How to Manufacture Luck, Avoid Bad Advice, and Build a Business That Lasts: Billion-Dollar Lessons from a Serial Entrepreneur with Jonathan Cronstedt and Joe Polish

The hype is absolutely real. And I just went through a full category design exercise, repositioning and strategy for a company that would have probably taken me a whole lot of navel gazing and three months compiling all of this. I did it with AI doing 90% of the heavy lifting and it took me about a week. Now, AI hasn't replaced me because, I mean, let's be honest, I'm far more attractive. But what AI has become is the most powerful thought partner you can ever imagine. Like, I want you to imagine every book you've ever read, every person you've ever wanted to come in contact with. And you can ask AI to adopt those thoughts, adopt those frameworks, adopt those perspectives. I can literally ask AI to shred an idea based on an entrepreneur I like or build me a category design based on an entrepreneur I like. And then I can continue to ask it, to refine it and tell it to it is the wildest thing I have ever experienced and I am now in the camp of I believe it is going to rip a hole in society that no one is prepared for and it is happening way too fast for any type of regulation or intervention to stop it.

How can you be a domino for someone else? The Joe Polish Show Any problem in the world can be solved at the Right Genius Network. Jonathan J. Cron Cronstead is an investor advisor and author. He currently serves as a board director at Kajabi.com knowledge commerce platform. He's held executive leadership positions for SAS, mortgage finance, digital publishing and direct sales. After his 20 plus years in executive leadership, operations and strategy, Jcron developed the bullseye Formula, his proven method for scaling to exit. Using the Bullseye Formula, Jay Kron invests in and advises a diverse portfolio of companies through Apex Equity where he is Managing director. Jcron believes entrepreneurship is the greatest transformations force in our world and is dedicated to supporting and equipping the next generation of entrepreneurs. And please help me welcome J. Cron.

Wow, dude. Thank you very much.

What's up man?

Come here, let me grab your butt.

I love it. Let's do this for a while.

I just want you to know I love you.

I love you.

Have I held this long enough to be awkward?

Yeah, of course. It's all right. It's all right. No, I'm used to awkward stuff, so it's good.

I didn't realize you were closing out with Alex. You never tell me you love me and tell him you love him. Come on.

You know, there's different people, different things. You know, there's certain people that have more value in your life than others.

You know, Totally understand. That's why I only try to see you every five years.

Is he on? Can you guys hear okay?

Microphone. Great.

All right, so here's your new book.

Yeah.

Which is billion dollar bullseye, scale as big as you want, as fast as you want and exit if you want on your terms. And Richard Koch, who. Who wrote I've still never interviewed this dude. He's the author of the 8020 principle. Real successful guy. Brilliant, innovative, creative, intriguing and faintly disturbing. The product of a first rate mind. So I love what you wrote in here. For me, this is how far I'm at it. Okay, so I've not read the entire book yet, but just to make you.

Feel guilty in front of everyone, I finished your book.

No, I know. No, you did, you did, you did, you did. But we do have copies of your book for everybody. Yes, yes. So. And I've known you for a long ass time, so we. What are three of the attributes that make a successful entrepreneur and a failure? Because you've had what you openly talk about, some massive failures in your life and some big successes. And when you guys had your $2 billion valuation, which I'm going to ask you about, you made a boatload of money. So what are your thoughts?

So I would say if I were to go with the failure part first and the characteristics that I would most attribute my bankruptcy to, because for those of you in here who have the bankruptcy T shirt that was part of the adventure in 2007, number one key characteristic of failure would be arrogance. That I immediately thought that because I was making money, I was smart. I was in my early 20s, probably making three quarters of a million bucks a year, and I thought I had everything figured out. It prompted me to take risks I shouldn't have taken. And so arrogance, number one, for sure. Number two, and closely related to arrogance was really bad advice. Really bad financial advice specifically. So I think that one of the questions I get the most about my journey is, well, how did it all happen? And you don't really have an encapsulated answer because it's hard to be like, well, so I paid this guy $500 for five minutes and then all this shit happened. But the closest I've come to is your journey will be directly proportional to the quality of advice that you can access in the very few inflection points that actually matter. And in the case of my mortgage bankruptcy, I didn't have access to quality advice. I remember going to my dad and saying, you know, dad, I'm making all this money and I have all this free time, I don't know what to do. And he said, well, son, get married. It'll take care of both. And then he proceeded to tell me that, you know, well, just live on half of your income, save the rest and you'll be fine. And so I did listen to the part about living on half of my income. But I didn't know that a mortgage market could not just slow down, disappear entirely. Like, nobody told me that your income could go to zero. And then nobody told me that when your income goes to zero, the assets that you were counting on also could go to zero or be worth less than what you paid for them. And it went bad far faster than it got good. You know, Hemingway joked about the fact when someone asked him how he went broke, he said, well, gradually at first and then all of a sudden, and it felt very much like that. So arrogance, bad advice. And then I would say the third was just laziness that you don't find out until it's adjusted, that opportunity is perishable. That had I known then what I know now, I would not have been working half days and spending all of my money trying to dine around in Chicago. I would have been working 20 hour days banking as much money as possible, knowing that the market would collapse. And like my smart friends, gone and bought hundreds of homes in Las Vegas for a dollar and then sold them years later and made a ton of money. I didn't know any of that. I was too busy having fun. So, failure, let's go with arrogance, bad advice, laziness.

