From Agency Hustle to an Exit: The AI-Native GTM Playbook

When people go, hey, is AI going to help us or is it going to hinder us? It's definitely going to help us because the output from each human is tenfold. The ones that know how to use it. The ones who don't know how to use it, they are going to be— Then they are going to be— The problem with AI is when the Industrial Revolution came. So let's go back to, you know, 200 years ago when everybody was riding horses and then the cars came, right? The horses got replaced by cars, but the horses were— they had vets, they had blacksmiths, they had the shovelers of the crap, right? All those guys got replaced by mechanics and tire fitters and all that. There was a job that they went to that they could be replaced with. With AI, there is no job you can go to once you get replaced. And even upskilling, you're competing against other things. So yeah, that's my views on AI.

Guest Johann Nogueira. Am I saying your name right, Johann?

Yeah, Johann Nogueira.

Johann. Okay. So Johann has a very interesting background. I've been listening to some of his podcasts and recently he went through a wonderful exit and I thought this would be a great time for agency builders, companies who are building services and software together should, you know, to be very, you know, very insightful conversations with Johann today. His background, and we'll touch upon that a little bit on his LinkedIn profile. Johann, I saw that you have a PhD in agricultural sciences and, you know, I haven't met anyone with an agricultural science background to be an entrepreneur, but yet you have done 3 startups. You have, you've been a serial entrepreneur for some time now, more than 20 years of experience building tech ventures. And with your recent company, I think you have about 2 or 3 companies now. The co-founder of White Label Suite, which got acquired, or Comet Suite that got acquired. And you specialize in various AI-native GTM workflows and acceleration growth. So tell us a little more about your background, Johann. It's very, very interesting.

Yeah, yeah, for sure. So 21 years ago now, I was doing the PhD and my professor came up to me and said, hey, keep going, and in 10 years you'll be at my level. And I said, wow, that's fantastic. You know, this guy's traveled the world, speaks on stages, you know, it's top of his industry. And I went, this is who I want to be. And then I asked him how much money he made and he told me and I went, oh my God, okay, cool. I need to make a change. Because, you know, it's on a science, you do science for love. And so I said, okay, I need to start a business. And so I started going down the whole self-development route and learned all about, wow, I can control my own destiny. I never had that before, right? Coming from the background that I have, I have an Indian background and parents just want Engineers, lawyers, doctors, you know how it is. And so I said, okay, I'm gonna be an entrepreneur. And I started my business and the business made more money than my professor did in 6 months. And it took me an hour a day to run. And I learned the power of leverage. So having a system working for you while you're doing whatever you're doing is the easiest and quickest way to build wealth. So I built this company and then I built 6 more of those. And yeah, it was a Pretty awesome time in my life. Then 2000 and well, 2004, 2006, I launched a well, I got into affiliate marketing because that was all the rage back then. And so I learned how to do media buying because affiliate marketing is essentially media buying. You get paid on generating leads and you get paid when a sale is made. Eight CPA marketing came out, which is cost per acquisition. So every time we generated leads, we would get paid not just. On a sale, but on a lead, which was amazing. So now, 2008, Google was like the cheapest source. We were buying leads for 5 cents, 10 cents, 20 cents. Like, you can't get that now. It's $60 for the same types of leads that we were buying. So it was when the industry was very young. And then I built a digital agency. The digital agency ended up having 100 employees. And it was, we used to take companies, we used to grow them, scale them. And so we had this amazing team. But 100 employees is a lot of stress because back then I didn't have the right systems to have this much. Well, we had big overheads, we had project managers, we had account managers, we had our clients, our staff, and at the end of the day, it all was down to me. So it was great, but it was one of the most stressful times in my life when I look back on it right now. We ended up building because we started off as a digital agency. We ended up becoming specialists in platform development. So, we ended up building all these amazing platforms and like power plants, et cetera, like the tech behind it, building management systems. And I love the building space, building technology. So, we ended up building a building management system, a mobile app for buildings, and we grew that company to $20 million in 4 years. And so, we exited that in 2019. And then 2021, we bought 8 different companies. We put them all together. We created Comet Suite, which then became White Label Suite a year later. So Comet Suite was the first inception of it. And it was all those 8 companies plugged into HighLevel and then selling that as a package. Now explaining one of those technologies by itself is people go, whoa, but trying to explain 8 different technologies in one shot is their eyes were glazing over. They're like, wow, you sound like you do a lot of stuff, but I have, don't have the capacity to take this on. Anyway, so our pivot came when somebody said, hey, you guys are growing. And we were growing and, you know, we got to $50K MRR very, very quickly. And I think it was 3 months. People started saying, how are you guys doing this? We said, well, it's our lead generation tool. This is how we're doing it. And they said, can we white label the lead generation tool? Because this is the GoHighLevel ecosystem. And I said, white label it? What do you mean? We just spent millions acquiring this company. You want me to let you white label it for a couple of hundred bucks? This is crazy. Crazy. So that was on a Friday. And then my business partner and I were sitting down and there's no, no good, no interesting story started where with, hey, I was sitting down having a salad, right? We were sitting down, we were having a rum. And I think I was 2 rums in when I said, why don't we do this white label thing? And he's like, sure, hold my beer. Let me, let me get it done. And by the end of the weekend, he white labeled the entire platform. And we launched it, and that week we onboarded 100 new clients. By the end of that week— by the end of the next week, we onboarded 200. By the end of the month, it was 500. So—

