Interview With Daniel Priestley: Entrepreneurship And Life

So Daniel, thank you so much for doing this, buddy. I appreciate it a great deal. I am a huge admirer of your work. I've been following you on Twitter for some time, uh, read your books, plural. How many books total do you have now?

I have written 4 books and I've co-authored 4.

Wow. Busy man. Busy man. So give us a quick rundown on all of them.

Well, actually, I think you give me a bit of a run for my money, right? That's right. You got books out there as well.

Yeah, I got 4 of them as well. That's right. That's right. And, uh, you know, that's something I need to think about, uh, what my next one's going to be, because I'm starting to get the itch a little bit. I don't know for you if it comes in waves like it does for me. I don't know if this is definitely—

I go through a wave where I say, that's it, I'm not doing another book, I'm done, uh, I've done— I've said everything I need to say. And then shortly thereafter, I get an idea that I have to absolutely write about.

And then when that— when that idea comes Is it a burst of energy that you have to continually follow through?

There's a, there's a burst of energy that gets me halfway through, and then it's discipline the other half.

Yeah, discipline, discipline. Because with writing, you have to do some semblance of it every single day, or else, yeah, you lose the muscle atrophies.

Yeah, and also you, you lose the thread of the book. You, you know, your mind moves on and you lose the kind of momentum of, of what you're trying to say inside the book. So you kind of got to get into that rhythm, or else, uh, you know, if you let too much time pass, you've got to reread the book. And you know, every, every time you pick it up, you got to spend 2 hours reading.

I started writing— shoot, it was maybe like a couple years ago— a fictional book. And, uh, that's something that I'm like, I need to get back into that. But I went back and looked at it. I use a program called Scribd or Scribd. I don't know how to pronounce it. And I went back and started looking at all those sections and it's kind of mishmash. I'm like, wow, I need to either start all over again or just— yeah, because I've— you're right, I've lost the thread completely. And in a fictional story, that's really important. Characters, you know, you got a lot of balls in the air and, uh, uh, you have to keep everything making sense. So Back to you and tell us about, because you're like a lot of hyper-achieving entrepreneurial types, you have a lot of balls in the air, don't you? You have a lot of different things going on.

Yeah, so I run a group of companies with probably around 100 employees and in the group we've got technology and we've got publishing. I've got some training and development. Um, so a few of those businesses I started and a few of them I bought. Um, I've got 3 little kids, uh, and we operate on— we've also got people in all time zones. So we've got a team in the Philippines and we've got a team in Australia, Canada, UK, and then we've got a bunch of remote workers around the world who, who kind of remote work in. Um, yeah, so I guess, yeah, you could say I got my hands full.

And you are a relatively young man. How old of a guy are you?

42. Wow.

And you've accomplished all this. I don't know how.

I started very young.

Yeah, I would say so. Yeah.

Yeah, I started at 21. So from 19 to 21, I was part of a fast growth startup and I had this mentor who took me under his wing and he basically, I was employee number 3, and then within 2 years we had 60 people, we had millions in revenue. Yeah, so I did this 2 years with this guy and learnt a lot from him, and then I left at 21 and started my own company, and it took off very rapidly. So I, my first company actually went from, uh, 0 to 1.3 million in year 1, and then it got to 10.7 million in year 3. So it was actually by the time that first business ran its, you know, by the time we were 3 or 4 years into that first business, we hit a million a month in sales. So it was pretty fast growth. That was, I was like 24 when that happened, 24, 25. Yeah.

There is a, there's a podcast I listen to quite a bit called How I Built This. I don't know if you're familiar with it.

I've seen that one, yeah.

Yes, and there's a question that he asks of every entrepreneurial person that he has on there, which is, how much of your success do you attribute to luck, and how much do you attribute to your hard work?

So I think luck is a huge thing, and a lot of the luck that we experience is, um, is luck that we just totally take for granted, like a fish swimming in water doesn't notice the water. Um, so like when I went to India for the first time and I spent time in the slums, and I was staying in a 5-star hotel a mile away from the slums, and, um, and it just hit me hard, really hard, that, um, that my whole life I'd just been lucky. Just being born in Australia was, was incredibly lucky. Uh, growing up with almost no crime, or, you know, a stable healthcare system and a stable education system. Um, and it really, like, it just— something shifted inside me because I just realized so much of what I attribute to myself and my own skill and abilities is essentially, you know, the pimple on top of the, the head of luck. Like, you know, it's just, um, take away all of those systems and those structures that I took for granted, and, um, and there's not a lot that I could do from there. Um, so, so there's that basic, just pervasive luck. There's also the luck of being born at the right time. So, um, you know, being born any other time in history, you probably end up being a farmer or a soldier or something like that. Um, so being born at a time where you can actually explore entrepreneurship in a sensible way. Um, and then being very lucky to get a mentor, uh, very early, you know, and being part of an early-stage startup. Um, so, you know, I would say it's, it's— there's a huge amount of luck there, massive amount of luck. Um, because I acknowledge the role of luck, I actively try and do things that would be lucky. So like, for example, if you stay at home watching Netflix, that's there's not a lot of luck that could possibly happen from that. If you go out and mingle with a group of interesting people, then there's probably a lot of luck that could happen off the back of that. So I do evaluate, is this a lucky activity or an unlucky activity? There are certain things that I think are unlucky activities, neutral, and quite lucky activities. So I don't know if you knew I'd talk about this, but I do think about luck quite a bit and just that whole idea of Can you make yourself luckier? Can you do things that have a larger surface area for luck?

