How to Pick a Business You ACTUALLY Enjoy (In 64 Mins) | 065

I obviously want to make as much money as I can with whatever I'm doing, but I'm not doing any project that I don't absolutely feel 100% fired up about.

What are we optimizing for?

I think it's ultimately like a quality of life.

My guest today is Isaac French, who has built over $5 million of enterprise value, and now he has so many opportunities but not a lot of clarity on which one is best. You have 4 great options: the content agency, launching software, building the next property, and then really scaling content.

I've had so many offers for capital investments from other people. It's a little overwhelming.

There's this quote from Warren Buffett. This is the difference between successful people and really successful people is that really successful people say no to almost everything.

Let me ask you a question. Everybody says SaaS is like the best business model in the history of the world.

Yep.

Is it a pipe dream to think this kind of needs to be front and center?

There are two aspects of money. One is short-term cash flow and the other is long-term enterprise value. If you came to me and said, hey, the thing that I'm optimizing for is enterprise value, It could be a path to $100 million. One mistake that I see a lot of creators make is they don't—

I'm pretty excited because I feel like, okay, I can take the next step with confidence. This is the right way.

Isaac, you've done something that I think is absolutely insane. You built basically $5 million of enterprise value from an in-person project, told the whole story online, exited in 2 years. Yeah. Give people the quick version of what you did and then how you leveraged the online business.

Yeah, so found a piece of property in Waco, Texas where I live, designed and built 7 modern cabins, spent $2.3 million, launched 10 months later. We built 140,000 Instagram followers in about 15 months, which drove 95% overall occupancy, 80% of all that direct bookings, which is kind of insane for the industry. And then just, yeah, less than 2 years after starting day one, exited to private equity for $1 million a key, $7 million, and then started sharing the story on Twitter actually, and started building up a small audience there, converted that to a newsletter, and was doing a ton of one-on-one coaching. And then I was like, well, what if I just took like all of the information in this concise format. So created this, you know, all-in-one, 8.5 hours of video content, this masterclass for experiential hospitality. And so now I have a subscription-based membership for like the best operators.

What's the recurring revenue on that right now?

We're at about, we're about $200,000 recurring revenue. So Darryl Westerfeld has sort of been my coach. I know he was just on the show. So what we developed is a 7-day email course. This is basically the entire masterclass boiled into 7 emails. But people are more, a lot of people are like wanting something cheaper, something more bite-sized. Anyway, what we settled on is this membership, the community really, really nicely like dovetails with the course and references a lot of the information given there. And we built this all out in Kit, automated it. So it's completely hands-off for me.

Okay, I should write this down. Yeah. This is good. On the masterclass, you are, you said the funnel is going from the 7-day course and then we're going from—

If they click a link, they get automatically enrolled in a 7-day FOMO sales sequence. Okay. If they don't, they get a bridge email to my newsletter. Basically they're qualifying themselves by clicking on the masterclass link.

Yep. And that goes into, The pitch.

The pitch. And what we did there is set up an automated timer coupon code. So if they book, if they sign up directly in the 7-day pitch, they can save $1,500 if they— but it's on a timer. So depending on when they start that sequence, it'll end in 7 days. If they don't buy that, then they get a 1-day delay and they go into a just a 24-hour payment plan. Right. But what we also have been doing recently is we have 3 links now in the last 4 days of the 7-day where we're suggesting they book a call with me or my team because a lot of people want to talk. So now we have a sales motion and he, the sales guy, is getting 17%, but he's also hopefully selling it at the higher price point of $6,500.

Okay, I love this. So There's so many things that I want to get into here. In this episode, what we're going to talk about a lot is where to go, where the business is today, and then where we're going with it long term. All the opportunities, what to pursue, all of that. But let's take a minute and map this out. So the masterclass, this is the funnel for it. Yeah. What are you able to acquire leads for on Facebook right now?

Around $3, call it. Yeah. And we've been testing a variety of static, some video. Multiple different angles. So much fun to test creative and see what's working.

That sounds good. So Facebook ads coming into the 7-day course, and then if someone's interested and they click on a link that talks about the masterclass in some way, then they go into a sales sequence for that. If they don't, they're just gonna find themselves in the newsletter.

Right.

And then if they're really interested, you'll get them under 7 days.

Okay, gotta layer on one more piece here that Derral's now telling me we have to do. Yeah. So regular promotions. So he's built up like, as you know, some massive course businesses. And the way they acquire leads is through these webinars where they're basically teaching and they're basically doing what I'm doing in an email, they're doing live. And then they're letting the, you know, they're not selling in that, they're just giving value for an hour and then they're letting the emails do the selling for 7 days after that. So I love teaching and I have never done a webinar, so I'm looking forward to this. But once they're in here and they go through that 7-day course, then we like tell them, hey, we got a webinar that's gonna solve X, Y, and Z. Right. And this will also be an opportunity where you can interact with me live, ask a question, get an answer. And then from there, we just think that that's going to qualify. 'Cause right now we just started this in the last 60 days, this funnel right here. And we're converting about 0.3% of these leads, which is paying, easily paying for the sale. Yes, to a sale.

So let's put a pin in this side of the business for now.

Yeah.

So this is the digital products, that side of things. What we— so we have this split into two right here where we've got the masterclass and then the community, the community. So on the masterclass, What's the total revenue that you've made on it?

$600,000.

Let me just say, I love this business. It's like, 'cause it's such high margin. There's so much. I love it.

It's a great niche too. Like nobody else is doing this.

Yep. And on the community, do you wanna like—

Yeah, so real quickly, basically it's $250 a month, $2,000 a year.

So what's the— What's the total either? Yeah, let's go total revenue on the community.

So annual or like $200,000 ARR.

So, okay, so we've built a digital business. Yeah. I say we had nothing to do with it. You've built a digital business to $800,000 roughly. And then I think it's important to talk about the physical side 'cause when we're saying what you could do next, like you could go do another project like Live Oak Lake and let's get into that. So over here we'll just say, let's get some numbers for Live Oak.

Yeah.

Okay, so this was $2.1 million in.

$2.3 million in.

$2.3.

$7 million out.

Okay, like when we're thinking about what to do next, I love just mapping out like what have you done? What skill sets, what resources do you have? So this other aspect is the, like the content and storytelling. And so you've done it obviously in so many different ways, but the one that I think stands out the most is the threads on X. And so let's get some stats from—

So just call it the last 4 months 'cause I took a big break before that and I was just figuring out my way before that. The last 4 months I've gotten 40 million impressions on about 12 threads total. So that's very concentrated. I don't tweet a lot, but when I tweet, I try to make it count. And I sort of figured out the formula for what's working. Now here's a beautiful flywheel.

