Rob Hope - The science behind building a perfect landing page!

So what's my angle on competition? Be friends with them. Share what you failed. Try, try let them succeed. And that's honestly been one of the best things I've done in 15 years is just be close to the competition, share as much, celebrate them, and let— and try help them grow. And then they send it back. It's like a good juju online, whatever you want to call it. It's, um, it really does come back to you and the vibes are good.

There are like, I think, 3 ways to handle competition. One, hate them. Number 2, ignore them. And I think you just kind of— the, the most difficult thing is love them, embrace them, celebrate them. Welcome to the Undefeated Underdogs podcast, where I unpack and narrate stories of ambitious people who turn obstacles into opportunities. My goal for this podcast is to create a platform to narrate underdog stories and maybe play a small, teeny tiny role in inspiring you. I intend to highlight the underdog mentality and make authentic conversations with people who play the long game, take action with a chip on their shoulder, and convert obstacles into opportunities. Buckle up as I'll be bringing some authentic founders, VCs, community builders, and content creators who got underestimated their whole lives, and yet they beat all the odds to become insanely successful. Now today I want to tell you a little bit about our awesome sponsor acquire.com. Selling a business is as tough as building a business. As someone who went through this process once, selling my own startup, I know the pain it takes to get to the end zone. This is where our sponsor shines. Imagine this: You're a founder who's built a solid SaaS product, acquired customers, and generating consistent monthly revenue. The problem is you're not growing forever for whatever reason— lack of focus, lack of skill, or just plain lack of interest— and you feel stuck. What should you do? The story I'd like to hear is you buckle down, somehow reignited the fire, get past yourself and the clichés, and start working on your business rather than just in the business. You start building an audience, move out of your comfort zone to do sales and marketing, and in 6 months you triple your revenue. The reality isn't as simple. Situations may be different for every founder facing these crossroads, but too many times the story ends up being one of inaction and stagnation until the become business— the business becomes less valuable or worse. Worthless. If you find yourself here, or your story is likely headed down a similar road, I offer you a third option. Consider selling your business on acquire.com. Capitalizing on the value of your time is a smart move. Acquire.com is free to list, and they've helped hundreds of founders already. Go to try.acquire.com/sharath and see for yourself if this is the right option for you. Now let's get into today's episode. If there is a guru of landing page that can teach you the art of building an amazing landing page, this is the guy. My next guest is someone who mastered the art of designing, developing, kind of like conceptualizing, strategizing landing page for more than what, 10 years? And I can't wait to dig into this conversation with him. He's the founder of One Page Love, which is the home of some of the best landing pages on the planet. He also hosts this podcast called Yo! So simple, right? Yeah. That features designers, developers, founders, entrepreneurs. And my God, this guy is amazing. I've been a very big fan of this guest who's inspired me so much in my making of side projects. It's none other than Rob Hope. Rob, how are you feeling today? Welcome to the show.

Thank you for the intro. Very humble. Those are very kind words. And also just great to hear you've been getting value out of the stuff I've been putting out there for a very long time. I'm sitting here in the bottom of Africa. And that's why I love doing these podcasts. It's just like, you know, you're in the States, you know, hometown of India. We, you know, we have this common love for cricket and, you know, we have a common love for design podcasts. So here we are. And I'm very grateful you asked me to be on your show.

Yeah. The world is very small, Rob, right? Right. Like, you know, we never knew what we're going to end up with or what, who are we going to meet up with. Right. That's the serendipity that— that's the kick I get when I do this podcast. Because like I said in the intro, I've been like, gosh, I've been inspired by One Page Love so many times. Every landing page I've built— I've built 15+ side projects, by the way, and all those, all of them were completely inspired by you, the work you put in.

Wow.

I just want to put that out in your mind because you make a tremendous impact on people. especially who are like, you know, building on the side, like who are like, who's solo, who's doing everything all by themselves. They don't have a team. You've been a massive, massive impact. I'm sure like you've impacted on startups as well, but just want to put that out here before we start and appreciate you. Appreciate you, Rob. You know, always been a big fan. Cricket. Yes, we should definitely, you know, chime in a little bit.

But if we had 3 hours, we could just get into favorite players of all time, but we don't. But thank you for the kind words. Yeah, One Page Love, it's been a huge chunk of my life. There's no question about it. 15 years ago, I started the site and, you know, I was scratching my own itch then. But then through the years, the more I realized that the more I invest in the site, the more I'm saving other people time. And when I create time-saving online, that's where value is. And that's when—

Hmm.

People return and then you can start getting really creative with monetization and we'll get into it now. But I'm just saying is that the stories of time saving for other people and how they appreciate when they're looking for references and then they arrive at my site, those are the stories that honestly just keep me going. It's definitely not for the money. And that's why I just thank you so much for that story.

No, I think it seems like 2008 is when One Page Law, the first time you introduced that to the world. Let's dive into the conversation. Before that, Rob, I just want to mention this. Rob went full-time on his side projects, One Page Love, Yo! Podcast, after a decade of putting his work into freelancing. That's amazing, right? Like, you know, uh, it— so the reason I want to mention that is it takes a lot of time. A decade.

100%.

In Naval's words, it takes a decade to build a career. So you have to put into work, repeat, rinse, And you kind of become better. And that's where like, you know, you take it. I want to talk about the leap.

I just want to add there in that 10 years, it's not exactly about just building one thing. It's like I was trying lots of things and a lot of them I thought would be the next big thing that I would be working on for a very long time. And this is while One Page Lab is still going on, but I would, you know, have an idea, shiny object syndrome, call it what you want, but I would have an idea, I'd launch it and then It would get attraction and then it would fail. And through that learning, through reinvesting it back into One Page Love, back into another project, going down that road, learning a little bit. So the biggest takeaway is that yes, you can put all your eggs in one basket for 10 years. And that's pretty much the reason why One Page Love is bigger than a lot of the competition is that I've added content to it pretty much every single day for 15 years. And that alone, you know, just that, call it reps, and that alone will separate you from a lot of people. But it's the failing forward and it's, it's about being vulnerable. It's about, you know, just putting yourself out there, building public and then failing. And then people are like, hey, I, I'm, you know, I saw what you're trying to do. Um, this is what you do, being interactive. You know, there's many takeaways, but the reason why One Page Love is my full-time job and that allowed me to quit freelance is because I worked on it every day, and I wasn't afraid of failing forward.

I love that. Not being afraid of failing and moving forward. Let's talk about that for a minute. Where does one get the courage to do that? Like, failure is such a bitch, right? It stinks. It bites you hard. It hurts. It sucks. And doing that for 10 years is no joke. It's like, you know, it puts a lot of— you have to have— you have to find every fucking ounce of that courage in your body to go take another step. How Rob Hope found courage in the last 10 years.

So an easier way to approach this, I mean, yes, you can pull courage from, you know, many macro things around you. But when you try and create a project to solve your own problems, that's a really easy way to start because no matter the outcome, it's going to be a success for yourself. And the more you invest into something to help save you time— and for me, just to give a little context on why I started One Page Love— is that I was building WordPress websites for clients, HTML websites. And they would give me half a page Word document of content. And they would say, Rob, please build me a 5-page website. And I would always go, why 5 pages? He's just like, that's what everyone else has. And that's the standard. So I was starving for references of, of brands and apps that were telling their story. And persuading the user to take action within the same page. So I was looking one-page website, single-page website, couldn't find anything. So what do you naturally do? And I guess it's, it's also the little entrepreneurial bone I have in my body. I, I had to scratch my own itch and I created the resource that I felt that the internet was lacking. So I created and I started off very light. You know, you look back at the site now in 2008 and how WordPress even looked, it was Yeah, it's not the nicest thing to look at, but you, I was consistent. I would add references. I would add tags. I would add categories and I would start filling them up very slowly. And back then there was no curation because I would just add anything I could find because there's 2 goals here is that the goal number one is that I'm trying to find references to single-page websites. that I can gather inspiration from, you know, to help create the designs for myself. But the second one is I need to convince my clients that this actually exists because they, they think the norm is a 5-page website. So I needed to say like, hey, you want an iPhone app landing page? Here's 12 references. Take a look at them. What do you like out of each of them? So I started to create these references, and sure, there were other inspiration galleries out there that You know, I also got a lot of, you know, influence from, and I, you know, huge respect to a lot of them. There was, you know, I think it was the Zen Garden, and there was, there was a lot of good ones back then, but the niche, one-page websites, some of them eventually got the categories, the subcategories with one pages and so on, but I just stuck with a niche. Many times I was thinking maybe I should make it bigger, but sticking with my niche was very important for the site's success. Um, you know, I've sort of owned that narrative of being one page. And, you know, to answer your question about where did I get the courage to, you know, fail, it's, it's like I couldn't really ever fail with One Page Love because I kept building sites for clients and I kept trying to give them references within my own resource. And what I started to realize over time, and this is like a little bit of value I can add for anyone who's, you know, got that side project on the back burner that's maybe not doing so well, is that you need to ask yourself, you know, when a visitor finds you through Google and they arrive at their site, you know, they, they're presented with the current site right now, but what could you do? How much, how much value could you just add? Like one extra little thing. What would be really useful? And then just add that, you know, just incremental over time, over time. So what I did with One Page Love, Just made the search a little bit better, make the screenshots a little bit crisper. Then all of a sudden, websites used to redesign and go offline. Then all of a sudden, my references aren't that good anymore. So then I would take a full long scrolling screenshot so it would preserve the reference. So now it provides even better value. So out of the 8,000 sites on, you know, right now, maybe 5,000 have long scrolling Retina screenshots, crisp. You can see the textures, you can see the drop shadows.