Wow.

We got to 4,500 clients, and that's the— that's, that's what we— that's what we did. And it's just, it's just epic, like the stories that people have. We've got a folder with more than 800 different testimonials of how people use the technology. So technology, we call it stem cell technology. When you give people the They can literally take it and create these amazing things that you cannot imagine of what they created. And so we've got all these amazing stories. So that's the company that we've exited, and it's been a wild ride. Like, and on the back of that, you know, HighLevel themselves, we are— we've been in that ecosystem for the last 5 years watching them grow. They've grown to a billion-dollar company now in 5 years with 110,000-something, uh, you know.

Using your technology in the backend? No,

no, no, no, no. No, no, no, no, no. That's all on the bigger we got because the more people they brought into the ecosystem, the more people got exposed to our software, the more people saw it, the more people wanted it. And so that's the secret to our growth. There you go. I've given it away. Yeah. And so we love sharing stories on how people can grow and scale. And so we wrote the book. We wrote this book which is called The Unofficial Playbook for GHL Agencies. And we did an event. We had 2,000 people at the event. It's been Pretty crazy. So that in a nutshell, my friend, I've given you 21 years of story, my story with all the good stuff. I haven't talked about all the bad stuff. There's always bad stuff that happens. Business is life.

It goes up and down. Happy to share those stories as well. So Johann, I think, you know, maybe let's double down on one of the things. I mean, what's interesting, and we have a lot of SaaS founders, growth leaders listening to this particular podcast and This is wild. You built, you built an agency and then you white-labeled it and made it as a product. And then that got, you know, that got so many customers in a span of about 3 to 4 months. That's not even how typical B2B SaaS companies even worked. Even companies who went really wild, like Apollo and Clay, Even they took a very long time, you know, to get to those kind of numbers. Tell the story behind what was the motivation. Maybe let's double down on what were you and your founder or co-founder thinking about why should you white label it? You were going good, $50K MRR. Why did you even venture out, you know, to become a white label product?

Yeah, because people said, hey, we want this technology now. We got to go back a little bit. And why do we, why do we do business? So let me give you our philosophy of business. We believe that government's trying to control the world, right? But businesses change the world. If there is a successful business, what happens? That business employs people. When you employ people, you are creating good in the world. If you pay them more than the award, more than the base rate, they're happy. When they're happy, when they go home, they raise their kids properly without stress. A household without stress leads to children that are innovative, and they— the innovative ones turn into leaders, and then leaders turn into business owners. And so that's, that's the, that's the why behind what we do. And so how do we do that? Like, we could, we could easily say, hey, we're not giving this technology to anybody, we're going to keep it, and we could keep on growing, no issues. But that's our, that's our little Yay, we win. But here we have thousands of people winning all day because of our technology. And it's business is how much value you add to the marketplace. So that's the scorecard. So the more value we add to the marketplace, the bigger that scorecard is, the bigger the number is. It's the reward. It's the laws of karma, right? And so that's what we believe as well. So the more we can add into the marketplace, the more value, the more happy people there are, the better the whole— everybody wins. And so one of our little catchphrases— we run events all the time— one of our catchphrases is, a rising tide lifts all ships. Why? Because when we learn, when we share all of the stuff that we've learned and shared, we don't— you can't learn this in university. You can't learn these strategies in, you know, books. This is learned through peer-to-peer sharing, listening to podcasts, listening to YouTube, listening to people who are there willing to share their knowledge because they know that knowledge shared— if I share my knowledge with you, I've not lost anything. We've both gained because we're going to have a great discussion. So that's why we do what we do.

