The Wealth Ladder & How To Take Advantage Of It Now

Live right now, we're about eight minutes from starting, but I just wanted to test to make sure everything's working. We are streaming basically to the webinar, to YouTube, to Facebook, and we are also streaming to Twitch as well. So if you guys can hear me right now, type into the chat. Type that you can actually hear me, and let me see what else I can do here. Type in the chat if you can hear me, and then we'll kind of go from there. Let's see. We're live on YouTube. I'm checking everything else. Dashboards, destinations. Let's do this. Okay. By the way, type in the chat if you guys can see me. If you guys can hear me, tell me where you're coming from as well. Looks like we got Facebook Live as well. YouTube is live, and then those of you that are in the webinar right now, type into the chat if you guys can hear me. If you guys can see me, and let me just get this thing right here. I think there's going to be a little bit of a delay, but I just wanted to test. Kind of streaming across the board, and we'll basically start in about six minutes. We're going to talk about the wealth ladder, and then and then go from there. So let me see if I can. I'm going to hide myself real quick. Okay, I can share my screen too. All right, I'll be back in about two minutes. Sit tight. Start typing in the chat. Tell me where you guys are coming from. Tell me what you guys. Are planning for the weekend as well. And it's going to be a fun time. It's going to be probably 10, 15 minutes of content and then a lot of Q&A. I'm really excited to do this and we'll go from there. So go get your water, go use the restroom right now real quick. And then we're going to get started in about 6 minutes, give or take. And then we'll go from there. I'm going to hide my face real quick and I'll be right back. All right, so I'm back, and we're gonna start in about four minutes, and I'm gonna check chat again. And those of you that can. Hear me and see me? Type one into the chat if you can hear and see me. I know there's a delay on the YouTube side. I'm checking. I'm basically using a tool called Restream, and then we're we're basically streaming kind of across the board. You guys hear me? Type one if you can. Okay, cool. And then I'm just testing a bunch of other stuff right now. Oh, I should just hit start webinar. I'm going to start the webinar right now. Cool. So I guess I wasn't live for a second in the the actual webinar software, but we are actually live now. So if you guys can hear me and see me, type one into the chat. I'm also checking chat on YouTube. I'm checking chat on Twitch and Facebook as well. So we'll see how it goes. And then yeah, basically from there, let's see what else is going on. If you guys can hear me, blah blah blah. Cool, David. I guess you can hear me. You can see me. Awesome. Tell me where you guys are coming from. Tell me what you guys are planning to do this weekend as well. And super excited to do this. I think it's going to be a fun time for everyone. It's also going to be recorded as well, I believe. We're going to get going in about 2 minutes. But hello, Yvonne. Hello, Melissa. Hello, Teresa. David, great to see you as well. And yeah, it's a good time. It's going to be a good time. Tell me what you guys are— I'm going to basically do a survey as well. I'm going to basically ask a couple of questions as we go through this. Do a quick introduction. And again, I don't know if I mentioned this earlier, but it's going to be 15, 10 to 20 minutes of content and then a lot of Q&A. So whatever burning questions you have around just where to go next, or in terms of the type of business that you want to start, or maybe where you're stuck in your career and all that kind of stuff, right? Because I think we've all kind of been there. We're all at different levels. And that's why I do want to talk about the wealth ladder, which is something I had a good friend put together and I actually, I think the document or the diagram is really awesome to take a look at. Hello, Brian. Brian, Mr. Asian Hustle Network. Hello, Julian as well. And guys, so here's how we're going to do this. We're going to start in about a minute to 2 minutes, but there are a couple questions that I'm going to answer and start dropping in your questions as I do this because I'm going to come back to the questions. That way we can kind of go back and forth. Because when you ask the questions and I'm able to answer one to many, it's beneficial for everyone, right? So I appreciate you guys taking the time for this Sunday— Sunday— for this Saturday coming on and trying to learn and trying to get better. So, and what I would say is I tend to talk quickly. I think if you're able to get even one takeaway from this, it would be considered a win. And then from there, you just kind of want to continue to build on top of it. Doreen, hello. And yeah, I think we're just gonna go ahead and get started. I am going to share my screen and then we're gonna walk through a couple of different things and I'm gonna do a quick introduction for my— for myself as well. But if you guys can see my screen, type 1 into the chat and then I'm gonna go into presentation mode. Cool. So I'm going to switch over here, and there is a little bit of a delay. I'll tell you what, Arthur, if you— if we're having some technical issues, just send me a text. I'll look at my phone every now and then. But right now we are sharing my screen. I just want to make sure everyone is good, and you can start dropping in your questions. But I first want to start off and talk about different ways that you can grow right now and one way that we're using to grow in times like this, because it's obviously very turbulent times. And so, quick background on myself. My name is Eric Siu, and I think I'm just like all of you. I think we all start from humble beginnings and then we just continue to have a journey. We have our own different journeys through life. And I have a software company called ClickFlow, which is kind of in the marketing analytics space. And then I also have a podcast called Leveling Up and another podcast called Marketing School, which I do with another entrepreneur named Neil Patel. And the Leveling Up podcast is really a weekly podcast where I talk to other entrepreneurs and it's really for learnings. A lot of awesome people, a lot of awesome learnings. And for Marketing School, it's a daily marketing podcast where we talk about Where we talk about— sorry, Arthur, I'll get back to you in a second. But yeah, Marketing School Is Every Day. And we've been doing that podcast for almost 4 years now. The Leveling Up Podcast has been almost 7 years. And I can hear the questions coming in, so keep them coming. And I also have an ad agency called Single Grain, and we get to work with cool companies like the Amazons, the Airbnbs of the world. So, one thing I want to talk about first, and then I'm going to go into the wealth ladder for a second, but I think probably one of the most important things you can be doing during this time is actually taking the time to create content. And what does that mean exactly? So, if you think about how— like Gary Vee is a really good example of this, or people that end up buying a lot of media companies, a lot of newspapers, right? Ultimately, what they're buying at the end of the day is they're buying attention. You think about why, why is Google so big? Why is Facebook so big? It's because they have the attention. So what you can do in today's day and age, obviously this is nothing new to any of you, but you think about the YouTubes, the TikToks, the Snapchats or Snaps of the world, the, the Instagrams, the Facebooks of the world. You can basically start creating your own little media empire and you don't necessarily need to be really big. So if, let's say if you're a local plumber and you target a certain area, if you're out there, you're helping people, you're creating content. That's how you actually build leverage. Because if you think about it, sure, you start from nothing in the very beginning, but it compounds over time. One follower becomes 10, becomes 20, becomes 50, becomes 300, 1,000 or so. And then you have your own little audience and then you can figure out how you can best serve that audience. And that actually is a really good approach. I think at least for me coming from a, growing up as an Asian American, parents are like, oh, you shouldn't put yourself out there. You shouldn't be vulnerable. You should go work a job and then you should, you know, work a stable job. And then they— I mean, and by the way, like, they want you to be safe, right? And there's nothing wrong with that. But at the same time, like, that also means if they want you to be safe, they don't necessarily want you taking risk, at least for most Asian parents. I know that was like that for me. And, um, by the way, guys, type in the chat, tell me where you guys came from as well. I grew up in a suburb called Arcadia in California. Which is right next to Pasadena. But I think for me, I'm not an extrovert. I'm an introvert actually, but I do like teaching. I like learning and I like teaching because it helps me articulate and it helps me go from one to many and then you can kind of pay it forward, right? So, this whole thing around creating content, if you think about Bill Gates in the '90s, he said every company has to be a media company. And he said this in the '90s. And now's your opportunity right now. I think whether you are looking for a job, whether you are looking to start your own thing, whether you have a full-time thing going on, I think if you want to build leverage for yourself, you got to start creating content. And if you think it's too early for you to start creating content, then it's probably a scenario for you where you want to learn before you start to earn. Let me, by the way, let me check the chat real quick because I hear a lot of noises. So I just want to make sure everything's actually working. Cool. Everything is actually working. Can— if you guys can still see my screen, type 1. It— and that's actually gonna be helpful as