Wow.

So what it does is it just provides more value. So that's the big takeaway. So it's like sort of a non-answer to about failing in public, but when it comes to your side project, when it's scratching your own itch and you keep referring to it and you keep adding more value and people now return, people say, hey, have you seen One Page Love? There's some really good references there. Traffic builds, Google loves you because you are adding more content. People are linked, linking to it. Start to monetize. That's the, that's the long game here. But when it comes to an idea on the side, because, you know, like I'm very guilty of shiny object syndrome and, you know, while doing the client thing, I created another website called Case Converter. And this was way back before it was native. within all the software we have and operating systems. But, you know, I bought caseconverter.com. I got a friend to help me code up the JS. I designed this really cheesy wet floor logo. And there it was, but that was a side project. And again, useful, using it, using it. How can you fail? You can't because it's something I'm using every day. So when it, when it got into failure land was, you know, when we got more ambitious and One of probably the biggest fails I've had is I teamed up with 2 friends in the UK. I had built a magazine website for them when I was doing freelance. It was a great music magazine. It did really well as well. And it had a lot of downloads of the PDFs every month and so on. And we were like, hey, we should try create Facebook but for music. So it was a social network, but just aimed at people who loved music. And I landed up going to the UK. We got investments. I'm talking, I'm wearing suits, drinking green tea at Heathrow. And honestly, at that time, I told pretty much most of my friends that like, this is going to be the next biggest thing. You know, I'm, I'm going to make it. Like I was young, you know, I was in my 20s and I was like, we're going to make it, you know, like this is it guys, like full confidence, putting yourself out there. I think another element to your answer is that you sort of have to believe that it's going to, going to do well as well, because if you don't have that belief, then maybe you're never going to push through when it gets super low and dark. Because you know, that's happening, especially when you're building out a social network and you need validation and so on. The bigger the site, I guess, the more risky it's going to be for that real trough. Um, and again, so how do you push through? Where do you get the courage? You just got to say, I'm, I'm a human being. This is something I believed in. I love music. The whole process, like, you know, being in the suit, having pitch decks, learning about, you know, building the dev and social, like also outsourcing. That was a huge lesson learned. So again, The big takeaway is failing forward because, you know, we failed so hard, but I extracted easily a dozen lessons I've put back into One Page Love. I put back into the next projects I put into projects that I've sold and made money from, all from that one experience. So where does the courage come from? Just know that if you're working on something that you are passionate about and it's something that maybe you, you're unfamiliar with, that, you know, you're going to learn, you're going to bank that learning. Yeah. You're gonna bank that experience and you're gonna reinvest it in the next thing you do. So it's a fail forward.

Yeah, yeah. I love the fact that, uh, you're doing this for yourself, right? And you're your own first customer. And I think there is a beauty in that because, um, you don't need motivation because it's for yourself. Uh, if you, if you have external factors, then you need motivation to like, you know, pursue or wake up every day to like, you know, work on them. And the best way to build something for others, but basically like build something people want, is to build something for yourself.

100%.

And I think you're like a true testament for that statement. For 10 years doing the same thing, but becoming one person. But I love the fact that you just said, I just changed this one screenshot update to another thing. Like that small small, like a change, 1-degree change. Looking back 10 years, it's like a massive, massive, gigantic,

huge

leap that people will think that, oh wow, this guy is like legend. No, the legend was made in those tiny little details, right? I love that. And I think you sort of, I don't know if you realize, One Page Love is like a Wayback Machine. Oh

yeah, in a way. I'm glad you're mentioning this.

Right. I love the fact that for some reasons, some of the times I just go to OnePageLove to see what people have built like 5, 6 years ago or even like 10 years ago. Hey, what was their mindset like? Maybe there is like an inspiration there. So it's like a Wayback Machine for landing pages in a way. So probably, I don't know if you have it, it would be like a great idea if you do like a Wayback Machine for landing page. just have like one section featuring websites from 2008. Like, so that would be an amazing project.

And you're saying the same websites or just websites from 2008? The same exact domain?

Same thing. It's like Wayback Machine powered by One Page Love. I'm going to, I'm for sure it's going to get like a lot of, uh,

so

I gotta add,

I mean, I'm so stoked you're saying this. So, you know, in my idea bin, call it my idea book, my idea bin. I have 100 folders, you know, like screenshots, ideas, a lot of stuff that never got greenlit. And definitely one of them was the incremental changes of different app designs. I mean, you call it, there was an industrial idea I had to it, like how did the phone evolve? And I know people have done this. So anyway, to go back, to circle back to what you were saying is that I always am asking, how can I provide as much value as I can on One Page Love? You know, we've got more revenue now. I've got a few people helping me with a little bit of admin on the wings using Upwork. Um, I've got someone that pretty much does screenshots for me every day. Uh, we won't, we won't get into like the difficulties of, of screenshots and how like we really take a lot of pride in making them perfect. And there's no automated tools that exist out there that can get to the quality I'm after. But a big question is that how can someone still get the inspiration of a website when it has redesigned to a multiple-page website, or if it, or if it goes offline, or if the business doesn't exist anymore. So the answer there, and like, this is through asking people over many, many years, and the answer is like, yes, you can take a screenshot, sure. Another way you can do it is you can capture a video, you know, you scroll through it and it's like you show the animations and so on. And as much as I've seen a couple of websites like Godly Websites, and, you know, they're doing an amazing job there, but Personally, I, I don't like absorbing a new design at someone else's pace. I don't want to— I don't want someone else to scroll. Like, if I see something I like, for example, a testimonial section, I want to stop there. And a video is really bad at doing that. Um, you sort of have to pause the video, scroll back up, and so on. So how can I experience the one-page website that has It's now offline and it's linking elsewhere. So what we've been doing is we have been downloading every website. Our last 2,000 websites, we've downloaded all the code. We're using a Chrome plugin called fullpage.js, I think, something like that. It's a Chrome plugin. What it does is it basically, you know, inlines everything. So it's not perfect. Mm-hmm. A lot of the stuff that uses the external libraries, it like tries to pull it all in. But it's surprisingly very good. So what you can get now is you can get hover interactions on certain things. You can definitely, you know, select text. You can see beautiful animations, even when those, you know, CDNs have gone offline and so on. It's like all within one, and the whole thing, it's one HTML file. There's not going to be a million libraries. The problem with Wayback Machine and, you know, Wayback Machine is absolutely incredible, especially for podcast research, which we'll get there. But Is that when there's an external image library is that often it goes offline and then your Wayback Machine reference is just text and like placeholders. So what I'm trying to do is I've been trying to combat that. So I'm going to throw it right here right now. The legality of it all is like, it's not great. I'm still trying to get my head around it. It's not, I haven't told anyone about this yet. I've like, I literally have the 2,000 that have been doing it. And if it also, it's manually done. Because the automated tools can sometimes preserve a website and the backup is really bad. And then what happens when it's offline? Then all of a sudden they go to just a terrible looking backup and they're like, One Page Love sucks. So everything gets a curation. The backup's good. It provides better inspiration than the screenshots. That's sort of like the baseline. So what we do now is that we have dead link reports and It crawls our site through all the inspiration links. And when we get 404s, we go into every single one of them. And then we, we, we just double-check like, yeah, there's a 404. And then we tick a category called offline. Okay. Now what that does is it'll have a fallback saying if preserve is found, then swap out the inspiration link with the preserved CDN site. So right now there's, there's probably like— Awesome. It's not a lot, but there's probably about 100 one-pagers now that are loading through our CDN that have been completely redesigned. And the whole point here is that I, you know, it's answering that question back to the original question of like, how can we provide value is that people are now staying within the website. They're arriving, they're looking for app references. And now they're getting an animation. They're staying there, staying there, staying there. So the legality though, I still am unsure. No one has told us that they didn't like that. But there's email addresses that get scraped, you know, there's like maybe people are no longer part of a team, and they don't want to be a part of that team. So takedown is very easy for us. But we haven't got there yet. And yeah, we're still trying to work out how much we want to promote it. So maybe it's like there's a big bar at the top that said, hey, this is a Wayback Machine, pretty good at that as well, saying, you know, we are trying our best here.