That's the eternal philosophy. It looks like, Johann, you might be— maybe the next venture might be even an NGO doing a social cause. I mean, this is just philosophically wonderful. I haven't heard any founders talk about the entrepreneurship creates a better society, right? Most of the times entrepreneurs will talk about we've We've grown, you know, we've tackled problems, we've made a lot of money, we changed how businesses run, we made impact to the customers, but nobody really talks about the social, social functions of it. So compliments to you on that line of thinking.

Thank you, man. And in terms of money, so let's talk about money for a second. You know, people say money is the root of all evil. Other people say, hey, we don't, we don't talk about money in those terms. We say anybody who says Money is— money doesn't make you happy has not given enough money away. Because when you see the happiness and joy when you can give to somebody who's underprivileged, it changes your world. So we've got a company that we support called B1G1. Now, B1G1 was started by Paul and Masami. People can go look them up, b1g1.com. Masami was— they were walking through a shopping center and they see this dude who's got this big giant TV that he just bought. And Masami said, hey, wouldn't it be amazing if that guy's going to go and enjoy watching this TV? What if somebody on the other side of the world got the gift of eyesight? And so it's like, wow. And so they built a platform called B1G1. And then through this, like every transaction that happens, say you and I, say you went to buy a movie ticket. Let's just use that as an example. You buy a movie ticket, you've bought it, you've gone to watch the movie and you get a a text message saying, Guru, just because you came and watched the movie, we've actually given eyesight to another person in another country. Like, that is rewarding, right? So through that, they've now made 391 million lives impacted through that platform. So why did I tell you this story? We built another business called Business Authorities, businessauthorities.com. And this is all about getting the right people on stages. And it's not people who are designed to extract money from the crowd, you know, the trained NLP speakers and all that. This is real business owners. who have lived it, who have built it. When I was enjoying this beautiful success with my other company, unfortunately, 3 of my friends, they committed suicide in a 6-month span. And I just went, geez, like, this is crazy. So I started calling up and just one of the guys, you know, 500 people were at his funeral. And you're like, wow, that one person made this one decision, a lot of impact on 500 people over here. Yeah. If being a business owner, one decision can change the trajectory of your entire life. And so, like, I've had the pleasure to be able to be surrounded by amazing mentors. And we know how just that reframing or changing the mind can change your entire direction. So I said, I don't want any of my friends to have— make that the ultimate decision. So I started calling up all my friends and saying, hey, how's business? You know, what's going on? And all of them, business had plateaued. Business is hard. I'm relying on a few key projects. I'm so far behind on my taxes. Hey, my wife is complaining I don't spend time with her, but if I don't do what I got to do, she's getting, you know, she's not going to have a house to live. Like, she doesn't understand. All that kind of stuff. Those were the main common themes. So I said, wow, these people are doing it hard because people get into business why? Because of a passion, right? They're passionate about something. They go, I can add value, I can get paid. Wow, this is amazing. But then they don't realize all the other stuff that comes along with running a business. And so that's why Business Authorities was built. We built it and we said, hey, come, it's a 2-day event, we're going to teach you everything to build, grow, and scale your company. And everybody who came from that— so this is a tiny company, we had 150 people at the launch, we had 3,000 members by the end of year 3— just that tiny little company impacted more than a million lives because all the money that we made from that company we gave to different causes using the B1G1 platform. A million lives impacted just because of This tiny little company. So imagine if all the different companies banded together and helped, how many lives could we change?

