Unlocking the Potential of Undercover Experts: Insights with Nick Fisher, Co-Founder of Agexa

But in the beginning, like, I didn't have any clout or fame or edification for myself, so I had to go with undercover experts. I never really thought about the fact someone like, not to throw someone like Kim Kardashian under the bus or whatever. But what I found is like, people are like, oh, she's famous for nothing. Why does she have so many followers? There's always some value. She's providing value to her followers in some way, even if you can't see it initially on surface. So like, that is a good definition of pride. Sam.

Hey, what's up everybody? Welcome to the podcast here in sunny Los Angeles, Sofi Stadium, the home of all things great. Well, most things great, mostly David Meltzer and all of the wonderful activities that we get to share with him. And amazing guests like our guest today, Nick Fisher, who is the co founder of Agexa. That's right. All of you that were wondering, how do you say a gexa or what is a. We're not there yet. We're just on how to say it.

It's the number one question I get asked, what is it?

What is this word?

Yeah, is, is. I say a gexa, but most people do say Ajaxa.

Ajaxa.

I wasn't, I don't know if I was gonna go ajaxa.

But it's sad that that's the number one question I get asked normally, like a lot of people, what is the.

What does it mean?

I thought immediately, what does it mean?

Yeah, I want to know what it means.

It does have a meaning behind it. In a story so familiar with back in the day, that one guy, he, he Google expired and he sold it back for like $100,000 to Google after the domain expired.

I heard that rumor. Is that an urban myth or is it real?

It's. Well, that's a good. I never really looked into it, but it was so influential at one stage in my career where I was looking at expired domains every day and just being like, I'm going to be the person who sells back Google the next time it happens. So there's webs, there's a website that you can go that actually just lists all the expired domains in real time as they roll off. And I never got anything valuable, but I did see a gexa.com and I grabbed it.

And this is before someone had it before you.

Yeah, someone had it before, right?

Yeah, someone else had it before me. And it's very rare where you can get a five letter domain, a dot com that actually has some linguistic like sense to it. So it's one off Alexa.com and I was like, you know what? I can say that word. I'm going to make something of that someday. And that's it.

What if the originator doesn't say it like that and it's like age.

You know what if this, if this interview, if we can track down the original CEO and founder of Agexa, please reach out to me. My name is.

I want to know.

Yes, that would be amazing.

Can we start a TV show tracking down the original owners of domains? That'd be cool stories, right?

That would be so sad.

Where are they now?

I hope he or she is proud of you.

I own the dot com.

Well, let's start there. What exactly is. Once you had acquired the domain you had to build a company.

Yes.

Around the five letters.

So what is Agex it.

But yeah. And then the company actually came three years after. @ the time I was at a company called consulting.com.

I spent a whole $2.99 I've ever.

Started a company like this.

Okay.

Where I just bought it and I was like I'm going to do something with this someday.

That's great. That's a great way to start.

So you were working. I own this domain. And then there's this moment. You were like, I have it.

Yeah. I was like, it just makes sense for this type of company that I'm starting. And while I was at. I helped, I was employee number one a company called consulting.com we helped coaches, service providers start their business.

That's a good domain by the way. If that inspires. Let me know if you had that domain.

Actually the entrepreneur who bought consulting.com from Sam, the founder and CEO who, who owns consulting.com or did is here in LA. You guys should have him on. His name is Ryan. He has, he has a really great business and we have similar models actually. So yeah, shout out to Ryan. But yes, it came apart. I didn't know what I was gonna do with it. And when I left consulting.com, i was super passionate. I'm super passionate about experts like yourself. Probably all of you guys here. Like if you have a certain productized knowledge in you, whether you know that you productize it or not. And I love nothing more than putting those people on and because there's a lot of kind of, you know, jabroni fake gurus out there.

19 year old life coaches.

19 year old life coaches. Which occasional can run into a 19 year old life coach that knows something about social media. Yes.

But not about life, bro. I'm sorry. I'm 56. It took me a long time to know this much about life.

