Uri Bram, CEO of The Browser

Welcome to another edition of the Small Business Show. How you doing, Dave?

I am good. How are you, Shannon?

I'm great. I'm great. I'm really excited about today's guest. I've had the benefit of already listening to this interview, but his mistake comment was fascinating, different than anybody else we've ever heard. And it's one of the most authentic shows I think we've done certainly in a long time. And I think I laughed more on the show than probably last hundred.

Yeah. Yeah, I think so. It was. Yeah, it was an enjoyable interview. I think you folks are going to enjoy this.

And.

Orey is authentic and has some great lessons, even though he might not know it. Maybe that's just his natural way of being understated. I don't know.

Yeah. So you'll have to tell us after you listen to the interview and give us some feedback@businessshow.co. let us know if we're on the right track. If you think that's the way to, to you know, that, that Ori does it. It's really a fantastic interview. I think you're going to love it.

I think so. Yeah, absolutely. And, you know, I want to take a minute here and talk about our sponsor for this episode. During the, during the interview, you'll hear us talk about how here Uri talk about how when he gets a canned customer service response that's obviously canned and it comes late and clearly isn't personalized to him. And no one, he sees that as a bad sign. And he doesn't want to do that in his business and you don't want to do that in yours, just like I don't want to do it in mine either. And that's where our sponsor textexpander@textexpander.com podcast come in. Because you can take those canned customer service responses, put them into textexpander, and you can create little spots for specific variables that you're going to put in. And when I say variables, I say that because I'm a programmer, but really it's just little. You can tell textexpander to prompt you to put in personalized information. It can even grab some information if you have it on, like your clipboard and even other sources so that it automatically personalizes this. But it can also stop in the middle of creating the snippet for you and prompt you for what's the name of the customer, what's the name of the product, what's the problem that they're having? Or choose from a list so that the grammar is right. Wrapping, whatever. The problem is, you know, your, our this like, you know, setting everything just right so that it reads in a nice flow with the right amount of personalization without you having to literally type the whole thing every single time. I use it like this all day long. We use it here at Backbeat Media. We use it here, you know, at the Small Business Show. We use it in our businesses and it is life changing. Oh, yeah, you can use it in yours. Yeah. So here's the great part about Textexpander. You can get 20% off your first year just for being a small Business show Listener. Go to textexpander.com, podcast, and that's where you're going to go to get started. They'll ask you which podcast you heard about it from. I think you already know the answer to that small business show, but, you know, visit textexpander.com podcast. Check it out. I think you're going to love it. And our thanks to textexpander and the folks at Smile for sponsoring this episode. All right, man, are we ready to get rolling here?

I am ready to small business.

Let's small business. He is Shannon Jean. I'm Dave Hamilton and this is episode 298 of the Small Business Show.

I mean, I am as shocked as anyone, but we have 10,000 paying subscribers and it's one of these things where it seems natural that people will pay to make everything else go away, essentially. So we're curating outstanding writing from other publications, but obviously when you spend time online trying to find things to read, you're spending your time even if you're not spending your money, even if a lot of it is free to view. And obviously what we do is just save you time and attention. Like, obviously not every person will like every piece we recommend, but if we recommend something, you know, it's, you know, you know, it's been filtered, you know, it's like high quality. It might not be your cup of tea, but like, there's a reason we picked it. So, yeah, I think people are really willing to spend, you know, with a classic sort of $5 a month less than a cup of coffee business. And people are really happy to spend $5 a month to, you know, not have to wade through a lot of clickbait and junk and noise on the Internet and just have, you know, five really good candidates for something to read each morning.

Hey, Dave, I'm sure, you know, like me, you get flooded with information every day, all day long, right?

Articles all the days?

Yeah, all the days. Articles, headlines, podcasts, news, and more, you know, so I'm really excited. Today we have a guest on that runs several businesses that are built around curating this kind of flood of content that's coming into our lives, you know, to build things that are worthwhile to read or to listen to, stories that have lasting value, stuff that you know can change your life. So Yuri Brahm, and I'm sure I pronounced that wrong after I just said I wouldn't, he's the CEO of the browser and the listener. Businesses built around curation that I'm really interested to learn about. Orey, thank you for joining us today.

Really, thanks so much for having me. What a joy.

Yeah, we're excited. I'm really excited about this because I know nothing about this business, so I'm really looking forward to getting all your secrets. It's going to be great. So I'm really curious, but first, if you could share a little background with our listeners, how did you get to where you are today with the browser and the listener?

I'm afraid our best secret is not very actionable because it's start 10 years ago. I think that's always the way. Right? Start a long time ago and you'll be doing well.

Overnight success only takes about 20 years, so you're halfway there.