Okay.

The members in my community, the recurring revenue community, which are super high value, I get to coach them, learn from them, see their stories, pick the best ones, share those as threads, which generate a ton because I'm the expert now.

And it positions you as the guy.

I'm the magnet for the best stories in this space. And I just tell those stories.

Right.

And educate through that. And something I learned with threads is like, people don't like facts nearly as much as they like stories. So find a way to educate in the guise of storytelling. And then so that immediately qualifies, if you're interested in that story, you're going to be a candidate for this or this.

Right, and then you can go from there to the 7-day course.

And they just cycle virtuously.

Okay, so let's actually draw that flywheel. We're basically going from a thread that you're telling, So that's the beginning of the flywheel. So as we map this out, we're like from the thread, we're going to an email capture of some kind, right? And then from the email we get a, we're eventually going to sales.

Yep. Whether that's community or masterclass. So then we get a story which goes into a beautiful thread.

And then which comes back into the thread.

I love that. And so really the question that I have is like, how do I allocate the hours in my day to balancing all this, right? When I also have all these other opportunities like a content creation for other brands, SaaS products, because I'm very, you know, invested in the space and this is a particular niche. So do I do the agency?

Do I? There's so many opportunities.

It's a good problem to have.

Like the crazy thing here is that you've built phenomenal business in itself, right? You've demonstrated that you can do projects that you can build and then either keep and run. Like the beautiful thing about Live Oak Lake is you didn't have to sell it at all, right? You could have held onto it. But that's an amazing offer.

And you know, that, that turn on and return on investment and the story of completing the whole thing, right?

Yeah. All of that is, is phenomenal. But it's like you now have the problem of too much opportunity.

Yes.

And There's this quote that I recently love from Warren Buffett. It says, "The difference between successful people and really successful people is that really successful people say no to almost everything." So actually, let me switch these and we'll pull it over here. I'll let you hold that one and put it up. So that's now. Let's talk about next.

This is so cool. I've never actually thought about this like this, but this is awesome. I love flywheels and how you applied it here.

It's such a great thing. Once you understand flywheels, you see them everywhere.

Yeah. Okay.

So what are the options that we're considering? Talk through like a content agency.

Yeah. So content agency. I've had several folks that already run successful agencies reach out and say, hey, we'll do a 50/50 split, which would probably be the easiest. The problem with that is that I am so picky that I would want to have my hand in what they're doing.

Right.

And so they, they see me as valuable because I have an audience in the space. But I'm extremely protective about the value of that.

Okay, so the content agency, this is basically taking what you did for Live Oak Lake to build an Instagram account to over 100,000 followers.

A ton of work.

Drive all of this stuff and say, hey, we will do it for a fee for this property.

Yeah, so the way the workflow works is, you know, I would fly out with a team or I'd have a team of 2 cameramen and a director and they'd just, you know, let's say I had 10 properties. And I have a friend of mine who's doing this exact playbook right now and he's crushing it. And he flies out to like 10 Live Oak Lakes, shoots for 2 days. He's there every, you know, 3 to 4 months. Now he's actually doing 30 properties charging $3,000 a month. He goes home, cuts it up. He knows what works, follows the algorithm, posts on behalf of that brand account every other day. So it's consistent, it's good quality content, and it's just a numbers game. Like over time you get virality and then the virality leads to followers and the followers leads to bookings. Okay. So it's a win-win. $3,000.

So that's—

it's like $30,000 to $40,000 a year per client.

Right. So the lifetime value is very, very good. And there's a very natural sales progression, right? If someone comes in, they take your masterclass and they learn how to do it and they develop the property and then they— in that storytelling process, they realize like, oh shoot, this is hard. Yeah, like we're building the property. I'm learning how to build in public and man, I could really use some help from someone who's great at doing this. So let me hire that out, right? And so you have this product ladder that goes up.

What we're teaching them, like a key framework in this whole masterclass, and I think this can be applied broadly in life. This is like the way I try to approach learning things. Number 1, if you can hire a consultant, someone who knows something about what you're doing, pay them absolutely whatever they want because they're worth it most of the time. And then number 2, do that thing yourself. No matter how much you don't want to do it. So if that's video creation, like short-form content, I've been avoiding that for years, honestly. And then recently I was like, no, I'm just going to do it. And so I spent 20 hours editing one reel, but it got 150,000 views. And then number 3, once you've got your identity figured out, hire someone else to do that. But you as the owner need to understand that. So we're teaching them, you know, we're the, we're the consultant.

Yeah.

And we're holding their hand through the community and through the whole program where they're actually doing some of these things like creating content. And then most of them won't actually want to follow through and make content every day of their life. So we could also have an agency where it's like, okay, you understand it, we'll kind of help each other as far as the voice. 'Cause it's also very important that they maintain some function of like, you know, again, taste and like curation. But we're doing the heavy lifting for them. But you can't just assume that like, okay, I'm gonna sub it out to so-and-so, I don't know anything about it. And there a lot of people want that, like a quick fix.

[Speaker] Yes, so in this, basically what you have is a model where you're saying, hey, we'll teach you what to do, And if we pursue this agency, we'll do it for you.

Yeah, exactly.

So option number 1 is the agency. What's option number 2 that you could pursue right now?

A SaaS product. Okay. So what I would choose— there's a lot of opportunities here, but I would say a direct— a beautiful direct booking engine, a.k.a. a Shopify for experiential hospitality. Okay.

There's a lot of pros and cons here. I know a thing or two about software. I have a love-hate relationship with software. As all this. What's the third option? What are you considering?

I mean, alongside all this could be another Live Oak Lake, right? Or 20 other Live Oak Lakes. So I've had so many offers to, you know, for capital investments from other people. It's a little overwhelming. But I've been, again, like extremely so far intentional about like, no, no, no, no, no, no, without burning those bridges because I don't want to scale so fast that I can't do any of these other things. Or I can't do hospitality well.

Right. So we're going to the next property.

The next property, which could be any number of sizes or scopes.

Yeah, you could do a 7-unit like Live Oak Lake. I'm pretty sure that you could even beat these numbers because of where you're coming from. You know, of— I mean, generating $4.8 million in enterprise value in 2 years, like, that's insane. Also, the content that you create from that, right? Like on one hand you could do another property and say it makes, let's be really conservative and say it makes $5 million of enterprise value in 5 years, right? $1 million a year. The content is probably worth at least $500,000 a year.