What do they say? Luck is where, uh, hard work and opportunity intersect. And you have quite a bit of opportunity as a result of where you were born, your family background, your social network, the time, the when you were born, and everything else. But You see all this opportunity around you and you act upon it. That is a mechanism that a lot of people don't have. Um, entrepreneurial types, people with a natural business acumen, see all these little changes around them and they, they can sense the way the, the wind is blowing and they say, how can I take advantage of this and how can I make some money at this? That's something a lot of people don't have. And this is a good segue into By my estimation, tell me if you agree, at no point in time do we have more opportunity to take advantage of all of these things. The foundation has never been better for taking advantage of all these opportunities than right now from an entrepreneurial perspective, especially thank you internet, thanks to the internet and everything that it affords us.

It's more than just the internet. There's never been more money on the planet than right now. So the definition of inflation is too many— too much money looking for too few goods and services. So by very definition, when the government floods money into the system, uh, essentially if it runs out of products and services, then it inflates the value of the products and services. So, um, we're all globally, we're experiencing too much money chasing too few goods and services. Um, so that is pretty amazing. Uh, we also, thanks to the pandemic, we now have this ability to, um, have remote working in remote markets. So for a very long time in my career, if you were going to start a business, you really did have to sort of have 3 to 5 people who worked within a few miles of each other, um, who were going to run that business. And the best people really didn't matter. It was the best people locally. And then if you were going to sell something, you had to sell it to the people locally. There was no real chance of, you know, like, like you and I connecting. Um, the fact that you've spotted my work, I've spotted your work from across, you know, the internet, and, um, you know, and we've, you know, may never set foot in the same geographical location, but, you know, we can have a connection, we can have a bond. And I've got really crazy high-paying customers who are all over the world. Um, yesterday my tech company signed up, uh, customers in 29 countries, and some of those countries I'd never heard of before. There was a country called Suriname, which I'd never heard of. Suriname, it's a Dutch colony in north of South America, and I, I had to look it up.

Isn't that amazing? It's, uh, you know, I started my little company, Dad Starting Over, and we have this little private men's group which is part of it. And never did I think that the number 2 largest, uh, group outside of the United States as far as members were concerned is Australia. It's like, who would have thought Australia of all places? So much so that they have little gatherings there that they call Mate Fest. So they get together once a year. They've been to, I think, Brisbane and Melbourne and, uh, you know, they hang out for a weekend and we do a Zoom. It's amazing.

Your work is impacting these people in Brisbane.

It gives me chills. I have chills just thinking about it, you know. Just, uh, never in a million years did I think a short 12 years ago that I would be in this position. But it was luck, it was opportunity, it was a big part of it though for me was listening to smart people like you say Have you thought of fill in the blank? No, I haven't. And I think if there's any key to my success, quote unquote, it is taking advantage of those things, recognizing them, and just immediately jumping on them. Go, go, go, go, go. And it may cost— and it may cost me thousands of dollars and some failures, but I learn a lot on the way and I go, go, go, go, go. So many people I see, they're like, sounds like a great idea, maybe one day. Maybe one day I'll write a book.

Yeah, you've recognized that there's asymmetric risk. Asymmetric risk is really that there is a downside, but the upside would be much, much, much greater. You know, if you went to a casino and every dollar you bet could win $10 or lose $1, um, and you know, the— provided you have reasonable odds, you keep betting, and every time you lose it's painful, but every time you win it's really great. And that's very much what the internet's like. So you have this asymmetric risk that it costs you a small amount of time and money to try something. Maybe it does cost a few thousand dollars to try setting up a business and to validate it. But if you get it right, it could be hundreds of thousands or even millions of dollars that comes in. It's important when we talk about luck and hard work, it's really important to just acknowledge the opposite of that, which is there are a lot of men who are very, very hardworking, very hardworking, but they don't place that hard work in an asymmetric risk situation. So if you are an Uber driver and you're doing 14, 15-hour days, it doesn't matter that you're doing 14 or 15-hour days. It's a linear pay scale. There is no exponential liftoff point where suddenly it can start doubling and doubling and doubling and doubling. You are just simply going to add an extra hour of work to the day and get paid for one extra hour of work. So it's really important to zoom out and kind of have a tough word with yourself and say, am I putting my time into something that could scale, that, that could provide that asymmetric, uh, you know, asymmetry?

It's, um, a big portion of my audience are men that are going through life post-divorce. So this is a big time for them to completely reimagine and reinvent themselves. They've wiped the table of their old self. Now they have some time free. You know, they only see the kids half the time or whatever it may be.

Yeah.