Okay, no. So what comes to mind? So I got this from Gary Halbert. The most expensive information in the world is bad information. So you can, even if the information is free, if it's bad, it can totally send you down a really dark path. So it's being able to know who to talk to when, what your intentions are from seeking out that advice, what their intentions are for giving it, and determining who really wants to help you versus who wants to pretend that they're helping you. Because there are lots of people that write books on success, teach seminars on success. However, most of those people are reporters of success. They're not successful themselves. They will write about what they think success is, but have they actually done it? So doesn't mean it's not good advice. There's some great advice that I get. Like, I always find it funny that if you want to know what someone is interested in, including myself, what am I writing books about, what are they writing books about? What are they talking about? Those are the things they're interested in. And some of the best advice, like time management books, almost every really phenomenal time management book, even though is it time management or priority management or is written by someone that usually sucks at time management and they're so intimately aware of the pain of it that they study it enough to talk about it. Right? And that's sort of those that can't teach sort of thing. And I think everyone, including some of the best teachers, have a little bit of that in them. It's when it becomes incongruent with what they say and what, what they do, which is, you know, and that's something to look for. So when you seek out advice, because as long as I've known you, you are that type of person, you never would have called me and said, hey, you know, can I hire you for 10 minutes if you weren't trying to find things? So how do you filter now to get the very best guidance? Because at this level you can play a big game.

So I would say I'll weave that into the three qualities on the success side. So number one on the success side is access to amazing insights. And so growing up in a family where I had two great parents but no real financial acumen, like always vice presidents always working their asses off, always busy traveling, but we were always, you know, upper middle class, broke. And it was a situation where I remember sitting down with my dad and I was like, dad, I'm transitioning out of Success magazine and I'm not really sure what I want to do next. I've got couple of job offers or I could take this Kajabi thing, but the Kajabi thing, I'm going to lose roughly 50% of my salary and I'm going to have an equity opportunity. And my dad said, lose half of your salary? Are you insane? Like, no, get the best salary you can. Max out your 401k, you'll be in great shape. And then I was sitting down with my friends from ypo, which I had joined, kind of recognizing that this is a world that I don't have in my world, I need that in my world. And I sat down with two guys and similar advice from both. But they said, well, can you get another job if this software thing doesn't work out? And I said, yes. They said, oh, then there's no question, take the equity, because that's the only thing that matters. And had I not done that and I Only had access to the information I did, my journey would look incredibly different. So seeking out that wise counsel and having access to it, huge element of my success journey for sure. And when I look at what my filter is today, I think the filter is number one is the person I am talking to, did they have their success from an area that is not what I would be paying them for? In other words, if I'm paying for advice, did that person's success come from building something? Not the advice that I'm writing the check for that today. My hopes are I want to meet people that are going to completely stretch my reality that are playing at levels where, where their initiatives are rounding errors, but they happen to be my whole net worth like those kind of people. And that mentality excites me because I become very risk averse. My financial PTSD from my bankruptcy still looms fairly large. I'm not far from when I lived at rural in the 202 here for a year, working for jet homes, eating half of a El Pollo Loco chicken bowl for lunch and half for dinner. So those kind of things don't go away even, you know, with the dollars.

That is true because I have never forgotten. You know, at times I will distance, you know, it seems like a, like a different world I lived in, you know, I mean I grew up half our, half our life because I used to, I didn't. My father moved every year, two years, my entire childhood because after my mom died he just never recovered from that. And so we lived in trailers, you know, half of our life. A lot of, you know, goodwill clothes and stuff like that. But we were never dirt poor, you know, I mean we ate. It wasn't like, oh my God. I was like, you know, living in a. I don't make up stories about living in a bathroom. And I was shit like that that people do. So you know, you know how I'm talking about.