well. Maggie, hello. Hello, Diana. Hello, Anne. So we got people from Seattle, we got people from Pasadena, born in China, grew up in Riverside, San Jose, third of a block away from Arcadia, 626, Bellevue, 626. A lot of 626 as expected. Irvine, Fremont. That's awesome. So, okay. Anyway, I'm just going to do it like this. I mean, you can see my next slides. I don't really care. I'm just going to walk through this. So, the podcast I have with Neil, Marketing School, we've broken 30 million downloads lifetime. And the reason I want to bring this up is because I just want to tell you that all this stuff takes time to compound. These numbers might be really scary for you, And it's only scary because you think, you know, 30 million is unattainable and, you know, oh, they're at like a certain level and I'll never be able to get there. But you have to understand that we all start at a lower level. We all start at level 1 and we have to get stronger and stronger over time. My first podcast, which was the Leveling Up Podcast, the first year of doing it, I was spending 6 hours on it every single week and I was interviewing entrepreneurs and I was learning from these entrepreneurs. And because I was trying to save my company, Single Grain, at the same time, And my company was on fire. I probably shouldn't have been doing a podcast, but now looking back on it, I have no regrets at all because I've been able to build leverage with that. So the first year of doing it, I was spending 6 hours a week. I was writing all the content. I was reaching out. I was doing the interviews. I was editing everything. And after the first year, I was only getting 9 downloads a day on that podcast. And after the second year, I was only getting, I think, I think it was 30 downloads a day second year. So, you know, Asian parents probably tell you that, that you should probably, that you should probably give up, right? You know, the numbers don't look good. And, you know, from there— and wow, that looks actually really small on the screen. I'm gonna make my screen bigger again. But, you know, my point is you just keep sticking with it. And the goal is not necessarily numbers. The goal is, are you getting better and are you learning? Because these things take time. Like, my YouTube channel is not really big right now. It's about 35,000 subscribers or so. But again, that takes time to compound too. When I look at the traffic, when I took over the company Single Grain, the ad agency, we were only getting 4,000 visits a month, which is— it's honestly, if you know what you're doing, you'll get to 4,000 a month pretty quickly. Now we're at about 250,000 visits a month. But everything you're doing when it comes to media and you think about the internet, it takes time to compound. Most people give up too early because They're worried about what people will think about them. They're worried about they might not be good enough, and odds are you're going to suck in the beginning. You're probably going to suck in the beginning. At least for me, I usually suck really bad at something in the beginning, and my learning curve is probably slower than most people. I would say, and I'm just being honest with you, but it picks up. And you know, marketing school has allowed us to you know diversify our our income streams, and we also have a lot of flexibility now because now. with this. We have the attention. Now we can figure out how we want to serve our audience, right? So look, again, like if you think you're just starting out right now, how do I even start creating content? You can document your journey right now. You can just take your phone out, film what you're doing, film that you're trying to start something right now. Even if you're working full-time somewhere or even if you're unemployed right now, that's totally fine. You talk about your journey because then you get, you know, 10 years down the line, you look back, it's like, man, like everything's there, everything's documented. And then once you get better and better, You learn and then you can start earning, right? And you can start teaching, you can start earning, right? So it takes time to get there. It's just a lot of us are— I even had a conversation the other day with someone that was very accomplished in Silicon Valley and she kind of had a mental block going on. You know, like, you know, maybe I'm not good enough for this. Maybe I'm not meant to do this. But, you know, my whole thing is why not? Because if you look at everyone around you, everything that's built, you know, I'm looking at this microphone over here, I'm looking at this monitor. that this hat that I'm wearing, everything around you is built by people. So why can't you do it, right? You know, you've done— most of you, I would say, you've done pretty well in school. You're doing— maybe you have a solid full-time job. I can tell you, I almost got kicked out of school. I almost got kicked out of high school only because I didn't feel like going to one of these classes and it was like a required class. I almost got kicked out of college for playing too much World of Warcraft and going to the casino too much to play poker. Um, and so like, you know, all these things at the end of the day, like I'm not like a model Asian, um, Asian kid and it's still like, you know, my parents are like, yeah, you're a bad kid. I don't think I was bad. I just, I think I just did whatever I wanted, right? So I think the key for you is to realize like if something doesn't jive with you, you have to make the— you have to take the action on your own and you have to, you have to take action and you have to ask for what you want because if you don't ask, you're not going to get, right? Um, so that's that. And so not only that, like once you start to get one, um, one media channel working, so you get podcasts working or you get audio working, whatever, then you think about how you can diversify. So this is the YouTube channel, right? And then, um, this whole leveling up thing, I have a book coming out next year. Um, it's about the whole concept of, of leveling up. But you know, for me personally, I'll just share a story with you. Um, you know, I used to play all those games, you know, before esports became a thing, the, you know, Counter-Strikes of the world, The StarCraft, the World of Warcraft, Warcraft 3, all those games, right? And so the way I look at the world, and you guys all have your own unique experiences, is when I look at everything, when I wake up in the morning, I feel like I'm playing a game because it's fun. It's fun. And that's how you want to make life a game, right? And so it depends on the lens that you look at the world, but this is how I look at the world. And my whole thing is, you know, the reason I'm even doing this book is if I can even inspire a couple of people, to flip how they look at the world and tell them that they can in fact make a difference, then great, right? And business is just my canvas. Business is— I'm just going to keep building businesses, buying businesses, and just have fun while I'm doing it and teach other people on how to do all this stuff too. So point being is once you start to get one media channel working, you can start to diversify. I think if you start to do too many at the same time, you start to overwhelm yourself a little bit. All right. So What I would say here, and I'm not going to go too much further on this slide, I'm going to go actually into the wealth ladder, is if you think about the process, you know, the process here when you're creating content, and I don't know if my laser pointer is working. Here, let me get my laser pointer working again. Here, here's my laser pointer. Okay, so the process is basically this. You start with a video. Let's say we're doing YouTube. And then we can sprout it into audio. So what that basically means is if I have a video for 1 hour, I do an interview with someone, I probably have 5 to 10 other audio clips I can make. I can chop it up. And then I can chop those up into little blog posts or into little tweets. And so, 1 piece of content can become 10, 15, 20, maybe even 30 pieces of content. So, this is what we call content sprouting. So, once you start documenting something, you can chop it up. You see a lot of these YouTube channels, they chop up, you know, these long-form pieces of content. And then they maximize the distribution because the whole idea here is when you're creating a piece of content, you want to not just use it once, you want to maximize the use of it, right? Because you don't just drive a car, take a car off the parking lot, you drive it for a little bit and you return it. You want to make the most of it, right? So that's that. And that's kind of what we do with our Instagram too. So my Instagram is, it's not huge, but what we do is we We take a look at our YouTube content and we repurpose it for Instagram, and then we do these carousels. We post the carousels to Instagram and post it to LinkedIn as well. So you just got to think about, hey, there's all these channels right now. The attention's so split. How do I make the most of it? Because even what I'm doing right now, when I'm doing this webinar with you guys, it's not only hitting the webinar, but it's also hitting YouTube, it's hitting Twitch, and it's hitting Facebook as well, right? So This is one to four different channels at the same time. All right, so you know this is something we do as a team. Even if you you have a team, you don't have a team right now. It's important to kind of just track your daily output and then see how you're doing. And then once you you start to get a little more advanced, then you start to you know track more. You start to branch out into these other other channels. All right, so this is content surrounding. I don't want to go too much into this. I want I want to talk about the wealth ladder right now. So this is one practical thing that you can do. I think. Again, because I'm only bringing this up right now because the time that we're in right now, we're sitting at home a lot. Now is the time to think about how can I start creating content? How can I start documenting my journey? How