Yeah, our industry has a lot of them, but we put a lot of. We. I. I take a lot of pride in putting on the right types of people because I had this marketing skill set, and I love education, like, more than anyone, to the point where I'm always looking for who is the world's best person in this niche and can I help them teach what they love? And that's, like, if you guys had Matt on earlier today, that's. That's what we saw in Matt. We probably interviewed or looked for over 20 different people to teach that specific niche. We. We gauge educational demand. We have a bunch of fancy tools that I've created in the background that basically are, like, cool during COVID Like, people want to learn sourdough bread. How to make sourdough bread. Like, people want this, people want that. And then we go out. The difficulty in our model is actually finding the right influencer or person of talent or expert, because as you guys know, fame and true expertise don't always go hand in hand. If you have both of them at the same time, please send those people to me. Those are, like, my favorite. They make life easy. But we've made a name for ourselves being the ones who find the undercover expert, so to speak, and then bring them to the masses.

And in that respect, one of the things that I found in all media brands, let's say one of the advantages that all three of us, I think, hold as a capability is the ability to actually articulate what we know. So beyond being famous, because I represented a ton of famous people that could not articulate what their expertise was.

That is very common.

And in your business, how essential is it to not only have an expertise, but be able to articulate it? Like, the clients, like, Matt did extremely good job of articulating.

Yeah, Matt was polished, and he. He just came, like, better than most people, like, when we found him. And we've gotten more picky now that we've had some track record of success. It used to be my. My co founder, Josiah Grimes, who's not here, but he was original brand number one, and he was. He was like the literal definition of true expert. He was flipping more homes in Arizona than anyone, but no one knew him. He, like, didn't want to be famous when I approached him. Normally. Normally, the people I like are the ones because I've worked with as. As have you. A lot of people who have the flash and the glitz and glamor. He's like, do I have to be one of those guys who, like, drives or shows my Lamborghini and ads in order to sell courses? I go, absolutely.

Same color.

Yeah. Or we're all the same. Yeah. Consistency of branding does matter, but the ability to articulate your expertise generally, I found, comes over time. Like, no one is really great at it at first. You have some natural, like, savants who are like, oh, man, you were born with that sales and marketing gene.

One take Dave.

Yeah, one take Dave. One take Drake. I try to one take stuff too, as well, but you get there just by repetition, practice, as I'm sure you have too. So, no, it's not essential, but I do like it. It speeds up years of kind of the process if you can communicate and articulate. But the people that I've gotten myself in trouble with are the ones who can articulate what they're good at. But they're good at so many things. We have a really hard time niching down of what exactly you're going to teach. They're like, well, I could teach this, or I could help people with this, or I could help people with this. If you lack the clear vision of who you want to help, like, specifically now, because to me, I'm like, okay, we can do all of that over the course of our career together, but let's start, like, somewhere, and it has to mean something to someone. And the. Yeah, the only time I've really screwed up with super talented people, it's when I'm like, okay, I'm gonna try to be everyone to everyone right off the gate.

I think this is really important point that you bring up because I feel like so many of the experts out there, the ones that are the most knowledgeable, have done the most research, get the best results in their profession or their industry, are the quietest. Right. And they're the most unknown and they're hard to find. So, number one, how do you find them? And then number two, how do you actually help them break out of their shell? Because like you said, they're much like the guy in Arizona that's like, I don't know that I want to do this right.

Yeah, I'll. I'll tell you guys how I'm doing it. But honestly, it's the hardest part of my model. You guys might be better at that than I am because we're really good at gauging the demand and then building a list of, like, finding a bunch of different people, then actually connecting and deciding is tricky because you're right. You like, do you go with like, how. How far do you go to unearth these people? I don't know if we are in fact, like finding the best in the world.

Right.

So what I always use is the heuristic is are you the best in the world? I'll ask them that directly. Or do you desire to be like. I'll take one of those two answers. I'll be like, we champion the underdog and the undercover expert. And a lot of people that we work with, they're either I was going to confident or humble of whether they're the best in the world at what they do. But yeah, we certainly gauge that and then do our due diligence the best we can. But yeah, as far as, like, our actual process, we're really good at finding the demand of the actual niche itself. The expert still eludes us sometimes for a while until we find them. So it can be years. Like there is. I'm still waiting for whoever wants to be the next Dave Ramsey for the next generation of like, who Personal finance. That's the biggest niche that I have yet to find the right person. So a lot of times I just have these industries in the back of my head. I'm just waiting for the right person to publish because I've learned life is too short to work with bad business partners or ones that the next book.