I do.

Anyway. So the, the thing though is I never forgot the struggle. And I think if you forget the struggle and you start believing your own PR when you start having success. Real dangerous scare.

Well, I mean, dude, I mean you were the first to kind of like when I was like, I wrote a book and I'm like, I did it. I always said I would write a book. And I feel like I have something to say and I'm gonna send Joe my book and Joe gets my book and he goes, oh, billion dollar bullseye. Scale as big as you want, as fast as you want and exit if you want on your terms. That's a hell of a headline. You clearly paid attention to the marketing. I don't need. Can you actually deliver on that and consider my imposter syndrome triggered in epic proportions? I'm like, honey burn the book name. It's over. I have nothing to say ever again. Ever. I'm not leaving the house.

No. What's funny is as I started reading the book, that's how you know, by.

The way, that Joe's a true friend. Because a true friend always stabs you in the front like that. Like, like that. That's how you know you have somebody that you need more of in your life. The.

The book is phenomenal. What I've read so far, like even. Even the very beginning, first 10 pages of it is. It's. It's a great book and I. So I've even. So that's why I think you're going to get a lot out of it. But again I. I've known you for a long ass time. So.

So the other two qualities that I would give for the success side and going back to your point, I would say that anyone who achieves significant success that is not willing to admit that luck or serendipity plays a role I think is pretty delusional. I would argue that you can certainly work to increase your surface area for luck, which is where I believe the work component interacts with the world of luck and serendipity. But there's certainly two seasons for me where I was on the wrong side of luck in the mortgage business. VP of sales in 2007. I know what it's like when the trends are crushing you. And then being president of a creator commerce platform in 2021 after having ridden through a digital is now today immediate. We must not. We'll go digital someday. That was. The trend's working in my favor. So there is definitely a case to be made on the success side of increasing the surface area for luck but also recognizing that there is an element of luck. So that would be quality number two and quality number three would just be. For me it's just been work. Like I know some people don't like the hustle culture. I don't know that I'm a Gary Vee esque level worker. I don't know that I fit there. But I think that for me the magic came in the extremes. It might not have been 100 hour weeks, but there were definitely nights at 11:30 that you know I'm answering Facebook comments because our app is down and there's like 30,000 people really upset with me and, you know, they're not on my front yard, but they're in my screen and they're all mad. Those were the moments where the Kajabi brand was built like, like we didn't win for any reason other than we cared about their success more than anybody else, without question. And it's in those moments that that was the crucible that that brand was built. So I got to give like some element of being willing to shovel shit when you got to shovel shit.

You know, it's funny because I have a question, like written here. Kajabi. So these are the questions I came up with for you. Kajabi hit a $2 billion valuation fast. What's a behind the scenes challenge you haven't shared that shaped your approach to scaling? I mean, you just kind of said one, yeah, what other?