Well, that's good to know. I'm glad to hear that. Yeah. So our founder, Robert Cottrell, was a journalist with the Economist and the Financial times, and about 10 years ago, he realized that there was just too much writing out there. And so he thought of starting his own publication. But he decided instead, what the world needed was a curation service that would read all the interesting things coming out every day and just pick five amazing articles each day and send them out to subscribers as a kind of, hey, here's some of the cool stuff that's going on in the world without you having to read all the rest of the Internet.

Oh, that's great. And so is this hand curated? I mean, is this like a Craftsman type of service?

It is absolutely a craftsman service. Robert is a genius in my opinion. And he reads all day. I mean, he genuinely, he wakes up in the morning, he does nothing but read. And then by the end of the day, he likes to say he's not the best red person in the world, but by the end of each day, he might be the most read person in the world. I genuinely don't know how he does it. So, yeah, he just picks his favorite five each day and then the next morning, he wakes up and starts all over again.

Yeah, it's fascinating. And I've been getting the newsletter. Email the newsletter, and it is. It's like, oh, that's really nice. It's curated in a really interesting way. And now you've also added podcasts. Right. With the listener. Does that work in the same way? Or you have a different group of people that are looking at that?

Yeah, no, it's kind of incredible. But that's also just one person who's Caroline Crampton, who's another amazing journalist. So, yeah, a few years ago, when podcasts were kind of getting cool, I assume I can, you know, I assume I can get some agreement on the fact that podcasts are really cool here.

Yeah. I might argue with you about the timing of it, because I've been doing this 15 years, but that's okay.

No way. That's amazing.

Originals, man.

Oh, wow. Damn.

You know, it doesn't really mean anything. I mean, it does to me.

It does to me, too, Dave. It means a lot to me, too. Use the pat on the back.

I will rephrase this. About three years ago, when us less cool people started to realize that podcasts were cool, the browser wanted to add some podcast element, and we brought on Caroline, who's amazing and who also did podcasts, I should say, before the rest of us caught on. And, yeah, it was just so wonderful. We started it as just like a Sunday edition of the browser would just be five podcasts. And it was so wonderful that we had to spin it off to be its own project. And similarly, she just listens all day. I mean, I don't know how they do it. They just. They just spend all their time immersed in this content and pick their favorites.

That's really hard to do because, you know, with reading, there are tricks to be able to read quickly, listening quickly, like. Yeah, it's not so much.

Yeah. Even just increasing. Speed it up. Yeah. Yeah.

Still. Yeah.

I really think the sort of more generalizable lesson to me of all this is just that if you have some really weird skill that most people would say, you know, as much as I love reading, reading all day every day just sounds like an absolute terror to me. But if you have some person who, for whatever reason is, just loves reading so much that he's happy to read all day, or some person who's happy to listen to podcasts all day, that's like a really viable basis for a business. Right. It's like the thing that you can do that no one else Wants to do.

Yeah, well, speaking of that, like those talents. I think doing some research for this, you have a really interesting talent stack. You know, you're game designer authority. Looks like you helped founded a school and now you're the CEO. Talk about this. You know, we're really interested in how these things evolve over time. Was this your plan or did you just kind of move along the path of least resistance or doing the work that interested you the most? How did it all come about?

I am not sure if I should be embarrassed to say this, but I have never had a plan in my life. I find it very hard to see even like, you know, a year into the future when people, you know, when people ask like, oh, where do you want to be in five years? I always have this internal panic of like, oh, what even is five years from now? I don't know. I. Sometimes I'm in two minds about this. Sometimes I think it's totally fine to just flow with everything. And sometimes I think being a bit more deliberate would be smarter. Where do you guys fall on the planners versus, you know, haphazard divide?

I'm more like you. I think Shannon. Shannon is slightly less like us, but still more leaning this way.

I'm a fantastic planner in reverse.

Yeah.

You know, and I.

That's true. You are.

Yeah. And I can talk. I can talk about it. And people are like, wow. It's like, well, it wasn't all just like that. But I. I think I can wrap a good story around, you know, around it. But I. I would agree. Not that the flexibility that I think we've all had in our life is one of the precious gems that I think is worth protecting.

Right. Absolutely.

Yeah. So I love that. And. And I think it's great. And I. I think embracing that change is really important and terrifying sometimes, but it's great. I'm glad to hear you say that.

Oh, sorry.

Go ahead.