can I start making things? How can I start creating leverage for myself? So then, you know, whatever life of, you know, freedom that I want in the future, it should be attainable, right? Because I just think All the stuff that people do, that I do, I just think that if I'm doing it, anybody else can do it, right? I just think it takes time. You gotta get started, get the suckage out of your body, and then you'll get better, all right? So, I will answer some questions real quick. Let's see what questions are in here. Let me know kind of where you guys are at right now in your career, where you wanna go, kind of where you feel like what your number one challenge is, and then I'm gonna kind of jump into it. But I am going to go into the wealth ladder right now. So this is— I'm going to make my screen— well, I guess I can't make my screen bigger. So this is the wealth ladder. I'm going to make this a little bigger. And then here's how you want to think about this. Let's start on the left side over here. This is from my friend Nathan Berry. He runs a company called ConvertKit. They do about $20 million a year or so. But you got to think about the wealth ladder as a game too. So when you're starting on the very left side, you're basically— what you're doing in your life is you're trading time for money. So you might be working hourly for a company. I remember I worked hourly at Circuit City, which is now defunct. Then you can level up to getting a salary of a full-time job at a company. And this is what your Asian parents tell you. You should get a stable full-time job. You should get pension, blah, blah, blah. And, you know, you get insurance benefits and then you're covered, you're safe. Yeah, you know, that's all fine at the end of the day, but well, I think what you want to do ultimately is you want to build leverage. So I'm just checking real quick to make sure that I'm sharing the right screen with you guys. Give me one second. So on Restream, it looks like we're sharing the right one. Okay, great. So the wealth ladder over here, coming back to it, even before thinking about trading your time for money, think about before that. Those of you that are maybe still in school right now, think about this. How are you going to— how are you— why do you deserve to get paid money in the first place, right? And part of it is having a skill, but even before having the skill is, How do you build the right habits? And that's what my book Leveling Up is all about. It's about building the right habits and treating life as a game, right? So you go all the way to the left of the wealth ladder. The first part is about building habits. And important habits might be, for example, waking up at the right time, right? Being healthy, eating healthy. Also figuring out how you can optimize your sleep, right? These are all habits. But also there's other things too that you gotta take a look at. And when you look at how you go about your work, how resilient are you? How persistent are you? At the same time, like how do you draw inspiration from other people? Or you can call it ethically stealing from other people, right? So that's all in there. You gotta create the right habits so then you have the right operating system. So when you move on and you build a skill, the way you think about the world, your worldview is going to be different, right? I think it's— Most people don't constantly try to adjust and challenge their own worldview. And what I would encourage you to do is, at least for myself, what I do is I always look at what entrepreneurs are. I follow different entrepreneurs on Twitter. I follow different VCs on Twitter. And they all think about the world a little differently, right? And that changes my worldview a little bit. And you want to make sure that you heavily curate who you're following on Twitter because if you don't, it's just going to be a ton of noise and that's not going to be too helpful for you. Right? So that's what it is. So you build the right habits first and then you look at the skill and then with that skill you figure out, okay, you know, I don't have any money right now, how do I start working for someone hourly? And then how do I break out of that? Then you gotta level up to the next level. A lot of people, they get to one level and they complain. They complain about things, they complain about things not being fair, they, you know, they complain about not getting chances, they complain, they blame other people and, you know, at the end of the day, You can do all that or you can take responsibility for yourself. I think not enough people take responsibility for themselves and that's why they get stuck at certain levels because they just start blaming and they start, you know, they come home and then they just like, they play games and, you know, they watch Netflix, which is nothing— there's nothing wrong with that, but I'm telling you, look, once you get to the level where, you know, you're kind of doing your own thing, even if you're doing like a side gig for yourself, like a freelance thing, you're going to realize that that game's so fun. Yeah. Right? And you might want to play that game more. So we talked about habits, we talked about then you got to have a skill, then you got to monetize the skill so you're doing time for money. And then what you're going to do after that, what I think is really smart for people to do first is if you have a skill in marketing, web design, whatever, right? There's— we all have different skills. Then you think about starting your own service business, okay? So that could be consulting. Um, and you know, for the Asian Hustle Network, I actually gave away my, my Agency Accelerator course, which we charge $1,497 for. That's to help you start your own service business. And you know, that expired about like 2 weeks ago, right? Um, but then you start doing hourly work for clients and then, you know, on top of that, you start, instead of charging by the hour, which I think is a terrible way to charge, then you go by charging by the project. Okay. So instead of saying, hey, you're going to pay me $10 an hour, you're going to say, no, you know, you're going to pay me $500 per project. Right. Um, and then from there, you're going to figure out how you can hire a team, but these are all different levels and you only get to go to the next level of the wealth ladder if you've actually gone through the pain and you actually deserve to get to the next level, right? So you got to beat the level to get to the next level. So I'm gonna answer some questions right now. And so Eric Hung is asking, Eric Hung from Pew Pew Tactical, which is a great entrepreneur by the way, you should check out the website Pew Pew Tactical. Where do you think the opportunities will arise post-COVID? I think even right now talking about COVID I think, look, one of the most important things I think, even this webinar right now, we're doing this webinar on Saturday and there's actually, the attendance rate is fairly high for a Saturday. And what I would say is this, I think online education is going to be bigger and bigger. I mean, there's people sitting at home right now, they want to learn skills, they want to get better and better, right? And I think that's one thing. And then I take a look at the— there's other— I mean, Clorox is obviously crushing it as well, right? But I think digital is going to be bigger and bigger. I think you look at the companies that have evolved, the restaurants in New York City, a lot of the fancy restaurants had to close, but the ones that were able to adapt to delivery, they're able to at least survive right now. Who knows if they're thriving. And I think another good example to call out would be Simon Sinek. So, Simon Sinek, he has a really good talk on— did a really good TED Talk on Start with Why. And he is a well-known speaker and his whole business is speaking. You think about it now, that business is done, at least for now. You can't go around speaking anymore. I think, you know, right now people are trying to slang masks, right? So, I think that's a hustle right now, but you got to think— I do think the world is going to adapt. You got to just look around. And say, okay, what's going to happen with the world after this, right? We know for sure digital usage is going to be way higher. People might be a little more hesitant to travel, at least in the next 12 months. You look at, I think, you know, Asian countries did a good job with wearing masks. I mean, they've always done that culturally, you know, growing up. But, you know, what I would say is, I think that's going to be a big opportunity moving forward. At least I think, you know, European countries, American companies, Companies, countries, Latin countries are going to adapt that more. So if we want to talk about, hey, that's a hustle, here's an opportunity, great, right? I do think this: I think income share agreements are going to get bigger and bigger. So there's a company called Lambda School, and Lambda School is they teach you how to code, they teach you how to do web design, and they'll teach you for free. The only deal there is. They're going to take a percentage of your first and second year salary, so maybe 10% or 15%. And so, it's basically a pay for performance thing, right? And they'll charge you like monthly from your salary. So, if you think about it, that's actually a good deal, right? You don't need to pay upfront. You can pay them $20,000 upfront if you want. But if you think about it, paying them after you learn all this stuff, And the deal is if you don't get a job within the next 5 years or it's like under a certain amount like $50K or something like that, you don't have to pay them. So that seems like a good deal, right? And we're actually planning to do this for marketing school as well, like an income share agreement, all right? Let me check the chat real quick. Tell me in chat where you are in your career right now. Are you unemployed? Are you full-time? Are you an entrepreneur? Are you looking to start your own thing? I just kind of want to get a sense for where you guys are. Right now, and let's see. I'm