But I mean, if everyone wants to know all the stuff I screwed up, I mean, I got, I got a laundry list, but I can pick my favorites. I would say the first mistake we made that not only hurt us, but hurt others, we over titled, we over promoted and we broke people with the best of intentions. That as a company is scaling super fast. And especially a company where you've got a lot of camaraderie and nostalgia and amazing culture and all of that woven into it, you're going to have people that believe they're going to get the title because they were there, whether they can do the job or not, whether you can describe what the job requires well or not. And that was something that we screwed up significantly. And I can remember it because we had people that we promoted because they were like, I want to do that. And we're like, cool, you're here, you get it. And then watch them under deliver and get demoted and get demoted again and have to sacrifice equity on a vesting schedule because they're like, I just, I can't do this. I thought I could. I wanted to. And it's like, had we not wanted more for them than they either wanted for themselves or were capable of doing for themselves, they would have been perfectly happy in their role, progressing as they could. But we moved them to the Peter principle of you'll be promoted to the level at which you're incompetent and then kind of breaks. So promoting and entitling based on time in that was a mistake. And the other one was managing from the perspective of being more of a family than a team. And this is one for me, that this is still a gut punch to talk about. Because anyone in here is going to be fucking idiot. Why did you respond that way? But like, we sat down with our engineering team and this was, you know, right when click funnels coming up and very aggressive marketer enabling platform. And we at the time did not offer multiple one click upsells. You know, kajabi, it was, you bought something, would you like something else? Thank you very much. We like, you go on with your day. And click funnels, you could have 542 upsells if you wanted to. Like, this person could literally die in your upsell funnel if you wanted to. And so we had a lot of people that are like, well, I want more than one upsell. And so we sat down with our engineering team. We're like, all right, guys, guess what? Multiple upsells, let's go, let's build it. And the team said, oh yeah, it feels so skeezy. It feels so gross. I don't want people to be able to sell that way. I personally hate it when someone's selling me that way. And you would think that being the leaders we were, we looked at the team and said, well, guys, our customers want this. Our competitors have this. You either need to build it or I need to find somebody that will. Which would have been the mature corporate leader building an enterprise. That's what I should have said. What we said instead was, well, okay, I guess you guys don't feel like you want to do it, don't feel good about it. We'll just skip it. And in that moment it felt a little innocuous. And in that moment it felt like, oh, we're solving for culture. We're doing the right Silicon Valley. Everyone's kumbaya ing about how we're putting our feelings out into the universe. You shouldn't have more than one upsell. Stupidest shit ever. And what it did, and kind of part of the framework for the book is I didn't realize that in that moment I introduced a burden on customer experience that shouldn't have existed because they now have to deal with angry customers that can't do what they want to do. I introduced a burden to sales and marketing that they now need to find other ways to sell against an apples to apples comparison because we have an area that's deficient that we weren't willing to fix. That all of a sudden, this one decision now pulled through the organization in a way that we were no longer executing on our purpose, which was above all else, our kajabi heroes come first. We weren't executing on our profit because we were now not getting customers we could have gotten and been making more money. We weren't executing on our product because our product had an area that was a blind spot that should have been fixed. We weren't executing on our prestige. Our customer experience was failing because we were, again, deficient in our product. Our promotion and persuasion required a whole lot more because we were deficient in this feature. And the people in our organization were also going to be hurt by this because no customer service person wants to keep answering angry tickets for something that should exist. So I watched that one inflection point expand and huge failure on our part.

And so, yes, these are very good. We could just spend the whole. Just talking about all the things you screwed up on, which I think would really Massive.

Massive list. Massive list. How many of you, by the way, how many of you saw my interview with Joe in the 100k group? So I want to make sure. Okay, not a ton of you, but I want to make sure that those of you that did see it get at least something different out of this chat.

So. Good. Now this is. This is actually quite insightful. So I like what you said about increase the surface area for luck. That's an interesting line, because I think there's. So. There's so much that we can do to increase the surface area for opportunity, for advantages, and that requires an openness, and that also requires the ability to. It's like, would you rather be rich or would you rather be right? And when people so badly want to be right, they prevent themselves from getting rich or they're so stuck in their ways. And then when you're talking about, you know, arrogance, bad advice, and laziness, there's. What's that Warren Buffett line of when the tide comes back? You don't know who's swimming naked and who isn't. When the tide goes out, you find out who's swimming naked and who isn't. And then when all the fish are jumping in the boat, everyone thinks they're great fishermen. Yeah.

Yep.

So. And there are times where. Yeah. When the real estate market is just kicking ass. Everyone's a realtor and everyone's having success and they actually think they're talented. Yeah. Versus, you know, I always use the supply and demand example. So if you have supply and demand on your side, you don't need to be a good marketer. And oftentimes you don't even need to have a good product. And if you just have it available, people will buy it. You know, as I've. I. Evan Carmichael I sent is my fault. So I send him over some pictures of grocery stores with the price of eggs and empty slots in grocery stores of they're out of eggs. And I'm like, should I do one of these green screen videos that you always tell me to do? And he's like, yeah, I'm glad he leaves me a nice messenger. You're talking about something that's culturally relevant right now. You do, you know, give your opinion, don't give a vanilla answer on what do you think of this, but just get, you know, and of course, the road to hell is paved with good intentions. So I still haven't posted the video. I. I watched all of this stuff going on with. With eggs. I will. I'm saying it publicly now to shame myself. So, you know, so there's all this stuff going on with. They don't even need to be good eggs. And as a matter of fact, there's, you know, there are sometimes where if there's no eggs left and you have half a carton of a dozen eggs and half of them are cracked, someone will come and buy it because there's no other eggs. It doesn't matter if it's organic. It doesn't matter what they fed. They could feed the chickens like gummies that people will buy them, right? So. But the thing is, when you have competitors, though, you better have your together. And then when there's better options, you know, you better have your act together. And so during the pandemic, remember the toilet paper? So I started having people reach out to me, and I did a Nightingale conant program in 2004, which became the number one selling marketing program of Nightingale's history. And it was called Piranha Marketing. The seven success multiplying factors to dominate any market you enter. And I did it with Tim Poulson. And so there was a section where I talk about supply and demand. And I said, if the world's supply of toilet paper evaporated, you don't need anything special in order to sell toilet paper. All you need is a cardboard sign. Put it out in front of your house if you have cars to drive by. Toilet paper, $50 a roll. People will buy it if there's no other place to get toilet paper because they, you know, people need toilet paper. And I don't know when toilet paper first existed. I can't remember now. I looked it up and I started thinking, God, what did they do before then? I mean, that was the even better.

