Dumb iPhone Apps Are Making People Rich Again (Here’s how)

When I talk to 12 founders a week, I'm seeing 6 of them are crushing it with iOS apps. There's a guy that we interviewed on the channel that have an app that forces you to do pushups. They're doing $30K a month.

So Pat is here from Starter Story. Pat, HubSpot just bought Starter Story. Yeah, it's amazing. Congrats. Congratulations.

Thank you.

Is the news out?

It is a fit. Technically, not closed yet. So I'm in a— going through a whirlwind. I'm going to try to put on a good face for you guys.

You're 7 days out right now from selling. And when this goes live, it is presumably closed. And yet you are nervous. What's that about?

Well, the deal is supposed to close tomorrow, but, you know, it's the psychology of it needs to be signed, closed, wired. Otherwise, I cannot take myself to that place yet, that place to, you know, celebrate or tell people or anything like that. And it's kind of weird, you know, doing the production process because, you know, content needs to be recorded early to go out. So it's super weird to do an interview before it's done.

How did you do with the negotiation? Do you feel like— walk us through how you approach that and how you think you did. Give yourself a score there.

I had a number in my head before any of this conversation happened when it just came to my head. I started talking to ChatGPT about it, having a little conversation of like, What is— before even the sale or anything, conversations happen. She said, like, what would be my walkaway number? And I just remember thinking back what that number is. And when I went back to the negotiation and then it sort of was that number, I was like, okay, well, I made up that— that would have been my number before any sale influenced me or anything like that. I negotiated to that number because I wanted to be like authentic in my negotiation of like, that was like truly my number, not to make up something for whatever. That was actually the number.

Do you feel any bit of regret because you're like, oh, I got my number, I should have asked for more?

Yeah, 100%.

You haven't made it if that doesn't happen. That's the final stage for maximum regret, and then it turns to maximum relief when it's done.

Yeah.

All right. So let's, let's explain what is Starter Story. People don't even know.

Starter Story is a lot of things, but it started out as a side project while I was working a 9-to-5 because I couldn't start any successful business. So I said, why not just start interviewing founders and sharing their stories online? And maybe I will find a co-founder through that, or I'll find a good idea through that. Long story short, it took off. We found other mediums. We had the blog with the case studies, we had products, we had community, we had a YouTube channel. It is all built around interviewing founders doing anywhere from $10K to $100K per month.

Let me ask you, what'd you get right? Because this idea of, hey, I'm going to interview founders about, you know, how they did it, that's not like a new idea. And you did this only a couple of years ago. How many, how many years have been 3, 4 years? How long has it been?

No, I've been, I've been in the game longer than, than you might think. 8 years is when I officially started the business.

Even 8 years ago, that wasn't a completely novel idea. But you, you did well with it, right? You separated yourself from the pack. You made it a success. What do you think you got right that others didn't? And I really hope it's not just like a, I worked hard, you know?

Yeah, I think one thing that now I'm looking back, what did we get right is that we were— you had to share your revenue to get on the website. So a lot of founders at the time, they didn't want to share those things because they had investors. It was private or whatever. We made it a requirement to share your revenue on the site. This is something that we got from IndieHackers at the time, which was big on that too. Shout out Courtland, who built that. But once you could see like, well, you don't want to read a story about a business and you don't know how much revenue they're making. You want to know how's this business doing? Okay, now I want to learn from this business. So having that revenue number at the top, that was really, really big.

If you guys Google like Starter Story case studies and you could find one or and you could find this thing, it's called the Full Case Studies Database. And so early on you were really interesting because you would interview people. And I always thought that I was like within a very small niche of people who like this, but I think it's actually a lot of people who like it where where I love numbers. I'm obsessed with numbers. And you would do these interviews with people and they very clearly were not interviews of you speaking. It was as if you just sent people a Google Doc, the same Google Doc over and over and over again, and you ask questions and they typed out the replies and then you created a graphic at the top and it said, here's one. It says Brewmate. I think it's called Brewmate. Yeah, Brewmate. I grew a drinkware brand to 1. $1 million per month at 23 years old. And it said Jacob, and it said his revenue per month is $12 million. His, uh, there's one founders, there's 53 employees. Like the way he, you did such a good job of just outlining those numbers. And then what you did was once you had like 100 of these, I could sort through like D2C, uh, SaaS, I could sort through all these things. And frankly, if I was just trying to clone someone's company, yep, that's probably not the right word, but figure out what business model I want to do and like find Well, if you wanted to clone someone's company, some asshole was going to do that. Yeah, but like, if you wanted to, like, research, that's a better word. Uh, you were like, you were, you, you and IndieHackers were like the best. But like, you had like a bunch of legends, like you had David Hauser from Grasshopper and a bunch of people like that on early on. And it was really cool.

