Fail Fast & Fail Cheap | How We Launched Investment Fund Secrets

Boom, people, welcome back to the show. Today I wanna talk about actually the story of how we launched Investment Fund Secrets. I talk a lot about how I launched my fund, how we got off the ground. You guys remember I went and pitched my dad for money, he turned me down, I went and raised money and I got it back, my dad's never invested in my fund before. We've raised it, we launched 2 funds since then, the whole thing, right? You guys have heard that story before, I'm guessing. But I rarely talk about how we actually launched Investment Fund Secrets and why. We launched Investment Fund Secrets. And I wanna take you back a little bit, and it's something actually in college. So back to my original story, you guys remember I started 6 businesses my first 2 years of college, and then I started my fund. And after I launched my fund, I was actually still at university. I was at Brigham Young University. I was still in there, still in their business program doing all the stuff there, and I had an incredible teacher sit down. He was an entrepreneur teacher. This guy had done all these crazy businesses, and he would, he just came and volunteered his time at the school. I loved it, and it was one of my favorite teachers. And he said this, and we read this book called Nail It Then Scale It. If you guys have ever heard of this book, it talks about fail fast and fail cheap. A lot of us have entrepreneurial ideas, and this goes beyond funds, okay? This is just, this is in general. Anybody have an idea before? Oh man, I had that idea 5 years ago, and somebody else started it and they sold their company for like $100 million, and you're like, man, that was my idea, right? And he goes, in the book he talks about a lot of us have these ideas. These ideas are a dime a dozen. What we need to get better at is failing fast and failing cheap, and failing forward is another way to say it. And what he means by that is this, and what our teacher told us, is any entrepreneurial idea you have right now, you should be able to vet it and test it out your market in 3 weeks and for $500 or less. I was like, what do you mean? He goes, a lot of people bounce an idea for a business around in their head for a year or 2 years or 5 years. And if they're lucky, if they go for it, they'll eventually start it and maybe it takes off. A lot of people do that. And he goes, why? He goes, this is what he told us. Number 1, keep a journal of all your ideas for business. I was like, damn, that was perfect. I was like, seriously, 'cause I was running my fund, but I still am an entrepreneur. I'm always looking for other stuff and other things, which I probably should focus more. I get like the shiny object syndrome. I don't know if anybody else gets that, but I get that a ton. A lot of other stuff going on. So he said, just write them down in a book. So I started a journal. I started to write in my phone, my notes. I would write down all my business ideas. And I'm like, ah, that one's crap. And I'd crap, and I'd think about it. But if one, he goes, if one sticks with you for more than about 2 to 3 weeks, and maybe you, out of 50, you've got like 2 that are great that have stuck with you, pick one of them and give yourselves 3 weeks and $500 to test it out. So I had this idea to launch Investment Fund Secrets. It was one of my ideas. I was like, you know what, I've ran a fund, I have a lot of friends, a lot of people asking me, how did you start that fund? My dad runs a huge fund, my brother works at a fund, and a lot of people ask us, How'd you guys do this? How'd you guys start a fund? How'd you get into this? And I said, I wonder if people would wanna learn more about this, about running a fund. And I looked on Google and YouTube and I did my kind of just researching before spending money, and there wasn't a lot of people talking about it. No one was sharing about it, and if they did, they weren't sharing about actually the how-to, about how to actually get up and run. And so I found my business partner Mason. We'd been friends for a while. We actually started a few businesses prior. We started some online, we were doing online marketing and other stuff. I said, Mason, I knew he was really good at building websites and doing online marketing. I was like, dude, I got this idea. We're gonna teach people how to do funds. Like, what do you think? And he was like, yeah, I'm down. And I said, okay, we got 3 weeks, $500. You willing to put in like $250? I'll put in $250. And he's like, sure. You know, we kinda laughed, like $500 seems like nothing, but it's really interesting actually how little people will invest and spend on their own business. Isn't that interesting? People will spend thousands of dollars on a new iPhone or going out to dinner with friends or entertainment, on a trip, a vacation to Hawaii, But when you ask them to put in $1,000 for their own business, they're like, whoa, that's a lot of money, I don't wanna, there's no way I'm spending that much money, right? So we were like, yeah, we're in though, for $500, we're down. So what we did is we started a podcast, got it going, it actually got some good traction, we actually didn't even need to use our $500. The podcast got a