Now they've lost the big home and all of that overhead. Then now they have the small car and the small apartment and they got a little bit extra cash to play with and some extra time to play with. And a mistake I hear from a lot of those men is a lot of those men come from very blue-collar backgrounds, and they will say, um, I'm thinking about doing a little side business. What you have in mind? And they will invariably say something to the effect of some kind of business that requires me to put my hours in, to be hands-on and do something. So I'm going to do landscaping. It'll be me and my brother jumping from house to house doing landscaping.

Yeah.

And what I don't hear from a lot of people is and here's how I envision scaling said business. They just look at it as putting in my 8 extra hours a week or whatever it may be of time of landscaping, of power washing. I hear that one a lot. I don't know if that's big over there where we have the power washers of the, the, the— what do you call it— the pressure washers. That's what we call it, where you clean off the driveways and the home and stuff. So everybody thinks that's a good easy quote-unquote way to make some extra money. But what I don't hear enough of is taking advantage of This, the internet, literally sitting on my butt, you know, doing things that allow me to potentially scale and reach. Yeah, million. You and I were talking before we got on here that I have made dumb little videos with my dumb little bald head talking to that, and I can see the stats, you can see the analytics, 5 million individuals have seen me yapping away.

That's a Super Bowl commercial.

That's a super— hey, thank you. Exactly. And, and who am I, some magician that has figured out a secret formula? No, I'm a guy who just did it again and again and again.

You know, this is the fun thing with digital assets. Digital assets. So here's, here's the 3 superpowers of a digital asset. A digital asset, as soon as it's created, it can be anywhere in the world immediately. So if the person who sees the most value in your work is in Brisbane, then it goes straight to Brisbane. So, so it transcends space, it transcends geography, and then it transcends time. So you could create an asset today and it might get liftoff 3 months from now, and it might stay hot for 3 years, and someone in 6 years might discover it, and actually that could be the thing that changes, you know, them, and they suddenly build a relationship with you and a huge opportunity happens. So it transcends time, space, and then it also transcends wear and tear. So you create something that can be used millions of times over, um, and it loses no quality. So one of the things that I love about all things digital assets is that you transcend time, space, and wear and tear. And the more that you build those assets, the more you can transcend time, space, and wear and tear. So if you do have a lot of digital assets— so, you know, I'll give you an insight into one of my businesses. I've got a business that is a digital business, um, called ScoreApp., and it allows people to build online assessments and quizzes. So we built some algorithms, we built some software, um, and we now, uh, have a subscription to that that averages out at about $30 or $40 a month, um, per person. And we have about 4,500 clients. So there's, you know, a few hundred, couple hundred thousand a month worth of just revenue that comes in on that business. And the algorithms are created And every time we want to add another 10 customers, they just magically use the algorithms. And if we wanted to add another 1,000 customers, they just magically use the algorithm. So we issue people a username and a password, and then they log in and they use the software, and they're happy, and, and away we go. So, you know, we expect that that business will get up to about a million a month in 2025, '26, um, and it'll just tick over and people will like it and enjoy it and use it, and everyone will feel like they're getting great value for $20 or $30 a month., and we'll feel like we're getting great value. Obviously, our invention generates a million a month, you know, at that point. So the beauty of that is that it doesn't matter where I am in the world, um, even right now. It doesn't matter where I am. Time, space, and wear and tear doesn't really matter because the thing that we've built, um, you know, is, uh, is, is ticking away doing its digital asset thing.

And I am a SCORE app user. And I— and how I use it for you guys watching this online, if you have seen my little ads on Facebook and Twitter and so forth, there's an ad for complete our survey, our scorecard, and get a free book. And so that's what we do. And people go in and they take a series of questions that allow us and allow them to kind of gauge where they're at in their self-development. And we now, we have a quote lead or a contact that we put into our system and we market to them. And we have our system, we use a system called Ontraport. I don't know if you're familiar with Ontraport. And so we can tell Ontraport based on if they answered this question in the Score app in this way, market this particular product to them and so forth. So that's something we need to flesh out more, but just so much opportunity and Score app. If you're an online entrepreneur and stuff, jump on the Score app like now. That is just a huge— I mean, that's one of those duh things that once you, you know, looked at it and you go, why didn't I think of this? It's such a good idea. Um, because people— it's the perfect little thing of people love to talk about themselves, fill out a survey about themselves, discover something about themselves. And then if you give them a freebie at the end, oh, hallelujah. They're like, that's Happy Days, exactly right.

And a little interaction to start the relationship.

And we have thousands of leads every month because of it, and we've made tens of thousands of dollars in sales because of it, because of your little app. So thank you very much.

So, but that's great.

Perfect example. You came up with this little idea, you put it out in the market, it costs dollars a month, people like me grab it and say, and in turn I make thousands of dollars. Uh, duh, this is a win-win. This isn't a widget that you went and had somebody assemble and put together and make prototypes and put it on the shelf and cross your fingers, hope somebody buys it. That world exists, great. If you want to be in that world, wonderful. That doesn't appeal to me. Um, it's not nearly as scalable for me sitting on my butt here in the office like I am 8, 10, 12 hours.