Like maybe we would argue, I mean based off these numbers and what I've seen and then the ability to raise money, 'cause that's the other thing, like, there is so much. I mean, I've literally had probably $15 million verbally committed to do another project. Now, even if I was— here's the stalemate. I could take that money and I could be a developer. But for one, I'd be missing out on some of the intimacy of the content creation storytelling of doing this thing. You'd be doing a whole bunch at once. Right. And then for two is, again, as a perfectionist and someone who cares so much about the product, I could hardly see you doing that.

The great thing is you could raise money on your own terms. You could say, like instead of for that $2.3, you're like bank loan, your savings, your private equity.

Yeah, and I gave 45% equity to get it over the line. Yeah.

And so you could do that and like maybe you risk far less money and 10% equity in this next one. Is there another, like a fourth option of double down, like purely on content creation?

Yeah, I guess there would be. Okay. So the fourth option is, you know, how many channels can you do at once? Right now all I'm doing is X and a newsletter and it's taking up a lot of time. But that's because I'm like really, you know, again, the results speak for themselves. If I go out with YouTube, which is what I really want to do actually, like that's kind of my dream is to grow a really nice YouTube audience. And then of course the short form on Instagram to complement that and on YouTube Shorts, then I could be like, okay, I'm gonna put this on pause. I'm gonna put actually all of this stuff on just on ice and I'm just gonna focus on taking this mainstream. Like it's all about beauty, architecture, whatever my story is, redemption.

It makes me think about, you know, on one hand someone like Hans Lory who has scaled his Instagram really well, But even a level beyond that would be like a Cody Sanchez or a Dan Martell who has said like, you know, they're bringing in a film crew that they like have a whole team and all this. You could scale the content side significantly.

And I would want to do that in some kind of a, I mean, just a super personal, uncommercialized way if that's possible, where this is really hard, but like YouTube would be the main thing for me. And it would be, you know, 15 to 30-minute episodes weekly. And it would almost be like a show, but it would be as much about my life. 'Cause I mean, again, I love all these things. I could show these properties, but I just built like this really cool studio, which is tangentially related. It's like incredible architecture. It's nature immersive. I could rent it out as an Airbnb. People, everyone has this dream. I mean, that thread got 5 million, 6 million views. Everybody has this dream of like creating a workspace in the woods.

Right.

And so that's how you kind of take it mainstream. It's not just experiential hospitality. I mean, that's, that's a part of it, but it's like I'm creating beautiful places and for people to be in.

Okay, so you have an amazing launching pad and you have 4 great options. The content agency, launching software, building the next property, and then really scaling content. And these aren't mutually exclusive.

Yeah, I was gonna say, I can have 'em all.

You can have them all. If you go back to the Warren Buffett quote, how well will you do it And how big of a team and— How big of a team. So the question that I have in all of this is what criteria are we using to make this decision? What are we optimizing for?

It's such a great question. I think it's ultimately like a quality of life and happiness and fulfillment in what I'm doing. It is not money at this point. I mean, I obviously wanna make as much money as I can with whatever I'm doing, but I love connecting with people. That's why I love this community so much. Like-minded people that care about design. And I love traveling and seeing new places, meeting new people. And I love shining a spotlight on them. Like, it's the best feeling in the world that I have a small but valuable audience that can make a meaningful difference in these people's lives.

Okay, so quality of life, people, you said travel.

Travel. And then of course, you know, before all of this, my family and my faith and being able to be grounded and even just show the lifestyle I have, like say at the Nook, I could make so many videos around that that would blow up, I think.

Oh yeah.

And without even like having to run out and do any of this stuff.

So yeah, there's so much in that. Now one thing a lot of people talk about, like money not being the focus in some way, but they're actually like kind of lying.

Yeah.

Like I really, really like making money. And me too. Yeah, I'm not ashamed about that in any way. But there are two aspects of money that you're thinking about and people often conflate these. And so one is like short-term cash flow, like what profit are we actually bringing home? And the other is long-term enterprise value. And we've got some really interesting elements that touch on both of these. But one mistake that I see a lot of creators make is they don't think about the difference. They don't think of those two buckets.

And so I guess as I write this out, you have to feed your family and keep the lights on while you're building an insane amount of enterprise value, whether that's another property or a SaaS product.

So we had the, I don't know if you imagine like these two buckets.

Yeah.

Are you more interested in creating cash flow right now or creating equity value?

Man, that's— I want both. I really want like, I want 50/50, right? I want a nice lifestyle. We don't have to worry about whatever. We can be generous. And I want like a nice nest egg that I can pass on, that I can leverage, that I can do whatever I want with.

So that's a good— that's a helpful lens, right? So I think that what we're optimizing for, right, quality of life, people, travel, There's a version of this where you could say, this all was fun, but I'm gonna like go do a giant hotel deal.

Yeah.

And like leave the internet and honestly I have enough connections, I don't need more, right? And it's pretty obvious that that is not the right path for you. You're right. And you can't go in and make something that's gonna require like a stressful 80 hours a week.

Yeah.

Or like nonstop travel.

Nope.

You did the stressful 80 hours a week when you built LiveUp.

That's why I'm like, even if I did another one, it'd need to be scaled down 'cause I can't spend that much time. Right.

And you would use like, I learned you would deploy money.

Exactly. You know, I wouldn't manage every detail.

Yeah, you'd be one level above.

Let me ask you a question. So you run a pretty sizable SaaS company. The grass is always greener. Yeah, but everybody says SaaS is like the best business model in the history of the world. Yep.

I agree with them.

You build so much enterprise value. Yeah. Once you make the initial investment, there's also quite a bit of cash flow. I mean, there can be. Of course you can reinvest. Is it a pipe dream to think that I could fit? Because something is telling me that like this kind of needs to be front and center, right? Or it doesn't need to happen at all. Because if I try to do that halfway, it's going to drain my money. It's not going to— is that, is that a correct intuition or do you think there's some way where I can kind of balance this, especially this with all these other things?

So if you came to me and said, hey, the thing that I am optimizing for most is enterprise value, like that long-term equity. Yes, I've got cash flow covered really well, right? Like we're set. But enterprise value, long-term equity is what we're after. As I look through these 4 options, it's for me, it would be the next property or it'd be software, right? Because if you build—

the states agree. Yeah.

Yeah. Like we've already demonstrated.

And then if you like hold these properties and compound it and, you know, I mean, eventually stepped in step-up basis when I hand them down to my kids, there's zero tax. It's a beautiful model. Yes.

One quick aside. There's a bunch of people, I think a lot of content creators sort of like, I don't understand tax, it's complicated accounting and all that. I would just say for anyone listening, like you, Sean Sweeney, Nick Huber, so many people are like, who are insanely smart entrepreneurs, like took the time to learn tax.