Part, is that culturally, you know, Toilet paper is pretty frowned upon in lots of other areas of the world. It's sort of like the whole thing, like, spill something on your carpet, you're not just going to wipe it up, you're gonna spray some cleaner on it or whatever. And like, that's why, you know, the bidets and hand shower, that probably predates toilet paper because we had water before we had paper.

That's. Yes, that is true. Huh.

Deep Thoughts by Joe and J. Cron.

Yeah. Yeah. I'm just sitting there thinking, what?

So do you ever just sit here and think that it's amazing that they're all here and they're hearing you wax poetic about toilet paper? Like, that's really cool.

No, I often. Yeah, I think all of this. No, but so here's the thing. So during the pandemic, people then started to reach out to you. Remember you did that whole section on toilet paper. It became real. There became a point, like literally almost 20 years later that the supply of toilet paper ran out. And all of a sudden it was. And I'm like going, yeah, you know, but there's a marketing lesson in this is make sure whatever it is you're selling and doing is packaged in a way to where it is unique and people actually place value on it. Because the moment it becomes a commodity, it's very hard to sell. Unless you run out of the commodity, then it becomes extremely valuable. Right. So the thing with. So let's talk about today, and then we might. We'll bounce back and forth and then I'll take some questions from the audience. So how are you seeing AI reshaping businesses and what hidden opportunities or risks? Because there's a boatload of people playing the AI game right now because attention is on it, but there's in, you know, and they may have a shelf life of how long they can sell their thing. I think there's going to be so many AI companies that are going to be gone, you know, six months and a year from now that seem like the big thing right now. So what are the opportunities and the risks that entrepreneurs are unprepared for? That's really the key. What are they unprepared for as it relates to this?

So I'll give you two answers. Number one is the Mike Koenigs barometer. For those of you that don't know, I had the opportunity to work with Mike at Traffic Geyser. He hired me out of Chet Holmes and Tony Robbins at Ultimate Business Mastery Summit. Part of my journey. And Mike's always three years ahead of whatever's going to be the next big thing. So, like, whatever Mike's playing with, it's going to turn into something. I watched Mike be in video marketing when there were 45 video sharing sites and it turned into one. I watched Mike be doing local marketing before local businesses knew how. I watched him start playing with mobile marketing before then and now he's playing with AI. So I know for a fact that it's going to eat huge segments of the business world. So the Mike Koenigs barometer checks out. And I would say my personal evolution in AI was if back when we were at 100K Group, we started talking about AI and I was like, you know, I don't know, I think it's a little overhyped, hyped. The hype is absolutely real. And I just went through a full category design exercise, repositioning and strategy for a company that would have probably taken me a whole lot of navel gazing and three months compiling all of this. I did it with AI doing 90% of the heavy lifting and it took me about a week. Now, AI hasn't replaced me because, I mean, let's be honest, I'm far more attractive. But what AI has become is the most powerful thought partner you can ever imagine. Like, I want you to imagine every book you've ever read, every person you've ever wanted to come in contact with, and you can ask AI to adopt those thoughts, adopt those frameworks, adopt those perspectives. I can literally ask AI to shred an idea based on an entrepreneur I like or build me a category design based on an entrepreneur I like. And then I can continue to ask it, to refine it and tell it to. It is the wildest thing I have ever experienced. And I am now in the camp of I believe it is going to rip a hole in society that no one is prepared for. And it is happening way too fast for any type of regulation or intervention to stop it. Now, I'm not a doomer type because like, I remember we were at abundance. A360 in 2014, I think, give or take, when Kurzweil was there. Ray Kurzweil, who's, you know, 88% of his predictions, he's dead on 92%, he's correct. If you give him a year earlier, year late, he's sitting up there in 2014 when Google's AI couldn't recognize a cat more than seven out of 100 attempts. And he says, 2028, true generative intelligence comes online. 2032, degenerative disease is gone and effectively by five, 10 years after that robotics catches up, work is gone and it's now artistry. And I don't think he's far off. Like, I mean when you look at Dalio with Tucker Carlson went live a couple days ago and Dalio's like, I don't think anybody realizes this is PhD level intelligence in every single category embodied in the same brain that it can pass a Google Level 3 engineering job interview, which is a $200,000 a year position. And ChatGPT can do it today. It can pass the bar exam, it can pass the MCATs. Like you are looking at something that is going to shred jobs that in many ways probably deserve to be shredded. Like you know, you're seeing now the resistance to it. The longshoreman's union in California which runs our largest port, they just settled their contract negotiation. They were on strike. One of their rules was a seven year moratorium on technological or automation improvements to the port because they knew that they could demand that they get to push buttons for another seven years and charge us an ass load of money. China's ports 1/100th the people because it's all software and automation and technology. So you're now seeing people realize oh shit, this is going to eat our lunch. We got to fight this. And a book that Joe gave me when we were on Bill Phillips his plane, which I read, I have a photo of it. The Spider and the Starfish. The story of the music industry's response to Napster and to all the streaming stuff they tried to centralize and they tried to fight it and they lost. I think we are going to see I have that play out and it's going to happen even faster. So it's one of those things that if you're not playing with it, start playing with it immediately. If you're not asking what positions can I eliminate using AI you should be the next iteration will be the agentic future. Mike can probably explain it much better than I can because I'm still new to this stuff. But the agentic future is basically the creation of agents. So it's no longer asking ChatGPT things, it's assigning ChatGPT jobs. And you'll see viral videos online of people literally launching entire businesses where GPT comes up with a business idea, reaches out to prospects offer is it it's priced and packaged and comes back with the data and the customers. So if you're not playing with it, start playing with it today. Like literally go home and play with it.