Yeah, and look, it's interesting too because both you and I have written books. And it's funny with books because books are— there's so much of an infrastructure with Amazon to just simply sell books online. If you, if you know something about something, um, you know, take your story for example. You went through a painful situation, you wrote about it, you took some great insights about it, um, and you put that into a book. And then I don't know how many, how many, like, thousands and thousands of copies that sold. But what year did you write that?

That would be 2017 was when I put out the first version of it. Dead Bedroom Fix is the one we're talking about. That's my most popular.

Yeah, so 2017. So something that you created in 2017, I wonder how many copies it sold in the last month. You know, probably hundreds or thousands. And it's like, you know, something you did in 2017 is, A, helping people in 2023, and B, um, earning you money in 2023.

Yeah.

And I bet you, you had a weird situation that, like, I bet, I bet there was a situation during the pandemic where you would have just hit on, you know, a lot of people are going through a tough time in their marriage. Um, you would have had a bunch of people just discover it, and you didn't even know in 2017 that you'd written this thing that would help people through the pandemic.

There you go. And it's funny, once you put a product like that, that out there in the ether, and it does have to rest on some kind of platform like Amazon— they, they rule the roost. Amazon, Audible, all the same company, by the way. And, um, but something comes along, and I, you know, like every other online entrepreneur, I monitor sales and I watch the graphs and stuff. And then one day you'll be like, what just happened? It's totally out of your control. And you go and you look, and I do a little digging, and I realize, oh, the podcast interview that I did with somebody 2 months ago just came out, and it was just mentioned live, and, you know, a good 30 additional people in last hour just bought it. Like, okay, cool. But that— I guess our message is to a lot of people out there, don't discount or throw out the world of the internet and all that it provides for you, because it If you are the type that's typical listener, viewer, I'm divorced, partial custody of kids, money is not growing on trees, I have to— I do have to count my pennies, I'm working very hard, I'm budgeting, I'm doing all these things, but I would like to do something to bring in some extra cash. Putting a digital product or something like that out on the market via the internet makes a lot of sense for you. So, but the question is though, guys say I don't, I don't have any ideas. I don't have any— is there something to help bring about that, like, state of serendipity or something?

Well, most people do have ideas, um, they just don't have any very good ideas or well-formed ideas. Um, so you've got to build that muscle in the same way that you go to the gym and you can't bench very much on day one, and, and then you build the muscle. So keeping an ideas journal is a really great place to start. Just noticing problems that people face. Anything that you've ever experienced as a pain or a problem or a frustration, there's a business in that. Because if someone else is experiencing a pain or a problem or frustration, they're going to want to know how you handled it. Um, so, uh, an ideas journal can be as simple as, I've noticed that the houses in the local neighborhood, uh, the driveways are disgusting and I'm going to pressure wash them. Okay, there's idea number 1. I've noticed that a lot of people want some, you know, some landscaping. Okay, there's idea number 2. I know that the guy who owns the elevator repair company down the road, he's turning 70 and he said that he's going to close the business down. Maybe I'll take it over and pay him off over 5 years. There's idea number 3. I know that I once got through a really tough time and I'm going to write something down about it and put a book out and have a little community. And, uh, there's idea number— there's the next idea. So essentially, you start with an ideas journal and try to clock up 10 ideas before you evaluate any of the ideas. So you just want to try and get 10 ideas without judging them too hard, just, just for the experience of building some muscle. One of the reasons I think a lot of people fail is they act too quickly on their first idea. They just get an idea and they go. They don't have anything to compare it to. So, you know, they get an idea and they just start, start on it. And I would say a great thing to do is to say, all right, first I'm going to go through and say I'm going to come up with 10 ideas and narrow it down to the 3 that I think are the best, uh, out of the 10. And I'm gonna put some I'm going to put some rigor into why I think they're the best. Do they have the ability to scale? Do they have the ability to, um, go exponential, right? What I mean by exponential is that they can double and double and double. So is it possible that it could double and double? So Uber driving, you will know you cannot double and double. Landscaping, incredibly hard to double and double and double, but not impossible because you could theoretically hire an entire crew and all of that sort of stuff. Digital community, very easy to double and double and double. You know, 10 people turns to 20, turns to 40, turns to 80, turns to 160. So okay, that's built into the mix. Another question you may ask is, could it potentially be exitable? So could I sell this for millions? So, you know, you're, you're talking about a lot of your community thinking about getting started. I also just want to throw it out there it's not crazy to think about the idea of, could I sell this for $5 or $10 million? Um, so for example, if you have recurring revenue and you have a core team who are loyal to the business, um, and you have some form of proprietary asset that you've developed, uh, that could— there's no reason why that couldn't sell for millions. Um, so I've sold businesses for millions. Um, I've sold pretty unimpressive businesses for millions. Um, so, you know, pretty like— I, I had an IT services company, um, that just did basic IT services for, for others, and I bought that business and sold it for millions. Um, and, um, it wasn't like— it wasn't like this was Microsoft. It wasn't like it was changing the world. I didn't invent a cure for cancer. We just managed IT service contracts, um, for companies, and we grew you know, we grew to a, you know, to a decent size and we sold the business. Like, um, so you want to ask that question as well. Like, is this, is this a kind of business that potentially could sell? Because I will say, if ever it happens, it's a life-changing event. It's, you know, there are life-changing events that are negative and there are life-changing events that are positive. And you can actually try and shoot for a positive life-changing event where suddenly you don't have to worry about money as much as you once did.