just looking at the comments real quick. So text Eric. I don't know what text Eric is for. I am looking at the comments, and then I am going to read some of the the other questions from earlier. Jackson, you had a ton of questions from the Slido or Slido, whatever it's called. Let me see what's most relevant for most people. Let's see. Okay, so Jackson has a question here. Jack of all trades, master of none. When and how do you realize it's an appropriate time to bring in an outsourced solution? So I do want to address the first part of your question, the jack of all trades, master of none portion. I think it's important to focus in the very beginning. So you have a skill and you double down on it. But once you get that skill going, or once you get like one business going, once it's going really well, Then you can start to think about expansion opportunities, right? Because if I think about what I've done with, you know, the 2 podcasts, the software company, the ad agency, and then, you know, parlayed that into other opportunities, you always want to look at expanding. Because right now, the way I look at it is a lot of agency-type businesses that I know of, they're down 40 to 80%. And that's really tough. And I got a text the other day from someone saying, now's a good time to buy video services. And I just felt really bad for that person. So you want to diversify as much as you can. So when you get to time periods like this where crisis arises, you want to be able— you want to be diversified where you're protected and you're insulated, right? So you don't have one single point of failure. So in the very beginning, you focus and you diversify. So, you know, you don't get into a situation where you're going to lose your shirt because the person that messaged me, you know, that's a $10 million a year business. And once the right time to find an outsourced solution, I think When you find that you're getting so much business that you can't do everything anymore, that's when you start thinking about, okay, how can I start hiring contractors? And then as you get stronger and stronger, how can you think about hiring full-time people, right? Because if you want to build a full-time great company, a full-time great company, a great company, what you're going to have to do is think about building a great culture. All right. So how is COVID-19 affecting your business? So I can tell you for software, it's going well. Education stuff, it's going well. Podcast is going well. Almost everything is going well except I would say for our the agency side of the business, you know things are shaky right now because the first thing that people cut is is advertising spend. But you know for me, I'm just like okay, you know what can we do to you know what can we focus on more? Because what I can tell you, you know people have this saying. Forgot who said this, but it's like you never want to waste a good crisis. And so, you know, for us, it's making changes quickly and it's your— during times of crisis or war, because this is very much a war, you think about how you can make adjustments quickly and you don't need to consult with everyone. You don't need to worry about hurting people's feelings. You can cut anything you want. You can go in any direction you want if you're the leader of the company or if you're a manager. Yeah. And you know, you can move a lot faster and that's kind of the benefit right now. You can move a lot faster than you normally, you normally can and you want to take advantage of that. I mean, if you have a couple of team members, whatever, just get them behind, you know, make sure the messaging is aligned and you can, you can kind of go from there. All right. I'm looking at, you know, more of the chat right now. So Giancarlo runs a coconut company. Tell me what that means, Giancarlo. What is a coconut company? Adrian is an insurance tech company. Brian is self-employed, handful of businesses. And then Jimmy is a full-time career professional looking for side hustles. Yeah, guys, I mean, look, the best way to get started with your side hustle, you can either do e-commerce, which I think is getting more and more competitive because everyone's doing e-commerce, everyone's doing dropshipping right now. I just think that that's a tough thing. I do think, you know, having a service business Teaches you how to build relationships, teaches you how to— I mean, it teaches you how to like have to reach out to people when things are tough and drum up business on your own, right? I'm not saying ecommerce is easier. I don't necessarily think it's easier. I think they're very different. I would just say that having ran ecommerce businesses in the past and service business side, I think it's— It's a, it's probably easier to get going on the service business side and kind of just go from there. All right. So let's see. Is it Jenny or Jeannie? Owns several businesses, various stages, data analytics, marketing consulting, working for a B2C marketing agency. How to incorporate AI and CRM into the search and reach? Mike, if you can clarify your question, I think I kind of understand what you're saying, but I just want you to clarify it so maybe I can answer it. Michael, congrats on starting your your digital marketing agency. Julian's a full-time college student. That's awesome. And then Saf has his own video production business. That's awesome. And then Brian Pham is a software engineer, runs Asian Hustle Network, real estate investor, and Teresa restaurant owner. Cool. So. Going back to some questions, and I'm going to come back to the wealth ladder. So I'm seeing what was upvoted the most. Jeannie asks, what's the best way to learn how to make good quality videos for YouTube channel ads, social media, etc., and edit if you have no idea how to do that? Okay, that's a great question. So what I would say is, I think in the very beginning, you have to learn how to do it on your own. And you got to get yourself to a competent point. So there's a lot of YouTube videos on how to edit videos, on how to, um, you know, make a good YouTube channel. Um, you know, I have a couple videos on the Leveling Up channel as well in terms of, you know, what you need to do. And some practical tips if you're looking to start for YouTube, um, is ideally you should make sure your videos are at least 10 minutes or longer because YouTube values watch time. And you want to have a good thumbnail. So there's a couple things. There's good thumbnail. You want to make sure you can drag it out to 10 minutes, have a really good title. And that's kind of the bulk of it, right? And you want to focus your channel on a topic. Mine's typically around marketing. So, you know, okay, now your question is, well, how do I do a good thumbnail? So what I would say in the beginning is you want to at least establish a theme. Like if I were thinking right now with no design skills, it might just be me and I might have, you know, a very similar text for each one, right? So it might be like purple text or something. I'm just making something up. And then so when people see me on suggested videos, they'll see the theme. You know, over and over. So you want to have a theme for your thumbnails that people can easily see. And, you know, for us, ours is just— our channel is very purple. So the thumbnails are generally purple and teal. Now, in terms of editing, so you can learn on your own first. And then what I would say is you can go to a site like Upwork. Upwork has a lot of video editors. And then in general, I'll tell you this, like living in LA right now, The one job I've ever posted that got 400 or 500 applicants instantly was a video person. Because in LA, there's a lot of video people looking for work. Especially right now during these times, I think there's a lot of video people that would be open to work. So you can pay them, you know, on an hourly basis, right? Even though I'm not an advocate of hourly, you know, there's different ladders and you can figure out how to make it best work for yourself. Yeah. All right. So Jackson asks, I'm just going to answer a bunch of questions over here. What would be the right time to start adding ads into your podcast? I would not look for the Leveling Up podcast. We didn't add ads into it till maybe, I think, 4 or 5 years into it. So my goal wasn't to try to make money from it. It was again, to try to learn. So I think oftentimes you got to think about What the goal is. If the goal is to learn and to get better and to get free advice from entrepreneurs, which is what I got for years and years, that's worth way more than any money I could have made from advertising. And then so for the Marketing School podcast, we didn't start monetizing until maybe less than a year ago. It's less than a year ago, but I'll tell you, I mean, I'll be very direct with you in terms of we get 1 million downloads, 1.1 million downloads a month on it. And The advertising deal that we have is about $800,000 for the year, and that's split between 2 people. And that's 2 people working on it for 3 hours a month. You think about the leverage that we've built, like over time you get to that because you've built economies of scale. We put in the same amount of work than we did in the very beginning. We just have an audience now, and it took time to build that audience. So I'm not saying it's easy. But what I would say is I think it's fairly simple to get there and you should defer money, defer gratification as long as you can because that's how I look at it. And this actually applies to the wealth ladder too. And I'm going to come back to the wealth ladder right now. The longer you can delay gratification, the better. So, a lot of people think, oh, I should be taking in a lot of profit in the beginning. I should be taking a lot of profit. If you're fortunate enough where you— let's say you're a single person right now, You don't really have any obligations. If you can continually redeploy the capital, the profit that you're making to grow the business faster, the business gets bigger and bigger, then you can take that capital and then redeploy it into other investments, into other