Yes.

And it is 100% worth it. Put yourself through the rigor. Yeah.

It will pay dividends.

Even if you were like, hey, I'm gonna spend 20 hours, to learn and go interview 10 entrepreneurs like, hey, what are the most important tax things you'd learn?

Completely agree.

Like I learned about QSBS and all these other things like way later in my journey. And yeah, just don't— when your accountant's talking, like just don't gloss over, like be a, hold on, stop there for a second. What was that term? What did that mean? Like ask those questions.

Yeah. Basically take that same framework. You need to understand it, you need to do it, and then you can sub it out. Yep. But you've got the—

100%. Okay. That's the aside on tax. Creators learn tax.

Yeah. Okay. So if I was going to optimize for enterprise, that's what I would do.

Yeah, that's where I would go. You're exactly right in software that you can't half-ass it. Like you have to go all in if that's what you're going to do. And you can get a great multiple and valuation. But if you think about the amount of work it took for you to get great at experiential hospitality, like what is, how do you build a foundation of a building? How do you like, what's the, the whole like, the crazy number of skills for that, expect that same amount of effort to get for software. Yeah. Right? Where you, there's all kinds of things. If I had a building and I'm like, hey, will you look at these plans? You would immediately be like, ooh, not that. Hold on, what are you thinking here? And you'd notice like 10 things right away. That's me with software 'cause I've spent like the same amount of time or more that you've been doing that for software. So I can tell you like, oh, in onboarding, oh, you got to have gradual engagement, right? Like what's, you know, like all of these things. If you want it, if that journey excites you and you could go all in on it and you're optimizing for equity value, then I would say software is it. But I would assume that this is a 5 to 10 year path. Okay. Now it could be a 5 to 10 year path to $100 million, right? But it sounds like it's a different skill set. So Personally, in your shoes, that's not the path that I would choose, even though that's the path that has made me all of my money.

Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. And I think it's very clarifying. Like, there's so much peace and confidence in doing what we're doing and just learning to isolate thoughtfully and be like, okay, you know, you find what it is by what it isn't and not tricking yourself, first of all, because I'm exactly like you. Like, I am way too ambitious and I'm a generalist, so I love to do everything at once. And it's worked really well so far, but it was— it took a lot of like discipline and sacrifice. But I'm at a juncture where because of like now I'm married, I was barely married when I did this. Now I have a kid. Now we have another kid on the way. It's like I have to rethink the entire balance. I'm not going after— if $100 million comes to me in 10 years, I'll be like, I won't complain, trust me, and I'll work for it too. But I am not going to sacrifice all that other stuff that's much more valuable to me than that. And so like, yeah, I think that has been like the allure. It's like, oh, I could build up this product. It would be worth X. Look at these multiples that other people are selling their things for.

And I think you would be in a great position to do it because you'd know as a customer you'd be building the tool that you wanted.

It's exactly what I did with Kit where I'm like, I have an audience too.

I want that tool. But so many people miss when they see like what I built for myself in Kit, they're like, oh, I could do that too for my niche or industry, but they miss the fact that software was my industry, right?

So here's the other question that applies to both of these. I've had multiple developers reach out and I've had multiple existing agencies reach out to me and offer similar deals, 50% across the board, cash flow, equity, everything. All you have to do is promote us. Now I, if I was even going to be able to make that work, would have, no, I would, I'm such a micromanager and care so much about the product and the details, I would have to be involved in that. Is that a pipe dream? Like, it sounds really good that I could just literally keep doing what I'm doing and have like, you know, 1 hour a week dealing with these.

I think it's absolutely possible. I would not do both simultaneously, right? Because they're both new skill sets for you. Like a lot of people have done really well with agency partnerships. You have to have the right person and you would need a way to really vet that individual. Like if you think about, if you were to pick a random family and say like, okay, you now, you guys are like scrappy enterprise people, like go restore this old barn. I would say 90% of those, 98% of those, if you picked a random family, would end in complete disaster.

Yeah.

Right?

They hate each other.

The project wouldn't work. Everything else. Yeah. And so you think like, okay, if 9 times out of 10 you throw this together, it won't work. Like how can you be confident that you actually have the right person? And so you need to do a small project with them. You need to see, is this the kind of person that will go through the craziest amounts of adversity? Yeah.

Or are they the one person too?

Yeah, are they a good person? Are they aligned on values?

And I think just, I mean, this is so helpful. It's like therapeutic to talk through this. A big fear that I have is, you know, and this sort of demonstrates that I have Darrell as a coach. I had people I could reach out to for help, but I was doing every bit of this. To this day, I have zero employees. I do everything. I have a coach who I talk to every 3 weeks for an hour or whatever it is. And I really like that model. I mean, it's actually working right now. And so like the thought of me—

Do you want to stay with a small team?

Yes. Do not want a big team.

Yeah.

And so the thought of managing a team or dealing with HR and just constantly dealing with people issues, I'm allergic to that.

So that's a really important thing. And what are we optimizing for? We added small team. Yeah. Right? I really wanted a small team initially, and then as I was building Kit, but then my ambitions kept growing. I'm like, oh, I want to build an ad platform, I want to like, you know, build an e-commerce platform, all this. And so I've scaled the team more and more and I realized in this trade-off I care more about bringing my vision to life than I care about keeping a small team. I still care about both, but you know, in that trade-off. And so that was really important. And so now we've got another good thing of what we're optimizing for is keeping that team small. So software, small team, That's really hard.

Well, even with the model of me being a distribution and having some say in the product, but not managing the team.

You could do that, but you would need someone who is world-class who came to you and said, I would like to be 50/50 partners on this business.

Yes. And I was really confident that they were a good operator.

Yeah, exactly. Probably on both of these. Now, agencies are hard. They're not as hard as software. If you made the software for Live Oak, What would Live Oak pay per month?

It would probably be like $300 a month.

$300 a month, okay. So you need 10 times as many clients to get to the revenue of a content agency. So software is gonna have this very, very slow ramp up where for the first year, 3 years, 5 years, it makes no money. Kit took 2 years to pass $2,000 a month in revenue.

Wow.

Right? And then, That third year we went from $2,000 to $100,000.

It's amazing that you stuck with that.

I mean, that's— I mean, I almost didn't.

Yeah.

Right? So it's just this like, and you have an audience, there's a bunch, like you could accelerate it some, but you should go in with it being that difficult.

It's a long game.