Yeah, I think people will understand. And I'm stoked. that you are already putting that idea into work. Like, you know, so I'm excited to like, you know, yeah, this probably like 2 weeks from now everybody will know after they listen to the podcast. You briefly mentioned about manual curation, which is I think the most important thing when it comes to quality. You know, these automation tools, even I'm building this research tool called GuessLab. It's not perfect. That's the first thing I tell to people. It's not perfect, but it'll give you a head start. Like all these AI tools, all these automation tools, they're going to help you start at step 3 or step 5 instead of you taking step 1, right? That's the whole point of these tools, in my opinion. And, but when it comes to one-page love type of businesses, it requires human level. Yes. Involvement. Talk to me about the importance, A, number one, and how did you maintain that for a decade? Close to 2008 to till now. What is the standard that you've been reassuring? Not just for you, by the way. I think One Page Love in a way is kind of also inspiration for a similar type ideas, right? And they might have like a blueprint that you gave when it comes to curation. So talk to me about like, how did you lay down rules for curation?

Great question. So, you know, design, fairly subjective. You know, a lot of sites are trying to look the same. You know, trends come and go. And when it comes to curation, I do feel I've got a slightly different attitude to the other inspiration galleries out there. And there's a lot of really good designers, and I'll say this out loud, is that they don't, they don't see One Page Love as a very highly curated site design-wise. I'm talking about like the best designers out there because I know for a fact is that not every site is beautifully designed. But what I'm trying to cater for is I'm trying to help people get the inspiration for the, for the certain niche categories they're after. And when it comes to, you know, a certain level of design where there's abundance of portfolios, the curation level is very high. It's like if your portfolio does not look spectacular, or at least has something unique about it, because I write about every design, I try and tell someone like, hey, this person has a sticky footer and it's really unique because you know, X, Y, and Z. You know, it needs to be remarkable because there's an abundance. I can add the same, you know, beautiful long scrolling portfolio 1,000 times, and I feel like the value gets a little bit diluted like that. So what I'm trying to do is I'm trying to fill those other categories. So there's categories, for example, like course landing pages. I don't— it's obviously a big topic right now, but I don't have that many references. You know, I think I have 20 or 30. I would love to have 50. And so an example is that someone will submit a course landing page. And if it's, if it's got something, you know, really, if it feels comprehensive, it's got a good explainer video, chapters are clear and its call to actions are great, but the design's like okay-ish, still good. It's going to get in. Nonprofit websites. I'm, I'm on a, I'm on a hunt for them. So also a one, because nonprofit websites are mainly multi-page, but a single page nonprofit. Difficult. So I'm going to lower the barrier to curation. There's also something I don't really talk about. So that's why it's not just like an— there's no like framework really of what exactly gets in. But, but, but is that when I start getting a little sloppy and I have done this in the past with a little bit more automation and, you know, not checking things that well, you know, maybe when One Page Love was in early days, Is that, you know, people, the community messages and they're like, hey, you know, what's like, what's happening, man? This site's like, site was okay. And it's amazing. It's because they care. And that's a huge, huge red flag for me. And that was amazing part in One Page Love's journey is that people are messaging me going like, hey dude, like what's happening here? You know, have you hired someone or, um, we got really bad with tags once upon a time. I got users to submit tags. So tags we treat as features. And if someone has a testimonial block, for example, that's the testimonial tag. We have testimonial slider. We have Twitter testimonials. You know, there's lots of different, you know, sub-tags. But I would, I would allow users when they submitted their URL to just add, like add 20 features in the sites. And then when I hit publish, it would just add those without curation. And that was a massive, massive, massive mistake. Next thing you know, our tags were misspelled. Mm-hmm. Um, you know, we, we, I originally had, I think, 10,000 features. I cut that down to, to like 1,800, and that was a huge improvement in quality. So the takeaway there sort of is like, how do we decide on a level of curation? You have to ask users, you have to, how's your experience? Um, when you are building your own websites as well, like I, I'm literally building landing pages and then I will look for Like, I'll search client logos. I want to see where the client logo sits on the page. Is it above the fold? Is it below? I'm searching that. I'm wondering, hmm, these screenshots aren't exactly showing client logos that clear in the search results, you know? So that's what that, you know, that's when we think, how can we do a better job with this? So there's certain components in landing pages we're actually trying to zoom in and spotlight, and that's a dedicated UI section that I'm— I'm still working on. It's very much beta. But again, if you start adding testimonials to a UI section and the design is quite poor or they look the same, that's when the whole experience is, is, is gonna be poor. And then don't forget as well is that when it comes to, you know, let's use an example of testimonials. When there's maybe 50 different testimonial designs, but within that we have 500 of the same style. All the unique ones and the ones that are remarkable are going to get diluted. It's like they're going to just wash away the uniqueness of the gallery. So I've seen other competitors out there have, you know, 500 contact forms. And it's like, what inspiration is that providing? Like, what do we want to know when we actually— and step in the shoes. What do we want to see when we're looking for contact form design references? And the answer off the top of my head is like, I want to see the different, at least the different styles. Like, they need to be unique. I don't want to see the same contact form with a different color. It's like, what's remarkable? I want to see big buttons. I want to see buttons when, you know, stacked uniquely. So often when it comes to a reference, to kind of round this up, is that on One Page Love, we, if the design is spectacular, it's in. if it's unique, if there's something very remarkable about the design, like, wow, they took a risk. I want to talk about it. I want to show you. Maybe the design's not that good. Think of brutalist design. Some people say this is an absolutely awful trend. At the same time, they take risks, and that's worth writing about. That's worth sharing. So yeah, it's a blend. So to answer your question in a non- Non-direct way. It's very subjective. It is, are people taking risks? Let's get them in, let's spotlight them. And the rest is like just high quality design.

I love the fact that you've mentioned kind of like the criteria is unique. That's it.

Yeah.

Like, you know, instead of showing the same thing in a different style, which is fine with different colors and all that, but I think if the concept is conceptualized and implemented in a unique way. That is, I think, you know, that triggers inspiration. I love the fact that you relied on that. As a matter of fact, I just want to share my experience. I started building side projects based on curation completely. So there is, it's such a— curation is such a beautiful thing because A, it is going to improve your taste. So you're kind of relying on your taste as an individual. And part B is you kind of find people who are in the same taste when you put that out, right? So I love— that's why I love One Page Love is like, hey, even though I never met this guy before, Rob and I have the same taste. You know what I'm saying? There is that community angle to it. Like, that's why I feel curation projects are so important. And I think it's the best way to start if you're like an indie maker, if you are like just young trying to like, you know, tinker things around, it's best to like put your taste out. So I love, I love, I love curation projects. And I think that's how I started my own journey by putting my taste out. And, you know, in a way, selfishly, I want to do that back and back and again and again and again so that I can improve my own taste. Right. Like that. There is a selfish reason for that. And I love the fact that you relied on community. That's amazing. Right. I think one thing you also kind of— I don't know if you intentionally solved— is that you've opened up the submissions for One Page Love. Now you have inbound flow of websites that you can pick and choose. So you're also kind of becoming like a decision maker, not just gathering information. So it's another way of solving curation because you once reach to a level, you kind of welcome people and, you know, oh wow, this guy's really good. These guys are really bad, or they have to improve more. So I love that. I think it's so fascinating to see that you did that for 10 years or more, right? That's so important. So one of the problems I feel, and I faced many times before, curation is a slippery slope. Once you go in that route, there is like, it's a rabbit hole. You see like thousands of thousands of things, you kind of divert. You've talked about this previously in your answer that you stayed within the niche. Which is one-pagers, period, right?

Yes.

So I want to, I'm curious to know, have you ever kind of felt like, or tempted yourself to go beyond one page? What were some of the ideas? Like it can clearly be Product Hunt for landing pages in a way, right? You can basically build like a same Upwork type system where people can submit, you can moderate instead of like, you know, put heavy, heavy, you can literally offload a lot of these things to community. So have you ever kind of diverted or you went back, you know what, I'll stay with my own niche? So talk to me about those experiences in the last, what, like 15 years?

