In this solo episode of the No Days Off podcast, host Brian Gubernick challenges entrepreneurs to adopt a "by‑product" mindset: every product, service, or business operation inevitably creates secondary outputs that can be turned into additional revenue streams or brand assets. He illustrates the concept with two well‑known case studies – Slack, which emerged from an internal communication tool built for a failed video‑game startup, and Kingsford Charcoal, which was created from the wood waste of Henry Ford’s Model T production. Gubernick then shifts to practical, actionable ideas for listeners, suggesting that existing training materials, recorded sessions, podcasts, and other content can be repurposed into sellable courses, books, or other products. He shares his own experience of packaging real‑estate training into a paid Kajabi program that generated six‑figure revenue, and notes that his current podcast itself serves as a source of repurposable content. The episode concludes with a reflective prompt: identify the by‑products in your own business and consider how to leverage or monetize them, emphasizing that many opportunities lie hidden in everyday operations.
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Thank you for joining me today. It's Brian Gubernick, and welcome to the No Days Off podcast, where we believe that every single day brings a new opportunity to get better. Let's get into it. Today I want to talk a little bit about being an entrepreneur and more specifically thinking around selling your byproducts. Most of our listeners, high achievers, business people, individuals aspiring to grow and develop. We've got a lot of business minds listening to this podcast. And, and as a result, I want to, I want to challenge everybody today to leverage these entrepreneurial minds that you have and think around today's topic, today's focusing question, as it pertains to Selling your byproducts. See, when you make something, when you build a service in business, when you make a product in business, when you make something, you're always making something else. In other words, you can't just make one thing. Everything you make in fact has a byproduct. And those that are creative, those that are observant, they can spot these byproducts. And see opportunities. So let me give you a couple examples. Okay. Let's talk about the communication tool that many of you know all too well, known as Slack. Okay. If you haven't used Slack, uh, you've at least heard of it by now. Well, I don't know if you know the whole backstory to Slack. Slack was created by a guy named Stewart Butterfield and, and some of his, some of his peers. And Stewart's history. Stewart, uh, was a video game creator. He and some partners founded a video game that actually failed, didn't work out. They then created a company called Flickr, which was a photo sharing company. That company sold to Yahoo. He worked at Yahoo for a little while, uh, as part of his earnout, the buyout. And then when he returned, when Stewart returned from his time at Yahoo back into the work, the workforce, you know, when he was no longer at Yahoo, but back as an entrepreneur, he went back to work on a video game again. He and his group formed a company, I think it was called Tiny Speck, and they had created or aimed to create a game, a multiplayer online game called Glitch. But this second video game, this one also failed and they had to shut it down. But despite the failure of the game, Tiny Speck, the company, had developed lots of different technology for the, for the Glitch game. And specifically, one thing they had created was an internal communication tool for their own team. It was a tool that helped all of his project engineers coordinate their work. This internal communication tool, the thing that they weren't even working on, just the tool that they were leveraging as they were building out this video game that failed. This internal communication tool, they decided to bring public, you know, bring to the public and see if maybe there was something there. Well, fast forward in August of 2013, the company officially launched the communication tool known as Slack. And they ended up selling Slack years and years later to Salesforce in, I believe, 2020, 2021, uh, for like $27, $28 billion. So the byproduct of this video game, one of the technologies they had created that they had just used internally for their engineers to communicate turns into a $30 billion, nearly $30 billion company. Here's another good example. Interesting story. Uh, you know, Henry Ford and Ford Company in the late 1910s, early 1920s, they created the Model T and they're building on all these Model Ts. And, uh, they used an awful lot of wood in creating the Model T. Well, Henry Ford figured out how to leverage this excess wood, this sawdust and whatnot, the scrap wood, and create charcoal out of it. This company became known as Kingsford Charcoal, which I think has at least 80% market share even still today. Ford no longer owns it, for what it's worth. I think Clorox or somebody owns it. But the charcoal industry, like how we think about charcoal for barbecuing, Kingsford Charcoal was created as a byproduct to the build-out of the Model T Ford. Pretty amazing. So where am I going with all this? I want you to reflect. I want you to think on your business. Or your businesses, the things that you're doing right now, the services that you've created and are always striving to improve, or maybe the services you're developing right now, or if you're in a product-based business, the products that you've created, there are byproducts that exist in your world you're not even thinking about at this moment. Let's say you run a sales business and you've got a group of, of team members, sales team members, some ideas for you. Are you teaching to your team? Are you creating content to teach for your team? Can you be teaching it to others? Can you get paid to teach it to others? That content, can it be repurposed for training? Can it be repurposed for distribution? Do you record your training that you're doing right now? Can you potentially sell that training to others? Is there a market for that? As far as content goes, like I mentioned, can you share it in other places? Can you turn it into a book? Could it potentially become a podcast that may not necessarily make you money, but extends your brand? So I want you to reflect, what are you doing in business right now that in fact has byproducts you're not even paying attention to? In my personal world, uh, with my real estate team years ago, my partner and I had built out a lot of training and we had recorded this new agent training, new, new realtor agent training program and realized one day, you know what, people would probably pay us for this particular program. And so we recut our videos, we rewrote our content, the supporting documents. We packaged it up in Kajabi, which is a, which is a learning management system. And we ended up selling hundreds of seats in that video training series and, and created 6 figures plus in revenue, which was a nice, you know, complimentary business and was just a byproduct of the training we were already running. How about the podcast that I'm doing right now? The No Days Off podcast. Recognize that the vast majority of the content is either content that I've leveraged in some place before or is new content I'm creating that will in fact be repurposed for other training and education and things that I do outside of the podcast world. There are byproducts. I could use this stuff in that it's, it's multipurpose. So where am I going with this today? And what do I want you thinking around? What's the focusing question? With the services you've created and/or the products that you've created, what byproducts exist that you can in fact further leverage or even monetize? See, software companies like, like, or video game companies like Slack originally was, was not thinking about a communication tool. Car manufacturers are probably not thinking about selling charcoal. There's probably something you haven't thought about that you too can also sell, or at least leverage in some other way. So that's what I want you to think around. Good entrepreneurial question to consider. That's all we have for today, the No Days Off Podcast. Thank you so much for listening. And remember, every single day brings a new opportunity to get better. So let's get after it.