Whereas the agency, because your average revenue per user is so much higher, you know, or average revenue per customer, you know, there's a pretty clear path to getting to $5,000, $10,000, $20,000 a month, right? And then you're like, okay, now I've got, I can hire people. That was something with Paperboy, which is my agency for newsletter growth. Sahil and I were talking about founding that agency, but we didn't do it until we found the right CEO for it. When we found Shane, who'd already built an agency to more than a million a year in revenue, it's like, okay, you know what you're doing. You are a truly world-class operator. Now we can provide distribution for that. Now I only did that, even though I love everything about it, I only did that because it furthers Kit's goals. Because now, let me give you an example. We launched, Lil Jon launched a newsletter on Kit like this last week. Now they needed a ton of help to get that live, great design, all this stuff, right? He came in with this vision. He's like, okay, it's called Wellness Wednesdays. It's about meditation. We're like, okay, that's not what I was expecting, but like, this is awesome. And so we needed an agency that could deliver on that vision. So when Sahil first came to me and said, hey, let's build an agency, I'm like, no, I do software. And then I lost a deal because I didn't have, I lost a customer, a potential customer for Kit because I didn't have world-class done-for-you, like just over-the-top value. And so when I realized that, Sahil was kind of like, hey, if we had made an, like the agency could have done this. And so then now I'm able to bring in someone like Lil Jon as a customer of Paperboy. Paperboy will go over the top, make it absolutely perfect, and and make them, you know, the best customer for Kit. So it's this flywheel that feeds itself. Now you have that with the agency where there's a flywheel that feeds itself because now you could tell even better stories about the properties. Yeah, right. And so that's, yeah, that's really good alignment.

So these are really completely dependent on the right partner because I'm not— it's, it's non-negotiable for me to have a small team. And so I have to find the right operator who's world class, who I'm comfortable with. And that's a huge X factor.

Is what really matters there. And I think we can say that at least for now, nice thing is all of this is for now, software's off the table. Does that sound right?

Yeah, I agree. Okay.

We're gonna eliminate software there. Okay, so now the content agency is interesting. What you could do is if you kept this open, you could say, hey, I'm looking, I'm the most patient person in the world, but I'm looking for the perfect operator. And let me just put that out in the universe. And by universe, I mean community and social and that sort of thing. And just say, hey, if that's you, let's talk. And maybe you take 10 calls related to that and you start to understand it's not the first person who comes along and pitches you, but you say, hey, over the next year, I'm gonna meet 10 to 20 people who might be this operator. And let me learn and let me take all kinds of notes, how they would build it, all of that. And then I will start to know what it takes to build a world-class agency and I'll know, okay, who's just making stuff up versus who really knows what they're doing. And so then I think you can put a pin in that.

And I'm not pressured to make that decision. That's just a little open-ended, which will help me make the best decision if I find the right person.

Yeah, and you can very passively learn about it. Which you're a student, like everything you do, you're like a student of it and diving in. And so that would make a lot of sense.

I like that.

Yeah.

That's a great way. And again, like it just speaks to the power of having this audience because they're coming to me. I'm not trying to find them and I already have them coming to me, but I can be a little bit more intentional and be like, hey, this is an idea if you're the person.

The other thing that it does is if you're getting like referrals to other agencies, someone's like, hey, like, Isaac, will you refer to our agency? You're like, you know, I'm thinking of starting my own, so I don't know, maybe. What, like, what makes sense there? And then instead of getting a 10% referral commission, or I don't know, say $1,000, you might be like, hey, the lead value is actually a lot and I'm teeing up amazing leads from the community, so I want to be getting $3,000 or 25%, or like, it puts you in a very good negotiating position because you're like, Look, this is, it's not no money or some money. Yeah. It's like all of the revenue or, and me running my own agency or, you know, a portion of yours.

And there's maybe even the potential that one of those folks that are currently paying me is the right person. Is the right person.

Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah.

So a great example would be Marshall Haas and Nick Huber with Shepard, which is now called Somewhere. It started as an affiliate relationship. And then like Nick bought in and they went up from there. Yeah, because Nick understood the value of the leads he was driving. Okay, so let's think about the next property as we're pursuing that.

You know, we have some inspiration on that. So what if I did a smaller version? Sounds counterintuitive. You could do 1 unit or 3 units. What is cool about this is it's a little less overall headache and work.

Right.

And it's also more approachable because I'm trying to inspire. I love connecting with people. I love seeing people light up like I have by this and, you know, not even realize they have the potential to create this and then go on and create it. And 1 or 3 units is a lot more approachable in terms of finances and just overall work than 7.

Yeah.

So I could do another one, document the entire thing, have a high level of, you know, input into all the design, which will also make great content, preserve the quality like 10 out of 10, and inspire a lot more people, document the whole thing, and potentially even, you know, go all out with YouTube on that.

I love that. Okay, so I wrote down 3 things as you're talking. I wrote down story, equity value, and risk. So when we're talking about the next property, one, I saw you light up about that in a huge way. Like there could be a version where you're like, I did Live Oak Lake, man, I never want to do something like that again. Like it was just, you know, left everything on the table. You lit up about this like you're excited about it. You could do it, all of that. But then you get into this conversation about the size of property, right? Is one unit worth it? You know, is three units worth it? If you're like, oh, I'm going to put this time in, it's not actually that much harder maybe to do a 10-unit or 20-unit because you're having to do all this. You have access to the capital. But we got to think about what are we getting out of this? And the first is story. And that's really what you clued in on where you're like, look, I can tell the story and can create a huge amount of content about this. And the content is basically the same whether it's 1 unit or 10 units. Equity value and risk are actually the 2 that change the most.

Yeah.

Where like if you're going to spend a year of your life bringing the next property to life and maybe it's 10 hours a week that you spend on it instead of 80 because you're hiring a general contractor, some of these things. But is it worth it? Like let's say we're netting $1 million in enterprise value after these several years instead of $5 million. And so that's a factor in there. And then the last one is risk, right? Content has de-risked so much of this. Like your con— I'm not even gonna ask you the question, of how confident are you that you could sell this out or all these other things. Because I know with this audience, like this is not a risky endeavor for you. But if we were to say like, you know what, 50 units is where we should go and each one should be absolutely perfect and they're gonna cost $800,000 a piece to build and all that. Well, all of a sudden we've created some risk.

A lot of risk.

Yeah. And so we know like how this is bracketed. But I think it's really interesting if we're optimizing for story, Story, small team, quality of life, 1 to 3 units.

3 units is like micro resort. So it's again, it's like in the genre of I could do the unique stay one-off, but I kind of like the 3 because it's like there's some exponential difference where you create like a communal setting and you can be like very secluded, geeking out about the hospitality experience for a second. But you can also feel like, hey, I could bring my mom and dad and my siblings have a little mini family reunion. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And again, like how many other people would light up by that same idea? Right.