100%. So I was really obsessed with footers, website footers, and I bought Footer Love. And I teamed up with a friend and again, When you greenlight a project, you also ask yourself, like, sure, you love footers. You love the idea of collecting good footers. You love the idea of saving other people time because you're going to just showcase them really good footers. There's like, there's a lot there. Maybe you build up a list. Maybe that list you can now cross-promote to One Page Love. Another greenlight there is that because One Page Love is growing, this ultra niche site has a better chance of success because I already have a community of niche people. So there's a lot happening there when it comes to greenlighting and the idea of sub- niche as butt, butt, butt is that the green light for me is I got to work with a friend on it. And, you know, One Page Love has always been me. It's like, I've thought of partnering, but it gets very complicated because it's like really my life. And I don't want to ever get in a situation where it gets awkward and I have to sell it or anything. But with FootoLove, I teamed up with a friend and he was just a much better designer than me. And he created this brilliant logo and we had textures and we actually used like shoelaces in the page dividers and like we got so creative. So here we are just having absolute hoots with a niche, niche, niche, niche website, just collecting website footers. And it got to the stage where, you know, you look at the traffic and you're like, wow, One Page Love. I don't know what it is then, you know, like now we have about 150,000 people a month that come there, but just say back then we had 50,000 and the footer site had 500. You know, and then it's like you're putting in quite a lot of time on the footer sites and the traffic sort of plateaus. And then you, you, you kind of like this actually, you know, the footers are okay. I was really fascinated with launching this site, but am I willing to go through the dip with it and just keep adding it? So, you know, then your partner goes, I'm not so into this anymore. And you're like, do you want to take this over? And we landed up selling it. So we sold it to someone who also liked footers. But also like to answer your question, like, have I dabbled? I'm always thinking of niche sites. I just, I'm born like that. I love the idea of like creation, like curation, like you said, but I made, I made a, call it a mistake, call it a massive fail forward in my life. I don't regret doing it, but I had the assumption that everything I'd learned from One Page Love And I have experimented with so many different ways of monetizing and I got it to a pretty healthy, you know, phase where I could quit freelance, you know, so I had successfully done that. I had created a project from zero to one from nothing and monetize it to surpass my Cape Town expenses that I don't have to do freelance anymore. So like I give myself that credit for sure, but I honestly had the confidence that I could do it again. And I was like, I can do this for email. Email marketing is so similar to, to landing pages as, um, Matthew Smith from Really Good Emails, uh, he tagged it. He's like, emails are landing pages delivered. And they are very, they are very similar. They're, I thought, I know how to tag them. I know how to create good search. I know how to optimize for speed. The website's going to look so similar. Everyone who has a landing page is pretty much going to be involved in email marketing. So I was like, the cross-promotion is amazing. The launch of it, I got very creative. Uh, you know, we were taking emails and we were stripping out the, the links with them. And then we were sending the images to Amazon, but that was going via tiny PNG and it was like optimizing them. So emails were even faster on our website than they were delivered to you. Like, and we had so much fun with that. It was like, WordPress plugins, and next thing you know, you can resize an email on our website, on Email Love. It was a brilliant source of inspiration. And don't forget, unlike a one-pager that goes offline, is that now this website is preserved. Sorry, this email is preserved forever. We've got the screenshots. We've got the HTML code. You can resize it to mobile. We even had buttons where you could disable images just to see what the fallback text would look like. Like, we got so creative. It was, it was, it was really, I was really proud of the site. So just with everything going on, podcast, a couple of little side projects on the side, One Page Love carries it to grow, but Email Love is just sort of plateauing. I put in a bit more time. It's not growing. Then Really Good Emails, which was the biggest competitor at the time, just totally redesigns. You know, I chatted to the guys at the time. They're just such cool dudes. And they were saying when I started to build in public, with Email Love, because they all knew One Page Love. They're saying, when I started to build in public on Email Love, they were like, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, you know, like, guys, um, we got to really start, like, you know, getting this going again. And they created such a brilliant version 2 of their website. It is fantastic. So when they launched that and you could save emails to your account, they had a Chrome plugin. Um, I just was like, I don't have the energy to even go here. Like, their inspiration is amazing. Um, I was adding one email every 2 days because I was, you know, trying to curate really high. I feel like the curation's okay. Mine is probably a little bit higher, but they were adding something like 500 a week or something. So their categories are just filling up. There's a team of 5 of them. Um, I'm by myself, but One Page Love is my main baby. So here I am with a site that's growing. And I have so much to do on One Page Love still. I can write tutorials. Um, I'm, I'm just doing an ebook. Ebook did really well. And here's Email Love and I'm going, and it's amazing. Like the dip will really, really, really tell you how you feel about your side project. Because every single project, anyone listening right now is that your project will launch, your friends, your colleagues will say, great job, man. It's going to get shared. It's going to get that boost in traffic. It's going to get signups, but it's going to hit this dip, and there's a lot of writing about this, but when you hit that dip, you are going to know exactly how you truly feel about that subject. And for me, when I hit that dip, I just thought to myself, I'm overwhelmed with information right now. And I don't love email. Like, if it was one macro thing, it's like, and I'm here, I am just going through emails and do I want to grow a team? So I had this big idea because One Page Love, you know, started to really take off. And my dream was like, I'm going to create a network of inspiration sites. So answer your question, like, this is exactly what you were asking is that I, I was trying to negotiate Type Love. I was going to do typography sites. Um, that was such a difficult domain to get. I didn't get it. Um, UI Love, UX Love. I got UX Love. I got Email Love. I was, you know, the, the, it goes on and I had this idea. I hired someone. All of a sudden, we were creating a lot of content that it was just so exhausting. I was just checking the content work. You would put 5 hours there was 5 hours not in the site that's doing really well, that the more you put in there, the better it does. So to answer your question is that I guess the green lights in that Love Network decision, I really learned a lot. I can't say I regret that. But having less projects right now, just having One Page Love and then focusing on the podcast and that's it. Having that narrative for me is just so much, so much sweeter being a solo guy. You know, like I, I thought growing a team was something I'd want to do, but having freedom and being able to just not be online for 5 days and One Page Love still has, you know, 6,000 people that come every day. It's a rad feeling. Um, checking people's work, going, I don't like how you took that screenshot. It's just, I'm the massive bottleneck. And I guess it's also fault of me being a bit of a perfectionist as well with, with growing a team. Anyway, I hope that answers your question. It's like, there's a lot of, um, reflection I've done since trying to grow the network. Um, and I failed forward, failed hard on this one, put a lot in that.

Yeah, I think one of the important qualities, especially for solopreneurs, founders who are doing all by themselves, is self-awareness. It's generally like one of the best skills people should have, own, founders, entrepreneurs. It's because you have to have this detachment to the thing that you love, because you basically have to make a better choice to move on from it, like how you did with, you know, a couple projects you just mentioned.

Yeah.

And find that, you know, find the choice where you, you can only focus on one thing and that's it. Like, you know, that's the end of it. And I feel it's hard. It's freaking hard. It's always tempting to do more. Less is enough, right? You know, they say less is enough, but it's so freaking hard to be in that mindset for a consistent time. I'm glad that you kind of shared the lows of your journey as well, which is, I think, really important that kind of— it's not like always you build something and like you said, it's going to go like bonkers. You'll end up in the slump and you kind of overcome it.

If I can add just one thing there is that A great bit of advice is that when you're about to go on this adventure on a side project is just ask yourself, how does the exit look if you actually decide that this is not for you anymore? You know, are you building this up? So partnerships are obviously a very difficult thing, but a, but an easy thing is that if you actually tell your partner, hey, maybe one day I'm not going to be doing this anymore, maybe I get a job or so on. Would you be willing to take this over? And if that's like an easy yes, then great. You know, that's going to, you're going to have fun with your partner and so on. But for me, it's like, I didn't truly think of a lot of exits before I started. And another one just to add there is that when you see another site and you're like, wow, that's a cool idea, but I'm pretty sure I can do that better. It doesn't mean you should do it. You know, it's like that literally means you're going to pull hours out of something you're doing already. And you're going to try to do it that, and you're going to say, Do I truly want to sit through the dip on this? You know, even though this is cool and I know I can get some traction, but this is going to be part of my life for the next 10 years. Will I make money? I mean, that's another thing you can say. Nothing I've really— money's not a big green light for me. Sure, it's like, it's a bonus. But with a lot of projects, people are like, oh, this is a quick buck. And that's most of those are fails. Most of those are fails. If someone's launched it before you, there's a good chance that like they've They're going to kind of get that first mover advantage. I'm talking about niche sites especially.

Yeah, totally. 100%. I think I'm with you. In your last answer, you just mentioned a lot about, I think, competitors, and there are so many other people that are doing similar things. Do you want to talk a little bit about or give advice about how do you not per se handle them, but how do you be in your own path, in your own road, chasing your own dream without being distracted by others?

It's also a super good question. I don't actually get asked that enough because this is like therapy for me. You know what I mean? I can really take it apart. And I am competitive, like you're talking about self-awareness and stuff. And it's like, I am, like I'm I'm, I'm not 20 anymore. Like I've really got to know myself, especially building online and chatting to people and sharing fails. It's wonderful. And I'm competitive, you know? So when I chat to someone and they tell me privately that, you know, One Page Love is like their favorite resource for landing pages, for example. And then a month later they drop it. a Twitter thread that are like, these are my 5 favorite places to get landing page inspiration. And then One Page Love's not in there at all. And then it, you know what I mean? It's, it hurts. It's like, wow.

It hurts.