Man, don't do business with dicks.

Yeah, I will be. Yeah.

That's what I'm an expert in. Doing business with dicks. Oh, sorry, guys. I'm kidding. I used to.

Yes. So I'm gonna pre order.

Not in my book. I was gonna say you're the. You're the ending chapter.

Yeah.

The last. And when you learn these lessons, these are the partners you're gonna have.

It feels so good when you finally get it right. All right. Yeah. Because for a while, I underestimated that. Having a business partner is like having an additional spouse.

Yes. Oh, 100%.

Or actual spouse.

Or an actual spouse. Yes. Yes. Like you're either work spouse or actually you get in business with who you marry.

Breakups are like divorces. We tell our kids they are a partner. Dissolution is just as bad and sometimes worse. Yeah.

Yes. Yeah is right. It's like dividing up the kids, dividing up the business assets.

Or like, I'm curious too. Like, what other areas? Like, I'm in a mid market media kind of blitz myself, just from the people that I know. And I don't build brands like you do. So I think there'd be a perfect marriage.

Yeah.

But, you know, I see things like how to take a company public, how to get a job in sports, how to utilize AI as an entrepreneur. Like, right, these, these are the ones that I've come up with, but I don't have, you know, it's not my main business.

Yeah.

You know, for you, what have you seen as being like, besides the Ramsey one, which I agree with, by the way, is there something else in entertainment that's more like American Idol? Like, that's more mass?

There is. There's two ways to go about it. You can either tap into existing demand or you have such a good, like, you know, quote unquote, Steve Jobs sense about what the product should be that you're like, I'm going to create my own demand here for it. Between those three that you listed, can I send you, like, a more in depth, like, report of all those niches we monitor? The coolest thing that we do at Agaxa and New Reach is We monitor over 20,000 courses out there on the web every. It used to be every week, but it was getting expensive. It cost us like 75k a year to run this, like, web crawling across all of these that we found. So we do it every month. And then I rank the niches. So, like, right away, like AI and automation and people, that's such a huge demand for right now. There's a lot of, there's a lot of fear. Some warranted, other maybe not so warranted, or it's further away, but regardless, it's causing people to be like, I don't understand this current world that we live in. How do I leverage AI in whatever type of job opportunity I am to in order to, like, learn a valuable skill that will actually be worth Something in 20 years. So a lot of people are looking at their industries. We always talk about, like, what is there any industry that AI isn't going to disrupt, at least eventually? Some are more prone to, like, initially than others. And it's like, dang, I'm having a hard time finding ones that are completely safe, especially once robotics gets there. Yeah, exactly. So, like, that is definitely in demand. And then what were the other two that you were considering?

How to get a job in sports.

How to get a job in sports has demand for sure.

And then it's not as big as AI right now.

And how to take a company public. Let me, let me, let me think on that. I can't think of any.

What do you got?

No, I'm Curious. What do you got, Lace?

Longevity and biohacking from a female's perspective.

That definitely has a ton of demand.

I know an expert. Yeah, like the female and she can articulate value.

Yeah, exactly. Yeah. No, like, that's. I love. We should have. We should have further conversations on there. I'm curious your unique perspective on it or like your guys, all unique approaches, typically, how these conversations. I'm like, great, you're an expert. You want to be the best at it or you currently are the best. What is kind of where do you see people getting it wrong or where are people screwing up right now? And how do you solve that problem?

Okay, once you discover the expert.

Yes.

Your expertise, your particular expertise is in marketing and selling that brand.

Go to market strategy.

Most experts, that is actually the opposite because they're like, I'm really smart about this thing and I don't want to. And we talked about that a little bit. But in your model, how do you elevate these brands? One thing that's very interesting to me, I also want to know as a sub question to this, ethically you've discussed this, but do you ever think, like, what if I'm being tricked? What if I'm elevating this person and at the end of the day they actually don't know what they're talking about?