Which brings it, comes into this flywheel of the content, the storytelling, all of that. Because there's a risk, right? If you were to say, and the next Live Oak Lake is going to be 50 units, all these people are like, I'm not, that's not what I followed you for. You know, that's not my dream. And I latched on, you know.

There's a lot of problems with that. You oversaturate, your occupancy goes down.

Yeah, we don't want to pursue that. Okay, so that's really interesting. Now we know quality of life, small team story. Yeah, that's what we're optimizing for. And so now this starts to seem really interesting. Yeah. Not because of the enterprise value. Now we've got it. Like in this case, you're like, oh, it's only accruing $1 million.

Like, am I crazy? The enterprise value, we haven't even assigned a value to the audience that we're going to build.

Right.

Like again, you leave your options open to, not that you would want to sell that audience, but your personal brand's like, in my opinion, like the most valuable thing you have. It's your reputation. It's your ability to raise millions of capital if you want it, tens of millions if you wanted to, to sell a digital product, to create any of these things in the future. And so in a sense, like, would it be fair to say I'm actually creating some enterprise value? It's locked in.

There's two buckets. Okay, so let's talk about this. So let's say audience. Is one. And then, or I'm just gonna say real estate.

Yeah.

But just for the buckets, when we're talking enterprise value, we have to now look at it in these terms of like, well, which is actually more valuable? To traditional, like if you want to take out a loan from the bank, they'll lend on real estate and business all day long.

collateralized.

Right. But you're like, actually the audience is worth more.

We know the future. We believe in, the future belongs to creators. Yep.

And so in this, it's an interesting balance, right? If we said, hey, equity and enterprise value is the most important thing, then we're like, okay, cool. Yeah. Which, which bucket of those? A little bit of both.

And they help each other.

A little bit of both. Again, we don't have to choose, but what you can do here is you can say, hey, if I'm looking at the next property, if audience is where I believe that enterprise value comes from, then a small property makes a lot of sense because it's de-risked. Quality of life, all of that. But if real estate is where we're getting the enterprise value, then go to a bigger property. And it sounds like we're both pretty aligned that for this next phase, it's about audience.

I would say it's about 70/30 right now. Okay. If I had to put all my eggs in baskets, that's—

That's how you split it? That's how I split it. Which is really good because one thing that I love about, you know, someone will notice I've had a lot of like real estate conversations on the show, right? With Sean Sweeney, Brett from New Story, all of that. And it's because I love the creators who are thinking about like the long-term enterprise value. 'Cause I've seen way too many creators be like, look, I made $1 million a year, $5 million a year, and then I built a whole team and I'm taking home less money than before and this is stressful. And then if it goes away, like what did I actually have? Hopefully a whole bunch of index funds and like millions of dollars in Vanguard, you know? But like too many of them focus on other things. And so, What I love about what you're doing is you get to have this balance between cash flow and equity. Yes. And now everyone can have it because take your cash flow and dump it into Vanguard. But yeah, you've got it.

And these are not at all mutually exclusive because you need the real estate to create the story, to build the audience.

Yes.

And it's actually interesting because like the Live Oak story demonstrates there's actually crossover. So the real estate, which we already acknowledge, is a lot more. It's the business, it's the brand. A lot of the value you're building there is actually some component of the audience. So you actually have two audience buckets. You've got, you know, potentially millions of dollars, potentially 20 to 50% of this because you're already audience, you're a creator, you're audience-oriented, you're building a brand, especially just given the whole story here of direct bookings, experiential hospitality. And so what I'm finding so much energy in, in terms of telling stories and building and creating content, I'm actually, you know, I'm getting to do it both places, but I have a hard asset at the end of the day here. I have a personal brand here. I could do whatever I wanted because I'm, I may just, you know, in 2 years from now decide to do something entirely different. And, you know, maybe if you were to optimize as a creator, like what should you do? Maybe that's not the smartest thing. But again, I'm not gonna be making it off of that criteria, that decision. I'm going to do whatever feels like the right decision. And I think the people that I've built up because I'm doing it in a personal way and people trust people, they're going to follow me whatever that is. And I can go and create the next thing. And that really is like a huge asset. Yeah.

It's incredible. Okay, so we're really excited about the next property and especially doing something small.

Yes.

Emphasizing the story and enterprising, or focusing on the audience. Let's talk about scaling content. Yes. Particularly on YouTube.

Yes.

This can be done at so many different levels. You could launch a YouTube channel, you could do it all yourself, you could scale it up to where you have a team of 8, 10 people. I think Cody Sanchez has 20 full-time people Right? Like there's all kinds of levels to this. What excites you about going all in on content, particularly YouTube?

Mastering, it's the pursuit of like storytelling, but in this medium that I love so much, which is like YouTube videos, you know, 20 to 30 minute. Basically I believe the future of film is YouTube. And it makes so much sense to, when I care so much about design, and brand and taste and nature and all these things, video and especially wide format, slightly longer form, is the ideal format to tell those stories. So like I wanna learn how to tell those stories. One tiny caveat is that I also enjoy like podcasts as a format. And so I'm considering, do I, when I'm already trying to balance all these other things, take on a podcast? But perhaps there's a way where I actually could do a podcast as part of, or maybe to start the YouTube. That's a whole nother discussion. Like do you do a separate channel? I've talked to different creators who see that differently.

Okay, so I'm thinking about if you went all in on scaling content, how would you know you were successful? A year, 2 years, 5 years? So like, how are we measuring success and like, or on what timeline? And then let's get into how.

So really it comes down ultimately to my newsletter. When I'm looking at the funnel here, okay, I know like I'm acquiring followers on Twitter by writing these threads. It's awesome. But ultimately, like I think I mentioned earlier, it all, I care about getting someone on my list where there will be zero dilution because I've experienced growing from 10,000 followers with Live Oak Lake to 150,000 and the kind of dilution you see. So I know YouTube is a much more valuable channel, but I still don't trust it. I don't own it. And I love writing. So we haven't even talked about that, but I really love writing because it helps me clarify my thinking, which leads to more ideas, which leads to better storytelling. So at the end of the day, I want a massive newsletter. Perhaps I'll write a book. I want to— I'll create more like legacy assets. And the YouTube will, you know, or slash podcast could potentially like rival the newsletter as far as value. But to me, like I'm talking to the email guy, that is like my most valuable channel. And then I can do whatever I want with that. You know, I want to be able to travel places and then meet more people. And of course I can use all my social channels for that. but there's something very special about me writing to that audience every week.

