The Sweaty Startup Guide To A $100K Creator Business

So here's the truth that a lot of online creators don't want to hear. The fastest path to revenue is not through digital products or passive income. That means it's not your digital course, it's not your Notion template, it's not your sponsorship deal. It's not your dream of waking up to coffee with nothing to do, living on $800 a month in Bali. The fastest path to real revenue is trading your time for money, especially for something that you're already really good at. Today on the show, I'm talking with Nick Huber, Mr. Sweaty Startup himself, who has become famous for calling out the Silicon Valley fantasy. Nick just wrote a book titled The Sweaty Startup about how boring businesses are the best path to revenue and profit. He'll also show you how doing real practical work is the differentiator between people who are making it and people who are just making it up. We talk about why online creators— that includes people like me and you and Nick as well— often ignore the most direct route to cash service businesses. Client work, and consulting. Nick's built his empire by leaning into this mindset, and he's here to show you how to start simple, scale smart, and yes, make a lot more money. Let's go ahead and get into it. Nick, I just went through your book, and you and I have known each other for a long time, so this is going to be a fun conversation. But the thing that really stood out is like you talk about sweaty startups, Boring Businesses. And the thing that stood out to me is we on this show mostly talk about digital businesses, digital products, offers, but applying that sweaty startup mindset to digital businesses. Can you talk about like how you think about that and how people like should just like, don't worry about building something big or crazy or new. Like there's lots of money out there waiting for you.

The book is an official call out to the Silicon Valley entrepreneurship culture that is The internet, social media, Shark Tank, biographies. You run into a normal person on the street and ask them what entrepreneurship means to them, and they're going to talk about new ideas, raising money, new inventions. They're going to mention entrepreneurs like Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg. When in reality, we look around our world at people who are doing really well, people who are eating at the nice restaurants, people who are doing what they want to do, playing golf, traveling, having the big beach house in Hilton Head or on 30A, wherever it is. Almost all of them started normal businesses. Now, do they have to be sweaty in town in-person businesses? No. It can be consulting agencies, it can be tech companies, it can be any kind of service business, but it doesn't have to be, hey, let's go raise $20 million and try to change the world. So frankly, I think that's a terrible route and Nobody should do it.

Yeah. I mean, this, this really struck me as I was going through the early copy because like even now, like I have a good-sized email newsletter. I have two separate, like $10,000-$15,000, $10,000-$15,000 subscriber newsletters. I've got over 100,000 YouTube subscribers, all of which are great. 60% of my revenue is still through service work and client work. And that's something that I don't think people like think about enough or stick with enough is like how profitable it can be. And someone will talk about a little bit more is like scaling yourself and like allowing other people to come along the journey and work with you. But I said I'm probably making, is that 60 to 70% of my revenue on services and it takes probably 30% of my time. Each month.

I think an amazing place to start in business is trading your time for money, whether it be internet work or in-person work. Trade your time for money, get paid $50, $100, then $300, and then where you, where you and I are, $500+ per hour for our, for our work and our, and what we're really good at. Then you bring people in and you delegate some of the tasks, and then you, if you're lucky, you can delegate some of the decisions and build a real company that can start to grow beyond you. But Man, the place to start is absolutely doing the work, man. Everybody forgets that step.

Yeah. And one of the other, one of the other things, especially for digital businesses, and I've talked about this on the show before, I've talked to countless people about this, is it's so much easier to find one person to pay you $1,000, $5,000, $10,000 than do like this launch culture. And you know, launches are great. I help a lot of people with launches, but If you're talking about trying to make your first $10,000, your first $5,000, first $1,000, having a clear service offer that you can give to one person for $1,000 or two people for $500 is so much more realistic than even trying to sell $10 mini courses or get 20 people to show up to your $50 workshop or download your Notion template. You only have to find one person.

I mean, I know people who have built massive companies where the average client is doing over $1 million of revenue with their company in a year.

Yep.

Goes all the way up from there, but starts with the high school entrepreneur who landscaped my neighbor's house and it was a friend of ours, a mutual friend of ours' son, and he got done with 3 hard days work and it's $600 profit. Is 18 years old, made $40 an hour. His friends are making, you know, $18.75 trying to work at Home Depot. So it's not too bad.

No, it's, it's not at all. And like, I know you talk about, like in the book you've talked about on social media, like what were some of your, what were some of your like early, like sweaty jobs or like trading time for money jobs that were you just like I know like we could talk about like the very, one of the very first stories that you shared is you were in your class at Cornell and people were putting together these like fancy decks and I'm gonna like raise all this money and I'm gonna create this like app or service or software that doesn't exist yet. And you're like, well, I'm gonna go make money and I'm gonna do this. So what was, what was that like?

Yeah, I mean, look, I, I, the end of my junior year. I got the bright idea to run around and pick up people's stuff up and putting it into my room to store it over the summer. Two weeks later, my business partner and I had $3,000 cash sitting on our bed in our dorm room. Two weeks later.

Yep.