I have this kind of suspicion that the ideal way to do this is to do a lot of quite random things. So obviously, you know, like game design, starting a school, some of the kind of tech stuff I've done, and then management, like, they're not really obviously related. And I like to hope that just doing this quite strange collection of things is a really useful way to start something. But I suspect that the ideal way for me, at least to do this would be at some point in life to pick one project and do it for 20 or 30 years. And, you know, just like at some point you find the big thing. But the question is like, will you be able to realize it when you do? You know, will you be able to spot that opportunity and change your mindset because it's such a change in momentum to go from a lot of random projects to one thing forever?

Yeah. Would you be able to do that though? I mean, of course I'm asking this question very much through my own lens and a lens of like, I have a couple of businesses that have been around for 20 plus years, but never as the only thing. Like, I am too invested in the value of what I call multiple faucets running simultaneously because I know one of them's going to dry up for something out of my control. I can certainly dry them up. If I control it, I can screw things up really well. But the safety net of knowing, okay, well, I've got this little thing over here, but all hell breaks loose with everything else I can go. And if I pay more attention to that thing, it, it can grow very quickly. Like setting the foundation for a business is hard. Once you've got it rolling, keeping it rolling and then having it where you can pay more attention and, and grow it, you know, and, and essentially open the faucet. It's way easier if it already exists. I, I think that's what I tell myself. That's how I sleep in it. So I don't know.

Yeah, it's a good question.

I suspect you're right and that running a small business, you're constantly in this state of slight shock or something. It just always feels wild and always like, ah, this could all go wrong at any moment. But I suspect that in the long run we're in a much better place than kind of people in more traditional jobs. Sometimes people in more traditional jobs will ask me like, oh, isn't it scary and weird to do all these projects? And I just think I feel like it's more stable in a strange way. It's kind of like skiing down a mountain. Like you're going really fast and you're not exactly in control, or at least I'm not exactly in control, but there's some kind of stability in that, you know, that fast motion that I think is really worthwhile and really prepares you for whatever else, whatever crazy things happen in the future, which of course.

Well, whatever. Yeah, you're prepared.

It builds resilience. Right. And I think allows you to embrace the inevitable change that's coming, you know, for, for all of us. So. And I think that that long 20 year. Pick a topic. To me that sounds terrifying and, and I would get Very bored. And maybe it's my, you know, ADD or whatever you want to call it, but I, I, I don't know, I, I think about it, I think we think that way sometimes because it doesn't happen for us. So where you have like a corporate person that's been doing this cleaner over there, grass is greener, the corporate person's listening to this, going, oh, these guys, they've got it made.

And meanwhile we're all petrified most of the time. Mild state of panic. That's right, that's right. You touched on, I don't mean to keep taking us in tangents, but you touched on something where you said by doing lots of seemingly unrelated things, as I like to call them, things joined at the Ori, right? They are related in that you did them. But doing that and having all these various things joined at the Ori makes Ori a, a more unique. I hate that I did it a, you know, because nothing is more unique than something else. It's either unique or it's not. But, but it, it creates this, you know, you as a unique person, right? And when you come in to whatever new project you're doing, you are bringing all of that wide range of experience with you. And that's what, that's where a lot of the value is, is, you know, if everybody had exactly the same thing and walked the same path and did just one thing for like you said, 20 years, you don't have the, like, wait a minute, you know, this thing that we're about to do seems like a smart thing if this is the only path you've ever been on. But I did this other thing and developed games and I can tell you this is going to be a mess unless we account for that. You know what I mean? Like that I think that can be a very valuable, you know, we call it the talent stack here. But building that and wide talent stack can be helpful.

I don't know, I think that is super underrated. I mean, it's just, it's almost like a basic economics thing where like if you're selling something that nobody else is selling, then if anyone wants that thing, you're the only person in town they can go to, you know?

Yeah.

This is kind of off topic. I feel the same way about dating. I think people should be much weirder in general. Like if you're, if you're providing something no one else has, then, you know, that's just a good place to be.

Yeah, well, and all these things that you have going on in your Life, you're kind of the hub, right? You make this stuff happen around. It sounds like you're that. That kind of person. It's fascinating. I think it's great. And, and I, I agree with you. I love, you know, the odd, the weird, the, you know, that it makes life look. You know, I think we all, at least the three of us would. Would argue we want to live a less common life, right? And so that I think it makes it certainly more uncommon.

So I think one of the really interesting things you're doing with the show, though, is that, you know, if you want to live a very mainstream life, there are obviously lots of examples of how to do that. And in some ways, you know, you think to yourself, oh, like, well, this person is successful and they did this fairly routine thing. There's kind of something to copy. And in a way, just like having a weirder life is harder because you can't exactly copy anyone. What you need to do is copy certain things from lots of different people and then apply them to your very specific situation. So obviously your show is a way of people hearing all these crazy stories from all these people who have done amazing things. And I think that's really cool.