Every single week I talk to founders, as I mentioned, that are doing between $10K and $100K per month and people that have sort of their businesses have took off recently. Um, so I like, I get to see, I get to have these conversations every single day and see like what's working like right now. We can go over some of that if you want to.

Yeah, give us one.

Yeah, sure. What do you guys want to talk about? I have a couple options for you. We can talk about iOS, we can talk about YouTube SEO, we could talk about APIs, we could talk about B2B video. What's exciting to you?

Um, let's do iPhone apps because to me that sounds like 10 years ago.

Yeah, that was probably the most surprising one on the list, right? It's like, wait, that's the, that's the now opportunity. I feel like that was the, the 2010 opportunity.

Right, right. So yeah, it might, it might feel like it's an old opportunity or is too broad. But again, this is all, this is not something I read on Twitter. This is not something that I just came up with through ChatGPT. This is what, when I talk to 12 founders a week, I'm seeing 6 of them are crushing it with iOS apps. This is where this is coming from. So a couple examples. There's a guy that we interviewed on the channel that have an app that forces you to do push-ups before you can go on social media. Like, you scroll, it blocks you, and then you have to put your phone out there and prove that you've done push-ups. They're doing— what's that called? 30K. They're doing 30K a month. And actually, they're doing a lot more. Can't disclose it exactly, but after we interviewed them, they told me some crazy numbers. Then there's another one that does basically the same thing, but it makes you pray. Makes you do a prayer to God before you can go on TikTok. Yeah, yeah.

Just like God intended.

Yeah, yeah.

To enter heaven.

Yep, there's like a feature in the iOS API or something like that that allows you to screen block apps. So there's tons of apps like this, or just, you know, basic blocking apps. There's a bunch of productivity-related apps that are popular like that that have some sort of, sort of almost gimmick element to them. but you see it on TikTok, you see it on social media, and you're like, oh, let me try it. Okay, I want to do some, I want to get a little healthier or whatever.

And are these, okay, so I see it, Pushup, Pushup Time Blocker, right? Pushup App Blocker.

Is it Push Scroll?

Push Scroll? That's the one.

Push Scroll. Okay, gotcha. So you go, um, Push Scroll. Okay. Push Scroll Screen Time Control. So you, you replace doom scrolling with a healthy habit. It literally has a picture of a guy doing pushups, like with AI watching him. And then it says it can limit the apps you're addicted to. And basically you earn, you know, you earn it as you make progress. Now here's my question. Are these doing the same kind of like, you make a fun kind of novelty app and then you do like massive TikTok content by giving, paying influencers or affiliates or basically getting like 100 or 1,000 pieces of content posted every week. They'll come up with their own hooks. Like, oh my gosh, y'all, you know, Check this out. I haven't used Instagram at all this week because of whatever, right? Or here's where these gains came from. Instagram? What? And then it's like, you know, is it that— is that the playbook that they're all doing?

Sean, you should become a TikTok affiliate. That's pretty good.

That was kind of natural.

What was really cool about this app, and this is a cool story worth telling, is that they didn't actually build the app first. They created the viral video first. And this is a really cool story that we told is basically they created a video about them having to do push-ups before scrolling. They pretended that the app exists and they showed them having to do push-ups or whatever. and they created a bunch of other videos about other app ideas. This is the one that went viral. And then when it did, it got some hundreds of thousands of views. They went and scrambled to create the app and then it took off. So they were able to validate the idea through TikTok and through their marketing channel they're going to use and then build it, which I thought was super cool.

Were they technical?

Uh, one guy— there was two guys. One guy was the technical guy. The other guy was the kind of the marketing guy. Yeah.