So then senior year, I got real serious about entrepreneurship and dove into the culture and I start taking the classes and I go to this entrepreneurship class with a mentor of mine who passed on one of the best sales lessons I've ever gotten, but he He runs this class and all the kids in the class, 25 of them had new apps, new ideas, you know, plans to raise venture capital and change the world. And there I was, number 25, storage squad. And they're like, hey, where's your moat? And I'm like, what do you mean? They're like, what's going to make you different? Like, what's your TAM? What's your total addressable market? And I'm like, there's a company in Ithaca that makes $400,000+ a year. And I think the way they're doing it is bad. Yep. That's, uh, that's my plan, guys. I don't have a moat. Um, I'm gonna go out and make some money. I'm excited about going out and making some money. I think one of those other kids that I know of succeeded and did well. So in the book, I, I didn't really talk about her because she hit the lotto, but, but yeah, man, like here I am an entrepreneur and they're all in corporate America.

Yeah. And I think like, One of the things about entrepreneurship is that we do certainly get seduced by the 1% or even the 0.1% of success. And, you know, whether that is saying like, okay, my, my idea is going to be the one that does really well. Or even like, I know I've, you know, been, I've been in the situation where like, oh, I've had a few bad months or it hasn't been a good year. I'm going to turn it around. And like, that's like, you good entrepreneur, like, optimism as well. But like, what you're telling— what you're telling me, what the book talks about, I know what you talked about a lot, is like, why worry about being like the 1% or the 0.1% entrepreneur, like VC-backed, that is going to like go to the top, like maybe 1% of earners or world changers, when you can be super happy, way more balanced as a person making good to great money doing things that proven business models. You can see people out there who are already making money on this and there is more money out there to be made. Or you can take over a market just based on doing things better like you did with Storage Squad.

Business is not an Olympic gymnastics routine. You don't get extra money and extra points for doing really hard things. It's not a David Goggins workout. Like I wanted when I was 16, 15 years old, I wanted to be in the NBA. There are 9 guys, there are 9 white guys under 6'4" in the NBA. Wow. There's 400 guys on rosters or I don't know, 35 teams, 11 per team. Okay.

Yeah.

You know, about 400. There is 9 of them. What are my, what are my odds? People don't think about it. People don't think about that when they go to start a company. In, in business, you get to choose your competition. Do you want to play basketball against LeBron James? The Silicon Valley, you know, $20 million of venture capital funding, computer science degrees at Stanford. You want to compete against that and try to hit the 1 in 1,000 shot? Or do you want to compete against the guy in your town who has a fax machine on his desk and has a private jet sitting, sitting at the airport?

Right.

Yeah.

And I was thinking about one of the, one of the things that, one of the little games that I thought we could play in this is what, one of the things you talk about in the book is like getting that first $500 or that first $1,000. What are some things, and I didn't set you up for this at all, but what are some things that you either have or would be willing to pay $500-ish for? And what would you need to see from someone in order to like, be like, okay, I'm going to trust— I, I'm going to trust this person enough to follow through on their offer. I'll, I'll start first because like, yeah, I didn't set you up for this at all, so I'll let you think about it a little. But one of the things that I would and have paid $500-ish for is like thumbnail reviews and new thumbnail design for YouTube. Like titles and thumbnails are really important. So like I've paid people like, hey, go through my YouTube channel, give me things that I should be doing better for my thumbnails, ideas for titles, like basically a whole title thumbnail audit and like 2 or 3 variations or ways that you could see these thumbnails being better. For someone who's good at video editing, for someone who is good at even copywriting, for visual design, someone who just really loves YouTube and goes, goes hard on it. I'm happy to pay $500. I've actually paid over $5,000 for a whole YouTube audit. So that's like, that's something right there that I would and probably will again pay at least $500 for.

Yeah, I'd pay $5,000. Well, I had a problem recently. My nanny quit.

That's a problem.

It's a problem. And I would have paid somebody $5,000 to post the ad on Care.com. Interview and screen quality candidates, do a background check and reference check on those candidates, bring me and set up final round interviews. And then once they're done, make sure that they get CPR certified and, you know, ready to go at my house. I would've paid $5,000 for that.

Yeah. Yeah. So like a, you know, a nanny, like someone who kind of under, maybe you've been a nanny in the past or you've done a lot of babysitting or you just kind of understand childcare, and you're like, okay, I'm going to have a nanny vetting and placement agency. And what's interesting about that is like, yeah, you could have a, you could have like a national program for that. You could also just kind of have a really awesome regional business.

I could make $500,000 a year in Athens, Georgia doing that for people just at my country club.

Yeah.