little bit of traction, we got some users and listeners, we said, I wonder how Facebook ads would do on this. So we took $500, I filmed like 5 ads, Mason put together our landing page and stuff and all this great stuff, and we spent $500 on Facebook ads. And we were gonna sell a $47 product, and it was our mini vault. Anybody on here bought that first mini vault when we launched it? It was a $47 product, had a handful of videos, had a pitch deck, a downloadable thing, all this kind of stuff. It was really cool, good little offer, and we wanted to just see what would happen if people would buy it, like what would happen. Instead of going and building the product first, instead of going and filming all the videos and getting it all together, I knew what I wanted to do, we didn't do that first though. We went and built the funnel, we built the landing page, we built the ads, all that kind of stuff. We ran $500 of ads and we were very meticulous. As some of you guys know, if you've ran Facebook ads, you can spend $500 in a blink of an eye and not know where it went. We were very meticulous, we knew where every dollar was spent. We spent $500, we sold a $47 product that wasn't built yet, and we made back, on our first weekend, we made back about $1,000, somewhere around there. We were like, whoa. First off, people liked it, we made a little bit of money, we were like, man, that was kinda cool. So we emailed everyone that bought, it was over like 2 days, we emailed everyone that bought, we were like, hey, the product's not done yet, sorry, if you want a refund, we'll just give you your money back, no worries, we wanna test it out, but hey, if you're willing to wait like a week, I'm gonna put it all together, I'll give it to you in a week. And I think of those people that bought, only like 2 people asked for a refund. We gave them a refund, we said no worries. And over that next week, I was in the studio, I was filming, we got it all together, we put it together, this nice little mini vault course, it was $47, it was awesome, we still actually have it today if you guys are interested, maybe it's below in a link or something. It's actually a really awesome product. Put it together and we gave it out to our people. And they loved it. And they were like, man, this is the, I've never seen anything like this. And they wanted more and we were like, okay, let's start a Facebook group. And so people started to ask us questions in the Facebook group. Hey, like, what's going on here? Can you answer this question for me? And I would hop on there live and start answering questions. And we started to make more videos and more podcast episodes, and we slowly grew. We slowly started to keep spending that money. We didn't give ourselves a paycheck. We just rolled, okay, the $1,000, we rolled it back in, then we turned it into like $2,000. And we rolled it back in, we turned it into like $5,000, right? We kept rolling the money back into Facebook ads for that mini vault. And then we had a lot of people keep asking us for more. Hey, I need more help. I want help on raising money or setting up a real estate fund or whatever it is. So then we decided to launch our mastermind program. Our mastermind program is an awesome program. We bring on all these great mentors. We have 100, it started out actually at the beginning it was like 80 videos, all these Excel documents. We gave you the legal templates. My brother, a lawyer, came on and taught. My dad, other mentors came on and taught. And we put that out and we sold that just to our existing list. And we launched it back, this was February 2020, we launched it to our list. It was, at the time it was in beta, and we sold it for $1,997. We said it's a beta program, you can join for $1,997, we only want 100 people. And we filled up, I think, 78 spots over 3 days. We did like a whole launch, we followed all the books and everything they talked about, Jeff Walker's book called Launch, incredible book. And we launched it, we were like, man, now we got all this money to play with, let's keep rolling it. And so we started to build a team out, we started to bring on support people, and now we've got, I think, I don't know, 10 people working for us now that help manage content and get this out and bring it all together and bring together Investment Fund Secrets. As of today, we've got around 750 members inside of our mastermind group, which is crazy, okay? It's an incredible community. I go live in there once a week. A lot of people are talking and launching funds. They can network with each other. It's a really cool program, our mastermind program. And we have over 750 members in that, it's crazy. We just launched an exclusive coaching program on top of that. People, you know, a lot of people want me to help them directly with their fund, like one-on-one. So we just launched another top level, it's called Black Card, it's a consulting coaching program on top of that, and it's been super, it's been really fun. We started it all from $500 and 3 weeks. And for whatever idea you've got, it could be a fund, it could be any business model you've got, $500 in 3 weeks will get you places really fast. Before launching IFS, okay, that wasn't like, it wasn't like for us we just got the bat and swung and we hit a home run. Me and Mason had tried launching, so I had 6 business attempts, I mentioned that? Those were actual businesses that like were up making money, like actual businesses. That does not count the other business tries I had. I had probably, I don't know, another 10 to 12 business tries. 