That's, that's an interesting thing. We, we, um, not as, as big as you guys, but we, we are thinking in terms of planting a tree for every customer that we win, and we support that, you know, through amilliontrees.org. But I think, you know, I love, I love the inspiration that you're providing here. Can I double down into something that you mentioned a little, little It's extremely difficult for someone to think like you in terms of white labeling. You know, I'm sorry, I'm still stuck there. The reason for that is not, not many people will think about— most entrepreneurs will actually think about getting customers first themselves rather than going through a partner channel. White labeling essentially becomes a partner channel. So could you double down a little bit on how did you find more and more such partners? And, you know, and how did you manage the conflicts that arise From you losing control of the product itself because the partners essentially are trying to bring their own stuff, right? Every partner has their own quirks and qualms. Instead of you focusing on the product, you're focusing now on the quirks and the qualms of the partner. Tell us a little about, you know, how does this white labeling business in general work? Go ahead.

So, as I said, we piggybacked off HighLevel. HighLevel is the biggest white label CRM in the world right now. And as they're growing, beautiful ecosystem. So we joined this ecosystem, and so we were we were in it as a customer. So we white labeled it, and that's how we launched Comet Suite. And then because they allow plugins, so we plugged in these eight companies that we bought and their technology into Comet Suite. And then from those eight, as I said, the people were going, "Whoa, dude!" Just just explaining high level to somebody, you know, to a business owner going, "Hey, we're going to do your emails and your SMSs and your voice," and and their eyes are glazing over funnels, etc. They're going, "This sounds like too much." And then on top of that, I go, "Hey, by the way, we can do your." Lead generation. We can do that. They go, sounds like too much stuff. I'm gonna put it off for three months. A confused mind never buys, right? But out of those eight, the one thing the people who did buy, the one thing that they all said that they used was they loved the lead generation platform.

Lead generation.

So we went, great. So then we started using our lead generation platform, saying, hey guys, we're going to set up your funnels. We're going to do your SEO. We're going to do your marketing. By the way, we've got this lead generation platform which you can have access to. And they didn't care about anything else. They just cared about the lead generation platform because they could go in there and go, find me all the property investors in New York who believe in impact and et cetera. And they had them and then they could close the deals. So that lead generation platform became the most valuable tool in our toolkit. So we would always lead with that. We had closing calls down to 7 minutes. So as soon as somebody got on the phone, within 7 minutes we had a sale. That's how good— Wow. That, that's how good the tech is, that when we showed it to people, they just went, wow, this is amazing. And across the last 5 years, 26% of people have never heard of this type of technology. So in our space, people have heard of things like ZoomInfo, Apollo, et cetera. The masses, the normal business owners have never heard of this type of technology. To them, it was magic. What do you mean I can just type in business coaches in Dallas and get all the business coaches? Yes, you can. Here you go. Wow, this is mind-blowing stuff. So that's the, that's the product. And so then when we decided, a lot of the people in the ecosystem, they're all, they're all building these massive businesses on GoHighLevel. So they've got big reach, big distribution. And so the decision to go, hey, we'll white label it, was, hey, we can get distribution through these other channels, channel partners. And so we did. And so once we got that distribution, then you're right. The biggest problem we had was people were selling it how they wanted to sell it, and then they started getting complaints, and then they started asking us for more development because they're going and promising something that they, they could never promise. And they're like, yeah, yeah, we'll build that in. I'm like, dude, you don't control the product. You can't go, you can't go and say we're going to add something in when without talking. Right. So that's, so that's something that definitely had to happen. So what we did to combat that was we showed them We built boundaries. We said, this is what you can say, this is what you can't say. Here's the guidelines and here's the presentations. We gave them white label presentations, white label videos. We made their job as easy as possible. And so through giving them that control of everything that they can and cannot do and how to do it and the material to do it made their lives a lot easier. Yeah, that's the answer to that.

Yeah, and I kid you not, Johann, You know, to all the listeners, you know, Johann and I, we are part of the same group called RevGenius. And, you know, we are acquainted with, you know, technologies like ZoomInfo, Clay, and whole bunch of things. But I think, you know, for many of the listeners, you know, especially if you're in the industrial manufacturing, healthcare, you know, technologies where you can type in, you know, your prospects, you know, some kind of a firmographic, say, for example, give me plumbers in New York. That's very rare, right? Uh, it's, it's very, very rare. Let me follow up with the question, Johann. You mentioned about growing the company, adding more and more employees. Uh, and I've been asking this for some time to most of the entrepreneurs now. What do you think in the next 6 to 8 months' time, will AI essentially stall the growth of a company? Uh, sure enough, they can book more revenues because of the AI, but do you think that growth By adding more employees is coming, coming to an end almost? Or you think that there is space for— how do you think about growth, company growth, which is different in terms of revenue growth versus the employee growth?