Yeah. You know, what actually happened? You know, like, were they trying to get something from me? You know, 50% of the times in a Twitter DM, someone's trying to get something from you instead of providing a lot of value. It's okay. You know, the game's, it's difficult out there. But acknowledge that it's fine. It hurts. It's because you care about it. You know, it's like you care, like you're really proud of what you've done. And for someone to tell you it's good. And then all of a sudden tell everyone else that everything else is better. It hurts. And it's like, that's okay. So when you talk about competition, I, it's, it's a tricky one because I definitely try not to spend too much time fixating on on how they are doing, but I want to see, you know, are there clever ways they monetized? Um, you know, what did they fail? Like, let's use Godly Website, for example. Like, um, Darryl's done an amazing job. It took off. He's a fantastic designer. Um, you know, he deserves all the success he's had with it. But I remember when he launched, um, a community section where I think you could save your references. And I remember it was there and then it wasn't there. And we got chatting in the comments, in the DMs, and he's just like, yeah, it didn't take off. And like, that's amazing. So then I would go to him and go, sorry, the learning's amazing. So then I would go to him and say, dude, I actually tried that years ago and it really fell short. I feel like people weren't really saving within the dashboard. And then I think he was like, I kind of wish I knew that a little bit sooner, you know? And like, so what I've What I've done with competitors, especially people that are spending a lot of their time trying to create these niche projects, is I'm just trying to share as much as I can with them. It's like, I really appreciate everything that anyone has shared within their niche ideas. So when it comes to it, if anyone wants to know anything, I'm just, it's like an open book. So that's one part. The second part is that you, you've got it. You got to celebrate them. These are people that are taking risks. These are people that also love what they're doing and they're curating. So most people that are my competitors, I'm just trying to promote this stuff as well. I remember Harry Dry from Marketing Examples, like one of the first things he messaged me, he's like, dude, we have like so much overlapping content when it comes to landing page conversion. And you're just like sharing all my stuff, like on One Page Love's channel. And he's just like, dude, thank you. You know, like, and, and since then we're rapping, man. He's told me like, that didn't work. I'm telling you, this didn't work. That worked. That worked. It's so wholesome. So what's my angle on competition? Be friends with them. Share what you failed. Try, try let them succeed. And that's honestly been one of the best things I've done in 15 years is just be close to the competition, share as much, celebrate them and let, and try help them. grow, and then they send it back. It's like a good juju online, or whatever you want to call it. It really does come back to you, and the vibes are good,

man. I always respect you, but after this answer, I kind of love you.

It's just you got to treat people like you'd want to be treated too, and that's it. It's end of story.

I just

like, I would appreciate people to— it's, we're all gonna die one day. We're all, you know, we've got limited time to do these things online. Let's just all support each other. That's it.

Man, that's so profound. Prolific. A lot, many people treat competitors as enemies. They develop this hatred, this negative tendencies towards them. There are like, I think, 3 ways to handle competition. One, hate them. Number 2, ignore them. And I think you just kind of— the most difficult thing is love them, embrace them, celebrate them. So I used to hate everybody who's like doing the same thing when I started. Like, hey, this is not good. This is really bad. for me being like, you know, self— it's like me, me, me. Then I learned a way to like be neutral about it. Like, you know, it's kind of like, okay, it is what it is. Let me actually focus on my thing, not them. It's me. You just kind of upped the game. You're saying that that's not the end. It's like you have to go embrace them. You just make allies. Not enemies.

100%.

They're your allies. And I think it's in a way that life is a positive-sum game. It's not zero-sum. And I feel that's why I think I'm telling you again, I love you for delivering that answer. And I think you just opened a gate.

To go a bit deeper on the 3 is that haters Yes, it's unproductive. Sure. But it's, hate takes a lot of energy. Sure. So does love. Sure. But, but hate is like, you've now defined that you hate this thing. And then next time you see it again, it, it affects you. It affects you in a bad way. It takes away from you. Whereas like love just adds and it's, it compounds. Yeah. And you know, a lot of these people I've now met them in real life. And, you know, this would have been— imagine I hated them and now I met them, and then we, we speaking and like we hug and we, we like, you know, what have you been up to? Oh, I did this, I met this brand. Um, it's just, it's so much more wholesome to embrace them.

I'm so, so glad that I asked that question because I think, you know, it's such a profound, profound, profound thing. Uh, that is, I think, the biggest takeaway if you have— if you guys listening I do have some questions. I don't think it's going to add this profoundness, but my gosh, love you. Love you, Rob. Couple of more. I know we're on time, but I want to ask about—

Yeah, I'm all here.

You're the kind of like master of landing pages. So talk to me about the science behind building Like a perfect landing page, if there exists like a perfect landing page, which I think it doesn't, because you just, you can improve a lot. So in your case, you've viewed, went through thousands and thousands of landing pages over the last 20 years. So you've designed, you kind of curated them. Talk to me about the science of building a perfect landing page.

100%. So to go back to your original question about the perfect one, I forget that saying, maybe you can link to it, but it's just, you know, perfection is when there's nothing left to take away. And I feel like that's a good mindset to keep in the back, you know, while you're building, you know, is there anything left to take away from the site? And I think, you know, the less is more attitude on landing pages is a good one to stick with. But the secret to a good landing page is when you acknowledge who's visiting, you know, it's not about you, you know, you, you know, with your, this is a good one. It's like with your startup idea where you are trying to save podcasters time by, you know, creating, you know, suggestions for topics, you know, scanning their LinkedIn and stuff like Like you're deep in the build, but what's great is you are a podcaster. Hear me out. It's like, that's a great start. But sometimes people are creating landing pages for products and they're not entirely using their products, but they're so deep in the dev. And what they're trying to do is that they're trying to, you know, explain their product with as much as possible. Like you won't believe it. It does this, this, and this, and this, and this, but you're not truly identifying with what someone would actually want to see. In the page or read in a page to be persuaded to act. So a really good landing page, just to like kind of start this off, is that it has sort of one objective. It's just you are trying to persuade the visitor to do one thing. As soon as you're trying to persuade them to do 2 things, it starts diluting sort of like, you know, all the text sort of competes with each other because some of the text is going to tell you sign up to our newsletter, and the other one is like sign up to our SaaS. You know, it's like buy our ebook, but also check out our job board. You know, that's all within the same real estate. So it's diluted efforts when there's more than one objective. So once you've sort of decided what you want the page to do, you know, this sounds like all very trivial, but you know, truly, if you were that person visiting, try understand what they'd want to see. And read in the page to be persuaded to act. Okay. So like, once you like, and a really, really healthy exercise is you just start off with a piece of paper. I'm telling you, you can type all you want. It's not going to absorb. Start with a piece of paper and you write like your objective right at the top, right at the top of the page. And then you write down like, who is the person arriving? You know, other podcasters. What's that kind of problem they have? These dudes are overwhelmed with how long it takes to get research done. You know, like there's, there's, there's so much we can do here. We won't go deep, but, and then it's like, how does your project actually solve, like help them? How does it? And I mean, a big one with yours, like it's a time saver, you know, it's like suggesting questions. Like there's all these things you write it down, write it down, write it down. Okay. It's all on paper. But now you're like, okay, so this person who's got this problem with researching is like, what do they truly want to see? You know, um, and, and read in the page to be persuaded to act. So let's just, I mean, let's just roll with yours a little bit. Is that, you know, you, you've got the, the SaaS that's gonna help, you know, you put in someone's LinkedIn and then it's gonna go through their timeline and it's gonna suggest, you know, what is it like working at that fund and like when you took the leap and then so on. It's like, like you said, it's 3 steps ahead. It's 3 steps ahead and it's suggesting all these topics for people. Great. But what would, what do I need to be convinced? You know, what would I need to truly be persuaded? So at this point, I'm like, who's using it? Who's using this thing? So it's difficult for you in the, in the beginning, you know, you need your social proof. Um, but you've been hustling on the wings, you know, you're getting those people, you're getting those testimonials. So what would I truly want to see in that page? I want a big podcaster right at the top before I start scrolling, literally to tell me that he has saved time. Like, that's it. Like a time saving. That's what I want. So I'm not saying that you have that in your landing page, but that's going to be something you're going to aim towards. So when you eventually, you know, you're going to be playing leap, you're going to get your small podcasts, you're going to build it. It's going to take, dude, it could take years. But what creates a good landing page is that, you know, it's gonna have that opinion leader right at the top that's gonna tell me. And so even seeing that, it's like I'm reading the testimonial by someone I recognize that's just like me. I'm also a podcaster. He's a podcaster. He's bigger than me. I want to be like him. He's using this software. That form of social proof is like, it's like a joker card in a deck. It's like. You're not even reading the features. You're not even reading the taglines. Like people will tell you, you know, like, oh, tagline, identify their problem. Sure, sure. You can do all the stuff on the page, but that nugget is more important than 20 testimonials. So it's about trying to aim for, you know, as little as possible, as high quality as possible. Now let's use an example just to try and, you know, teach us a little bit further is that imagine that testimonial was sitting in the middle of 20 testimonials. You know, not highlighted, all the same font. Maybe it didn't even have an image of the person. Imagine that was sitting there in the middle. So the idea is you're actually trying to persuade with as little as possible, not as much as possible. Sure, you can get, you know, 20 testimonials that are all good, but then it becomes a little overwhelming, the good ones on surface. So one step to the, you know, the next step is probably asking yourself is that You know, out of all these items, you know, which, which testimonials, you know, match with any features. So it's like if one of the big features is, you know, head topic suggestion, you know, like, and that's a feature block you're talking about is, you know, here's your little bit of text talking about topic suggestion. Then next to it is a testimonial that says, wow, we're already 5 topics ahead than, than we would be within 1 second. Well, I mean, within 10 seconds, you know, we're already 5 topics in, and it helps just snowball into so many good topics. So I'm saying is it's like positioning your content's very important, but when someone's in the journey of discovery and, you know, reading about features, how can someone just whisper in their ear and just back it up? So that's another part to a good landing page is it's very strategic where everything sits. Um, you know, obviously the, the nuances to landing page optimization are endless, but I wanna end it off with something that I, I'm really big on at the moment. And is that there, there are 3 ways to sort of persuade someone in a good landing page. And you can either, you can either tell them, so you can say, hey, my SaaS Is the best, and it's going to save you time. You're telling them, yeah. What's stronger than that is when other people tell them. So here's your testimonial. It says, "Hey, this SaaS was great, and it saved me time." Okay, so that's stronger. So you can either tell them, you can get other people to tell them, and best of all is you can show them. The first thing I want to see pretty much on any landing page is I want to see what the UI looks like. So. A great example in your case, and it's very difficult to pull off, but I'm telling you, when you start reinvesting in these sort of elements, these visual transformations is when the true magic happens on taking a great landing page to an excellent landing page. And you would have a UI that just typed in, maybe let's just use Elon Musk, like the most generic example, but you put Elon Musk example in LinkedIn and it pressed generate and then it just generated 10 topics like in the page. Within the same UI, you're like, that's exactly what it's going to look like for you. So it's not about like, oh, we're going to generate topics for other people. Like, it's amazing what the topic generator looks. It shows you how fast it is. It shows you how easy the UI is. And let's just say eventually you getting to Twitter and now Twitter is now something you can enter in a username. Imagine just pumping in They're like, enter in anyone's Twitter username in our page. And right there and then you can choose any person you want. And then next thing you know, it says processing, maybe it takes 10 seconds and it goes, people congratulated this person on this date. And this is likely to be their birthday. So they, this is their birthday. You know, it's like, and it starts building up this profile. And I'm just saying, like, I'm totally freestyling here. Like I've, I'm making this up on the go, but again, it's like, it's interactive. It's showing them, it's like, it's not just saying, hey, we will build up this profile just based on someone's Twitter username. It's like, let's go. It's, so it's breaking down the barrier to, to experience the brand. You know, a classic example people know is the Tailwind CSS landing page. It's like right in the header above the fold. You know, you would see the code change. And it would just change all the variables. And then next thing you know, the hero of the actual landing page would start transforming. And you just understood that it's just, you know, inline classes that would just start transforming, showing them. Imagine Tailwind CSS is like, we're better than Bootstrap. The second one, a little bit more, is the testimonial by someone who's built a, you know, he works for Amazon and he's like, this is better than Bootstrap. It's really saving us time. The third one is like, This is how it works. So yeah, the holy grail is all 3. Sure. Got to have good copywriting. You got to have good social proof, but you really should invest in showing them. So don't just tell them, don't let others tell them, show them. That's it. Show them.