Yeah, you find. You find that out pretty quickly, like within a month or two, generally speaking, because they actually can't help someone get to an outcome. And so we. But you don't know for. For sure. Like, there's certain niches where I can do the due diligence and I'm like, okay, I can suss this out. We. But to let you guys know this, we fail about like 50% of the time when it's go to market. Historically. Yeah. Like the ten plus brands that we have, like in our collection or partners that we have. Matt being one. Matt doing well, thankfully. But you never truly know. And that's one of the. I think that's one of the variables.

The other person.

Yeah, like a lot people have asked me on other podcasts, I'd love to get into what you do. I'm like, don't. It's really hard. I underestimate the difficulty.

I got the ideas, but I can't do that.

So I'm like, I appreciate the honesty around that because it is difficult to elevate a brand. Like, we. We know how hard it is to elevate a brand and then once it's elevated, sustain it there as well.

How do you have the chance to do it? Because even knowing Matt's talent, for example, and I get why he's successful, it's also a long game.

Yeah.

Because I don't care how good you are, especially the unknown talent.

Yes.

It's a long game before you build a big enough community to be successful to have a vending machine.

It is. And you guys are catching me at like, me re evaluating the business model. Thankfully, right now, like, I have the ability to connect with people like yourself where there's less risk. Now if I launch them, it's going to be. But in the beginning, like, I didn't have any clout or fame or edification for myself, so I had to go with undercover experts. And I like those people better. But these days, like, I, I want both. I want the people that are experts and already have some built in distribution or following. To me, like that has become the new definition of product market fit. Or like I never really thought about the fact someone like, not to throw someone like Kim Kardashian under the bus or whatever.

She doesn't care.

But it's a good. Okay. Yeah. She doesn't like she. Right. She'll. I hope she sees this one right.

Exactly. Me too. I hope she posted.

Yeah, More likely for you. Exactly. But what I found is like, people are like, oh, she's famous for nothing. Why does she have so many followers?

She did something that's aligned with my specialty. I saw she got famous.

Yes. Yeah. Like, right, like there. There's some value. She's providing value to her followers in some way, even if you can't see it initially on surface. So like, that is a good definition of product market fit. Otherwise people wouldn't be following her if they didn't have value, like, got value from her at all. So I'm over that now. That used to be a bias early in my career is like, okay, if they have X amount of followers or surpass millions and millions, I'm like, there's no way. They're probably still good at the thing that they taught about. I've been proven wrong many a time there. Of course there is. There's definitely some people that are there and haven't been good for a while. But in our space, teaching a course, you have about a year and a half Runway where you can pretty much pretend for a while and then people find you out and you betray trust with the community. And like for Matt or all of our other brands that we track, the number one metric we is student outcome or student success. Rate. And you have kind of the explicit promise of the course that you're in. You're like, okay, if it's something like bookkeeping that has a financial outcome, very easy to ask and measure that success rate. But then you start to see it over time. And those are the brands that we end up parting ways with. So, like, when I say brands don't fail, typically it's like business partner issue is like, is reason number one. Either it's not making enough money for us, it's not making enough money for them. Those are the two probably number, number one and number two reason why things dissolve. It's very rare where we don't. In fact, we've only failed from a financial perspective once or twice where just like, the numbers didn't work. Because if someone has the, like, at least the aura of expertise. In the beginning, you'll always find a few people, normally because we gauge demand so well, but then after that, the scale up is what, where you get stuck. Yeah.

I love it.

Yep.

So in any business, though, to be so vulnerable. I love the fact because I think it adds more credibility than anyone I've interviewed in a long time because, say, like, hey, 50% of these work. In that vulnerability lies the fact that other people won't be attracted to it as well. Do you find it as a qualifier by being so honest that it qualifies the people that will be honest to you?

You're the first person to point that out. That's like, exact. That's not why I am so vulnerable and transparent. But it is a qualifier because someone has to have at least enough of that entrepreneurial gene. Have you found this too? Like, when you're. You assume that any sort of influencer person who has status, you assume that they have like a ton of entrepreneurial tendencies. And that's not always the case.