Yeah, so the, the, I have an interesting view on this and it's because of what we do right now. Our company output, like we have 20 people, the output is 100 people. Because they are all AI-enabled. We encourage using AI all day, every day. Now we are— yeah, so in answer to your question about company growth, before going, who can we employ, we go, what kind of skill sets do we need? What is the end outcome? How much of that can AI do? Literally now we are building out virtual teams where we can say, hey, I need a marketing proposal done for this so-and-so person. Here's the details. And before I can even, you know, I hang up and then I go get a glass of water, come back, the proposal is done.

Done.

I'll give you another example. A friend comes over and he says, hey man, I lost my job. So he lost his job in December and he works for the government over here in Australia. He was getting paid $300,000 and he's in the marketing area. And so he said, hey, I finally got another job. a job, a job interview. I said, okay, cool, you know, this is great. And so he's— he went through depression because 3 months unemployed, he's given the government 13 years of his life and they just flicked him off like that. And so— and he's used to a nice salary, right? $300 grand. So I said, okay, cool, what happened? He goes, I've got 2 interviews. I said, what happens if you don't get the job? He goes, I'm gonna go back to gigging. I go, okay, cool, what does that look like? Well, he goes, well, I can do projects, marketing projects. I go, okay, give me an example. And he said, okay, I can build a brochure and it costs $10,000. And I said, how long does it take you to build that brochure? He said, 2 months. I said, okay, wow. Okay, give me an example of a company that you do this for. And he gave me an example. I put it into my— I use Manus, it's one of my favorite AIs. I put it into Manus. I said, build me a brochure. Here's some specs. Literally 30 seconds of a prompt, press generate, and boom, the brochure was done. And this guy's sitting there going, oh my God, this is insane. That's a $300,000 job that's gonna build 6 brochures in a year, which the AI can do right now. So you asked me, what do I think about growth? As much as, yeah, I love people, I am a people person, I'm a networker, I love amazing humans. Humans that are powered up with AI, they're gonna be unstoppable. The ones who do not embrace it, do not use it, they're gonna be replaced very quickly. And most companies have so much bloat. They have so much wastage in their, their staff, et cetera, that they are going to have to optimize in order to become competitive. And so that, I believe, is going to 100% happen in the next 6 to 12 months where they start going. But there are already freezes now over here in Australia. Companies are not hiring many more because they're trying first trying to figure out how much can AI do in the space instead of going, let's hire a person to do that job. And even, you know, the most basic thing, receptionists, putting an AI receptionist into businesses all day long, people are happy to pay $15,000, $20,000 setup for that and $2,000 or $3,000 a month because they don't have to pay the staff to sit there and answer the calls. They don't have to pay super, 401s, all of those sorts of things, plus all the, all the other things that come along with it, you know, leave, et cetera. You've got to—

You have to do the CapEx. and before the ROI comes in. So you're absolutely right on that one. Sorry, go ahead.

Yeah, that's it. But when people go, hey, is AI going to help us or is it going to hinder us? It's definitely going to help us because the output from each human is tenfold. The ones that know how to use it. The ones who don't know how to use it, they are going to be— then they are going to be— the problem with AI is when the Industrial Revolution came. So let's go back to, you know, 200 years ago. When everybody was riding horses and then the cars came, right? The horses got replaced by cars, but the horses were— they had vets, they had blacksmiths, they had the shovelers of the crap, right? All those guys got replaced by mechanics and tire fitters and all that. There was a job that they went to that they could be replaced with. With AI, there is no job you can go to once you get replaced. And even upskilling, you're competing against Other things. So yeah, that's my views on AI.