One guy's just great at push-ups. So this is the opposite of Field of Dreams, right? Instead of, you know, if we build it, they will come, it's like, if they come, then we'll build it, I guess. I guess we've got to build it then. And they just went viral first.

Exactly. They reversed the whole process, which I think is the right way to do things now. Because imagine creating 10 apps and having none of them work. That would take you a year. Or creating one video in one day and having it work, and that takes one day.

All right, so Pat is giving you guys something straight out of his playbook, which is his method to finding a $1 million business idea. It's a template that guides you through 7 proven methods to identify 21 problems that you can solve. It gives you real founder case studies so you can build and validate your ideas fast. If you want the template and case studies straight from Pat, you can download it right now. Just click the link in the description. Now back to the episode.

Are there other apps that you're seeing, another genre of apps that you're seeing that are working?

Apps are the new info products, I think. So anything in health, wealth, relationships, productivity, self-improvement— these are all great spaces. And the reason why I wanted to share the dumb apps, because they're the most funniest when you think about them. I'm not saying go build a dumb app, but build anything in these sorts of spaces right now. Health. So fitness, gym apps, these sorts of things. Wealth, money, productivity, these sorts of things. That is a great space to be building right now.

What are you seeing in wealth?

Well, there's not any kind of the silly apps, but anything that's in like crypto trading, these sorts of things, those are really, really popular.

What's a stop vaping app?

Yeah. So that would be another one of the health. I think the health one is a good space. There's a guy that just built an app that helps you track. It was called Puff Count. And I think you just track how many puffs you took, and then once you get to a certain low amount, it sort of gamifies the process of quitting nicotine. That was a cool one. He sold it for a lot of money, and we— that was, that was a really cool example. Did a lot of TikTok.

Bought it like Philip Morris and they shut that sucker down. Get that out of here. And are these kids built like— I assume I've watched your channel and it's almost a young, like, 20-somethings. Are a lot of them actually technical or are they just using AI to make this stuff?

That's the thing is they're using AI coding and this is why it's big now. And you thinking it was big like 10 years ago, it's big now because in order to build an iPhone app, you needed to have a team of 4 to build a good iPhone app. You needed a designer, you needed a product person, you needed an engineer, probably a backend and a frontend engineer. But with AI coding tools, you can just have an idea. It's not perfect. But it's like 95% of the way there, you can just build it with zero, basically a team of zero, apps that couldn't have existed before because it wouldn't have been cost-effective. You couldn't have built a stop vaping app with a team of 4 people getting paid $100,000 a year or $200,000 a year. It just wouldn't have been feasible. But now there's this opportunity for all these little kind of weird, fun apps that blow up on social media because You don't need anybody to build them anymore.

You know what's interesting is you said that, um, apps, the new info products that didn't, that didn't hit with me until just a second ago. Do you guys remember the police scanner app? I think it was called 5-Radio or 5-0 Radio. Do you remember that, Sean?

Mm, not really.

Okay.

I've heard of these, like Citizen is the one I know about.

This was before that. So I'm part of this forum where this guy is a poster and I knew he was kind of a celebrity to me a little bit. And his name's Alan Wong. And he started this thing called 5o Scanner. So if you guys Google him, he kind of was famous because he created this iPhone app. And I think his story was that he was an immigrant from another country. He came here with nothing. His family, I think, I think they worked in a restaurant, something like that. He created this thing called the 5o Scanner right when the iPhone got started and he made 8 figures. I think he was making like $5 million a year repeatedly for a very long time. And he like wrote the story about how he was able to retire his mom and dad. Then he like bought a Lamborghini and he took a photo of himself in the Lamborghini when he was like 24 and he kind of went viral for that. But he never actually taught how to make apps. He was like kind of like true to like just making apps. And I remember this guy and he was like one in a million. There was like not other people doing like these iPhone apps that were making $5 or $8 million a year with one employee. He was one in a million and it was so cool. And he's like a celebrity a little bit to me because I kind of grew up. He was kind of like my Tai Lopez. And it is kind of interesting to say that these the, the, they are the new info products because info products, when I was growing up, when I was 19 and 25 trying or 19 and 21 trying to get into the internet, it was always info product people that like I didn't, I didn't exactly look up to because I thought they were sleazy a little bit. But I was like, I want that life. I aspire to have that. Like I can make money anywhere, any time, be on a beach type of lifestyle. And it is funny that you're saying that the apps weren't even on my radar because I didn't know how to make them. I couldn't, I physically couldn't do that. But now I probably could. And that is kind of an interesting way to look at it. And then we saw we had this one. What was the kids who we had on here?