Let's talk about, uh, we're talking about a lot of positives here— money, opportunity. There are some negatives involved in this entrepreneurial world, one of which is if you're like myself, and I'm going to assume yourself too, once you jump in, we can become hyper-obsessive about this stuff, especially if you have multiple businesses with 100+ people working for you. This can be in your brain 24/7, 365. And at some point you have to forcibly say, I have to step away, this is not healthy for me. How do you manage all of this? How do you maintain your energy? Because you and I are doing this interview, for example, when it's relatively late at night there in the UK. And so you're taking time out of your very busy day to talk to me. Thank you again, by the way. But I'm sure you have lots of these kind of requests for your time. In addition to your time in your business, in addition to your time in your family. How are you managing all of this?

So there's a few support structures that I've got. Um, I have an assistant, um, who manages my diary. So pretty much everything goes through my assistant, and, um, she's able to schedule things. And I just tell her I'm getting a little bit burnt out, or I'm get— like, it's getting a little too much, um, dial it back a bit. And she'll literally just move the meetings around and And, um, or she'll, or she'll dial it back slowly by just not booking stuff, you know, giving me a couple of days off and all that sort of stuff. Um, so having an assistant is really helpful. Now that sounds like an extravagance, but a lot of people I know have an assistant in the Philippines for 3 or 4 hours a day, uh, which is realistically $6 or $7 an hour. Um, so let's say you've got an assistant who does all your scheduling and diary management and things like that. For $30 a day. Um, you know, for some people $30 a day is going to sound high, but for a lot of people it's like, actually, that's manageable. It gives me back some of my time to focus on anything at all that could be worth more than $30. Um, so yeah, Tim Ferriss—

you're familiar with Tim Ferriss and his, his 4-Hour Workweek? He was very— he's a big proponent of using virtual services all over the world to help him accomplish his day-to-day tasks.

Totally. You can't manufacture time, but you can manufacture team. So, you know, this might, this might be hard for someone who's just been through a divorce and you haven't got all your ducks in a row just yet. But one of the things that I've always been quite disciplined with is that I know what my time's worth. And if I can outsource something for less than what my time is worth, I do. So if I know that my time is worth X and I can get a cleaner for less than that, then what I will do is I will make sure that I'm not cleaning my house. I bring a cleaner in and they're cleaning the house. But here's the condition. The condition is, is that if I, if I'm paying a cleaner to clean, I'm going to be at my desk writing, or I'm going to be at my desk coaching, or I'm going to be at my desk making some sales calls. Because I'm freeing up the low-value time to do the high-value thing. Um, so it could be, you know, so, you know, cleaner, could be that you've got an assistant, um, could be that you've got an appointment setter if you're in a sales role. Um, you know, those, those types of people, having a few people around you who organize things, really powerful. Um, if you are, if you're doing okay financially, even just having an assistant who can help with like scheduling life stuff. So for example, you know, my assistant will make sure that, um, I'll tell my assistant the types of social stuff I want to go to and she'll book in all my social stuff. Um, so things like going out on dates with my wife and, um, you know, for example, where, you know, we'll go out and see We're off to see Jordan Peterson actually in London together. So that's, that's going to be a fun date. But, you know, that was already in the diary and it was like the tickets were already bought and everything. So, you know, that having, having someone to just make sure that stuff happens because it's very easy for that stuff to slip.

So Susie, that's the name of your—

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Exchanged emails with her. So we all need a Susie. Got to make a note of that. Speaking of notes, you talked about the journal and so forth. I don't want people to think that needs to be a literal paper journal with pen and paper. This, this is my journal. And I open up my Notes app and all day, every day. I don't know about you. A lot of people in our world have some ADHD tendencies. And if it, if it comes in my head, it quickly exits because it's replaced by something else. So once it enters the head, I have to very quickly tell everyone, shut up for a second. To get out my phone, type it in there and go, okay, now you got my attention because I just thought of something. Okay, go ahead, wife, tell me what you were saying.

It gets even worse now because of ChatGPT. You can have an idea and then copy the idea down and then put it into ChatGPT and just say, expand upon this idea. And it's going to like put 40 different points. So like, I will regularly now just have a little idea. And I'll say, um, I'll give you a real life example that was silly just from 2 days ago. I was with a friend of mine and we were talking about how you've got to make a list of all the things you want to do before you die, and you've got to have a list of 100 things you want to, want to achieve. And I— and he was telling me how he sits down and he journals and he makes up all the lists. I said, have you asked ChatGPT of like a list of things to do before you die? And he's like, no, you can't outsource that to ChatGPT. So I write it into ChatGPT and then we go through the list and it's just awesome. Like, it came up with way better stuff than we would have, um, and it did it instantly. So whenever I have ideas, it goes straight into my phone, but then it goes straight into ChatGPT where I say, write a business plan for this idea, do a financial for— do a basic financial forecast for this idea, uh, in the next 3 years. How many how many employees would this typically need? So like, I will say, I will say if I want to launch an app, uh, that is a writing tool and it's $39 a month and we want to get to 4,000 customers, what would be the typical employee headcount? What would all the roles and responsibilities be? And it'll just go, here's all the roles and responsibilities, here's the business plan, here's what you would aim for in year 1, year 2, year 3. Um, And then I'll say like, and then I'll say, who would be a natural acquirer for that business? Who would build, who would buy that business? And it'll just come up with, here's a financial acquirer, here's a strategic acquirer, here's a private equity example. And it just goes and—