Mike, can you please hand me whether success comes in cans and not in cannot. So Joe Weldon, you know, thank you so much. So he has this can. Success comes in cans, not cannots. And it says ingredients commitment, courage, faith, goals, imagination, creativity, honesty, persistence, knowledge, defined values, focused thinking, a sense of humor, and a positive I can attitude. Do not open can. Contents Inedible only. The message on the label is important because it's filled with cocaine, basically. So. I'm kidding. It's not. So here's what you can do. Keep this can in a conspicuous place as a reminder in your in yourself of all the things you can do. Here's what we can do for you. Custom corporate seminars and audio programs on leadership, sales and personal development. This is a registered trademark of Joel H. Weldon and Associates. And then Success comes in cans.com. when did you first create this? 1974. Now 51 years, he's half a million cans. Geez Louise, that's a lot of Coke. So and so, you know, while we're on break, I'm like, oh, I just need to. Let me see what I can do with AI. Right? And I. You know what, Mike, I think I'll send you the picture here. But so let me go to. So I Basically my first iteration to this is make a comical version of this. If it was called Failures comes and can'ts and won'ts. And so it says front of the can. Failure comes and cans and won'ts not in attempts or effort. Side one. Here's what you can do. Keep this can as a reminder of all the excuses you make daily. Stare at it long enough and you'll find a reason to not start anything. Use it as a paperweight. Since you'll never get around to actually writing anything down. Here's what we won't do for you. Motivate you. Because let's be real, you probably find a way to procrastinate that too. Offer useful advice because you'll ignore it anyway. Side two Ingredients Self doubt. The finest age variety guaranteed to hold you back. Excuses comes in I'm too busy, I'll do it later. And it's just not the right time. Lack of motivation pairs well with excessive Netflix binges. Fear of failure so potent it prevents success altogether. Overthinking the special ingredients that make sure you nothing ever gets done. Do not open can contents are just as disappointed as your last new year's resolution. So manufacture a proud product of Joel H. Weldon and associates. Far for more non actionable excuses visits. Failure comes in cans.com and then it says, would you like me to generate an image of this version for you? Yes, and a much funnier version. So I wanted a much funnier version because I was like, we can do better than that. Right? And so we have this. I can send it and pop it up on the screen, but that's not that important. But I'll read you the next one, which I actually think is much better. But the point here is, as I do this, it's kind of comical, but it's like, how freaking long would it have taken? I'm doing this in a like barely even thinking, oh, just type it, you know, with the simplest prompts. This is. There's nothing here that is.