Sean, Calorie Tracker, Cal, Cal AI.

We had Cal AI.

He was—

have you guys seen how big that business is now?

So he talked to it. This guy Zach talked to us literally. It was noon on a Tuesday. What are you doing here? He goes, I came home. He goes, I came home for lunch during high school to like do this interview and I have to go back to school. And at the time, I think it was a $30 million a year business. How big is it now?

I saw on X, so it's not verified or anything like that, but they, they said they did $6 million in January alone. So $70—

what does that put it at?

$70-something million.

That's incredible. Well, he launched a thing called App Mafia, which is like a course on how to make apps. And I don't think it landed. I think people kind of mocked it. But anyway, it was cool to like see that this is the new info product.

Well, it's cool because there's— sounds like there's two trends coming together, right? It's apps are getting easier and easier to make with AI and vibe coding. And on the other hand, you have a new discovery platform, TikTok, that you can get your app downloaded from. And both happening at the same time. Like Charlie Munger calls these like Lollapalooza effects where multiple factors kind of conspire in your favor and then suddenly you get this like crazy sort of Lollapalooza effect out of it. And so you get 1, 2, 3, 4 variables all pushing in the same direction unintentionally, and it creates like a new opportunity. So we were joking like, dude, iPhone apps is— this is like 2010. Like, well, what do you mean that's the opportunity? Well, there's something that changed. Apps got way easier to build and apps got way easier to be discovered. There's a new way to get discovered as an app. So the playing field reopened in a way that the window was sort of closed. Um, you know, over the last, let's say 5 years ago, it was less juicy than it is currently.

Yep, that's right.

Okay, you want to do another idea? What else you got?

Let's do this B2B, B2B video. I'm curious what you have there.

Yeah, I don't have like crazy business ideas here, but I have just some intel on how big this opportunity is. And there's so many business ideas you can do off of this. So I know this and you guys know this is that video content is hard. Doing anything on video is hard. Doesn't matter if it's long-form, short-form, paid ads, organic, getting authentic, non-AI gen— we're not talking about AI-generated stuff, like video to work for your business that gets views and converts customers. There, it's really, really hard. At companies, there's lots of functions, right? Design, that's pretty much solved. You get good designers to do good stuff. Product, that's a little tough, but kind of generally solved. Engineering, kind of solved, especially with AI. Sales. There's lots of playbooks for all these, right? But there's no playbook right now for video. I will stop there. Let me know what you guys think immediately about that.

I think you're spot on. I've said before, video is now the native tongue of the internet. It's the language that the internet speaks. And so if you can't make good video, you essentially— it's like moving to America and not being able to speak English. You might be able to get by, but it's not going to be easy for you. And so you're right that the way you just put it is really great, which is that companies don't even have really the job function yet at the majority of companies to be able to produce video. Who in, who in the company should be able to produce video right now? It's like it's kind of the youngest employee maybe is going to do it. You know, the guy who happens to have a camera and, you know, understands TikTok a little bit. I guess you can sort of do it. The social media person's supposed to be expected to do this, but it's probably going to elevate up to the level of Product, design, project management. Like there's going to be one of these functions at companies where you need to be able to produce good video because that's how we communicate with the world now.

Yeah.

Or it's going to be the person who's least embarrassed. What's funny is like, so starting in December, I started doing, uh, I tried to, I wanted to learn Instagram. So I was like, I'm gonna make a video a day. I was so ashamed to be doing this. Yes. And like, then I like started learning how to do this and I was like, This is so like manipulatable. Like, I know how to do this now. It took me about 30 videos to master, but what was holding me back was just the shame. Just the shame. Like, it's just so embarrassing to like be walking down the street and talking and be like, hey, so here I'm going to— wait, hold on. Got to redo it again. Hey, so here I'm going to— I was like, well, if I hold it a certain way, I could just pretend that I'm on FaceTime. But people hear me repeating the same thing over and over again. Like, this is stupid. Like, I'm acting here. It was horrible.