You are doing what every entrepreneur does. You are lighting up when you are talking about AI because you see the potential in this. This is a game changer, is it not, Daniel? This is beyond game changer. This is a world changer. This AI. Yeah, we, we can't— this is humanity, and this is in the infancy.

Yeah, we, we just happen to be living at the time where man discovers fire.

Yes, that's how big this is. That's how big this is. It will change everything. The negative is goodbye graphic design, see you later, we don't need you anymore. Goodbye insert thousands of other professions here. But at the same time, hello, infinite possibilities that we can't even conceive of right now. And, uh, yeah, you know, but for, for eons though, we've been saying technology is gonna make our lives easier. Just wait, robotics will allow us to sit at home and, and do nothing while putting our feet up and letting them make the money for us. And we have yet to see that on a grand scale for, you know, the regular Joe out there.

Yes and no. Yes and no. A lot of the jobs that we do today, our grandparents would be shocked that that's a job. Um, so like, for example, there are plenty of people who are YouTubers, and there are plenty of people who travel around and speak at conferences, and there are plenty of people who are fitness trainers. I mean, imagine going and saying to your great-grandfather that, oh, I hire a fitness trainer. It's like, what's a fitness trainer? Oh well, I pay this guy so that he meets me at the gym and tells me to lift weights.

What? He stands next to me on the treadmill and says, keep going.

Our grandparents would just be like shocked that this is, this is a thing. So, you know, to a degree, you know, if you think about just how many emails you send in a week and how much all of those sorts of things. And then if you also measure your access to experience, you are actually living in that time. That it doesn't feel like it because the human condition always feels stressed. Um, like if you talk to trust fund kids who never have to worry about money ever, they're not happy people. They're quite depressed, they're stressed, they have all sorts of anxieties and worries. And yet they have the very thing that most of us think would, uh, remove all of our stress if we had that, which is they have just an infinite block of money sitting behind them that can never go away. Um, you know, but, you know, if you, if you ever get the chance to befriend some trust fund kids, it's not— you don't naturally and normally think, oh, I wish I could just trade places with them because they seem so happy. So the human condition has something built in where we just can't be, we just can't be happy.

Well, we need— what I've determined is we need some kind of mission. We need something to keep us busy. We need a little prize to shoot for constantly. Anybody who's done like what you've done has said, once I achieve that thing, I go, huh, well, I kind of miss the journey. I kind of miss all that, all that work to get there. Well, on to the next thing. It's the, it's the journey. Yeah, it's getting there is what keeps you going.

Mission. It's having the mission. Yeah, because one— the one thing— so I do have a trust fund friend who— a very iconic business in the US his grandfather started, and, um, a business that if I said the name you'd be like, oh wow, that's like everywhere. Um, and so their family's got like a billion dollars, and, and they've also got all these like locations and shopping malls and all this sort of stuff. So he has an amount of money that that it can never really go away. But the funny thing about that amount of money being in the family is that it really makes most missions seem pointless. So for example, he got it in his head that he wanted to be a wedding photographer, and like the wedding photography thing, you know, is like $300 or $400 a shoot, and it just feels pretty pointless when your trust fund made, you know, $170,000 that week and now you're out in the sun for $400. You know, so—

Having dabbled in the world of photography, wedding photographers, not what you do for fun.

Yeah, and you might do it if you knew that it was a meaningful amount of money and there was a mission to it and all this sort of stuff, but add in a large amount of money and the mission seems pretty pointless. So you end up with, Yeah, having a mission is, I mean, it really points back to this idea that what gives you joy is having a mission that you feel really strongly for, you know, feeling driven on that mission. And most of my friends who are post-exit, they go start a new business real soon. So I've got this other friend of mine who's, he sold his first company for $200 million, he sold his second company for $900 million, and he's currently onto his third business that's currently worth about $2 billion. And he said like they, him and his brother after the first exit could have stopped for life, but they realized this is what we love doing. We love building businesses. We love, you know, making stuff. Why would we stop doing the thing that we love? So we sold it and we got straight on to the next one. And yeah, I mean, they're very happy because they've got a mission.

And you're pointing to something which, here, question for you. Are you ever going to retire?

No, never. Like never, never.

I don't see myself doing it either.

Yeah, I think I have a little bit of self-awareness because I've got some 80-plus-year-olds in my life at the moment that there comes a time where you do need to move into a certain older statesman role that's probably not— but my desire would be to never retire. I wish I could never retire. Um, but I also accept that there will be a time where it makes more sense to be like on a board or making connections or mentoring or something like that.