Like that's, that's what people thought. But everybody's, this is, this is what I just don't understand about entrepreneurship, Matt. People's minds go towards. Oh no, instead of doing that, I'm just going to create a marketplace. I want to create a marketplace where nannies apply and people post their jobs and you have on-demand nannies. I'm like, okay, hold on a second. We have this business. It's a proven recruiting method and you're going to shake that up to make zero money. Okay. If it ain't broke, don't fix it. Go do the work, make the money. Um, I've gotten, I actually don't get invited anymore to do, uh, pitch competitions at UGA here in Athens, Georgia. No, because I don't add anything positive to those pitch competitions and I don't get it frankly, because these kids come up and they pitch their new business idea and I'm the guy in the corner. It's me and several other like angel investors and whoever else, some corporate America folks and sometimes some really accomplished entrepreneurs. And it's me on the end and these kids are up there pitching their ideas and one of them started pitching a recruiting company. Just, oh, the recruiting business is all messed up. Did you know companies pay $20,000 to $30,000 in recruiting fees to make a placement with a business or to get a candidate in the door and started with their company? I'm going to build a marketplace. I'm going to, you know, vet the candidates. I'm going to put them in a pool and then I'm going to charge a monthly subscription of $99.99, you know, $999.99 for them to get in, have access and find their people. I'm like, hold on a second. I raised my hand. I was like, why would you rather make $99 than $30 grand?

Right.

You're like, oh, well, it's innovation. I think the market needs disrupted. And I'm like, hold on, disrupted what? Corn Ferry made $2 billion last year in profit. What are we, what are we disrupting? And I just kept saying like, why, why, why, why? Simplify it, simplify it, simplify it. If it ain't broke, don't fix it. Make a good business model. And then they never asked me to come back.

Right. It's instructive to think about and realize, and we said it right at the beginning, there are so many proven ways to make money that like you could even take the, you could even take a type of recruiting service. Like that person could have just stood up and said, hey, recruiting services and placement is an amazing business. Did you know they'll often pay $30,000 just for placement? What I can do is make the best recruiting agency for like this particular topic or this particular type of, of market. Like, I'm going to have the best recruiting and placement agency for graphic designers and that's all I'm going to care about. And so whenever somebody needs a graphic designer, they're going to think of me and my business and we're going to charge, you know, whatever, whatever it is. And we're only going to work with like large enterprise companies that are— have already proven that they'll pay and we're going to give them better results and then we'll, we'll charge more money. Because they're getting such great results.

But, but nobody in the audience at the pitch competition is going to go, ooh, ah, good idea. My, I love the grandma test. Like go to your grandma and tell them, tell her your business idea or your mom or whoever. Tell them your business idea. If they say, ooh, wow, that's awesome. That's how you know it's a really bad idea. If they say, ooh, Nick, that's nice. That's how you know it's a good idea. That's nice.

I like it. So I know like we've kind of alluded to this a couple of times is, and we'll, you know, we're good for those of y'all listening, watching, we're going to bounce around a little bit. It's like you own, you own somewhere.com, which is a staffing and recruiting agency. I am a customer. Very happy customer of Somewhere. My VA, shout out to Jenny, is starting on Monday, Monday after we're recording this. And I'm, I'm really looking forward to this because one of the things that we've been talking about is once you have it, you have a business and it's growing and that's an excellent place to be. But then one of the things that often starts happening, and I've been, I've experienced this multiple times over the past 5 years, is the business kind of stops growing or growth becomes a lot more challenging and stressful because you're wearing all the hats, you're doing everything in the business. And so one, you're no longer doing— two things are happening. One, I've just— for me, I wasn't doing as much of the things that I enjoyed. And two, I also wasn't then driving as much revenue because I was like doing all these other things. And So talk about like how, like, talk about like how you see people often like using and leveraging assistants and other hires to either give them more freedom or, you know, ideally give them more freedom and also give them more like opportunity in their business to do the things that made them want to start the business in the first place.

There is nothing more difficult than having to hire somebody for $60,000 a year as your first hire when you're trying to grow your company.

Got it.

It's like, yeah, it's literally to the point where it's half of your earnings or more as a business owner to make that first hire. So I'll put in perspective, I have a real estate private equity company, Bolt Storage. We've raised $40 million. We bought $100 million for the storage. We got 60+ properties. I have 50 employees on my team. 6 of them are Americans. So my team has a $1.3 million a year overhead. My competitor in Atlanta who's running this company with 50 Americans in an office spending $5 million a year or more on overhead. I talked to another group the other day who has 11 employees and their annual overhead is higher than mine with 50 employees. And you can find head of sales in South Africa. You can find a CPA accountant in Egypt. You can find, we killer executive assistant with customer service or graphic design or media background in South Africa or Sri Lanka or the Philippines or Latin America. So it's just a less stressful way to scale and grow your business. And frankly, I own some internet companies too. Somewhere is a digital company. Our e-cost seg is growing very fast. It's a digital company. Our competitive advantage is that we are saving 80% on payroll because we hire all over the world.