I love that. I love that. I think you just dropped like a gem in your last answer, which I think you should tweet about it. Probably I'll tweet about, you know, that. Tagging you. Social proof is like a joker card in a deck. It changes the game. It's so important. Social proof is such an— I've actually literally built a SaaS product out of it.

Yeah.

It's such an important piece to the whole game of building a landing page. And like you said, I think I have to also— by the way, thank you for breaking down GuestLabs landing page. In a way, you're giving me pointers. Live. I love that too. I think it's really important that it's not perfect, and I think there is always room for improvement, right? Like you said, we're in the early stage. We don't have like a big podcast, like you said, name dropping about GuestLab. Not yet.

It's a journey.

So we're just kind of like telling them how important it is, and it's kind of that evolution of the product. You know, the landing page should improve with your product as well. It's such an important thing. So just want to let people know that you're not going to figure out all the elements Rob said in one go. It's just like, you know, it's an evolution. So—

And one in, one out. You know, when you get a really good testimonial, that's— maybe we don't have to add it. Maybe we can remove, you know, like just add it to your 10 and make it 11. Maybe we just get rid of the worst out of the 10 and it stays 10,

right?

Or even 4, and then we get rid of 1 and we have 4 still. So

I think position is very important. That's something I learned. I think social proof tagging along with the feature is a great positioning instead of having a separate social proof wall or whatever people want to do it for testimonials. That's clever too. So I think probably I'm going to steal that after this. A couple of more things. One is I definitely have to talk about Yoast. What made you— so you're already knee-deep inside One Page Law. I wouldn't say knee-deep, like you're basically dipping yourself into One Page Law. What made you start a podcast? And I know it's not like a traditional way you do your podcast, meaning launch like left, right, center. You're very cautious, very careful about picking the guests. And you do good damn research. Like, if Derek Sivers says that you've asked one of the profound questions to him, that means, like, you know, you're in another league. So talk to me about—

I was shocked when he said that.

How did it all start? I was very shocked. Yeah, I saw that and I'm like, okay, now I have to ask Rob about, like, you know, Yoh. So Yoh, talk to me about it. And Talk to me about your research. I'm just curious about how you go at length about going deep in, you know, inside a guest's mind and, you know, asking them profound questions.

Okay, so let's just, you know, just summarize how Yo got to a podcast is that in 2018, I started a YouTube show. Very interesting part of my life where One Page Lab was doing really well. And I had a lot of, a lot of, not of time, but I had now quit freelance and I was not challenged creatively. Um, I sure had One Page Lab, but I was adding one pages. It was doing great. And I asked myself, you know, in my career and in my journey, it's like, what could I do now that could really challenge me? So on the 1st of January, 2018, I told myself, Rob, you've never used a camera before. You've never edited. You have 1 month, 30 days, and you've got to create a YouTube show. And that YouTube show was called Yo. It was the best month of my life work-wise. I've never learned so much. And that pretty much set up, you know, skills when it comes to editing. And, you know, I connected with so many people, but it's, we won't, we won't spend a lot of time on that, but That was my creative outlet, um, released. It was so wild because I just tried to create the YouTube show I'd want to watch. Design, music, punk rock, color, dev finds. But every episode took about 40 hours. I would script it myself, film it myself, edit, and some of them would do great. Some of them didn't, but I remember when it launched, like there was nothing like it at the time. And I remember, I think I got 2,000 subscribers in the first day or something on YouTube, 2018. And it was, I was like, at that point I was like, I'm a YouTuber, dude. Like I'm going to be a YouTuber. And what happened is that I sort of, I got a sponsor immediately, Flywheel. They were just like, dude, we love this. Can we please sponsor? I think they sponsored, I can't remember. It was, it was a lot. It was most of the season. So at the time it wasn't going to be a season. It was just going to be a YouTube show every week and I would just do it again and again and again and again. The editing got better. The lighting got better. As soon as the sponsor came, I bought lights. But when the traffic sort of plateaued, when it's not, you take, you're not taking it to a different place where you're not evolving. I wasn't exactly collabing or, you know, interviewing people and so on. It was just like I was curating design and development finds. That was it. Think about like, what's news? And the problem with putting 40 hours into a YouTube video is that it doesn't— problem with putting 40 hours into that style of YouTube video is that it didn't age well. Like Yo! 13, no one was watching that, you know, when Yo! 20 was out. And so it's like, it didn't age well and there was a lot of time and it didn't make sense anyway. So when the traffic started to plateau, That's when the burnout hits and the burnout was serious, serious, serious. I did 30 episodes in 30 weeks. And at that point I just called it. I was like, let's call this a season, season 1. And at that point, you know, it grew a cool following. The Yo brand was sort of known. I started the Yo newsletter and I took some proper time off and I asked myself like, am I going to try and create another YouTube show? in a different style, or am I going to try and do something different? And basically the show pivoted into a podcast. It's, again, it's just, Yo! is my creative outlet. And I ticked that box with creating a YouTube show. Doing more of the same and trying to do the long slog, it's just something I didn't want to do. What I hadn't done is created a podcast and podcasting was pretty big back then. And I was like, you know what? This could be quite cool. And I had my connections through One Page Love. And AJ from Card was someone that everyone knew, but no one had ever seen his face or heard his voice. Like that was something I thought to myself. Yeah. I thought to myself, like