But you're still doing something.

You still want to do something.

You still have a purpose. You don't, you don't just wake up in the morning and go, well, I guess I'll go walk in the park today. And there's still to do something.

Yeah, totally. And to, to a degree, I'm like already in a position where if I sold, if I sold up some of my stuff, like I really could just do nothing for a long time. Uh, just that the idea of that just sounds horrific.

But culturally, at least here in the U.S. where I've been lived most of my life, there's very much this, uh, theme of I have to work so many years for a company, get a nice pension, save, save, save, and then when I hit 60 or 65, whatever it may be, I'm going to retire, and then I'll— then I will be able— then I'll be able to enjoy all, you know, my riches that I have presumably saved all these years.

Well, I really think that was probably appropriate up until a certain point. Like, if we were to go back not too far in history, um, let's say pre-even 1990, it probably makes sense that the majority of jobs had to be geographically local, um, and they probably fit into a varying degree of unpleasant things to do. So you are either maintaining infrastructure that that was pretty full-on. You probably worked in maybe a hospital or a police or, um, you know, but it was— there was not a lot of exploring your passion in any of that. Um, and then, yeah, you probably did want to save up some money and retire at age 60 or 65 because this is where you can afford to maybe go on some holidays and do some exploration because you've gotten to the point where you've earned it and you explore it. So it probably made a lot of sense, but technology really changed things. Oh, the other thing to add to that picture pre-1990 is starting a business was extremely expensive. The further back you go, you really, you were either born into it or, you know, it was very, very unlikely that you could. Like, let's, let's take a simple retail business. You want to set up a clothing business in 1970. Well, how are you going to lease a you're going to have to lease a shop and pay 6 months in advance. You're going to have to stock the entire store out with clothing, which is probably, you know, adjusted for inflation, is probably hundreds of thousands. Fast forward to today, if you wanted to start a shop, a clothing shop, you'd go onto Spotify and take a $29 a month subscription. You would do print on demand or purchase on demand dropship type style arrangement for maybe $1,500 worth of rolling stock orders, um, so that you've got a little bit of stock maybe for fashion shoots. If you were to build a fashion brand in the 1960s or '70s, even just having a photographer take photos of the thing, process those photos in the darkroom, and then produce a physical catalog would have been tens of thousands of dollars adjusted for inflation. Today you can take photos on your phone, upload to Instagram, link to your Spotify account, and now you're making sales. So this idea that retirement and working hard and then getting to a point, I think that was actually totally appropriate given the landscape of how expensive it was to start a business. But fast forward to today, if you haven't updated the software and realized that none of that exists anymore, you know, businesses are super cheap to start, they're super flexible. You know, you can do anything, you can explore any passion. The other important point is that because businesses are non-geographically limited, you can explore the most weird, narrow little thing and you will find your tribe online. So for example, I'm part of a weird group on Facebook only because I wanted to find the weirdest groups. But there's a weird group on Facebook that I found called the Fruit Sticker Collection Society. And these people genuinely, real deal, they like, it's not made up, they really do collect fruit stickers and put them in little albums, and they have rare stickers, and they have, you know, different— and they discuss what they've found, and they take photos of their fruit sticker collection. I had no idea. Yes, these, like, Star Wars Lego fans, um, people who collect a certain type of vintage watch, like, you could genuinely take your passion for watches and just simply find people who want to sell watches. You could photograph them, you could do them up, you could sell them online. Like, because we're not geographically limited, any weird little thing that you want to explore could actually have 30,000 customers around the world who just want to explore that with you.

Do we see with the rapid advancement of technology, AI in particular, Do we see that allowing opportunity to be spread out more evenly across the masses, or are we going to see a wider discrepancy in your mind between the haves and have-nots? So are we going to see a whole lot of people left with nothing?

Yeah, it's going to be haves and have-nots. And there's two reasons for that. Reason number one is because AI has two superpowers. Superpower— the first superpower is to get you to consume more than you intended. So, um, you might just want to go to Instagram and have a quick little scroll, and then an hour and a half later you're still scrolling. That's AI. AI did that to you. Its algorithms figured you out and kept feeding you the perfect thing at the moment. I bet we've all had the experience recently with YouTube, because in the last 6 months YouTube has really upgraded its algorithm around Shorts, and it's very easy to scroll through those Shorts and spend 10, 20, 30 minutes more than you intended to just on those YouTube, uh, I delete the apps regularly off my phone 'cause I just don't trust myself. So AI has this power to get you to consume and there's gonna be a massive swathe of the population who are hyper-consumers and they end up running down the consumption rabbit hole, which doesn't lead to anything. And then AI has the second superpower, which is hyper-creativity, which allows you to come up with ideas and get them done within minutes. So as the— as this wedge divides society, some of us are going to get really, really good at building ideas fast and getting things rolling fast. And we will get used to the idea that you can turn an idea into a multi-million dollar business in 9 months, and that will just be like a normal thing to do. There'll be a community of people who build multi, multi-million dollar businesses in under a year, and then there'll be communities of people who just are, you know, hit hard with this hyperconsumption, this addiction to, to consuming whatever they're consuming. So that is the first reason that we're going to have haves and have-nots. The second reason we'll have haves and have-nots is because for most of human civilization, most of humans, uh, we had automation happening through soil. So the most— the value that was happening on society, in society was the value that was created through soil, through land. So you plant wheat and then it grows wheat, right? You plant wheat seeds and, and then it grows a crop. But most of the value was automated. It was an actually automated process that all you humans didn't even need to know how it worked. We just stuck a seed in the ground and out came a plant. Um, so this is very similar with AI. You put a prompt and we don't know how it works, but out comes all this value. It just fruit, just it bears fruit. So in all of human history, whoever owned the land became the very wealthy, extremely wealthy people, and everyone else paid to use the land and, and had a fairly meager existence without intervention. The way we're currently headed is towards digital landowners and digital serfs. Um, and it's really important that one of the reasons I do these podcasts is I really do want people to just get on the right side of the wedge with this. And to start playing and start exploring and start creating stuff. Because I do think there is a, a potential future that we could fall into where it's very much built around haves and have-nots to a large degree.