Yeah. Yeah. And that, that part of reducing the risk, like if I had to hire someone like directly full-time, yeah, I'd be paying probably $45,000, $50,000. And that's just untenable. And it probably would be for at least another 2 years. And then what happens in those 2 years? Like, do I actually grow enough of a business? To make that less, less stressful or less risky. Maybe, maybe not. I don't know. And like, this is something like between, like, I have some other contractors, some in the US, some in the UK. And so like, for me, I now have a, usually a month-to-month payroll of like anywhere between $2,000 to $2,500. And for me, I'm like, okay. I just freed up like 15 to 20 hours a week for myself, which now I'm like, okay, I can, that's like one sponsored YouTube video that now I have time to go out and find and to, and to create. And I can do that over and over and over. That's one more like newsletter client that I'm working with on a retainer and having that ability now, like It just gives me so much confidence to do things that I'm good at and I know, like, drive revenue. Because me uploading replays to Circle or to Mighty Networks, me even, like, doing the first cut of editing for these videos.

Yep.

I mean, there are some tools that have made a lot of this easier, but it's still like, I could make a video that I know is going to drive revenue. I can do cold outreach that I know if I send 20 cold DMs or emails, I'm going to get 1 or 2 clients and that's going to be $2,000, $3,000, $4,000, $5,000. Or I could like do all these little things that I know I can hire out, delegate, and create more leverage.

I think your model and your playbook and your strategy is exactly what I recommend. As soon as you can't sell, as soon as you can't spend half your time selling and doing business development, it's time to hire.

Yeah. That's a great way to think about it. I don't know if I thought about it that clearly, but that's really great.

You go back to doing 50% or more of your work on growth, on stuff that's urgent but not important, on stuff to grow your company, on, you know, record once, write once and have it forever on these type of assets or on business development. You, if you can't work in the not urgent but very important part of your business because you're bogged down in tasks, it's time to make a hire and delegate. And when you can do it for $1,200 a month, there's very, very little risk.

Yeah. And also like, and we don't have to talk about like the whole Somewhere process, but another thing that offset that risk for me is like that 6-month guarantee.

Yeah. Like, by the way, if anybody does, if anybody does hire on somewhere.com, I don't want this to become a sales pitch, but I'm happy to give some folks a discount. Email me nick@sweatystartup.com. But yeah, man, guarantee the hires for 6 months. So if there's something that doesn't work out, we got your back.

One of the other things that I want to talk about with that is, and maybe you can coach me a little bit, is like, okay, so my VA starts on Monday. What do you, what do you do? What do you see like successful people do with their first hire with early delegation in order to make that a successful transition?

Yeah, I mean, the folks that are coming out of South Africa and Latin America and they can type fast, they're organized. They have a lot of potential to really kind of morph into a chief of staff. So they might be 6 months in and they're not only, you know, labeling and managing your inbox and making sure your to-do lists are in order and booking your travel and doing follow-up to your leads and doing billing to your leads and starting to do some things inside your business, but they're creating your board decks. They're creating reporting across one of your companies. They're doing HR. They're doing bookkeeping. Like the high-end limit of what these folks are capable of is just really, really, really surprising. So yeah, start, start giving her tasks and see what she, see what she's really capable of. Did you find somebody who has a media, a little bit of a media background with some video editing and audio editing skill?

Not a, I, I actually wasn't a, I had the, a guy that I work with in the UK that I have for a number of years. He's, he's handling a lot of that, but I really did, like you mentioned the chief of staff piece and I really was thinking of the hire in this way. I was like, okay, can I help and train this person over the next 6 months to a year? I even said to her during both of the interviews, I was like, I want you to kind of think of this like an air traffic controller also. Like things are coming in, things are going out. You're not the only person that I work with, that I collaborate with. And so like if something comes in from a, for a client, I'm gonna help you like understand this early on, but it would be great in 3 to 6 months if something comes in from a client, you just say like, oh, Tracy's supposed to do that. I don't even have to tell Matt. I was like, I know that's Tracy's job, or I know that's Andrew's job. Or when, like, say this podcast, like, finishes taping, that I just, like, leave it and I don't have to say, hey, Andrew, don't forget that I just did the show with Nick. You need to do, you need to do the edit. That Jenny is like, hey, Matt's interview with Nick just ended. Let's have that done by, like, Friday or Monday or whatever the turnaround time is supposed to be. And then if it's not done Monday, and she's like, hey, Andrew, what's the status of the edit? And she's like, just, you know, and I even told her, and this is something that like maybe it's just me, but I was like, hey, if I'm supposed to do something and I'm not doing it for whatever reason, like, I want you to come back at me and be like, hey, Matt, you like, this is an email that you said you needed to reply to personally, and it's been 2 days. You haven't replied. You have to reply to this. So like, I'm not— and this is something that I've You know, a couple of mentors have told me is like, don't make yourself like above feedback or like task assignment if that's the thing that you said that you wanted, wanted help with. So that, that part I thought was really like helpful and interesting for me as well. I will say like one of the things that I asked her about and like we use some of the training material for like during testing is like, hey, how, how well do you know AI? And she was somebody who like really stood out. In that, not just like, I think this is interesting and I've thought about and used AI a lot over the past several months, but looking to say like, I don't want to just know that you can write a half-assed prompt into ChatGPT and get something. Like, I want you to explain to me how you wrote the prompt that you did. I want you to explain to me like why you thought of it this way and how you gave it feedback. And she was the best at that by But yeah, I, that's the other thing. Like, I just, I want to know how people think like that is, this isn't just like a VA, a VA thing when I'm anytime that I've worked with people and even when I, when I coach people, I was like, just tell, tell me how you think about something. Like, I want to know your mental process, like your frameworks, not just like, oh, you gave me an answer. And this is something like we're getting that, not getting a little off track, but like you've taught, you've also talked a lot about, you You have, you talk a lot about parenting, you talk a lot about school, and we've talked about this personally offline a good bit also, but it's like, anytime I've been like talking to my nearly 10-year-old son also, I'm like, he does jiu-jitsu a lot and when he like win or loses in a competition or even like in practice training, I was like, well, why did you win or lose? Or like, and maybe, maybe you won., but your technique wasn't very good and maybe you lost, but your technique was awesome and somebody else was just more awesomer in that moment. I was like, I'm really trying to challenge him and I try and challenge myself and people around me. He's like, tell me how you think about something and how you got to this place and not just like, oh, well, here, here's the answer. Cause I think like growing up, people for me in school cared a lot more about just like, oh, well tell me the answer. And I think this is connected to entrepreneurship also. It's like, I want to know the process. Like, and it took me, like, I was probably like in my early 30s before I started figuring that out.

