 92,000 subscribers called the Saturday Solopreneur. And basically, you'll get one simple tip on how to launch, grow, and monetize a one-person internet business every week on Saturday. And they usually can be read in 4 minutes or less. So, awesome. JustinWalsh.me. Yeah.

Awesome. Thanks, man. Yeah. Appreciate you again. And see you folks for, for another episode. Thanks for tuning in.

See ya.