And it seems that would, uh, logic would seem to dictate that a big portion of the haves will be the people that will be able to effectively control the AI, to realize how to manipulate it and, and shape it and mold it to do what we want it to do. So for now, it would be, if I had a youngster say, I want to get into computer programming, not necessarily the way you're thinking. Coding, done. It's— AI is doing all that now. You need to figure out how to control that AI and to get it to do what you want to do. Become the expert in that, and then you can write your ticket. That seems to be the way to go. So we're going to see, um, so maybe that's an idea for people watching this or listening to this. Maybe you want to start getting into AI more. Learn AI.

Yeah, all of the things that school taught you were bad are probably the things that you want to learn. So disruption, being disruptive, getting attention, putting together a team of rebels and misfits who can come up with a, you know, who can execute a little plan, um, uh, having, having a, um having— being able to jump from idea to idea and like, you know, get, you know, being, being flexible, not, not particularly being focused, just being able to mold like, you know, crazy person go around. Um, I— finding the answer, finding who's got the answer and asking to copy their homework, you know, all of those things, they're probably the good things that you want to learn how— relearn.

Yeah, the AI is doing a number in the schools. When a kid when they tell a kid, I need a 10-page paper on the US Civil War, and he gets it done by that afternoon. You're like, okay, yeah, something's up.

Yeah. And do you want it to rhyme? And do you want it to spell, you know, I can put it in French too while I'm at it.

Yes, it's, it's ridiculous.

So, and I've made it so that the first letter of every sentence spells out the, uh, the, the Constitution. Yeah.

Yeah. So for if there's anyone out listening to this or watching this who is ignorant of the world of AI, start diving into it now because It is unreal. The more you dig into it, I mean, I could talk about this for hours. It's just amazing. I saw the other day on Twitter where somebody took a photo of a diagram that they drew on their whiteboard during a meeting, like, you know, like a flowchart of something. And then they fed that to the AI, to ChatGPT, and say, write code in this programming language that will accomplish what we've drawn out here. It did it like that. And it was correct. And wow, that's game changer, game changer. So the— something for you guys to, to jump on that are listening to this. Daniel Priestley, where can we go to learn more about you, what you do, how you can help those out there who want to jump into the entrepreneurial world?

So, um, I wrote a series of books. Key Person of Influence is one of the most popular ones, and it kind of talks about building a personal brand. Entrepreneur Revolution is another one that is like about the times that we live in and how to spot opportunities. So those are some of the ones that you can check out. If you've already got a business, you may wanna read Oversubscribed or 24 Assets, which are about running campaigns and digitizing a business. So those books, yeah, those books are out there and check out ScoreApp, have a look at it, have a play. One of the templates we just launched on ScoreApp is called the waitlist. So if you've got a business idea, one of the cool things you can do is launch a waitlist for it. So you might say, oh, I think I might start a business pressure washing, right? So I'm launching a, I'm launching a pressure washing business in this area. If you're interested, join the waitlist, let me know, um, and then I'll get around to coming and talking to you. And if people join the waitlist, then it's a good idea, and if they don't join the waitlist, then it's not a good Yeah, so we've created some templates for people to very easily collect data and get a waitlist going. Um, so, so fun stuff like that is, is in ScoreApp. You can do all of that with a free account. Um, so, uh, yeah, those are very good things.

Daniel Priestley, Dent Global, thank you so very much. I appreciate everything you do. Keep it up. I'll keep following you on Twitter. I'm noticing you're getting more active. You're members— I've always thought you're a member of or your follower count was way too low on that. I know mine is. I have yet to crack that on YouTube. I have yet to crack TikTok. I'm big in Facebook. I'm big. But Twitter and YouTube, I have yet to crack those two. But follow Daniel on Twitter. Look for Daniel Priestley, Dent Global. You'll find him. ScoreApp, huge, huge fan of ScoreApp. Thank you so very much. Appreciate you.

My pleasure. Thanks for having me.

Thank you.