Yeah. When you do this with employees, two things happen. You get to see who, see how they think and see what they're capable of and potentially give them more work. And number two, they have, they get practice making decisions and think for themselves. Right. Same, same with kids. You know, people don't get enough practice. Like the answer in life is always one page back in the textbook. Look it up. Look up the answer. But life is not that way. So, you know, I love doing that same thing with employees. I do it all the time with my kids. Get a look into their mind, help them exercise this problem solving, help 'em exercise the decision making. And when you start, when the stakes are low, as the stakes get higher and higher, they get better and better at making decisions.

Mm-hmm. Yeah. The, another thing that I, I've been interested about, we've established that obviously you wrote the book. I love hearing about book writing process. So I'll preface it just, just a little. So like, I don't wanna like over ask something that you, you were just talking about this recently. You were just talking about this recently, but the, the way that I'll set it up is like, you're a prolific online writer and the difference between Writing online, I'd say for a newsletter, even shorter form, like for tweets versus writing a book and what the realization of like those two experiences is like.

Twitter and short form text flows from my fingertips. I have a gift that's a curse almost because I can't shut it off. I keep a little notepad by my bed and I write. I thought writing a book was gonna be the same. I start writing the book and very soon my editor tells me that, hey Nick, this is not going to work. This is not how we write a book. We need to start over. I had 200,000 words or no, 80,000 words. So almost 300 pages at this point. Wow. Like this is, this doesn't work. Like this is not how we write a book. I'm going to teach you how to write a book, but this ain't it. Um, we started over and over the next month, it was a humbling experience learning how to tell stories the right way. How to still maintain my clear and concise form of communication. But yeah, man, it was a, it was a humbling experience. And, and another thing is like short form writing, I can get instant feedback, right? I can write on Twitter and within seconds I see if people like it. I see how people are reacting to it. When I'm writing a book, I'm in my own mind for months on end and I don't know. So you go through these, through these, you know, dips and through these, you know, valleys of despair where you're like, damn, like, is anybody gonna want to read this? This is terrible. Who am I to write this? And you just have to overcome it and keep going. Yeah. And, but, but yeah, it was a, it was a great experience. I'm really glad I did it, but one of the hardest things I've ever done.

Yeah. And I'm sure that like challenge, that mental challenge is just amplified by getting difficult feedback. Front, like hundreds of, like tens of thousands. Is it like you said 200,000 words and they're like, no. Yeah.

I thought it was gonna be a combination of me just putting together my, my tweets.

Mm-hmm. That, that is not it. Yeah. I like Seth, Seth Godin. I mean, he kind of gets to make his own rules at this point, but like, I remember it and I've, I've even said out loud, it's funny you bring that up. To people in the past, like, well, you know, Seth Godin published a book just like putting all of his blog posts between like a hardcover. And I guess that's a Seth Godin rule, not a, not a, like the rest, the rest of us type, type of rule. Yeah. That's, yeah, that would be, that would be really challenging. I know, like mentally I'm, you know, personality-wise, I'm a little bit more, I'm, you know, more of a people pleaser, not as much of a people pleaser I used to be, but like. To be like, here's my thing, I did all this great work, and then be like, no, but, oh, that would, that would be really, that would be really crushing. I mean, like, I'm tough enough that I could rebound from it, but you talk about having that dark night of the soul and being like, well, someone already told me that this wasn't good enough. Is this any better?

I don't know. Yep. Yep. So, but then there's, then there's highs where you get done writing a chapter or you get done reading a chapter and you're like, damn. Like this is action-packed and I'm really, really proud of this. So it's a, it's a balancing act.