Let me ask you maybe a slightly counter question. You know, just before I got onto this, you know, to the podcast, I asked Gemini and Claude and, you know, ChatGPT the same question. This is what I asked. How many lead generation products and marketing agencies are there? Gemini responded with 7,963 all over the world. That's 7,963 companies which are either products for lead generation or their services or marketing agencies who have something like this on the website. Claude essentially, you know, put that to 12,000 plus. I'm not sure where that number is, you know, it's, it's so big. So if even the small segment of lead generation is going to be done by AI, wouldn't you assume that It's not just the employees within the company that are getting affected. It's the entire suite of companies, entire plethora of companies which are in that particular segment are going to be wiped out. Who's going to come to, come to and talk to a marketing agency if this happens in reality? It's still far away from there. But if they can ask a question on ChatGPT and say, hey, give me 10 plumbers in New York, you know, or, you know, 10 You know, roofers in Seattle. If they're able to go ask that to regular, you know, searchable products like Gemini or Google, you know, or, you know, or ChatGPT, would there be a role for these marketing agencies? Would there be a role for these tools, even ZoomInfo included?

Great, great question. So I was doing a presentation to 200 business owners a couple of months ago. I asked a very simple question. Who here is using Facebook ads or Google or any form of paid advertising to generate business? Out of the 200, how many put their hands up? Have a guess.

Probably 2 or 3.

3. You nailed it. That's 1.5%.

Yeah.

So it doesn't matter that we have access to all these tools. The percentage of companies that use them and use them the way we know how to use them is In the 0.001%, and so these services will always exist. We've always Facebook ad agencies came out in 2006; they're still around. There's still demand. Yes, Facebook is trying very hard to try and you know make it user friendly so I can tell Manus, hey, go launch me an ad campaign. But guess what? The business owner has not been trained in advertising, has not been trained in direct copy, you know, direct response marketing, hasn't been trained in the funnels, the emails, etc. They just know that they've got. For example, an excavator that they need to rent out to people. They don't know how to do all the other stuff. So yes, the tools can do anything. Literally, the tools that we have now can replace anyone and everyone, but it's who's going to operate them, who's going to— who knows, who has the foundations to do that. And I believe that the people who are above 40 years old are right now the most dangerous people on the planet because they have lived through the internet. The dawn of the internet. They've lived through the GFC. They've lived through the dot-com boom. Well, that was back then. And then after that, everybody got mobile, right? I remember a big revolution with mobile. And now we have AI, and AI has been around for 3 years. And it's those ones who know how to— that have the right foundations. They know how to leverage this. They know how to take it and scale it very quickly. So if you're above 40 years old, you have the best chance to create generational wealth with the tools that we have because you have the right foundations.

Yeah, I think, you know, on the other, on the flip side of it, the younger generation, kids who are just graduating from colleges, you know, they'll probably have a very bad time ahead. You know, they don't have the foundation, as you rightly said, but they also don't have the know-how of how to build things appropriately. Maybe that's a question for some other time, some other day. Let me ask maybe a couple of questions. I know we will be at the fag end of, you know, of the time. I'm going to switch to maybe some rapid-fire questions, right? How about that?

Before you do, before you do, I'd love to tell you that the kids these days are empowered by their parents. So I hang around with a lot of CEOs who've spent $40,000 or $50,000 on their kids' education, and they say the same thing. What are the kids going to come out to do? They can't be accountants anymore because all of those jobs are going to be replaced by AI. They can't So my passion is AI and robotics. The robots are coming next year. We are building the programs for the robots right now. The robots will be able to do the maintenance. They can lift 200 kilos. So all those manual jobs are going. So blue jobs, blue-collar jobs are going. The white-collar jobs are going. I don't know if you've seen things like Harvey AI, et cetera. All the lawyers are just, they're freaking out. Kids.

Car legal's finally.