projects, and then you're going to get stronger and stronger, especially if you're reinvesting into your own company. You're not really going to be paying taxes on it. And here's the other question for you. If you live in California right now, if you were to take that money and let's say you made $100,000 in profit, If you were to take that money in, you would get taxed. I mean, it's basically 50%. So you lose 50 grand on it, right? So if you think about it, and by the way, this is not financial advice, this is just what I think. I think if you can, if you're smart enough to know how to have a lot of your expenses go through your business and get as much tax deductions as you can within legal boundaries, And then instead think about how can I grow the pie bigger and bigger? You know, you're going to be actually a lot safer in the future too because the pie is so big. And, you know, I don't think you're going to regret doing that. So delay gratification for as long as you can. And in order for you to think in that respect, I think, you know, we talk about habits in the beginning, we talk about working, you know, getting a skill, working hourly, getting stronger and stronger. Eventually what you're going to realize is once you start a business, You have to have a vision that's so unrealistic that you're probably not going to accomplish it in your life because everyone can start working towards that. Everyone that's working around you, whether it's contractors or full-time people, you can work towards a vision and you get stronger and stronger. So, my vision for my entire life, talking about this Leveling Up book, I just want to level up the world. And so, people can look at me, they can scoff at me. I can tell you for damn sure my parents scoff at me. When I say something like that, but that's something I can wake up every morning to and be like, I'm just going to keep doing it. And then from there, everything just kind of falls into place, right? As long as you have your head screwed on straight, your worldview is— you're happy with your worldview, you're constantly learning, you're getting better, there's no reason you can't continue to advance up the wealth ladder. So let's come back to the wealth ladder. Let's look at tier 3. So productized services. Yeah. So what does that mean exactly? Now, when you look at a service business, if you're charging hourly, you're not really building that much leverage. But when you start to have a team, what you can do is you can start to productize your service. So maybe you pay me $5,000 for this package per month, $2,000 for this one, $1,000 for this one. You can sell strategy packages where you might charge $20,000 or $50,000 for something like that. But more leverage for yourself, more profit for yourself, and then you can decide what you want to do with the profit. Then you want to do what you want to do ultimately is you want to build recurring, right? So recurring instead of one-off projects. Like if I help design your website and you pay me, you pay me, I don't know, $5,000 for one website, that kind of sucks because you can't, you can't continue to do, to get, reap the benefits from the work that you did. So here's an example of what you could do. For example, our, the agency Single Grain, What we do for clients is we run a lot of paid media for them. And we say, okay, you pay us, let's say, $5,000 a month or whatever, or we'll take 15% of the advertising spend. So if they're spending like $100,000 a month, instead of the 5 grand, we'll make $15K instead. And so, but that happens each month and we're constantly managing for them, right? So that's recurring. And then productized service is easy for people to understand. I mean, that's the third tier, but if you want to get to real economies of scale, you got to think about selling products ultimately. So, products could be like, you can be selling courses, you can be selling software as a service, so subscription, you could be selling ecommerce products, and then you just get stronger and stronger on the ladder. And you can see on the fourth tier over here, The SaaS is like right there, second from the top. And so, if you think about a SaaS business, SaaS businesses command— these types of businesses command really high valuations. And my whole take on this is you start from the very bottom, habits, you get stronger and stronger, you start doing digital products, you start selling courses. Because the cool thing about all this stuff is I can put $1 into advertising and I could potentially get $5 or $10 back. When you're selling, when you're trading time for money, even if you're doing like a consulting type of thing, it's really difficult for you to scale because what you have to do is you have to, as your company gets bigger, you have to hire more people. So you're just throwing more money at the problem. And what happens when you add more people is the culture eventually becomes more and more diluted. So those of you that are looking to get into the agency type of business, what I would say is you want to use the agency, at least this is my perspective, use the agency as a Cash cow, and you use that those funds to fund the other projects. So this is why I have a have a SaaS company. This is why I have digital products. This is why I'm also investor in other companies as well. This is why I'm also advisor in other companies too. Because what you're trying to do is you're trying to build. You have equity in these other high leverage businesses, and the agency is a good cash cow, right? Because I know if I were to continue to grow the agency into something really really big, let's say I wanted to have. I don't know, $500 million a year in revenue with the current model right now, I might need to have like a couple hundred employees, maybe probably upwards, maybe like 800 or 1,000+ employees. That to me is the most important thing when it comes to business. So I'm going to come back to questions right now for a second while I get a sip of water. Okay. So Arthur, I think this is a question that he put in. So Facebook marketing requires implementation of pixels and lacks consistency from an advertiser standpoint. What are strategies to overcome this situation? So if I'm understanding this question correctly, Facebook's pixel is unreliable, right? And what I would say is, in general, you want to have different sources of truth with your advertising. You can't just rely on the Google Pixel. You can't just rely on the Facebook Pixel. What you want to do is you could, you could use different reporting tools as well. So an example might be Wicked Reports. We use Wicked Reports for kind of multichannel attribution for tracking our funnel from, from end to end. And that tracking is one of the most important things you can do when it comes to advertising and to just rely completely on Facebook and Google. It's not exactly reliable because even with our tracking right now, we're spending and sometimes like the conversion tracking is just way off. Like we might get let's say like 100 conversions in a day, and then Facebook might be you know underreporting it by you know 50. They might just say we're getting 50, right? So you know from there, if we just looked at Facebook's reporting, it might just completely say that that could be the difference between us scaling and us dialing it back, right? So it's really important to know your numbers and to have different. Sources of truth, I think, when it comes to this. All right. So reversing— so Kevin is asking a good question. So this is known as inversion. And I really encourage you all to take a look at mental models. Look at Farnham Street. So that's F-A-R-N-H-A-M Street. I think it's F as in Frank, S as in sugar, fs.blog. Check that out. Mental models are basically a tool for you to evaluate the world. And inversion is basically saying, okay, what— instead of thinking, you know, what do I need to do to be successful? Think about all the things you need to do to become, well, unsuccessful, right? So, you gotta look at things from a different perspective and in that respect, that's basically here's all the stuff to not do, right? Instead of thinking these are all the things I need to do, think about all the stuff you gotta avoid. So it does flip things. So Kevin's question is, reversing your question a bit, what are the biggest problems you or your companies are facing right now? So I think the biggest struggle right now is because I work on so many different things, I think it's probably a people problem more than anything. And so to be able to have more people, more operators running these things would probably be more beneficial. And I would say one of the things too, kind of related to this is not only just people, but when you think about hiring people, you want to probably err more on the side of being able to pay them more because you get what you pay for. If you go too cheap, and I have a couple friends that go really cheap when they hire people, Paul Graham from Y Combinator said this, if you pay peanuts, You get monkeys. So make sure you don't do that because I know for me, you know, Asian cheap. You know, I guess I should probably tell you guys what I am too. So I'm half Taiwanese, half Cantonese. But yeah, so yeah, that's the answer to your question. And then I'm gonna come back to your question. I'm gonna finish off this wealth ladder. So the last stage of this wealth ladder over here at the top right is marketplaces and social networks. So you think about the Ubers of the world, the Facebooks of the world, the eBays of the world. When you're able to build a marketplace, a marketplace is basically you have 2 sides of it, right? Good example of this would be eBay. You have people that are selling, you have people that are buying, and you want to build a platform. That's how these companies are so big. You think about, you know, before all the craziness happened, you think about Expedia, you think about Glassdoor. These are also 2-sided marketplaces. You're able to build a lot of leverage that way because you're creating so much value. I think about the Zillow's out there. Just there's just a lot