Yeah. What was your, what was your process? Did you have like a protected time, a process for writing?

Stressful thing about the whole book is that I sold my book to HarperCollins and got my contract on, in mid-October of 2023. Mm-hmm. About 2 weeks later is when Marshall called me and we started the process of me acquiring somewhere.com. Okay.

Yeah, that's, that's, that's a lot to happen at once.

Yeah. So would I have sold my book and committed to writing a book knowing that I was about to buy a $50 million company and raise $20 million and go down, you know, the, the route of, you know, taking over and growing and scaling the business? Mm-hmm.

Probably not. What are, what are some of the like nerdy writing details? Did you write in Google Docs? Did you, did you try and hit like a word count? Each day or like a couple of times a week? What was that process like?

Yeah, July of 2024 is when I got the majority of the work done, oddly. Okay. I wrote a chapter and I could write a chapter in 3 days and then I would spend 2 days shrinking that chapter by about 30% word count. Okay. So I was constantly bumping up against the fact that they told me they didn't want my book to be over 70,000 words.

Okay. Yeah. That's, that's not crazy long for, that's what I figured for a nonfiction book. Yeah.

Yeah. Okay. So I was, I was constantly trying to think of, okay, can we cut this? Okay. Can we cut that? How can we make this paragraph more concise? How can we make this story more concise? Which I think the readers are gonna appreciate, but it was really hard as an author.

Yeah. And something that you talked about that I appreciated, I could see it like once I heard, once I heard you say it, I could see it again in the book is like, there's been, there's been kind of a trend with nonfiction books and you know, Nat Eliason, right?

Yeah.

You know, you know, Nat, so yeah. Yeah.

Nat, Nat has talked about this book and Crypto Confidence.

Oh, it's, it's fantastic. Like I've recommended it to so many people. The thing that, and one of the things that I appreciate about Nat's writing and Paul Millard's a lot like this also is there's been a trend and it's probably just, you know, driven, driven by sales of like a lot of nonfiction books now are, I'm going to tell a story at the beginning and then I'm just going to like either retell that story or like provide more facts to support my story throughout the rest of the chapter. And so I like how, like you do include stories 'cause we as humans love stories, but then it's very like concise and actionable and like giving, giving advice that you can take action on sooner rather than later. Like based on the story and based on the analysis that you've done. Yeah. Was that something that. I think it's something that probably came natural to you, but like in the editing process, was that kind of hard to wrangle or did you get any feedback on that as like, hey, we want it to be in some kind of different format?

Yeah, like I wanted to, I had 40 stories that I thought were super impactful with a business lesson from each. Stories, half of them are my stories from the trenches and then half of them are stories of other entrepreneurs that I had to kind of reach out to and find a way to anonymize., you know, make the, make the story anonymous or if they wanted it or put their name in there if they wanted it or change a couple details so they weren't identifiable basically. So that process is something that I'm not quite used to, but I only ended up getting to use 29 of the stories.

Mm-hmm.

So I had to figure out which 11 stories were not as important. I'm excited. I'm excited to write a second book for sure.

Yeah. I, okay. So you, you do, you do wanna do a second one. You're gonna put yourself through this again now that you're gonna understand a little bit better.

I definitely think writing a book is a skill and I learned how to write a book. Yeah. So the second one will still be very difficult, but it's not as, not as difficult as the first one.

Yeah. You'll know, know, know the beats a little, a little bit more.

I highly recommend it. Like it's, it was, I learned a ton. It was humbling, but it was exciting. I'm super proud of it today. And I'm so glad that my kids and grandkids will someday be able to pick it up and get a look into my mind and how I think about things.

Yeah. And you mentioned that, and we've touched on parenting before. Like, I think there's a lot of this that, like, I know you talk about legacy. It's something that, like, I think about a lot as well. And I, there's a certain element of entrepreneurship and content creation specifically. I actually started my YouTube channel cuz I was like, okay, I have some things to share that are like tactical, strategic, good advice for productivity and getting things done. But then I was also like, I'm gonna share, and I actually kind of got away from it cuz those videos weren't as like, you know, weren't as popular. But I started making YouTube videos because like I wanted my kids to see like what was going on. Like what did I think about things and how, how was I like going through life? I think about like, what would it, how valuable would I find it now if like my dad, when he was 40 with 5 kids, if he was sharing videos or recording podcasts and so like, I think like that's. I mean, that's one great thing about having kids, but I also find it like very inspirational, even if something, you know, maybe doesn't have the critical or commercial success that I wanted to from a business perspective. I'm always like, I know my kids hopefully at some point are going to want to like watch and engage with this stuff and be like, this is what dad was thinking about when he was 40 and like, all these things were happening.

Yeah. I, I listen back to the podcast episodes that I recorded in 2018. Mm-hmm. And I have changed my mind on a lot. Yep. Which I'm proud of, but it's, it would've been kind of a forgotten mindset if I would've never recorded it or written it down. But yeah, I look back at my, you know, 20, 26, 27-year-old self and man. I was irrationally confident and I thought I knew a lot.