We think it's cool. This is why we do it, because we get to hear these stories. It's amazing.

I always say I learned the most. I mean, I get to pick and pick these little pieces out and go, oh, that'd be great. We should start a newsletter and curate that stuff.

Yes, absolutely.

Ten years from now. So let's talk about that business model. It's fascinating. So how do these businesses work? I mean, how do they generate revenue and give us some background?

I mean, I am as shocked as anyone, but we have 10,000 paying subscribers, and it's one of these things where seems natural that people will pay to make everything else go away, essentially. So we're curating outstanding writing from other publications, but obviously when you spend time online trying to find things to read, you're spending your time even if you're not spending your money, even if a lot of it is free to view. And obviously what we do is just save you time and attention. Obviously not every person will like every piece we recommend, but if we recommend something, you know, it's been filtered, you know, it's like high quality. It might not be your cup of tea, but, like, there's a reason we picked up it. So, yeah, I think people are really willing to spend with a classic sort of $5 a month less than a cup of coffee. Business. And people are really happy to spend $5 a month to not have to wade through a lot of clickbait and junk and noise on the Internet and just have five really good candidates for something to read each morning.

Okay. It's awesome. I think it's great. But I'm confused because how do you convince them? What's that magic that I went to your website@the browser.com thelistener co and I'm all, that's cool. That's great. You know, but does it. Do you get them signed up and then you kind of ease them into, you know, a paid thing? What's the hook?

Do you know this idea that product market fit is when people just show up and buy your product and you don't know why?

Yeah.

Okay.

To some extent, that's where we've got to, like, I really cannot explain what is the exact moment when someone goes from saying, you know, I can just go on Twitter and there's lots of links there to the moment when someone says, yes, I want to pay for the browser. And we, you know, we kind of have a free list, so, you know, people can get a little taster of what we do for free. But I don't know that I can give an answer on exactly why people switch to that moment of, you know, pulling out the credit card.

That's great.

So the people that were listening that were saying, oh, these guys have it made. Now they just hate you. That's okay.

Sometimes it's a good point.

No, but now I'm so. I'm curious. Do you do any sort of intentional marketing for this, or is it we build it and they came?

We have tried, I want to say, almost everything over the years, and we've never found, you know, when marketing really works, you know, immediately works. You don't have to do the maths, I think, or say, like, oh, you know, like, we spent this much and this. I think if you really find the right channel, then, you know, you just. It's so obvious. So far, we haven't found one where we said, you know, this is just incredibly worth doing and we should go all in on this. So we've done lots of different things, and some of them have brought in some new subscribers. But, no, we don't have some amazing marketing ploy.

But clearly something worked. I mean, you said, what, 10,000 subscribers. That's so clearly.

10,000 paid. 10,000 paid subscribers? Yeah.

Yes, yes. I would say I'm obviously biased, but I actually was a huge browser fan before I worked for and now run the browser. And I just read it and loved it. And honestly, I paid for it. It was the first thing I ever paid for online as a subscript subscription service. It's just so good. I just. I think I'm obviously biased, but I think Robert is just an amazing mind. And, you know, I just. Is. Am I allowed to say I think it's just a really great product and that people.

Want.

What I would. I would argue is the authenticity of the way you answer these questions with the Even just like, I'm not sure. I don't know, you know, we're doing this and we do it because we love it and it works. It just works. That that is part of the secret sauce, if you will, of your success and the company's success is kind of understanding that and being transparent about it and not understanding certain things. Right. That's a big deal.

That's really good to know. I think one of the big challenges to me of running a small business right now, of small businessing, I believe this is a verb that I should use correctly.

That's right.

It's just you kind of on the edge of your vision is always this kind of startup scene. This kind of like, oh, there are these people who grew from zero to billions in, like, a month. And supposedly, if you just did all of these wild marketing things, you know, oh, maybe, maybe we do. It's so hard to look at that and not give in to the temptation to, you know, think, oh, yeah, no, we should clearly be doing all these things because I. I'm never quite sure whether those things work for anyone, but they certainly wouldn't work for us. Or I'm fairly sure they wouldn't work for us, but it's just hard to remember that, like, what we're doing is like this different thing. Like, I'm not really on that track.

That's good. And that's why we focus on these kinds of businesses here on the Small Business show is because we love that it's the, you know, the ones that put in the work every day. And. And it's, you know, you're. You're grinding it out, building it yourself. I mean, you guys have been around for, you know, an unbelievable 10 years, right? And. And you've been there for five years. You've been the CEO for, you know, two and a half years now. Are you. Is. Are the businesses doing what they originally started out to do? Have they morphed into something different? Or have you adjusted how. How does that work?