of opportunity when you're able to think about how can I really build economies of scale? Excuse me. And one thing I would say about marketplaces and social networks in general, a lot of them eBay, for example, they leverage the power of SEO. So I think one of the most important things you can learn trying to you know break into entrepreneurship is learning SEO. Some of the best entrepreneurs I know, they understand SEO, and I'm telling you that the person that founded You know, Glassdoor, Expedia, it's the same guy and he just leveraged the power of SEO. A lot of these sites tend to get a lot of traffic and the tool I'd recommend is with my podcast co-host, Ubersuggest. Check that tool out. It's a free SEO tool. He's super generous about it. But yeah, I would say you want to, as quickly as you can, those of you that are watching this, if you're just starting out, build out the right habits and then from there, you know, start trading some time for money, okay? Get some money going, you know, save up some money. Start your own service business, get that going, get the cash flow going, reinvest it, right? Start to build productized services, you know, start to make it recurring. Then take that money, reinvest it, start building into products. You build so much leverage. And then, you know, even kind of beyond marketplaces and social networks, you think about changing the world. You think about Elon Musk, you know, doing Tesla. You think about Elon Musk sending rockets into the area. Jeff Bezos and Richard Branson are doing it too. You think about really world-changing stuff. But that's also very capital intensive too, right? So to do that, you got to build up capital first, then you can get to the next level. I'm telling you, you do this stuff, you're gonna build relationships with people, you're gonna be able to invest in other companies. There's just no way, there's just no way you can't be successful. Like, unless you totally just get lazy and do nothing and, you know, watch the years pass you by. Now I'll tell you, those of you that are in your 20s right now, right now I'm 33. You know, I felt like it was just yesterday that I started working. You know, ten, eleven years ago. Time flies really quickly after, and you just you're just like whoa! All like like four or five years ago, I think I just moved to downtown and boom! It's just like time flies, right? And so yeah, but that is the wealth ladder. The one other thing I want to call out for you guys too is this is from a. A marketer named Russell Brunson, and I actually had him on the podcast. I think we're releasing on Leveling Up in the next couple weeks, but he just came out with a book called Traffic Secrets, and he also has DotCom Secrets, and he also has Expert Secrets. He has a company called ClickFunnels that does about $143 million a year in revenue. And what you got to do is when you think about selling stuff, you have, you have this wealth creation ladder, but when you're selling stuff at the same time, Guess what? We give away our free content. That's free, right? But then we have other paid tiers. So I have a premium podcast where there's no ads and then there's a monthly newsletter for myself. You can actually go to singlegrain.com/pro for that. And then there's actually a free trial for it. But for that, you can maybe pay $10 a month. And then beyond that, you can pay for, let's say you can pay for a course. Beyond that, you can pay for the coaching program I had for agency owners. I'm actually doing one-on-one calls with a lot of agency owners right now. And that program might be anywhere from $3,000 to $15,000, right? Then beyond that, Neil and I, we have our own mastermind. That's about— that's probably going to cost $35,000 plus, probably up to $50,000 for the year. Beyond that, there's services too, right? And then there's just— you go higher and higher up the ladder. But first, what you got to do is you got to build the audience first and then ascend them up the ladder. So this is known as the value ladder. And this is from Russell Brunson. So I recommend checking out all his stuff. But yeah, if you guys want access, like a free trial to the premium podcast, you can go to singlegrain.com/pro. I'll drop that into chat right now. And then I will answer guys' questions. So now the rest of this, I'm just going to answer questions. So drop your questions into the question tab and then upvote whatever you like. And then I'm going to go For as long as I can, and I'm going to make sure I get stay hydrated. So okay, so Michael Shea asks, "What are the unique digital marketing opportunities at this time?" So there's actually a there's a study like right now for the services that are in demand right now. PR because crisis messaging. Web design is actually in demand right now. And I'll tell you the type of businesses that get hit the hardest are the 2 services that get hit the hardest are the 2 services that my agency has. It's paid media and it's SEO. Now, ecommerce businesses are getting, they were getting hit pretty hard, but I think it's actually coming back now. I would say for B2B type of businesses, because the sales cycles are longer, they're not getting hit as hard, right? So I would say, you know, those 2, the PR and kind of, you know, content creation, also web design, those are good right now. I would also say if you're in any type of data, I would say any type of data scientist right now when you're doing data analysis, whether you're doing statistical analysis or reporting, that's always in big demand. Jason, great question. Is it better to start your own business or buy a new one? You're going to hear from every entrepreneur past a certain point, They're always going to say they wanted to buy a business, right? And I'm going to give you guys something cool. And I want you guys to actually drop this in the chat. If a business is doing $1 million in revenue, $200,000 in profit, what do you think that company should be valued at? If it was just like a standard, you know, general question, right? I know there's like, you know, different industries, right? So, what multiple do you think should be on that $200K? Let's say it's like a— let's say it's a marketing agency. I'll make it a little more specific, okay? So $200K in profit. What should we pay for this company? Right? Drop it into chat right now. I'm curious to see what you guys think. And then beyond that, if if the the buying price is let's say you know I'm gonna wait for you guys to fill this out. But let's say it's it's it's you want to buy it for three x so six hundred thousand dollars. Type into chat right now. Out of pocket, how much money do you think you need to pay to buy this company that's doing $1 million in revenue? Type it in the chat right now, and I'll just wait because I know there's a little delay on YouTube right now. I'm going to actually stop sharing my screen so you can see my face. Okay. So Jason says it should be 1.2x on sale, so $1.2 million, 3x profit, $600K. Um, $600K says Will Lin. Um, and I know— I don't know if that's my Will Lin. Uh, John John, $2 million. Fatty, uh, 2x. At 2x on, on what? Uh, $3,450,000. Um, so yeah, I mean, it's what Will and Eric are saying, $600K basically, right? So now tell me, uh, and I, I think there's a little delay now. Tell me what you guys should be, um, paying for that out of pocket. Okay, so Will is actually—I mean, I mean, Will—I'm curious to know what you do. Brian says sixty dollars, fifty percent down from Fannie, one million dollars for the company generating one point two million and two hundred k. Okay, so look, the people that said sixty k, you're right on target. If a company Is the buying price is $600,000. You can pay 10% down and you can use the rest through like an SBA loan, right? So it's actually not that expensive. So if you think about it, what you should be doing is you should be thinking about, okay, during this downturn right now when valuations are lower, how can I go buy a company? Or how could I go buy a Facebook group, a YouTube channel, an Instagram profile? Because everything's down right now, everybody needs money right now, right? What are you going to do about that? So, and by the way, Jason, good idea too, owner financing. There's so many different ways to skin a cat, and really, the price is just one aspect of a deal. And I'm sure there's some of you that are much more experienced than I am talking about this stuff. You think about it, you could set so many different terms up where you basically, you can even have, you know, the owner continually be involved with it. It's really the price is one aspect, but you ultimately have to think about the terms of the deal too, because the terms really define, you know, how it's going to go for you long-term, all right? So, there you go, $600 million business, that's a good deal. Plus, if you have a business that's running right now, you can plug the employees in, you can instantly start using, you know, the resources from that company to make your business even bigger. And not only that, if you think about it, if you're paying $60,000 down, this company is going to be paid for through its own cash flows. It could be in a year, it could be in 2 years or so. You're basically, you're almost getting the company for free if you know what you're doing, right? So, I think that should be the mindset long-term. You think about, you build your own stuff, you get the consulting stuff going, you build your own cash flow, and then from there, sky's the limit, okay? So, oops, I hit the wrong thing. Back to questions. Care asks, what is my typical day? So for me, typically I'll wake up around— at least I'll like move around in bed probably like 5:30 to 6:00, and then, then I'll be up. Then I'll get on my bike back here. By the way, if you guys have a Peloton bike, add me, Eric Siu. I've been writing it every day because I have, you know, if I don't write it, I think I'll go crazy. But yeah, I mean, Mondays, like my— here's what I'll tell you, Kare. My week is very structured. So Mondays are very meeting heavy. And then Tuesdays I focus on the software company. Wednesday I focus on