Yep. My kid, my son is 10 years old, my daughter's 8 years old. They're both entrepreneurs already, right? So my son, he goes on to— and so we have an exercise every Saturday. We'll sit down, we'll build a world. And so behind me, I don't know if you can see, but there's lots of games. I teach through games. I bought games. We're a gaming household. And so we sit down and we build our universe. And I said, okay, cool, let's create a universe. You know, you've got 9 planets and what's the ecosystem like, et cetera. And so we described this. We just imagined up a whole universe. He turned that into a book series. And then from the book series, he's like, cool, what do I do with this now? Like, it's a beautiful, like, fully animated and everything. I said, now we can put that on Amazon, we can sell it for $20 a pop. And I showed him how, and he goes, hmm, I'll come back to you in 5 minutes. So he goes and he goes on Google and he goes, hey, Dad, there's about 1,800 students just in this little area with these 3 schools. I was like, okay, he just figured out his TAM, right? He goes, now if 50% of them buy it and we can also do a charity thing and then we can do it in the fundraiser. And he comes back with, okay, so he's 10 years old. By my calculations, when we launch this book, and this is one book, he's got 7, he goes, this book is going to generate me $24,000. I went, yep. And so he's getting ready to build all the marketing material to go to the schools where he can say, hey, here's your fundraiser, here's blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And I'll print, I'll ship, I'll take care of everything. You don't have to do anything. By the way, who's printing and shipping? It's Amazon. He's just going to get Amazon as his fulfillment partner, right? 10 years old. So I think that the kids that are born into this technology is going to be— they're going to be the most incredible entrepreneurs because they don't have this. We used to take— I used to load up Dreamweaver and sit there and build, you know, and it would take me 6 months to build something that was even remotely beautiful. And now in seconds we can build— in a week we could build an entire business from scratch and have it launched and in market. So, yeah.

Yeah. I mean, if a dad is a hustler, the kids would be a hustler. So, I think, you know, hustling is the only way forward. You know, this is amazing. This is amazing. So, let me switch over to maybe some rapid-fire questions, you know, and let's see how this goes. So, maybe, you know, the first one is, would you start imagining a 2-people company with a billion-dollar business done within a year's time? Do you think that's going to be a reality soon? Yes, no?

So I heard it from Sam Altman about 2 years ago when he spoke about it, and that's been my dream. And so me and my business partner have always been, how can we make this a reality? And now with the tools that we have, 100% is definitely doable.

Wonderful. Okay, so maybe the next question there is, if it's a 2-people company, um, are people going to talk to people to buy things, or are people going to talk to websites and agents to buy things? Meaning Is the sales function pretty much dead or not? What do you think?

I had a book here, but it's just disappeared. And it's gone from just B2B and B2C to A2A, agent to agent, agent to person. It's now gone from 2 to 16 different modalities of sales. And so I will be giving my AI the— I'll say, hey, for example, right, go on my Facebook, see all my friends who are having birthdays and send them all gift baskets. And you've got, you know, $100 per person as a budget or whatever it is, and the AI will go and do it. So the AI is going in doing the research, and it'll probably talk to Amazon's AI and go, hey, I need these 20 things done, and they'll get it done. 100% that agents are going to be talking to agents, AI is going to be talking to humans. In fact, in our company, we already have people talking to AI, and they are more truthful with the AI than they are with the humans. Because when they're talking to a salesperson, they're beating their chest saying, I make 40% profit on my product. And then when they talk to our AI, you know, a month later, they've forgotten that they had this conversation. They'll say, I make 10%. Exactly.

Yeah. So I think, you know, maybe the follow-up question is, if that's going to be the reality, and if you think that entrepreneurship is going to be the primal way for success, you know, your story being a highlight there, what would most of the masses do if they can't find employment?

Yeah. That's, that's been argued. We've been watching so many different things on it. You're talking about universal basic income and all this stuff, but it comes down to when you give— let's look at what the world has— history repeats itself, right? As soon as the government does a handout and they give— so example, we had COVID over here and they gave everybody, I don't know, $2,000 or something like that. What did everybody do? They went and upgraded their TVs and they just went and spent it and they were $2,000 less again anyway. And the entrepreneurs made all the money. And so they banked it. Same thing's going to happen. They're going to give everybody universal basic income. Those people are going to spend it, and the people at the top will keep being the people at the top because it's a mindset thing, not a society thing.

Yeah. So you heard it. Johann is also about UBI now. So this is great. So thank you so much, Johann. Any final recommendations or any advice to the listeners?

What a time to be alive. This is the greatest time in history to be alive. You have all the tools to create generational wealth. You have all the knowledge. You have everything. There is no excuse to not succeed and to build whatever you want to build. So go ahead, you have everybody's permission. Go do what you got to do. Talk soon. Thank you for having me, Guru.

Thank you so much, Johann. There you go. It's Johann Nogueira. Sold his company. Very, very likely he's going to be a monk traveling the world for the, for the next, uh, next upcoming days. If you happen to be here in Seattle, love to host you. Thank you so much.

Thanks, man. Appreciate you.