This game humbles. It does, but don't you like, and this is kind of going back to like that, that optimism of the entrepreneur is like, oh, this one didn't go the way I want, but the next one is definitely going to go the way that I want. It's like, I heard this on Founders Podcast, the Jerry Jones episode, but he was referring to a quote, I think by Charlie Munger, who said, don't overestimate don't underestimate a man who overestimates himself. It's like the irrationally confident person, the, you know, potent— the person who is like, yeah, just irrationally confident. There's another word I was thinking of, but couldn't quite grab. Will do things and at times achieve things that he or she has no business achieving. It's like, well, of course I can, of course I can do this.

Like, irrational confidence. I know so many people who make phenomenal money simply because they're not insecure. Hmm.

I know a lot of— Let's talk about that a little bit more. I mean, one of your, one of your early viral tweets was like, the world is run by C students.

Yeah, I think, I think, I just see a lot of very wealthy people. I see a lot of people who just do really well in life who are not brilliant. They're not spectacular. They didn't get perfect scores on the SAT. They didn't go to the Ivy League. Many of them dropped outta high school. But they have kicked ass in life because they have confidence and they're able to push that insecurity aside. Now, there's a fine balance because if you don't have the humility to change your mind, if you don't have the humility to like take in new information that disagrees with you, you can lose it all very, very easily in this game. But yeah, I know a lot of, I know a lot of below average people who earn phenomenal money because they're not insecure. So, yeah, I think, you know, insecurity is what's, what's holding back so many people.

I really like the way that you put that. I wanna come back to it in a second, but like, I'm just thinking about like that dichotomy or the balance between like having some irrational confidence, but also at the same time being able to take in new information and be humble enough to change direction or change your opinion based on like the reality of of what's happening, and especially if it's happening over and over again. But going back to the, like, whether it's insecurity or lack of confidence, which I think, you know, you could say are similar things, how do you think people can— do you have any advice for people who are looking to, like, be less insecure, be more secure, basically, like, get out of their own heads, stop doubting themselves, just take action?

Yep. There's a, there's a practice that I got picked up from Tim Ferriss called fear setting.

Have you ever heard of this?

No. Yeah.

Mm-hmm.

Yep. So I talk about it in my book with a key example of like one of the toughest decisions I had to make in my life. But when I'm about to make a decision or take a risk, I write down the absolute worst case scenario. Hmm.

What does it look like? Yep. I've done this.

Yeah. How much, how much money am I gonna, do I stand to lose? What will my life be like if everything goes to shit? Where will I go? What? Where will I make money? Who will I live with? Whatever it might be. But when you start doing this from a business perspective, you realize that, hey, you start to look at this on paper of like the worst case scenario, what you are so afraid of, and you're like, that's not so bad.

Hmm.

Yeah, I live in America.

Bankrupts—

bankruptcy is not permanent. My parents, you know, They're middle-class people. They got a bedroom open for me. And that's, that's like, things get real bad.

Yeah. I mean, it's so true. And yeah, it does like speak to how fortunate we are, but also like, I've like, I've done this before. Like when I left, I was working. So a lot of people listening will know that I worked at Kit early on and then I worked at Podia. So I had, you know, good startup jobs paying me really good money., and I decided to go out on my own and I thought to myself like, well, if this doesn't work, then, you know, very similar type of fear setting. It's like, probably still like, I mean, the worst, worst case is like moving, like things get really bad. Yeah. I mean, I can move in, we can live with my parents for a little bit, but you know, I can just get a job.

Yeah.

And that's like, you know, I'm a smart, talented person and I can go find a job or like, I hadn't really thought about as much, like, 'cause when I did all this stuff initially, and it was actually like a bit of a downfall for me in 2021, 'cause I was like, I'm gonna sell digital products. I'm only gonna do coaching. I'm like not gonna trade time for money anymore. And the first 6 months of that were awesome. And the second 6 months were terrible and they kind of evened out, but that last 6 months was had an outsized impact on my psyche. And, you know, I worked with, I worked with a couple other people during that time. I got a little bit more like stable income. And then, you know, over, and now I'm kind of like going back out on my own at the beginning of 2025, but with one, a much clearer idea of like I talked about, I still have, I'm not just going like full digital, like product sales. 60% of my personal income or my business income is through services. And, you know, over time I want to kind of flip that, but I'll probably always hold on to that service component, not just because of the consistent, reliable revenue of it, but also because like you learn so much, like doing the work and talking with people directly, like it informs everything else that I do. But, you know, even past that, if things like— and I'm kind of in the same like fear-setting mindset again, it's like, okay, you know, if this— if I can't make at least $150K this year and I'm, you know, well on my way to that, then I just need to go find a job. And I feel like I can do that. Or I'll just like, you know, I said like, I, you know, I'm moving. Like there might be changes that you need to make in your life. And I think like Sometimes people are unwilling, often people are unwilling to like do something more drastic to do like a bigger thing that really matters to them. Mm-hmm. And I told you, I haven't actually talked about this publicly. I told you before that I'm like moving back to Florida to be closer to my parents who are doing great. Like I'm the one that needs help, but I'm like, I love living in Nashville. Nashville's the fav— my favorite city that I've ever lived in. And I would love to stay, but I also know like things are cheaper. I have more help and it's totally like fine to like do that because like my wife wants to stay at home and, you know, for the time being we want to homeschool. Those are big decisions that take a lot of time and effort, but we had to get to a point where like, okay, if we want to do all this, this isn't necessarily fear saying, but like, How far are we willing to take this? If I'm going to run my own thing and you want to like run the house and like we want to raise our kids this way, how far are we willing to take this? Well, we're willing to take it far enough that we're leaving our favorite city that we've ever been in, friends that we've had for 12 years to move to like still a really good situation, but that's like, I don't know if many people would like move away from like, you know, the big cool city to like live in the burbs, which, you know, again, nice burbs.