Something that you said that stood out to me is about mastering storytelling. I think that when we go into what are you optimizing for, something that's really important is to think about what skill do you want to learn most? So I'm gonna write this down. People like you and I obsess over what new skill that we're acquiring, and that's how we become generalists that are pretty damn good at a lot of those things. You know, a lot of people are like, oh, I'm a generalist. And you look and you're like, What are you actually good at in that? But instead it's like, no, when I picked up computer programming, when I came, like all these things, I went pretty deep in it. So that stood out to me of like a lens to decide the next project being the skill that I'm trying to acquire. And you said master it. Like I felt something there when you said that. I'm like.

I think that you're exactly right. Like when it comes down to it, I want to create films that move people.

Right, yeah. And so, I do think that the YouTube channel in itself is really, really valuable. I look at people like Mark Manson who built a big email list, very successful business, and then he said, you know what, I'm going to master YouTube. You know, I think he's 2, 3 billion followers on YouTube now and it's done really well. And he's all in on that. So there's a—

Quick question.

Yeah.

Is there a flywheel between his newsletter and his YouTube? Does the content, is there overlap? Does it spawn?

There's some overlap because his newsletter is about transformations. And so he has this storytelling flywheel of what transformations were created. It's not as direct as something like this flywheel we were talking about earlier. But if you wanna master storytelling, then I think doing it in a new medium will be really helpful because it's gonna put you in different positions and then you'll be like, you're written versus, video storytelling skills will play off of each other really, really well. Makes a lot of sense. And so I love that angle. If you were to double revenue, like double your cash flow, does that do much for you? Is that really exciting?

From here, just existing?

From the whole business. Oh. Let's say you're pulling in $800,000 a year or $600,000.

No, that does not move a needle really for me.

Okay. And is that because of?

If it came at the expense of any of these things, than it is.

And is that because you're able to clear a few million from Live Oak Lake and you just don't spend that much money to begin with?

I have a, you know, we live within our means.

Right. And you live in a community where you do everything, like it's crafts, you know.

I wanna be able to travel, but like not, you know, I don't necessarily need to fly. Okay, I say that and I've never flown private. Maybe that would change if I tasted that.

Well, it'd be one thing like your family's into aviation, right? If you were like, oh, here's the— I want to get my pilot's license and buy a million-dollar plane.

True.

But like, I haven't heard that from you.

What I'm like, okay, since day one, like I've always felt like I didn't have quite enough. Yeah. When I was a little kid, like always trying to relate to that. And it's good. Like it helps you acquire skills. But now, like having tasted just a little bit of like financial success with these things, money is— I mean, this is so obvious, but money is a means to an end. And I have found so much value in like communicating, connecting with an audience, telling stories, living a life that I'm privileged to live.

Right.

And I just don't wanna mess that up. And so, I mean, if I could get a few extra $100,000 a year, fantastic. But like—

But that's not the main thing.

That is not the goal.

So it seems like, I'm just gonna say success, I'm just gonna put audience here.

Yeah.

Because that's, That's what we're trying to scale because that's the form of equity value that's really gonna serve you. It's gonna tie into everything you're doing right now. So I'm gonna suggest something and you tell me how it resonates. If I were in your position, I would do, when it comes to the content agency, I would put it on ice, but I would put it out there, hey, I'm interested in this. And I would have a portion of, Notion or wherever you keep track of your notes, that every time an idea comes up for that, you would stick it there and you would say, hey, I'm gonna do 10 calls and I would log that. But it's just this idea bank that we're logging for something a few years down the road. It's a category that we're learning. So this is like, hey, we're gonna spend 20 hours of the next 6 months on this.

That's it.

Software's off the table, at least for the next 3 to 5 years. Then the next property You go all in on a small 3-unit, you know, the storytelling is perfect and you're really optimizing for the story and the equity value through the audience.

Mm-hmm.

And then when it comes to scaling content, it's not about building the biggest team or scaling the fastest. It's about mastering storytelling. And so when you're out there looking, you're not like, okay, who's a cheap videographer that I could hire that I could keep with me all the time?

Mm-hmm.

Is who's someone that's going to push me to be better at storytelling?

Yes.

Who's someone that I admire? Maybe I'm gonna take some more cash flow that I have and I'm gonna put it into getting the right person.

Yeah.

Who I can learn from. Yes. About visual storytelling.

Yes.

And then you're not gonna get to a huge amount of overhead. You're not like, oh, 5 employees, 8 employees. 'cause a small team really matters. And then in that, we're gonna keep driving back to growing the audience and growing the newsletter. 'Cause then that's just a bigger platform to launch whatever else you want. And then I would set aside a certain amount of money from the masterclass, everything else that you're doing where you're like, look, I'm totally willing to spend, to invest $100,000, $200,000 a year into learning story, mastering storytelling, and growing the YouTube audience. And it doesn't have to pay for itself. Like I have that stream of income and the audience growth and the storytelling is what we're after.

Huge asset there. And then, you know, all this is such a valuable thought experiment, but at any time I may change my mind 'cause I—

Oh yeah.

I'm not like permanently fixed on any of this stuff. These are, you know, fairly, especially some of these are fairly fixed for me. But I may say, okay, you know, In a year from now, I've spent a lot of energy and time on this. I've kind of exhausted my people connecting, you know, like, this is awesome, but like, I want to like go all out with another project. And I'm like, okay, I need to raise $10 million to do that. All I've done is put myself in a much better position with more leverage because I have a bigger, more valuable audience and I've proven already that I can execute hopefully on that scale or bigger than that even. So like I'm still leaving all these other options open.

Oh yeah.

If I really want to go all out with this or this. But to be honest, like this scaling, this having 25-unit properties or 5 20-unit properties, but probably the former over the latter is much more appealing to me than this. And you don't have to say— and I think there'd probably be like a similar at some point, like a similar parity there as far as enterprise value created and cash flow generated.

Yeah. And then I also think your chance of success is really high in this path that we just outlined.

Yeah, exactly. Yeah. There's very little downside here. I'm not really missing out on opportunities at any point. I can leverage this audience, which I'm being so careful with, to raise money. I already know that, like, they're wanting to give me money for several of these projects, but I'm like, okay, I'm not doing anything. I'm not forcing anything. I'm not doing any project that I don't absolutely feel 100% fired up about.

Yep, exactly. Well, and then you think about the skills that you'll have coming out of this. Like written storytelling has gotten you an insane amount. If you think back to like when COVID started, right?

2020.