the software company. Thursday I do content. I do— and then I have more meetings with my team to make sure they're getting what they need. And then Fridays, typically what I'll do is I'll spend time on strategy. But for like a typical day, you know, I usually eat the same thing every day. What I would say is as much as you can think about how you can buy back your time. So before the craziness happened, you know, I had a cook and the cook would drop off the food. It doesn't sound as expensive as it is, but each meal would come out to about $15 or so. And so if you can buy back your time that way, great. Now all I do is there's a— I live above a Sweetgreen in downtown LA. So I just keep ordering for the sweet green, and so I just keep eating salads. So and I usually eat later, like eleven past eleven. And then actually, I mean lunchtime is coming up soon, I guess for me. And I'm gonna I'm probably gonna watch anime. So My Hero Academia for those of you that watch it. And then yeah, I mean from there, I'm just you know my day's already planned out. My calendar's planned out, and then you know I'm just cranking out things. And then generally right now because we're staying at home, I'm I am working into the evenings, but I enjoy doing it. So I'll probably work until like. 8 PM or so. And then at that time, I'll just be reading until 9 or so. And then sometimes, I mean, I'll kind of veer off track and I'll just keep watching YouTube. But I've gotten a lot better at, um, at taking, um, reducing my screen time on my phone. It was like 5 to 6 hours a day before. Now it's like about 2 and a half hours. So I would delete the social media apps from your phone. Um, hopefully that's practical. And I do start my day by using a 5-minute journal. That's where I fill out 3 things I'm grateful for, One affirmation and then 3 things I'm gonna do for the day. And then at the end of the day, before I go to bed, 3 amazing things that happen. And it's always something different that you don't expect. And then there's one thing I can improve on, right? So it's good positive reinforcements and that's what I do. I love this question. If you can go back to your early 20s, what do you wish you would've known or done differently? I wish I would have gotten started earlier. Honestly, I didn't take over this business until I was 26-ish. And so I learned a lot, right? But those lessons I could have learned a lot earlier. So I would just recommend starting earlier because I like— if you think about my podcast co-host Neil, he started his business when he's like about 14, 15 years old. And not only that, other buddy, he's the world's biggest WordPress affiliate. He runs WP WPBeginner, he has OptinMonster. He started his business I think when he was around 12 years old. So, I think for my children, if they ever wanted to, if I have children, I would, you know, if they want to start a business earlier, I would encourage them to do so and I'd do everything in my power to help them do that. And then what I would just say is, you know, be willing to fail a lot and just be patient. I think there's no way you won't be able to figure it out. Jackson's question is, are you constantly thinking of work even when you're off the clock? For me, I think a lot of people might hate this response. I don't think so much about work-life balance. I think about how do I integrate everything together. So if I don't like doing something, I'm not going to do it. So to me, it's all fun. I think what's kind of discouraging for me is when I see a lot of my— a lot of friends, you know, their weekend is— during this quarantine right now, it's, you know, they talk about how bored they are. Or they're showing— they're not taking advantage of the time, right? Because they've separated out, it's work and then it's life, right? But if you integrate them, and Jeff Bezos says this, if it's work-life harmony, you create— you're able to just constantly think about, okay, how can I continue to create value for the world? And that's what you're ultimately here to do. My whole theory about all this is, okay, what's the purpose of life? I think the purpose of life is to continue to spur evolution. I think that's what it is. I think, you know, no matter if it's— who knows if it's to, you know, continue to evolve, to continue to evolve humans. Don't know. I'm just talking theories right now, right? But, you know, if evolution for us is to eventually just make sure that, um, you know, we get off the world, whatever it is exactly, or we all become cyborgs, or we all become robots, who knows, right? But the goal is evolution. That's why the whole leveling up thing. Okay, so I know I went a little kind of out there, but So what's the best way to market a product that's highly saturated in the market? So Giancarlo, I'll give you an example of marketing agencies right now. I think marketing agencies or agencies in general, even though I'm saying it's a good business to start, I think they are a dime a dozen. I think the business model is broken. So I think charging retainers is, that's fine. We talk about recurring revenue, but how can you charge a service that's not a service? Where you align incentives more with your clients. So instead of saying, hey, I'm going to charge you $5,000 a month, maybe you say, hey, I'm going to charge you nothing. And then I want you to pay me a percentage of profits for the next 12 months if I'm able to hit these numbers. And if you do that, you're able to build leverage for the long term. All right. So instead of making $5,000 a month, you could be making $100,000 a month. Okay. And that's a different approach because it de-risks The client and it aligns incentives because if you're just doing a retainer, your incentives aren't necessarily aligned. And because you're trying to make money each month, you're incentivized to draw out your ideas as long as you can to draw out the contract. But if you're like, you're working on a performance thing, you're going to do, you're going to bring all the good ideas, you're going to front load the good ideas and you're going to be treated as a partner instead of just like a vendor. This is part of the reason why I hate agencies. So Maggie's question is, what is the best advice you would give to someone who is starting a podcast or starting a business in general? Or JP's question, next one, I'm going to answer that one too. So best advice to someone that's looking to start a podcast, if you're going to start a podcast, here's tactical advice. And we have a lot of this on Marketing School as well, so you can check it out. Just go to marketingschool.io and you can search how to start a podcast. But I will launch with 5 podcasts. I would, if you have an email list, hit whatever channels you have. For Maggie, I mean, you're co-founder of Asian Hustle Network, right? So hit the Asian Hustle Network, tell them you have a podcast coming out, promote your podcast to your group, right? Start engaging conversations, ask, you know, ask people to comment if they want the first podcast or whatever, kind of similar to how we did this one. You can get a lot more engagement. Build your email list, hit your email list as well. That's how you're going to get into the new and noteworthy. And then from there, it's just going to take you time because again, whenever you're trying to build an audience, it just takes a long time to get there. Unless you're really hilarious, then your audience just grows really quickly. Or you're a really good gamer, then whatever. But I'd rather have a quality audience than have a big audience. And honestly, Maggie, your question around Starting a business in general. When I think about me taking over Single Grain, I took over the company in 2014. And for the first 2 years, I was completely— maybe 2013, I was just completely floundering, had no idea what I was doing. Dropped all the way down to 1 employee. Outside accounting firm was like, hey, I think you guys should shut it down. Almost took a job full-time. Was really close to— Yeah. I think I actually said yes to taking that job. I was this close to moving to Dallas, Texas of all places. And so, it's just understanding that— and I talked about this on the Marketing School Podcast. Any type of thing usually takes about 3 years to start to see it work. 3 years, that's the magic number. And Neil and I, we talked about this on the Marketing School Podcast. So, give it 3 years. I know you just started Asian Hustle Network. If you stick with it, you continue to make adjustments, I think you'll get there. But the worst thing is if you don't make adjustments and you kind of just let this group sit there, and this is for the group right now, if the group stays stagnant and if the group— I think you and Brian are taking really good actions to make the group really positive and make the value really high. As long as you continue to be able to stack the value and obsess over the customers, there's no way this thing doesn't succeed. There's just no way. So, if you start to see the growth plateau a little bit, it's like, okay, why is it plateauing? What do I need to do next? And then from there you get outputs, right? So, what are you doing on a day-to-day basis, inputs to get to the next level, right? It's doing more webinars or more trainings like this. And then thinking about what type of premium offerings you can have, the value ladder, right? Your value ladder right now is this group's free, and then you can have a premium and then a higher tier and then a higher tier. And then a higher tier, you can have conferences, et cetera, virtual conferences, sky's the limit. JP asks, what books have been impactful in your overall growth? The books question is a really good question. It's hard because usually I'll just think of the first book. I would say, and I'll put this in the chat as well, type my answer, The Hard Thing About Hard Things. Things. So this is actually the most recommended book on the Leveling Up podcast by far. And this, it's the book I always remember. It's basically all the tough things that you're going to run into when you're running a startup, all the shit you're going