Yeah, the only really Big change in our lifetime has been we started out as a website and then we added a small newsletter component. People could get our daily website update as a newsletter. And then we saw that so many of our users were only reading the newsletter and never going on the website. That kind of internally we had to shift to thinking, okay, now we're a newsletter where we have a little website on the side for people who still want that. But in terms of the cool product, it really has stayed the same. You know, we sort of added the Sunday Listener. I mean, we, you know, changed. We added a Best of on Saturday. Like, people said they were getting too much from us. We used to do six days a week of completely new content and people said, I can't read this much. So we changed Saturdays up. But basically we're still doing the same thing. I should say, you know, I, maybe this is the wrong thing to do. Maybe we should be moving into new products. I don't know, maybe we should be doing 10,000 times more marketing. And I, you know, all these things are. But what we, yeah, we have kept the, the same. The core thing, the same.

Yeah, you have, but you haven't. I mean, where. Whereas you at least express a, a level of not being intentional at all with your marketing, at least not anymore. You're being very intentional with how you're running your business, right? You're paying attention to what your customers are doing, your users are doing. You're making changes in reaction to what you're learning about what your customers are doing. So you're being very intentional with your metrics and your data and, and it. And your reactions to those. So this isn't just like, oh, well, you know, hope everybody pays next month, you know, like, I think there's a little more to it than that.

Yeah, no, that's very, very true. And I, I agree with something you said in a recent episode about customer. Like all businesses are customer service businesses, right? I think we are really obsessed with keeping our customers happy. And people email me any time of day or night, and I try my best to get back to them immediately and give them, you know, a proper reply. Like, there's nothing worse than you write to some company and something's gone wrong and you, you know, you get this clearly auto reply that got copy pasted from somewhere. At least for me, that's like always a bad experience. So, yeah, I try to give like a really human answer to everyone and just really? Yeah, like our priority is that people be happy. And I guess that is our best form of marketing is word of mouth from already happy customers.

Yeah. And I think in a world filled with chaos, the simplicity that you offer is super valuable. And I think that a lot of people, certainly myself, you know, are really attracted to that. If, if I could just go, you know, I don't have to pay attention to the. To all the garbage. I can't, you know, I just got to stay away from Twitter. I just can't do it and everything else. And then, you know, if you could go back and just look at these things and you know, it's. It's a great, It's a great journey to go down to. And that simplified manner. I love it. I think it's cool.

I mean, it might. It might be argued that doing a month's worth of heavy Facebook ads right now, of saying, are you sick and tired of seeing the news from everybody else's feed? Do you want just the news from ours delivered to your inbox? You know, cleared out the muck from it. People might actually be really into that now. That would certainly speak to me. I don't know.

I tried Facebook advertising in the past and it's like all these things, it's very hard to tell. I'd love to hear your guys thoughts on this, but it's very hard to tell whether it didn't work because you implemented it wrong or it didn't work because it's just not right for your business or potentially just not right for any kind of business in your space.

No, that's right.

So, yeah, we tried it. We definitely. The cost per acquisition was not commensurate with the value of those new subscribers, though it did definitely bring in new people. I spoke to some Facebook marketing experts and one of them said, and I don't know if this is true, but said that kind of Facebook marketing is just this. Facebook itself is this monster. It's like this AI monster that nobody understands anymore. And all Facebook consultants are kind of these almost religious figures just like praying to the Facebook monster God and hoping that it will deliver them new subscribers. So I thought that was really funny. And he sort of had this concept that you had to spend a lot. You had to spend $10,000 to even find out whether your thing was going to work. It took that long for the AI to train itself on which kinds of people are likely to buy your product. Yeah, again, sort of. It's definitely a curiosity for me, like whether this is something that could have worked for us if we had done it slightly differently. But I can only say that in Practice it did not work well enough for us to be worth doing it.

If I was Facebook, I would definitely say that you need to spend at least $10,000 to figure out how our.

Engine is going to get smart enough.

Well, it's similar to the kind of dark arts of the search engine optimization business. Right. For years as you were trying to get your website up to the top of the first front page of Google, we have to paying after this and you know, I think it's just grown so much and it's just like it's its own monster like you say. And it's hard. I, I have had similar results where and I'm always, you know, I'm the type of person when I want to criticize, I have learned this concept. You know, criticize, you look in the mirror when you want to give praise, you look out the window. So I always think it's my fault. You know, I, I, I do these ads and I'm working with, even working with another Facebook company and you know, it's, it's a chall. We just went through this with our publishing, with our mistakes, our we love mistakes book and doing Amazon ads. Very similar, all these keywords and everything else and it's just like, wow, what are we doing wrong? You know, it's fascinating. So I don't know that anybody knows.