Yeah. Like your life is night and day different in like the business side of things. In many other of what you're optimizing for, it's probably not that different because you're like, you've had this like integrity and vision through everything. But I'm just imagining what storytelling got you and got you 40 million impressions on 12 threads and all of this. And so now if you go, if you master visual storytelling, I would expect a fairly similar step function in the opportunities that come to you. I wouldn't be surprised if Netflix is like, hey, we want you to do a TV show or something like that. And you'll decide, okay, what am I optimizing for? You'll map it out and go, No thanks. Or actually the next skill that I wanna master is down that path.

This is so helpful. So final, final question.

Yeah.

So we kind of landed on I want an audience. Yes. Which a lot of people want an audience. Surprise.

Surprise.

Okay, we see the value in that. You and I really, I think, understand that. But I actually just randomly with my small audience, but I'm a very, very small fish in a big pond. In some ways I'm a big fish in a small pond in terms of experience hospitality, but in a world of audience building and personal brands because it's unique enough. And I think, you know, hopefully I have something valuable to share, right? Like I've been able to connect with some pretty, pretty big people. This YouTuber the other day who has like 10 million subscribers just reached out to me randomly and was wanting to chat. And I don't follow this guy. He's actually like younger than me, but he's like built this massive channel and he just told me, we're just DMing on Instagram like, man, this is not at all what it's cracked up to be. I have no privacy. People are constantly here. And so whatever you do, basically be careful because you kind of take— You take a—

You can't come back.

You can't come back. And so I've heard this phrase before, like, I want to be famous enough where I can talk to anyone I want, but people don't really know me. I mean, enough people recognize me, but I am not— Any thoughts on that?

Yeah, I think it's a fascinating conversation. I think I've told this story before on the podcast, but Hosting Craft and Commerce has been really interesting, right? You bring in hundreds of creators and you get to see different levels of celebrity and how people interact with them. So when Casey Neistat came and keynoted Craft and Commerce, he was getting people trying to talk to him in the Boise airport as he's trying to get in the car as Haley on our team is picking him up, right? And he's like, hey, thanks, I gotta go. And people are like, Casey? And so that's one experience, right? And he gave his talk, he was great with all the attendees, but anytime he went somewhere, he was mobbed. Now the other side of it, Mark Manson, when he came and spoke, he attended the entire conference. He was at almost every session taking notes, enjoying the content, all of that. He comes on stage, closing session, and someone sitting in front of me goes, that's Mark Manson? I talked to him earlier. Because he'd written a book that had sold 10 million copies. But how many people open that back cover and be like, okay, Mark Manson, let me study this space. So there's something in the medium of storytelling. A lot of these YouTubers, if you get to 10 million subscribers, you're having to go very, very broad. And you might get recognized. You asked me, how often do I get recognized in Boise? Usually I can walk through the Boise airport and recognize at least one person or something, but that's in my hometown. Though I did get recognized at pickleball the other day, which is random, but it doesn't happen a lot.

And that's pretty cool.

Yeah, it's fun in that environment, but not when you're being approached all the time if you're out with your family. I don't worry that this path is gonna take you down that to such an extreme extent. And I think that you could pull back at any time.

Yeah, it's niche enough just in and of itself. Correct.

And it's here you're gonna be recognized by the kind of people that you'd wanna talk to. Right? Because they're like, I love you, I love your stuff. I actually use this to, you know, I've just done one unit, but I took my Airbnb and I dialed up the experience of it. Let me tell you 3 things that I did. And you'd be like, I love this. Here's another story. Another story. So, right. And so for you, there's, there's not really a lot of downside there.

And ultimately, when you really peel back all of these layers, I think that I want to have some impact on people's lives in a very meaningful way. Like, I want people to be change for the better. And this sounds like probably really high and lofty and stupid, but because of something they saw me do, as imperfect and flawed of a person as I am— and trust me, I'm extremely— but like, be like, okay, the way you cared and did such and such, or the integrity you showed here, the excellence that you pursued in that, or whatever. Like, I always go back to my grandpa who was a fine home builder, and he was like a total anchor and rock in my life and very involved in our lives. And he was the most unpretentious, like understated gentleman. And he said, I mean, this will just tell you a little bit. He saved up for 20 years living in an RV to build a house, but because he wanted to build it just, and he didn't want to take any debt and he wanted to build like this beautiful home. But every detail of that home was like absolutely marvelous. And his farm, every square inch of it was spectacular. And like my brothers and I grew up going and helping him. And he had a list of, probably a waiting list of about 10 years of the richest people in the entire state wanting him to build their house. He never spent a dime on marketing, but just basically put his all into it, cared for each project, each customer like they were his own, you know, family and like they were his own project. And that, you know, that is a life well lived. He kind of took a different path there. He did zero audience building. But he had a certain standard and like that just, spoke volumes about him. So I may be taking a different path, but that's the standard of integrity, of reputation, of excellence that I want to follow and impart to my own kids, my own grandkids someday. And so to me, that is my guiding light, one of my guiding lights.

So imagine this, if we think about being recognized in public, what you put out there is you're going to attract people like that. And so you're going to, your audience, is going to be people who have big dreams, work really, really hard, and are trying to learn to tell great stories. And I would be thrilled to be stopped in public by one of those people. Yeah. Like, that's just a really, really great position. I love it. Okay, let's sit down and let's just recap for a second. All right, so when we came in here, you were talking about like the amazing platform that you've built. Well, I was calling it amazing. You were too humble to say that. Uh, and where to go next. So I'd love just a little contrast. Like, what were you thinking? What was top of mind versus how you're feeling right now?

Yeah, that was like a therapy session that I've never even knew I needed, but I came in feeling quite a bit of like subconscious anxiety because the expectations have felt so high on the heels of Live Oak Lake. And I'm glad I've exercised some self-restraint and not forcing the next project. And I feel like we really came up with like a pathway forward for at least like the next 2 years. That is a beautiful runway that I can go all in on the things that matter to me and sort of check in at any point during that time and make a pivot, but also be in a very good position, hopefully at the end of that time. So I'm pretty, pretty excited because I feel like, okay, I can take the next step with confidence. I don't have to worry about a million things at once and just one step at a time, but with a general sense of this is the right way.

That's amazing. Okay. If people want to follow what you're doing next, where should they go?

I'm on Instagram and Twitter @isaacfrench_ and my newsletter, which I write every Monday, is isaacjfrench.com.

That sounds good. I'm so excited to see the projects that come and just thank you for taking the time to like share all the numbers behind the scenes of your business, the real-life flywheels. All that. I appreciate it so much.

Thank you so much for your time. That was extremely valuable.

If you enjoyed this episode, go to YouTube and search The Nathan Barry Show, then hit subscribe and make sure to like the video and drop a comment. I'd love to hear what some of your favorite parts of the video were and also just who else you think we should have on the show. Thank you so much for listening.