to eat when you're running a startup. There's this whole concept called the struggle when things are just complete shit and you don't know what you're going to do. You can't taste food, you're depressed, you have panic attacks, and every single entrepreneur goes through that. And that's almost like a rite of passage. So I really like The Hard Thing About Hard Things. And there's a lot of other books too that I can recommend, but I'm just going to go with that one. And then the other thing, the other one I would go with is Breakthrough Advertising and Influence. Influence by Robert Cialdini. That one's good because it's understanding different psychologies and how you can get people to do things. It's just humans are going to be humans. We've always been kind of More or less the same over the years, right? Oops, I put the I put the wrong answer. Sorry, I hit Will instead. Okay, so Will asks, have you always felt you were offering value at all points in your career? No, my first job, and I can see the office right here, was at the. Wells Fargo building in downtown LA and I was doing data entry. I would come in at 6:00 AM, I'd leave at 2:00 PM just because I can leave early. And then I would— I got a digital marketing internship and I would study until like 10 or 11 and then I would just rinse and repeat. So, I realized I wasn't providing value and I saw someone that was about 30 years old or so. So, at the time I was 22 doing the same job I was doing and I was like, I need to get the hell out of here. So I think you'll know, like the gut feeling is I'm not adding value right now and I need to move on. So it's 3 things that matter with human beings, right? What we're looking for is contribution, connection, and vitality, right? So if we're not contributing, we're going to feel like crap. We're not connecting with people like we're connecting right now, right? We're going to feel like crap as well. So you need to have connection. We're human beings, we're social characters. Even though I'm an introvert, I still love connection. Vitality. You don't take care of your health, you have nothing, right? So those 3 things: CCV— contribution, connection, and vitality. All right. Um, so Jerry Chen asks, what are your go-to sources to find reliable analytical traffic conversion CPC, CPM data? Um, so there's SimilarWeb, um, there's SEMrush. So what I would say, Jerry, with these analytics tools You kind of have to take them from a— for, for— you have to take them with a grain of salt. So we have SEMrush, we have Ahrefs, we have SimilarWeb, and we have all these different tools. What you want to be looking for is the trend line, right? If it's trending in the right direction, the trends are usually right, but the traffic numbers are usually way off. I also like using another tool called Adbeat. That's A-D-B-E-A-T to take a look at generally How a company or competitor is spending, where they're spending, what their ads look like, and it's really helpful. So that's what I'll do. It's not the best answer I have for you, but it's all I got. And so I'm going to take a look at chat real quick as well. Blah blah blah. Let's see. Okay. So continue to drop your questions in here. I'm going to try to stay as I'm going to try to stay a little longer. Let's see. Julian asks, tips for good habits, health, exercise, getting sleep, environment, distractions, social media. Number 2, how to get started when you feel stuck like a brain block, don't know where to start. So first one, health. I mean, I do intermittent fasting, not because it's cool, but because I'm lazy. So I just don't eat breakfast. I just drink my tea in the morning. Honestly, like, here's the other thing. And Bill Gates actually said this too. Usually the people that you want working for you, you want them to be smart and you want them to be lazy. So at least I'm lazy. I'm not going to say I'm smart. I'm going to say I'm lazy, right? Because lazy people don't do things, right? Because they're too lazy to do it. I think there's a quote from a military general. It's like, you have the diligent and you have the hardworking people, but what you ultimately want, The people that become generals, those are the lazy people, right? The lazy and the smart people. That's what you're ultimately looking for, right? So I digress a little bit, but exercise, I think if you're living in an urban area like myself, you're not going to go outside that much. So I recommend getting any type of bike you can, like this Peloton bike over here. Those of you that think it's unaffordable, I mean, if you can afford $60 a month to just pay through a firm, you're not going to pay any interest on it. And you're going to be investing in your health. I think a lot of people have a mental block. It's like, oh, it's $60 a month and then it's another $39 a month. But like 3 SoulCycle classes are like, that's $90 right there. And if you're not willing to invest in your health, then it's going to affect everything. Now, there's a trickle-down effect. I think the first thing is mental health and then you have the right operating system. So then you have something to take care of your physical health. And then it goes into your work. Social media, I set limits on my phone. So Instagram's like 15 minutes a day, Twitter's like 15 minutes a day. And I move my social media icons to other pages because I can flip. And yeah, after I deleted everything, the habit stuck. So I was, again, I was spending 5 to 6 hours on my phone, the bulk of it was social media. And now I'm like 2.5 hours, I'm trying to get it down to about 1.5 hours. So there's that. Distractions, I mean, you get to work from home right now, so set time for your work and like don't go watch anime or something. How to get started when you feel stuck? So what I really like doing when I feel stuck is I like learning. I like watching CEO interviews on YouTube. So I might go eat my lunch, watch CEO interviews. I'll read a lot. And when you read, you get inspiration. I save a lot of my stuff to Pocket. So I'll follow smart people on Twitter and I'll use an app called Nuzzle, which shows like what the people I'm following, like the most of them that are— like if a bunch of people from my following list are sharing something, Nuzzle will curate it for me and I'll save that to Pocket. And I'll just read everything later. I love just reading about other people's ideas and then because it gives me ideas ultimately, and we're all just kind of helping each other out. So that's what I would say. Let's see. Will, I do not have a good source for due diligence questions for e-commerce acquisitions. I do. You should follow a guy named Drew Sanoki. He's based in he's based in San Diego and super smart guy, and he he actually. Has done a couple e-commerce turnarounds. He spoke at our our mastermind a couple months ago. So I'm going to do another maybe five minutes or so. Guys, continue to ask your questions. Let's see what else we got. Yes, Art, that is the quote. Thank you for sharing that. Blah blah blah. Okay, so Asaf asks, I help businesses create and launch product/services/service videos. Do you have any advice that'll help me help my clients get and see results with video marketing? You know what you could do right now? I think it's, you know, video unfortunately is one thing that gets cut during these times. There's a company called the Harmon Brothers and they did on the, like the Squatty Potty video and they did all like Poo-Pourri and all these cool videos. And they typically will charge a couple hundred grand for a video. But what they do, sometimes they might go to a company and say, hey, you know what? I'll do the video for you and I might run the ads for you. I want a profit share. And, you know, the companies that can't afford to pay the couple hundred grand, they'll say yes. And then from there, this is talking about the pay-for-performance model a little earlier. So again, we talk about doing deals. It's how you structure a deal, right? If you think about it, if you're doing consulting and then you're paying, you're charging by the hour and you're charging by product, by project, and then you're charging by recurring and then you're charging by performance, ultimately what you're doing is you're just changing the terms. So the terms are one of the most important things that you have to continue to think about. Jackson asks, do you read multiple books at the same time or do you stick to one from start to finish? Stick to a book from start to finish, but now I just I go around different books. Like if I have different interests, like I have a bunch of books around my house, and I'll just you know open up whatever I feel like reading at the time, and then I'll just come back to it. So I'm reading multiple books at a time, and what actually made me feel better was Naval Ravikant, who founded AngelList. He's a billionaire, right? And he actually reads more. Oh, if Bill can do it, I can do the same thing too, right? So I come up with that excuse for myself. All right. Fanny says Centurica. I've never heard of that, but that's cool. All right, guys. So what I'm going to do right now is I'm going to drop a link into chat and then you guys can go get the trial if you want for the premium podcast. I'm going to write a newsletter every month. It's just going to be kind of what I'm thinking. And then there's also ad-free version of it. You can get access to the trial, singlegrain.com/pro. Check it out. And you guys can feel free to email me as well anytime you want, eric@singlegrain.com. But yeah, I mean, this was fun. Did this for about an hour and 15 minutes. Really appreciate you guys. A huge portion of you stayed till the end. So really grateful for that. And really appreciate Arthur. Brian and Maggie for having me on. Thank you to Asian Hustle Network, and have a good rest of your Saturday. And you guys be safe. Make sure you wear your masks and do your social distancing. Take care of yourselves, and hopefully I'll see you again in the future. Drew Sanokia, I spelled it for you right there. There it is for you, Will. All right, catch you guys later. Have a good rest of your weekend.