2017, I was making $150K a year and I realized I could not have the life I wanted to live in Boston, Massachusetts. Yeah. So my wife and I made a list of shit we loved. On my list, it was craft beer, live music, college sports, golf, good weather, no traffic. Yep. And on my wife's list, it was really family friendly, like 25-year-olds having kids, a great church.

Yep.

Good restaurants. And on her list had some more things on it at the bottom, like airport within an hour and a half and house for under $300,000. Yep. And we moved to Athens, Georgia. We didn't know anybody in the whole state.

Man, that takes guts. I mean, I'm, I'm moving near my parents and a place I grew up. And Athens is an, it's my favorite, like, and I, I'm a Gator. I went, you know, I went to school in Gainesville, but Athens, sorry for anyone listening, is my favorite college town.

Oh man. Awesome to hear. I love this town too. Like we ended up coming here, it was, we were insecure, but we walked up to people and asked them if they wanted to come over for dinner and we made friends through our kids and now we have an absolutely unbelievable community here that we're so, so proud of. So.

Yeah.

You can build a life anywhere. Um, I don't know if I would take it as far as being a digital nomad in Thailand and living on $800 a month, but, you know, cuz family and having kids is important to me.

But yeah, takes sacrifice, man. And yeah, that's something that, yeah, and I know people, you know, anyone listening, you're facing, you might be facing your own sacrifices or different things and, you know, what I'm talking about may sound pretty great as my like sacrifice. But I think like the, the overall like question is like, there's a lot of opportunity available to you, whether it's through a business that you can build, a job that you can work, like how much can you level up your skills? And I know like most people listening to this are content creators. They're, they work in digital businesses. The, the big thing that like I'm taking away from this and yeah, Nick, I'll, I'll let you. And I like put a bow on it as well as the author and the expert. But it's like thinking about like, it's great to trade time for money, especially when you can look at it and say like, I can actually trade my time for more money than I could. Like you're still trading your time for money in some ways. And that was something that early on when I was like, you know, awash in passive income optimism, like, okay, well I'll just, I'll create all this stuff and people will come and they'll buy. And I was trading time for money, very little money, because I would spend 100 hours working on a course and then nobody would buy it and be like, well, that wasn't a very good trade of time for money. You know, we can talk about like validating ideas and pre-selling things, but even still, like, I started to make more money consistently when I just was like, I'm really good at email marketing and course launches and setting up digital tools. And so like, I'm just gonna have a suite of offers that range from $500 to $5,000. And that's what I'm gonna sell because I know people are already paying for this and I'm just gonna go find those people and I'm gonna be nicer. I'm gonna be faster. I'm gonna be smarter and I'm gonna sell the hell out of this. And yep.

5 years later, that's still what I'm doing. I love it, man. I think the people get caught up in the big ideas and the big vision and the, and their ambition takes them. I think the worst thing that can happen as an entrepreneur is to write that ending story of where you're going to be in 10 years or 5 years or even 3 years. Some people want it all very fast and set way too big of goals. You read about and study these entrepreneurs who have made a ton of money. It's very easy to get discouraged and it's very easy to become numb to the opportunities that seem small and might not be able to put you there today. But if you have the energy and the drive and the security to go after some of those small opportunities, momentum takes over and time is on your side and business gets easier and easier and easier.

And it becomes a beautiful thing. Yeah. Nick, that's awesome, man. Thank you so much for coming on the Hey Creator Show. Thanks for writing the book coming out April 29th, right?

Tuesday, April 29th. That's it, man. Yep. That's the way to start off, right?

Get Rich Doing Boring Things. Awesome. So this, this show will come out on the 29th. So you're listening, you're watching, you see a clip from this book's already out. Go buy it. Link in the description below. Nick, this was awesome. This is one of the like easiest, most fun conversations I've had. So, uh, thanks so much.

It's awesome, man. You're, you're great at this. I, I appreciate it, man. Thanks for, thanks for the support. Thanks for being a, being along for the ride and being a good friend.

Yeah, absolutely.

All right.

Bye everyone.