the Daft Punk of, uh,

he's, he's literally of developers. And I just thought to myself and I said, you know what, man, let's, let's go for the shot. And I was like, if we're going to do this, I want to do this properly. And I, and the episode 1 was with AJ. It took a lot of persuading. I offered to buy him a microphone and all this stuff. He's like, No, don't worry about it. And like, you know, also because one-pagers were big and Kartra is a one-page website builder. Like I had that, at least I had that leverage. And I launched a show and it just, it was just a great start because everyone's like, no way. I didn't, I didn't even know AJ was a human, you know, like he, so the episode now when I listen back to it, I struggle because it's like, it's very awkward and slow and the editing is not great. I mean, it's fine. But, um, it was the first one I ever did and it's got better and better over the years. But to answer your question is that every guest that I've had on the show, I'm a big fan of. And I understand how the podcast game works where we use one guest to leverage sort of the next, or at least the next season and so on. And we on our way to, you know, Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk and stuff. But I've never had the intention of being a full-time podcaster. It's like I was doing it to hang out and interact with people that I admire. Exactly like you just said now, you know, before we were going, you said you've been following One Page Love for ages. Like, this is fantastic. This is a great time. Um, I'm sitting here in the bottom of Africa, man. You know, we're having a good time and like people will interact with me after listening to this. It's, it's just a great format. So when I get, you know, to chat to, you know, a lot of heroes of mine and ask how they do things, it's, it's great as well. You know, like we're saying about sharing the love when it comes to One Page Love. Even within, um, the episodes, I'll try to share a little story or something, but very light. And it's all about the guest, but try to add a little value and then ask them, why aren't you? It's like, dude, you, you just launched a digital product, but you didn't send a newsletter. Like, why didn't you do that? Like, I'm so interested in that. And by me being a product builder, having built a lot of startups, having quit freelance, like I feel like I do have not an edge, but I can ask a good question. And, but I'm curious. I care. I've been following every single one of my guests for years. So when it comes to like the curation of the questions and designing it, again, I'm trying to be creative. So I asked myself like, what kind of podcasts would they enjoy being on? And a lot of the time is like, I'll listen to all their podcasts. I'll devour their catalog. And then if they have talked about something a lot, I would, I'll literally go in the interview and saying, hey, so you did this and this and this. I'm not going to talk about it. Um, but I'm gonna link to it below. I'm interested in this and this and this. And they really appreciate that. So again, it's like, how can we make this fun and exciting? And I want to be creative is that I will, you know, create a game. Like, how can we create a game with audio? You know, we're going to do an intermission. We're going to have music. So I created a very like unsustainable format for a podcast because the research is insane. It's so intense. It's devouring the catalog. It's running with it in the mountains. It's driving with it. It's making notes. It's reading it back. It's, it's hating it. I'm like, this, this sucks. Going back a week later. That's, that's cool. Then it's about reaching out to the community and going, You know, which of the community do you think would like to know something from them? DMing them going, hey, I got this guest, you know, exhausting. You know, like the person's like, oh, I'll send you an audio bite soon. 'Cause I want the media to make the show more rich. I want their voice in there. I want the guests to hear the voice. No one sends me the bite. So like everything is like quite a battle. Time, time, time. Do you announce a guest? And then they, then all of a sudden they don't have any more time. I mean, you know this game, like you, like you, you've been in it, but for me, because I admire the person so much, it really helped get it over the line. But some people have reached out to me and go like, hey, you should really get that person on your podcast. And I'm like, I don't even know this person. Like, that sounds crazy to me. I'm not going to put 40, 50, 60 hours into this. People forget after the episode's done, the distribution, it's like— We've got the newsletter, we've got the tweets, we've got the clips. It's like, it's a big, big game. Um, so I gotta really admire the person and also it's great to spotlight them. It's great for them to feel stoked as well. Makes our relationship better. Um, so to ask you a question about the research, it's massive. It's a huge journey. And often when I'm so deep, it's like you question everything. Like I'll be completely honest to anyone out there, like listening is that, you know, having a podcast. You know, I ask myself, do I even want to be a podcast host, you know, full-time? Absolutely not. So why are you doing a podcast? Oh, because— oh, it's— sorry. Yeah, it's the thumb from the Apple.

Yeah.

It's because, you know, I like the people. I feel like it helps my personal brand. I'll be honest about that as well. It's like, it's great. Again, sitting in Africa, like a lot of these people operating out there, I feel like I'm not Doing things, you know, even though I'm doing great stuff and I've, I'm, I'm happy with what I've done, I still feel left out. And here I am chatting to them. Wonderful. They start sharing the interview with their audience and to kind of answer why I put in so much effort is you get to, you know, to have one of the guests or a lot of the guests tell me that that was sort of the best podcast they had been on. It's like, it really gives me that wholesome feeling as well going like, hey, You know, I like, I'm glad I did that. But it's just like a kind of loose interview, just doing a whole bunch every single day. We're interviewing someone. You don't truly know the person. It's just not a game I want to play. So less is more with the podcast. Try and make it more timeless. Try and unlock the personality with the questions. When you dig up something that they're like, wow, how did you know that? Then it's just like, for me, that's it, man. Like you've just Now we're in the next phase of this podcast. It's like we can really start enjoying ourselves. Um, Hot Ones is my favorite show ever on YouTube where they eat the chicken wings. They interview people like—

Yes.

Sean. Sean, he's, he's pretty much the best interviewer, I, in my personal opinion. And how they unlock a different side of celebrities is absolutely phenomenal. So I've been trying to create the podcast I want to listen to, but yeah, next season is sponsored by Webflow and they, they reached out and they said they really appreciate how much effort I put in and they want to help me take it into a video format. So we're talking full video interviews. Um, yesterday I met with a guy who's helping with the Yo animation. Um, I'm busy researching more beats. Dude, I gotta be creative here. Like I, it's, it's, you know where I'm getting at, but it's like with me, if I'm not sort of like pushing the level, then it's maybe I don't really want to do it.

I love that. No, I think it's, you know, one thing I can relate so much to you when you talked about, um, I'm doing this for selfish reasons is because it's just amazing to talk to someone who you never met, who you have no idea, like, you know, how they will be on camera, and you get to build a conversation. That is a phenomenal thing to chase, at least to me. That's why I do it. Like, even you, I never met you. I know you from afar. I'm a fan. I've been following your work. But that is just limited. That's just like in a box. What we're doing is kind of— we're playing, like you said in your words, we're kind of having fun talking to each other. Right. And I recently listened to this clip from Naval on his startup AirChat. Everybody should be on it. It's so amazing. He says, which I'm kind of trying these days going— I used to be like, research hard, not that intense. I used to spend at least like 6 to 10 hours on a person, guest, how they're thinking, dig back and all that. But he said something that actually changed a little bit of how I'm doing podcasts. Even today, I didn't do that much research. I have to acknowledge.

Yeah, no, great.

He said, he said a great podcast is a good conversation between 2 people who want to talk to each other. That's it. No agenda.

Wow. So good.

That's it. It's, it's, it's the end and it's, it's the thing that you need to explore. Together. So you're bringing something to the table as a guest. I'm bringing something to the table as a host. So he eliminates first of all there is no guest and host. You just talk to each other. That's it. You you're you're happening to record this so that other people can listen. But that thing should be you know that you should you should really shelf that thought and really have a good time. So I stopped. Kind of researching and fully, fully, fully, fully involving myself into the conversation. So all the questions I asked is based out of your answers, like, you know, so just being curious about how you deliver and what can I find. So I think one thing—

I can learn from you, man.

That's something that I've been trying these days in the last couple of episodes. It's been coming out great, like really great. So that's one thing I'm just like exploring with you as well today, talking about competition. I never would have asked about competition if I would have researched you because I would have asked something else about all that jazz, which is amazing. There is nothing wrong. But I'm so glad that I asked about competition. Then you delivered an incredibly profound answer to me, and I hope listeners will kind of get the same thing. But I love the intention, Rob. I just want to mention that it's so intentional. I think these conversations, the things that you do at YO, and I see I brought Arvid Kahl recently. That guy is damn intentional. Like, so intentional. I think the intentionality plays a lot. Of course there is jazz around distribution tactics, which is amazing, which you all should follow. But I think you should start with intention. So I love that you're being so intentional about who you choose, what you do, what you ask, how do you release, even though it's like a lot of work. So appreciate you for doing that. One more thing I want to ask about you, which is surfing. You've been doing surfing for 25 freaking years. I don't know how. And I watched this show. So first thing, I have no clue about surfing. I just know people surf. That's it. I don't know about the dynamics. The sport itself is such a big industry itself until I watched this show on HBO, 100 Foot Wave. Yeah. Ridiculously inspiring. It's like so freaking inspiring to me. I keep on going back to that documentary back and back and again.