3 weeks, $500, fail. 3 weeks, $500, fail. And what it was, it was first off to get the noise out of my head, to help me. Anybody have the noise in their head? You know what I'm talking about? All day when you're just thinking about stuff like, oh my gosh, I should do this and this, and you can't sleep at night 'cause it's just this noise in your head. That's the only way I can describe it, is a noise in your head. The easiest way for me to get that noise out of my head was to work and say, you know what, all this noise, I'm gonna put it onto paper and we're gonna make action happen. Very few people execute and make things happen. That's why very few people are successful. That's why very few people start businesses. That's why very few people run successful companies and do well and have great relationships and have great spiritual lives. All aspects of life. Physically, very physically fit, have a 6-pack, 'cause very few people execute. If you can determine, say, hey, my attitude was I'm not the smartest guy here. I'm not the smartest person in the room. I didn't get the great grades. I didn't get the 36 ACT. But I can execute. And I don't even work that hard. I'm not even that hardworking of a person, but I can execute. I can just get stuff done. And I'm inherently a lazy person. That's why I run businesses, 'cause I'm lazy. I don't wanna work for 40, 50 years and hope, hope the government sends me a Social Security check. I'm way lazier than that. I wanna be done working at 30, 35, whatever it is, right? Or be to the point where I don't need to work but I still work for fun, right? That's how, I'm lazy, okay? I'm inherently a lazy person and that's why I started businesses and decided to execute. And every time you fail, they always talk about that the true failure in entrepreneurship is not trying. It's not starting a business and failing, it's not starting in the first place. 'Cause you learn so much. Each business for me built on the next one and it led up to us launching Investment Fund Secrets. I have a successful fund, we're launching another fund right now. And now it's like magic, everything we touch turns into money. Well, how does that happen? You ever wonder that? How does Elon Musk, everything Elon Musk touches just turn into money? Well, maybe it's because of all the business attempts he tried before and all the things that he failed at. He just started moving. And for people, I don't know if you're this way, but for me, I said I just gotta start moving, get that noise out of my head. Okay, 6 months goes by, $500, $1,000 is gone. Big deal, right? Yeah. I can just do it again next 6 months. As long as I keep my monthly expenses really low, I had no car payment, I lived in a really cheap house, my phone was paid off, okay? How many people are on payment plans for your phones? Okay, get off payment plans for your phones. Get off payment plans for cars, okay? Maybe a small rent, that's what I had. Paid groceries and rent. If I could just cover that, I was good, and I could just spend all the rest of my time and money launching businesses. 'Cause it was asymmetrical risk. And if I kept failing, failed fast and failed cheap and failed forward, keep falling forward, I was gonna get to a place a lot faster than other people, my peers that were around me in college or in school or family, whoever it was. So if you're listening to this, if this is your call or whatever it is, you know, this is your wake-up call, alright? $500, 3 weeks. It's still the same with funds. You could go 3 weeks, start fleshing out your ideas, start pulling in investors, partners, If you follow the Funnel Launch Formula that I teach, you don't have to spend any money actually, probably $500 or less just getting your pitch deck together and buying a logo, whatever you need to do, buying a domain, okay, setting up that stuff. Get that together, go soft pitch it. That takes about 3 weeks. The whole Funnel Launch Formula takes about, you could do that in about 3 weeks. Fail fast, fail forward, and fail cheap is crucial. It doesn't matter guys, it doesn't matter if it takes you a year. Or heaven forbid it takes you 3 years, or oh my gosh, it's gonna take you 8 years. Think about the last 8 years, where you were 8 years ago. Okay, if you had dedicated those last 8 years, wouldn't it be worth it? And you're a multi-millionaire now and running this huge successful fund or company, whatever it is, wouldn't that be worth it? Yeah, dang straight it would be. So think about the next 8 years. You've got plenty of time. We've got plenty of time. If you're under 70 years old, we've got plenty of time. That's a— Gary Vee preaches that. I don't love all of Gary Vee's stuff, but I love that, is you've got time, you can do this. You guys are awesome, and I'll see you next episode. Like, comment, subscribe, whatever it is on this video. Let me know what you guys' thoughts are. Fail fast, fail cheap, and keep moving forward. See you guys, bye.