I can't even read as fast as GPT is serving up tremendous insights, it is spitting it out faster than I can consume what it's telling me. The other one that they just came out with, that is the ultimate cheat code for new or existing businesses. The Deep Research function is the greatest button. If there was a single button on the Internet, second to the buy button. That button has done more for me in the last two weeks.

Which button?

Deep Research. Oh, yes. It is a cheat code for starting, launching or vetting your current business. Like upload your financials, ask it to figure out ways that you can improve your business, find the holes in the bucket, upload ideas that you have for new businesses, or add on products. It will give you all of the data to support the greatest marketing opportunities you can imagine. The Deep Research function is a huge cheat code. So yeah, I mean, and I think what AI is going to do? Personally, I was at Search Engine Strategies way long time ago, maybe 08ish. There was a guy who wrote a book called man versus the Machine and this was about the Internet. And his quote was, we will not see the capabilities of the Internet until we bury one more generation of the frayed bit.

Wow.

And I think what we're going to see with AI is we're going to see this generation that we're currently kind of in. AI is going to accelerate the desire for authenticity and connection that if we look at the analog of the music business, when the music business went streaming and all of the music was available in the palm of your hand immediately. Music had no value because everything was available immediately. Well, what happened? Well, we watched record sales go up because curation and collection became exciting. And we watched live concert and events go way up because everyone's like, well, of all the music's in my phone, I got to find a way to make this cool again. I'm going to go to a show or I'm going to have some records. You're going to see the same thing happen with all aspects of information or specialized knowledge with AI. Because AI can tell me how to lose weight. But AI has never been fat. Like, AIs never had a body by in and out. AI has never been interviewed on Joe's 100K group on stage. And the first email I get was not a congratulations on your appearance on Joe's stage, but is everything okay? Because it was the fattest I've ever seen. You lost 30 pounds since then, largely out of shame. But AI has never experienced that. So it's like AI can give me the same information, but if it's not coming from something with a before and after picture, like it doesn't know how badly I want to hit the drive through at 2am as I'm driving home. It doesn't know. So the whole like just move more, eat less. Like, well that's great but you know, you're not person. Well, when my daughter grows up and AI has been around this whole time and the studies out of Africa are that two hours of AI assisted tutoring beats eight weeks of traditional instruction. When AI is viewed as something that they grow up with natively, well then all of a sudden the human element won't matter. We'll still crave connection, we'll still crave relationship, but the authenticity won't be the uniqueness that will still have that value component conferred on information from a person versus information from an AI. So I think temporarily authenticity will be the new currency and you got to capitalize on that while you can. Because I do believe that once a generation grows up AI native, that will largely go away.

Yeah, no. Wow, that's good. So by the way, as you're sitting here talking, I decided so I had the funnier version just because I have to stay on this cans and cannot thing because I'm like OCD and stuff. So you know, I had. Here's even the funnier version of Failure comes in cans and won't and it says ingredients, procrastination, age to perfection. Best served with unrealistic goals and last minute panic excuses. Now available in extra large economy sizes, flavors included. It's not the right time. I'm too tired. And mercury is in retrograde. Overthinking includes a free never ending internal debate on whether you should text them back. Here's success. Because what if you achieve your dreams and still have to wake up early. Infinite social media scrolling. Scientifically designed to replace your entire to do list. And then it goes on and on. But I was like, so okay, you're talking about all this stuff. It says do not open, can not FDA approved, blah blah blah. Recycling not recommended. The cycle failure is already endless. So it has these pictures. So I go, let's create a version for people that want to avoid using AI. Because I'm saying this based on image. So it creates this image. So there's the one. See it right there on the screen? Yeah.

So because you like manual data entry. Endless Google searches. Fear of Google searches Fear of. Yeah, it's still. Still working on the lingo. Asking strangers on the Internet.

