In this solo morning‑update vlog, Ryan Shank of Phone Wagon shares his perspective on why founders need an "all‑in" approach rather than a conventional work‑life balance. He references Gary Vaynerchuk’s laser‑focused 20s, argues that successful entrepreneurs should adopt a 24‑hour mindset where every activity—networking, partnership outreach, content creation—is treated as business work. Shank critiques the notion of work‑life balance as "bullshit," expressing guilt over not maximizing his productivity and pledging to cut out distractions. He emphasizes the value of building defensible platforms over standalone products, citing Salesforce and Shopify as examples of ecosystem‑based defensibility. A personal anecdote about answering a customer chat on Intercom at 2:30 AM illustrates his commitment. He then conducts a rough time audit, suggesting founders spend far more than the typical 20‑40% of waking hours on productive work, and urges viewers to eliminate non‑productive activities. The vlog ends with casual remarks about coffee, studio lighting, and a teaser for the next update.
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What up guys, it's Ryan from Phone Wagon. Today we have Bluestone Lane Coffee, second day in a row. I misquoted it yesterday. Huge, huge mistake on my end. Let me adjust the browser, the camera a little bit. As you can see, today we're going standalone mic instead of headphones. So we're really changing things up. We're hitting a learning curve. It's day 24 of our morning updates. It's Thursday, it's starting to be gorgeous. So, yesterday I was watching a YouTube video of Gary Vaynerchuk, which a lot of people follow his content. It's pretty good for aspiring entrepreneurs and business owners. A lot of it's kind of generic, but it's good overall. It's pretty good. But one thing resonated with me that he talked about was how he said he didn't do anything in his 20s outside of work. I mean, he said like nothing. He didn't go to, you know, he didn't go to bars. He didn't go to like sporting events. I mean, he was laser-focused, 18 hours a day working in, you know, whatever store he owned or whatever. And then now, now that he's in his— he's in his 40s now, but now he's kind of able to— and he still works an incredible amount of time, but now he's able to at least kind of zoom out a little bit and do some other things. He goes to like Jets games and things like that. So point though that I want to make is about how People want to be successful, they wanna have successful businesses, they wanna do all this stuff, but what you see too often is them simply what I call playing within, playing from whistle to whistle, right? They're like only playing when the whistle, when the scoreboard is running versus having this 24-hour mindset. And again, you don't have to be physically like slaving and doing work and in spreadsheets 24 hours a day, but I think when it's on your mind, when you're effectively just moving things forward, whether you're you're reaching out, whether you're establishing relationships, whether you're doing partnerships, you're doing, you know, creating content. Like for instance, this video right now, arguably someone could say, dude, you're just recording videos on the internet, like what are you doing? And then the other side would argue that, hey, I'm creating content, I'm engaging a crowd, I'm creating a community, I'm being consistent at something, that is work as well. So there's like, you know, different levels, um, different types of work and things like that. But it's important that if you want to build a really, really successful company, that you have to go all in, right? I think that work-life balance is actually bullshit. I even feel a little guilty, not a little, I feel a lot guilty right now because I know that I could be doing 10x more things and I could be so much more productive. I'm about to cut everything out and just go heads down and go all in. It's something that I haven't been for the past few months, but it's something that is absolutely necessary if you want to achieve big things. Things and do great things in the world. And I think, and ultimately, I think it'll make you happier. It'll make me happier just because, you know, the other stuff, the stuff outside of work, is, it's actually not that fun. I think, um, the process of building and creating and then eventually kind of seeing, you know, seeing people use a product that you built from scratch and like pay actual currency for it is actually really, really cool. And start to see, you know, big competitors in the space that are, you know, 8-figure valuations, 9-figure valuations start to even notice you, pay attention to you, move because of you. I mean, that's just kind of cool. Um, and but ultimately you want to build a beautiful product that people love, they can engage with every single day, and then create some type of mass ecosystem so that you can't become replaced. Because look, at the end of the day, products become replaced, but platforms are very, very defensible. That's why you see big companies like Salesforce and even these now like website builders like Shopify, they're all becoming platforms with app stores and people are building on them, integrating into them, and that just makes them so much stickier and they can't be replaced. And Salesforce is good, but if you think about it, I mean, it is incredibly expensive, it's difficult to set up, no one likes using it. You have to pretty, I mean, people like using it for functionality, but the interface is like, horrible, and in my opinion, and you have to employ someone or a team of people almost full-time just to get the value and benefit from it. And you have to have like data scientists to like kind of extract the data and slice it and deliver reports to people. So it is heavy, cumbersome, it's not good, but it's— they're a crazy ecosystem platform. You can't really leave it if you're a big company that's on it. You have your entire 100, 300, 500 sales reps using this thing. Like, it is— it's too much to leave it and go somewhere else. So that just took a different turn than I was thinking. Anyway, what you want to do though is you want to ultimately build that, and that's kind of what is more important than like going out. And all the other stuff that you do is like— if you think about it, I'm always sort of like examining my own like happiness in a way. It's like, hey, do I really like this? And then you start to like analyze how happy you are doing those certain things. And like the incremental happiness from doing personal things or like going out, it's not even really there, to be honest. For me, I enjoy this, the— I hate to say hustle just because it's so overplayed right now, but just like being scrappy and just doing whatever it takes. And just literally last night at 2:30 in the morning, I was in my bed and someone chatted in on Intercom and it was a customer. They actually signed up and then they chatted in. And I was like answering live chat at 2:30 AM Eastern time on my phone, um, in my bed. So it was just like, cool. Like, I really doubt any of my competitors are doing that. And if they are, like, that's good for them. It's good for the customers. It's a win-win. So I hope they are, but I don't think they are. Anyway, um, point is, spend more time on your business. You'll enjoy it. And Cut out all the other noise because it's probably, I mean, if you look at how many hours you're awake and then you slice it and say, okay, I spend this much time on a weekly basis, I mean, you're probably talking about 20, 30%, probably 40% of your waking hours doing nonproductive stuff, right? Hang, call it 3 hours, you know, you must take 3 hours a day, 4 hours a day. If you get off at 6 or 7, you're awake till 12, you know, that could be like 3, 4 hours. If you're not doing work then of, uh, you say you're awake for 18, I mean, that's crazy. You're wasting a lot. There's a lot of wasted time, and I think about this a lot. So, um, try to optimize your time better. Don't do that stuff. Try to really think about when you're doing things, like, are you actually having fun, or are you just sort of going through these motions because like society says that like it's cool to do these things, which it's not. Um, anyway, have an amazing Thursday. If you want Blue Stone's actually really good. I think it's gonna replace Blue Bottle for me. But also, I've been working from the beautiful home studio. Lots of, not a lot of light, really bad light. We gotta get these, those lights down. Anyway, have a great day. You guys are awesome. We will see you tomorrow. Morning Update 25.