Wow.

The guy Garrett McNamara. You should watch it.

People have told me about this.

It's so good. It's so good. The reason I want to bring that show is because the main spotlight is on This legend, you know it, right? You know him?

Yeah, yeah, definitely.

Garrett McNamara. He's a legend in the sport, and he talks a lot about surfing, but on a life's note. It's not about just the sport. He talks a lot about how the sport influenced in his particular life, how it reminded him being young, How he should pursue, how should— how he should be patient when, when there is swell, when there is no swell, versus— and when should give up, meaning when should move on, like with his age and everything, and how it impacted his family and all. So my question to you, you've been doing this 25 years.

Yeah.

How much of surfing impacted you as a person? As an entrepreneur, as a founder, and what are some things that you've implemented on a day-to-day, on a month-to-month, a year-to-year basis, learning from that great sport?

What a fantastic question. So just to, I'm going to bring it right back in and it's related is that, you know, you talk about the conversation between 2 people, a podcast. And we put down the barriers and we just like, you know, getting value from each other. So it's just, I'm so glad, you know, we, we got to do this podcast because I can see I'm going to be, I'm being in your DMs and I'm going to be like asking you like, hey man, so like when you did that, what did you think of this? I am actively seeking advice to be a better podcast host. And I'm also trying to help free up time and streamline things. And I'm just, I want to learn from you. Like, that's definitely something that you've got more episodes, like you're doing a fantastic job. Um, I just want to say well done there just before, like, we, you know, forget to appreciate, to at least acknowledge that. So, like, and I'm just so glad that you mentioned that, you know, we're, we're similar people and we're both on a journey. We're both building things, but there's, there's such a unique thing about Choosing to put something online and then, you know, be vulnerable and get feedback, fail, et cetera, et cetera. And then here we are. So it's like we are both sort of these internet dabblers and here we are just having this conversation. We've also created a podcast. We are obviously curious people. We also want to ask questions. Yep. And like by doing that, you've sort of like carved out a corner of the internet and here we are. So By your actions, you found your people. Like, that's where we are. So with surfing, it's, it's, it, it molded my entire life. Most of my decisions leading up to now, you know, I would say pre, pre-kid were like kind of surf related, you know, it's like, it's the reason, it's a huge reason why I still live in Cape Town in South Africa is because we have fantastic surf. You know, a lot of it you can call selfish, sure. But it keeps you young. It gets you offline. To take a break from an edit and be in the sea where absolutely no one is on a phone and everyone's just looking at each other, smiling. You're going on this wave. Sure, there's a competitive side to surfing, as with everything. But it's taken me around the world. I've, you know, been to Indonesia. I've surfed France. I've surfed Portugal. And a lot of those reasons why you go to those places is because like the end goal is to try and surf like a little funny rock in the middle of the sea just for like half a day. But the big takeaway and to answer your question is that surfing has really made me acknowledge that it's about the journey in the middle where surfing is about getting to the wave. I've surfed Namibia, you know, it's like I've, I will go and I will Research. We will look at charts, the swell charts, the storms will come in, but now we start interacting with friends and we're like, oh my word, did you see that chart? Just like the storm was really big in South America, you know, so nerdy on these things, but we just like feeding off each other. And it's like the richest, most stimulating interaction you can have is this sort of anticipation that maybe it's going to hit Namibia at a certain angle. And then all of a sudden it starts getting closer and closer. And then you're like, we have to go. And then everyone's like, I can't, dude. I got work, man. It's like, no ways, dude. Like XYZ. Then it's like, what if it doesn't come again, man? Like what if like next, you know, we're like, we're dead. You know, it's like, like we got to go. So all of a sudden we start like building up this hype. It's, we start saying, oh, Mo, do you see on social media? This guy just hopped on a plane in Hawaii. He's going to be at Namibia in 2 days. You know, we, we are lucky because we're just flying from South Africa as a direct flight, it's 3 hours. Guys are leaving. So I'm still working. Guys are leaving. Guy leaves from Tahiti and like, we're just sharing. It's like this live broadcast of people chasing a swell. We get to Namibia. You're at the airport and you just see surfboards. You call them surfboard coffins. They're like these big bags that look like coffins because they're filled with so many surfboards. Just see coffins everywhere. And you're like, oh my word, who's here? Who's here? That guy's professional. There's a photographer. And it's this excitement, it's this hype, but where I'm getting at is that you'll get to the wave, you know, I'm talking hire a car, you're driving through the desert. It's like there's jackals on the beach, there's skeletons. It's like there's misty. You'll get there and you'll surf 10 waves for a week of anxiety and stress. But the whole thing was that you were with your friends, you were stimulated, you absorbed in it. And like, there's not many things you can do in your life. Yeah. That you are so, you know, it's so stimulating. So there you get your wave and sure, you can get the best wave of your life. But then again, Portugal, it's like Spain. There's like, you're chatting to friends, your friends are in England and you're like, have you been to this place at this time? So it's a narrative. That's where I'm getting at is that surfing is a, is this ongoing thing with a, with a wave that is never the same. Storms change, swells are all different. It couldn't be more exciting. But like, where's the transition in my life is that I've learned that, you know, I love birdwatching, something I'm big on. And it's like, you see the bird for 10 seconds, but it's about getting there. It's like, oh my word, did you see it arrived in a certain place? Like a rare bird. It's about taking that journey. It's about chatting to the people afterwards. So exactly like this podcast, it's like maybe the best part about this podcast is going to be the narrative we have forever after. You know, it's, it's, it's, it's just that it's not truly about surfing the wave surfing. It's like, it's amazing, but it's everything else. It's about the friendships. It's about the walk down the long beach. It's about the injury. It's about the, yeah, it's the flights. It's, yeah. So the reason why I'm still in, in South Africa, a big reason, it's obviously family, but a second one is just, I get to surf. So yeah, it's a direct answer. Surfing is the big reason why I'm still doing what I'm doing.

I love that. I think there is something that you, I don't know if you knowingly delivered the answer. A lot of what we do is also narrative, right? It's not about launching that product or a business or a YouTube channel or a podcast or a newsletter. It's really about like, you know, process of getting there. I think that is the fun part, right? That is where I think I'm just deriving, you know, what you said. It's about designing that logo, coming with that name for a product, finding those features, like writing copy. If in this landing page, as an example—

The month of creating the Yo! YouTube show, acknowledging that what I knew on the 5th of January I knew nothing. And then I get to the 6th of January and I'm like, wow, now I'm on my way. Then you get to the 10th of January, like on the 6th of January, I knew nothing. On the 9th, I learned nothing. It's about that process of just committing to it, getting completely absorbed in the process, the middle, learning from it. Guys, can you check out this edit? Someone will reply and go, dude, the audio is disgusting. Unplayable. Okay. We learn, we go in again. That process. It's much better than hitting the publish button.

Yeah, I think I love it. I think that's something that, you know, as founders, we all should remind ourselves now and then. It's about that. I think there, if you find joy, if you even didn't find joy when you hit publish or it didn't work out, you will still end up having, you know, a lot of joy because you built this from zero to one. Rob, I love this conversation so much. I didn't expect anything of this. I just free floated with you. You were such an amazing guest. I'm so glad that you came to the show. I think it happened for a reason at this time. We were kind of in this mindset. We have so many similarities, side projects, being podcast hosts. Certainly. And there is a bit of taste in it. There is a bit of curation, love for curation, love for design, and love for going for a long run, right? Like, let's do this 10 years, 20 years, 30 years, and hopefully inspire 1 or 2 people along the way. I think that's the whole goal.

Absolutely.

Any closing thoughts? Anything that you want to Talk to our listeners before we wrap it up.

Yeah, I mean, so much to say. We haven't even talked about India not making that World Cup. Oh, yes, they were meant to win, man. I'm so sorry. But for real, though, is that you just got to acknowledge that often playing the victim is the easy Easy thing to think. It sucks. Everyone's got it difficult. I understand. Can't judge anyone until you truly walked in their shoes. But just acknowledge that most times where I stepped up and I said I was the one in the way of where I wanted to be and I stepped aside is when I really started to progress. So that's something that I keep close is that as soon as you kind of starting to make excuses, You just need to kind of get out the way because you know what you really want to do and you just got to make that happen. So step out the way and go get it.

I love that. I think that's the best way to close this out. And appreciate you, Rob. Appreciate you so much. And thank you so much for the listeners. We love you. We really do this for you. Yes.

I hope you got something out of it. Really appreciate it.

I know. That's it. That's a wrap. And we'll all meet you on the next one. Have amazing lineup like Rob coming on the show. We're going to have amazing conversations. Do all the jazz.

Thanks so much for having me and asking such great questions.

Appreciate you. All right, cheers, guys.

Cheers.