Yeah, I get the sense this person said something else that really stuck with me which was that he thinks when Facebook ads do work, it's not necessarily that the ad was good, it's that Facebook foundation, the kind of person who was inevitably going to buy, the kind of person who spends a lot of money on Facebook or the kind of person who is just very responsive to ads. And so obviously the content of the ads does matter and you have to keep iterating and experimenting with it. But his take was almost that what you want to do is wait for the AI to identify the kind of person who just buys anything like your product all the time and that if it did find such a group, then you would win and if not, then you and you would not. So that really stuck with me. Again, I don't know if it's true, but it seemed like an interesting angle that I haven't considered.

It's truthy. That's good enough.

Usually the race counts.

Yeah, that always counts. Unfortunately, that's true. So truthy, I'm not sure.

So let me ask you, let me ask you about your CEO role. So after you were there, you know your with the company and you become a CEO was, did you learn more about the. Excuse me. About the business at that time? Where. Well, obviously you would learn more. But were there anything that surprised you about the. How the business worked? I mean, the simplicity of it sounds from the outside with what has surprised me. What about you from the inside?

I agree with that 100%. I think realizing that this was a business where we had a good product that people liked, that is quite simple. We sell subscriptions and that really, obviously, when you come into a new role, you think to yourself, oh, should we expand product lines? Should we be doing this differently? Should we doing this. But I had this realization that, no, all we had to do was sell more of the thing that people already like and just put ourselves out there more, get better at all the parts of the process that lead to that outcome. But it is a delightfully simple problem in that it's a delightfully simple business.

That's wonderful. So how is. Let's talk about the. The curation of the content. You know, especially now where, you know, the world seems so polarized in so many different ways and, you know, like, it's like, if I wanted to know this much about politics, I would have been a politician. Right.

How do you go back to the days where we had a shadow government or something with the deep. It does.

Yeah.

I wish they weren't. Yeah.

So how do you keep your. Well, like the curator's biases, if you will, out of that feed where you want to just. I imagine you're searching for needles in a haystack or little gems of. That will maybe bring a smile to somebody's face every day or teach them something they didn't know. Right. How does that work? That seems super difficult versus a simple business model. Right.

Yeah. So we have a core philosophy that I think just kind of ties this together, which is writing of lasting value. We say we'll only recommend something if it's going to be as interesting 10 years from now as it is today. And that doesn't cut out everything about the news and politics, but it cuts out almost everything. Very few things written today about the presidency or whatever things are going on. The current events are going to be interesting ten years from now. They're just not. We're going to read them and think this was, you know, this wasn't such a big deal. Even, you know, like, each individual story was not such a big deal, even if the topic as a whole is obviously a very big deal. And so, yeah, we just pick things that we think will be interesting in the future. And that kind of guides us to a whole different kind of writing, you know, And I think our readers really appreciate that it gives a real change from your kind of algorithmic feeds.

It's crazy. Yeah, you just create this echo chamber where you're like, see, I'm right. I'm right.

I obviously don't want to claim we're free from bias. Like, in some sense, you know, all we're doing is picking off favorites. So there's certainly, you know, that bias is there, but it's just, I guess, a different. A different kind of bias, which is a nice change at some point.

Yeah. No, that's great. So has I know you, you know, your team all work remotely? Has. Has Covid impacted your. Your business that much? Or were people just already, you know, well adjusted from working from home or from, you know, working remotely? How does that work?

Yeah, so we've always been a remote team, fortunately for us. So for us, it wasn't a big change. Like, we've always communicated online and managed to make it all work again. It helps that it's a simple business where each person has quite a clear role. Robert is just doing the editing, and I run the business side and so Caroline does all the podcasts. It's not like we have to coordinate our day to day that much. We can kind of get by with phone calls and emails and updates and yeah, from the customer side, we've just been very lucky that obviously we're in a digital business in a time where, like, a lot of other entertainment options aren't available to me. People, you know, their trusty browser email is still showing up in their inbox, safe and sound. So we've been very lucky that kind of. From the customer side, we haven't been affected. I realize that for a lot of people, that's not the situation.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. That's great to hear. So here we're coming to one of the. My favorite, maybe the favorite question I would get to ask somebody because I've made so many mistakes. Because I make so many mistakes, you know, still every day. And so, you know, we like mistakes a lot, or at least we've convinced ourselves that we do because we learn so much from them. You know, looking back, you've had such a varied career, you know, is there a best mistake, if you will, that sticks out? That really taught you a lot, that has helped you in this really varied career that you've had.