Well, that's actually why it's a huge opportunity. And I have this on one of my other ideas, which is around YouTube SEO, but that's also related to video. But I talk to a lot of founders or people that want to be founders. People are afraid to put their— themselves on camera. That's actually why there's one of the biggest opportunities, because 99% of people would rather write an article or, you know, do something with like Google SEO or just do something that doesn't have to put themselves out there and put their face out there. And that's actually why YouTube, I think, will be a huge opportunity because most people are too scared to actually put a camera in front of their face and start yapping.

It's also hard, right? Like, it takes a lot of work to do YouTube compared to a podcast. A podcast is so much easier than doing planned, scripted, edited, packaged YouTube content. And then you get the big view number in your face and you get an immediate, like, slap or, you know, that quick high that you're then going to chase, right? And that's a very tough cycle on YouTube. I think, you know, short form is sort of similar. There's like the phrase like 200 view jail where a lot of people will create TikToks and they just sort of never get past the 200 view number. You just stay stuck in that state.

Right.

But there's a huge amount of, I don't know, self-consciousness as well as actual work that goes into doing this. So what's the solve here? How do you actually, how do you actually solve this? What are different angles you could take? Like Sam, how would you, let's say you believe this was the problem. I think Pat has accurately described the problem and the value that's there, but you need, you still need a key to unlock the door. What's the, what would be the key? What would be an idea that you would create in the space?

I could show you a couple people. Well, I, one guy that I think is cool, he does, so big companies, they want to get into video. HubSpot obviously wants to get into video. Big Fortune 50, Fortune 100, Fortune 500 companies, they need to figure out YouTube and they need to figure it out fast. And I know a guy who has an agency that he goes for the big boys. He goes for like the Microsofts, the Figmas, and he basically just sends them— he helps them build YouTube teams and he sends them packaging ideas. Do this title, do this thumbnail, do this title, do this thumbnail because you are Microsoft or some massive company. He charges like— it's different probably per client, but he's told me some crazy numbers like $50,000 to $100,000 per month just for YouTube strategy. And that shows you how much B2B, this is a B2B-specific play here, how much they're willing to pay to have this problem solved. And I still don't, like, that's like one example. I don't even know a lot of people that are solving this problem. I don't know what you guys think.

Well, there's other people who are doing like done-for-you, right? So we've talked about the guy, I think his name's Josh, who does the street interviews for companies. So it's like, oh, like Josh Suggs. You know what's the most shameful and awkward and difficult version of video is like, man-on-the-street interviews. So he's like, just niche down into like, I'll give you that format, you give me money, I will walk around New York and I will stop people on the road and I will ask them, you know, 3 goofy questions to try to get, you know, try to get you some clips. Okay, so that's like one guy who's doing the done-for-you service. I know these other guys that do— they fly to companies and they, they podcast interview them. They're like, look, forget even getting booked on an actual podcast, I'll just interview you. Yeah, chop it up like you were on a podcast. Nobody even needs to know that there's no long-form podcast actually underneath this, and I'll just give you the clips. Like, and for you, that's a lot easier. The, the— usually the CEO or the founder is pretty comfortable just sitting down and being interviewed about their company, uh, in a podcast format, and they just do it, the whole thing turnkey. And it's like, wait, let's just cut out the part of helping you get booked on actual podcasts and cutting it. We'll just fake the podcast. It's great.

Yeah.

And so that's like another, like, we will deliver this format to you for a, a, you know, tens of thousands of dollars a month type of, type of thing. Now you only need 10 customers and you're, you know, now you're cooking at over $100 grand a month.

Yeah. I like the idea of taking one popular format and then turning that into a business. Like you said, the street interviews, do that one format for one business. And I actually met that guy who started that business and he told me some pretty wild numbers about his revenue.

We talked about it. Yeah, it was doing— I think this year is going to do $10 million in revenue.

Yeah, one format. It's crazy.

Well, here, do this, Pat. Let's show. Okay, so do me a favor. You sent me a thing where you have your Google Sheet or sorry, your Google Doc that you have for every single video that you made. I want you to show it to Sean. And the idea here is like what you— your pre-work for your YouTube video was really good and it outlined the whole story. You did a really good job of when you showed me how to make a YouTube video. And what Sean's describing is basically just doing that, but for companies.