Yep. So but here's what it said. Front of the can. Avoiding AI in cans and won'ts not in progress or efficiency. Side one here's what you won't do. Automate simple tasks because I like doing things the hard way. Save time on research because Google is good enough after 47 open tabs. Let IA help because it might take my job, but manually sorting Excel files for six hours is totally fine. Here's what we can't do for you. Increase productivity because staring at an empty screen, debating your next move is way more fun. Adapt to new technology because change is scary and paper filing cabinets are forever. Help you understand AI because refusing to read about it is easier side to manual Manual data entry because typing the same thing a thousand times builds character. Endless Google searches. Why use. Why use AI when I can spend 3 hours finding the answer myself? Fear of change Specially formulated to resist innovation at all costs. Now, part of this is funny, but part of this is real. This has happened. I know so many people, they just won't do any. They're like stuck in limbo and they're going to get fucked up. Yeah, they will if they're going to be, you know, in anything that uses cognitive skills and so paperwork hoarding because digital stories is too risky. Trusting an old filing cabinet just feels right. Asking strangers on the Internet why use AI when you can get 27 different conflicting opinions instead? Warning do not open can may cause unnecessary frustration and missed opportunities. Side effects prolonged confusion, outdated workflows and involuntary groaning when someone mentions chat. GPT not recommended for forward thinking individuals. Would you like to tweak or any sections or add more human? Which I would say yes, but the point is this is like the simple but you. I mean there are so many things that AI can do better than the vast majority of my team. It just can't when it comes to thinking. So we're doing our best to get the team to adopt this, not just for my own company, but for them. Because what's that saying? Who said it AI won't replace your job. It's someone using AI that's going to replace your job. And that has not sunk in yet. I think in the next six months it's going to become more apparent in a year from now, you know, you think two years? Yeah. So, but, but the thing is there's so many things. And then Kasum, you know, the. On about three weeks ago had me, you know, use chat, you know, operator, chat GP operator. And so. And I am an infant at this stuff relative. But most of my friends avoid this. Like, oh, like, like, oh, I don't want to get on the Internet. It's a different thing though. It's so much different than that. So I like what you said. I thought that was. And if someone has questions about it, we'll come back.

Can I give everyone my favorite learning that came out of Kajabi? So going along with my, my over promising and under delivering headlines, I would like to give everybody a $670 million in enterprise value driving campaign. So if you'd like that, here it comes.

Would anyone not like that? Okay.

It's good. I mean, these are a lot of nice people. I didn't know if there'd be people that hated money.

They may, they may.

You never know. Dude, taxes, gotta pay them.

Yeah, no, it's true.

When we were at Kajabi, we stumbled onto what I would now call the recognition driven revenue flywheel in our business. So we started this idea that largely came out of understanding that online entrepreneurship is lonely. It's a tremendous amount of time in front of your screen. It's a tremendous amount of friends and family telling you you're an idiot. Nobody makes money online. Why don't you go get a real job? It very much is a journey where you're building something and putting it out into the world and hoping it works. And it's your faith that's powering it in those early stages. And so we wanted to be able to recognize people on that journey. And Kenny named it one day, just, he's like, oh, Kajabi Hero. Like, yeah, totally. Kajabi Hero program. So we started and we designed a T shirt that said hashtag kajabihero. And when you earned your first thousand dollars on the platform, we sent you a T shirt. Started off, you know, modest enough T shirts going out and Then all of a sudden these T shirts started showing up on all of these social media channels and people were posting about got a T shirt from Kajabi. I use Kajabi for my business. I'm on this platform called Kajabi. And all of a sudden it was like, well, what. What if we added a hat after the T shirt for ten grand? And what if we added a hoodie after the hat? So this program, over the course of 2016 to today, 2024, it now has grown into 15 or more different levels of recognition. And every single time we would recognize somebody, they would talk about us. So this is where the recognition component comes in. Key element of this is what is the transformative value proposition of your business and what are the most impactful points in that journey, hopefully paired with ascending price points or achievements that you can recognize somebody in a unique way. That's the unlock there. We then have our Kajabi partner program. And our Kajabi partner program is we're going to pay you commissions for referring people to the platform. So we all of a sudden have these two programs that are existing that all of a sudden begin feeding each other that as we recognize somebody on their Kajabi journey, it's. It endeared them to our platform and they start referring people to us. And as they start referring people to us and their platform success grows, we're able to then recognize them again, which then grows into more earned and owned media for them to point more people to the partner program, which then is more success for them pointing back to the recognition program. Now, why am I telling you that that's a $670 million in enterprise value unlock? That is because that from 2016 till this very day, which I found out in our last board meeting, which was shocking to me, it is still our most successful acquisition funnel. We've tried everything. We got all the money. I can tell you about how we were losing a million dollars a month back in the day on paid media. That funnel today still accounts for 33% of subscriber additions every single month. It has accounted for 33% of the revenue of the company. And the unit economics, which is a fancy SaaS way of saying how those people perform, how long they stay play and pay on the platform, the unit economics of that channel are the best channel we have. So if you are not recognizing people on the journey with you and you are not having them refer you and continuing to have that feed each other, you're missing out on what was the single largest promotional unlock in the history of Kajabi as a creator commerce platform.

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