This is such a wonderful question. I would say at the browser, if I have. Have made a big Mistake. It's going to be some mistake of omission. There's possibly, I mean, we've come back to this several times through this conversation, but there's various things where maybe if I had done something, we would have doubled in size by now or we would have got 10,000 new subscribers overnight from some intervention that I failed to do. And that's quite interesting because I think there's two kinds of CEOs or business leaders more generally. There's the people who kind of do too much and keep launching exciting new things. And obviously the mistakes they're most likely to make is to kind of fail to focus on the core. But I think what I have done is only focused on this one thing and not try to do anything too original or innovative. And there is clearly a risk that there is something original and innovative I could have done and didn't. But we'll never know. We'll never know what that is. It's not as dramatic or splashy as the more active mistakes. Hey, the ones where you can say, oh, this is all this, look at all this egg on my face.

Yeah, but it's in your head, right? I mean, you're thinking about it.

We talk about, we had a guest on years ago who, when we asked them for, you know, their general advice, they're, what they said was don't make fear based decisions. And, and what you identify here certainly could be the result of a fear based decision. Like I'm afraid to take that risk. I don't know the outcome of it, so I'm not going to try. But it also is just like you said, you're focused on, on delivering a good product. And so by nature of saying, essentially saying no, you are, you are making omissions. Now whether they have been mistakes or not, you know, is a conversation that we could probably have for hours. But, but that's not fear based, right? That's focus based. So that's not, you know, there's a, it's an interesting little balance there. So. Yeah.

Can I say another mistake that is worse? Kind of an odd one. Yeah. Always, always. I can keep going with that. I think. When I was younger and I first started starting businesses, I just did not have a lot of money and I didn't, I couldn't put myself in the shoes of someone who had, you know, spare cash to just spend on things they didn't really need. And I don't know whether that's, I would. To call it a mistake is weird because, you know, kind of what is the thing I could or should have done before, but as I, you know, started to get luckier, like had had more income to spend and started spending money on, you know, things I really didn't need either, I feel like that made me more able to see like, like what customers might want or like how, you know, how all kinds of businesses could run that previously had just baffled me and I think make better business decisions. So I do not know.

That's an interesting point out of that.

But it is really, really hard to put yourself. And I think I see a lot of people do this in B2B because, you know, if you're just like a small, you know, like a starting out entrepreneur, the idea of billing someone, you know, $10,000 for a month. Month is just like, oh my God, that's so much money. But to the right size of company, that is nothing. That's just a trivial expense. So yeah, somehow being able to think in large enough sums of money, that seems like a really useful skill that I don't hear people talking about too much.

Yeah, that's a good point.

That's a really good point.

Yeah.

It took me a while to get to the point where, I mean, and it's an ongoing process. If you get to the point where you're willing to spend 100 bucks, okay, now a thousand, whoa. You get to the point where you're willing to spend a thousand or ten thousand, now it's like, okay, 50,000 or 100,000. Whoa. And you get to that point, it's like, oh, now this costs a million. Okay, well wait a minute. You know, that's a million dollars. But, but it's, it, you know, but, but like you said, for the right thing at the right time, the right opportunity, this is, you know, this is the right decision. But it is hard. I've certainly seen it with employees when, you know, if somebody either changes jobs or their job expands in a way where their, their pay expands. Especially with like salespeople. I remember I had one sales guy and this was, I don't know, 10, 15 years ago, he doubled his income in a year. Went from like earning 40k to earning like 80k. And he was panicked and it was like, oh, right, these. I remember when, you know, those kinds of numbers were scary to me, you know, and it was like I had to walk them through the process. Like, nope, don't shut down.

This is.

Okay. You're on a really good track here, by the way, you know, like, keep doing this. But, but we all suffer from that in different ways and that I think it's.

For me, I would almost call it like the bootstrappers dilemma. You know, I've started so many businesses with, with like you or without any money, you know, and okay, how are we going to get it going, this kind of thing? So it often is. It's really easy to come from that very frugal mindset and expanding your world out until you've kind of done some big deals and seen the amounts. Yeah, that's, that's really an interesting bit of advice.

I love it.

I think it's good.

Amazing.

Yeah. Hey, so one of the things I really enjoyed learning about was on your personal website@oribrom.com, which we'll put a link in the show notes. One of the things that stuck me is. Tell us about the tagline on your site. I really like this. I make things out of thoughts.

Oh my gosh. I was just trying to figure out how to describe, how to summarize this bizarre collection of things that I've done with my life. And I decided that maybe the common theme is, you know, trying to take some creative, interesting, original, hopefully thought and turn it into an actual thing. Whether that's a book or a game or a school or, you know, I guess a website and newsletter feels less tangible, but I think it's still a thing. I wonder if this actually describes like a class of professionals at this point. Like people who make things out of thoughts. Is that like a group? Can we, can we make that a thing? Can we make that a thing?