Yeah, they might be a model.

They might. Right. Like and I.

Or funny.

Yeah, maybe that's like, maybe that was obvious to you guys, but it wasn't obvious in the universe.

Some of us have it all. Yeah. Right hand model. Really funny and entrepreneurial.

Exactly. So to me, it's like you sometimes get in there like, oh, like, this shouldn't have been a business partnership. Maybe I should have just paid a flat fee. I think that's what Masterclass. I. I just know them from afar and they're a good comparison for our model. Masterclass did the smarter thing. Maybe from. Maybe from an overall valuation standpoint of like, raise money, go pay experts in order to come in, and then Just then you don't have to do equity splits. Then you don't have to, like, cross your fingers.

You're gonna need Matt to take care of the accounting.

Yeah, I know. Exactly. Yeah.

Well, I absolutely love this model. Last question. I have a record producer always has people that are like, listen to my music, Listen to my stuff.

Yes.

As you go out and you're promoting your brand, are you getting more inbound experts that are like, hey, look, look, I know how to spin Frisbees or like, random stuff and they're pitching you.

Yes. Well, yeah, that's. That's my hope is what comes of this. And right now, like, we're only. We only ever watch because there's so much focus that needs to be had to go to market. One or two. So we have this backlog of potential people that want to work with us. And it's. Spin Frisbees isn't too far off. There's some interesting stuff in our, like, contact forms. But yeah, anyone watching this who is an expert or wants to work with experts, I would love to connect and just see if there's interest there because, yeah, there's niches in the back of my head and I have taken on, like, passion projects. Like that one would be a really niche passion project.

So how do people connect to you?

Agexa.com is the. Is the best way. Or connect with me on social Instagram or LinkedIn. It's not hard to find me. And usually if I don't respond to you right away, it's not because I have a lot of dms, it's just I don't. I'm not on social media a ton despite. Because it's my whole job.

I feel like I know what it would be like. So honest. Yeah.

How to be honest? Honest in social media. Nick Fisher. I buy it.

Well, thank you, guys. I actually appreciate that a lot because, yeah, at some point. At some point it might actually be this year. I need to productize my own knowledge and stuff as a way to give back. I am interested in the money it can make as a marketing course. Always does somewhat well. And I've played in those fields before. But there are a lot of people that I just want to help. Experts, whether we can work with them directly or not do things the right way. There's just a lot of, like, knowledge curve stuff that I can speed up for people. It's not that I'm some savant in marketing, although we think that we're very good, but we do have, like, I've done this for just 10 years now. And it's the only thing I want to do until I die is just. I love working with experts. I love sharing their knowledge with. It makes me feel. Makes me feel happy. At the end of the day, when I think about my life's mission of like retiring if I ever do. Of just like, oh, like, you want to learn this? I have someone for that.

Like, well, you can take my video. You can take my video course on how to repurpose, not retire.

There you go.

It's a very popular one as well.

Do you have. Yeah, I, I would. And it.

Told you.

There's the book. Really.

Okay.

Pre order right now.

Oh, I just.

I literally learned so much from that.

People love the title. I pro. I promise it was very valuable. It cost me about 100 million in losses. How about this? Of course, in dummy tax. Take the Dave Meltzer dummy tax course. I'm one of the biggest dummies over the last 35. I can teach you not to be a dummy.

That book already exists. Tax for dummies. Yours was dummy tax, dummy tax.

Yeah, exactly.

Sign. Sign me up. But it speaks to your resilience though, that you haven't quit though, and you're continuing to do, I'm guessing, a similar type thing despite all of that too, in the bad experience.

That'll be another great video.

Yeah, no, I would. I would love to know how you develop that. If that's something you had it like at a young age or if, if it's something that's just. The grit was built over time.

Both.

Right.

It's horizontal and vertical in its nature. But yeah, that'll be another video for you.

Cool.

We're loaded up today. Podcast.

Well, hey, folks. What an absolute gem of an episode. Thank you so much, Nick, for joining us. Make sure that you join us again next week for a brand new edition of this amazing podcast.