Let's do it.

So for the audience, Sean and I have done 750, almost 800 podcasts. Sometimes they're super well-researched. Other times we're like, let's just riff. What do you want to talk about? Tell me about your weekend. Let's just talk. And it requires like no work. And occasionally those will get seen by hundreds of thousands of people. Occasionally there'll be an interview that has little research and we're just friends with the person, and that could potentially get a million. Views. Yeah, uh, but then I saw yours and it was so much more work but worth it.

Yeah, I'm very anal retentive and I want everything to be planned out and I don't like off the cuff, I don't like spontaneous. I want everything to be there in the doc before that gets filmed. I'm not saying that's better or worse, but that's more my style. But I can pull up, uh, let me just find the right one to show you. Okay, so this is what we call a prep doc. I mean, My First Million has something like this too, but this one is a little different. This is our prep doc for all of our videos that we do at Starter Story, and we will do a couple things in here. First, we start with the package. So this is before anything gets filmed, and it's not post-film, it's pre-production. And we do the title and thumbnail. So this is this guy here, it's a different guest, but we're saying, hey, this is the thumbnail we're gonna do, and this is the video. This video did pretty well. I think it got like 500, 600, 700K views. So that's why I wanna show it. It's like a good example. And I learned this when I read this production book. It was like Hollywood production book. But when you sell a script in Hollywood, they have what's called a treatment. And it's basically a pitch of a video of why someone will wanna watch this video. If you wanna sell your script in Hollywood and convince some director to pick it up or whatever happens in Hollywood, you have to sell the, you don't, give them the 120-page script, you sell them the sales page of the script. So we always have title thumbnail, obviously, and then we have what's called a treatment. I'll stop there and let me, you guys let me know what you think about this.

So let's just read the treatment. So you go, this is Mike, founder from Australia. Now, are you thinking about this like, what needs to be nailed in the treatment? What do you have to, what's the important part to find when you write this pitch?

Yeah, I always try to think about how, and this might have been written by, by my producer, but what I like to think about in the treatment is like the vibes and the feeling that the viewer will get when they watch it. Why should this video exist? Why will this— why will they leave this video and think about it for the next 2 weeks or tell their— send it to their friend? I, I like to think about the feeling that you have when you watch it. Maybe this isn't the best example of that, but what is the viewer going to walk away with? This isn't really like an intro. This is more like, sell— I'm telling my producer right now, sell me on this idea so that when we go to record it, we know exactly what we're trying to get out of this and that it ends up being how we planned.

So in this case, is the kind of the main thing I would be feeling or wanting is, oh man, I really want the sort of exact playbook.

Yeah.

You know, in this case, the 10-step playbook validated by a Reddit post. With 151 comments of how he's built these, you know, he builds SaaS apps to $200K MRR, something like that.

That's the premise of this video is that, hey, I have this very specific 10-step playbook. And this is something that we found because he had written this awesome Reddit post about it. And it was really like a simple 10-step playbook. If I do this, I do this, I do this, I do this, something that our audience really likes. So we build the whole video around that. Checklist. And that checklist almost becomes like a character in the video that we can further dive deeper on. And this— the whole video— and this is another thing too, I kind of have it down here a little bit— is that every video has like a big idea. Like, why should this video exist? I don't want to tell the entire story of how, you know, he was born and how he grew up and all these things. I want to do it around one idea. And for this video specifically, it's the 10-step playbook. And then everything is built around that video because when the— yeah, that's something that our audience likes and is really valuable because he used it to actually build a great business off of.

Gotcha. That's very cool. And then when you go to interview them, you're, you're trying to extract— you're trying to basically now fill in the blanks of this skeleton you already think is a winning video.

Yep. Yep, exactly. And I like to look at— I mean, one thing that I like to look at is successful social media posts, successful Reddit posts, successful seminars or like talks that they gave at a conference. Those are all good bones for a great— and this is the checklist right here that he did, or the 10-step process. Those are all great bones for any video. It's like how I like to think about videos. If they've done this sort of talk or they've written this before, it's always, always a great outline, I guess.