Yeah, I love that. That. Yeah, because we always, we always push back on the idea. The concept of the idea is the most important thing. Right. We always say, no, no, that's not it. It's the person who can make it into something and take the action. And I'm gonna ask you an action question in a minute. So, you know, that's. I think what struck me is like, wow, that's really cool. You know, it's the flip side of the idea is the most important.

Yeah. You start with the I make things and then where, where. How do you know about the thing? Well, I have a thought and then I make it. But, but leading with the action. No, it, it. As I read this, I thought, wow, what a much nicer way of saying, you know, what I normally say, which is, well, if you want an idea to be worth a hundred dollars, write it on a hundred dollar bill. I mean, it's true, but it's a little bit, you know, it's. It's a little bit dickish to say that to someone who thinks they have a great idea, whereas your way of saying it is much kinder.

Yeah, I'm totally stealing that. So it'll be like dinner conversation.

What do you.

Well, yeah, it's very, it's. I love the way that it comes together because it really says a lot. So keeping on this theme, action, you know, we, and you mentioned it earlier, you know, we like to think of the term small business as a verb because you just have to take action to be successful, creating, running a company. Is there some, you know, action item, some tip that you can tell our small business listeners today that they could do right now that would help them be more successful? I don't mean to put you on the spot.

No, this is amazing, but very difficult. I tend to think, at least for me, that most of my business action problems are actually emotional, psychological problems. Like most of the time, I mean, sometimes you just don't know the right thing to do. But a lot of the time when I fail to do something I should or it takes me much longer to do something that I should than it should take. That was a sentence for the lord of shoulds. The issue is like some emotional hang up I have. Right. It's like some fear of something or some previous life experience that makes me aversive to that thing. And so this isn't like a kind of quick win immediate, you could do it today thing, but I think figuring out your emotional problems and learning to relate better to the world is the thing that I find most useful in terms of.

No, sure. Being able to step back and look at it from that perspective is certainly only an action thing that could change your behavior.

Well, and the pursuit of self awareness is something worth spending time on on a regular basis. I think, like, if there's any action to extract from that, like, that's certainly one of them is, yeah, you got to know yourself and then if you identify problems, fix them because there will be problems. You know, a human condition.

Yeah, yeah. No, that's great. Well, Ari, I mean, I've learned so much just listening to you and talking with you. I love your attitude, your authenticity, transparency. You know, it would be very easy to take credit for success, but it's not very easy to say, oh, I don't know, it's just successful. But that is really a great statement on your ability as a leader. And, you know, thank you so much again for coming on the show. What's the best way for our listeners to connect with you? And to learn more about the browser and the listener.

Thank you so much. It's been such a pleasure being here. The browser is@the Browser.com. please do come along and check it out. The listener is the listener. Co. And that is honestly the best way to connect with me right now is read the browser or the listener. That's kind of where my heart is and where most of my energies go.

That's wonderful. Well, we'll put all the links in the show notes and when we post this up on our social channels. So thank you again, sir. We really appreciate your time today.

Thank you so much.

Man, where to start? You know, that was fun. That was like a. I mean, it was fun. Absolutely fun. Orey is fantastic. I. It. I know he doesn't know why he's successful, but it's obvious why he's successful.

Oh, I know why. Yeah.

But that was a lesson in authenticity is really what, to me it was. If you zoom out a little bit, you know, when. When he was our first listener, without prompting to use small business as a verb, and it meant that not only did he want to seem authentic, but he truly, like, he put time into being authentic. He listened to the show, he understands what we're about. He quoted the. You know, every business is the customer service business, too, which. That. You got to go deep to get that here. So, yeah.

Gave me goosebumps when I heard those. Those terms. Right. They mean so, so much to me and I know to you as well. And, you know, I often feel like we're preaching and I hope there's enough listeners out there, you know, picking this up and it's helping change their lives. And if you do, if you are picking up on these terms, if you're going out there in the airways and you. You do like something, please let us know. Feedbackus show co Getting an email from you, it could be the best thing that happened in a. In a particular day. So, yeah, that, that.

Yeah, sometimes. Because you know how it is. Like, sometimes days are crap days, folks, when you're running a business. That one little email that, that actually, you're right, Shannon. That can mean a lot.

For sure. Yeah, absolutely. Change people's lives. So we change your life a little bit, give you some inspiration each week. And we thank you for listening.

Thanks so much for listening. Thanks so much for checking out our sponsor, of course, textexpander.com podcast. And we will. We will see you next week. That's how we got it. Keep living that charmed life.