So how many of these videos are you doing a week?

We're aiming for 2 to 3 right now.

So you're making 2 or 3 of these a week. That's a lot.

Yeah.

Yeah.

It seems like you kind of undersold yourself at the beginning when you were like, you know, I stuck with it. I think obviously consistency and sticking with it mattered. But it sounds like also what really mattered was building a system to be able to do this at scale. Right. A team and a system. You had to do that. I would say most creators don't know how to build a system.

Right. Right.

And it sounds like you found the, the growth, the growth hypothesis, which was if I put these types of stories on YouTube, there's always— YouTube will keep feeding me more and more audience for this type of content. I can grow that way versus SEO versus anything else, right? Like, yeah, one of the frameworks I always liked that I think has kind of gone out of style was Eric Ries when he did The Lean Startup and he said basically a company, you really have two main hypotheses. There's the value hypothesis that if I do this, this will be valuable to this type of person, right? It will help this type of person with this problem. And then he goes, you have the growth hypothesis, which is totally separate from the value one, which is if I do X, Y, Z, that will create sustainable compounding growth. And that growth hypothesis can be if I run Facebook ads, I can spend this much money, acquire users for this much, and generate this much to reinvest to buy the next user. Yeah, it can be SEO, it can be YouTube, it can be anything, right? Where you're going to basically have some hypothesis as to how you grow. And he's basically like, If you get the value hypothesis wrong, there's no company. If you get the value hypothesis right, but the growth one wrong, you've built a very, very small business. If you get both of those right, you just have to be an idiot to not get the money part right at the end. And I always, I always liked that framing. And so whenever I do a project, I sort of try to think about what's our value hypothesis? And I call it a hypothesis because we don't know until we go test it. And what's our growth hypothesis? We don't know until we go test it.

Right. I have a feeling you have a bunch of other, like, system-related stuff up in that Chrome window with all those tabs.

Yes.

And yes, I personally I'm very interested in seeing you click around. Can you do that?

Yeah, let's do it. So yeah, as Sean said, I'm a big fan of systems and processes. Maybe that's just like my more like logical brain, former software engineer, spreadsheet kind of guy. So I try to build my company around a lot of systems. And I had a note in here that I wanted to talk about, which was busy people are the biggest losers. I used to be in corporate 9 to 5, and I hated when— I hated urgency culture. I hated getting emails and one-off Slack messages. I worked at Deloitte and you'd get an email and then all of a sudden you're working a deal the whole weekend. I hated that. So I knew that when I started a company, I didn't want to build my business like that at all. I wanted to build it around systems, asynchronous systems, so that I could play tennis every day at noon. And also my people that work for me enjoy that too. It's not for everyone, but this is how we operate. So Everything exists on a Notion. So right here we have our— all tasks that need to get done in the company are simply assigned out to people, and there's no, like, real, like, deadline or meetings about them. There are just things to get done. When you can manage that deep work session that you meant to do that day, go and do those, and we're good. As long as you get the stuff done that we plan to and we hit our KPIs and all these things, you can work whenever you'd like. And everything is here in this Notion. Additionally, we have all of our production for our company, including YouTube, Instagram, Twitter, everything, everything we post on any sort of social media. We track it all inside Notion here, and we have freelancers helping edit the content and create the content.

Who, who manages this board?

I would say, well, I have a, like a producer, like producer light, I call him, who's sort of starting to manage this more. But I built this over I wanted to get more serious about repurposing. So I built this over like the course of like 2, 3 months. Built it is more just like created the spreadsheet and created the processes. And then I sort of handed it over in the last 2 months to someone else. So I have a light producer who manages this right now.

Light as in part-time or light as in half a person, a little guy.

Both.

A little guy. A little guy who works a little amount.

Yeah.

All right.

I love the busy— busy people are the biggest losers because I think busy is a badge of honor in a lot of different circles. And what a, what a terrible badge to be proud of.

Yes.

In my opinion. I remember my buddy came and worked for me and he used to work in, in investment banking. And he would— he kept saying this phrase that we were like, dude, Sam, what is this thing you keep saying? And he would say, He's like, yeah, he's like, can you get that to me ASAP or sooner? And I was just like, dude, what is ASAP? Means as soon as possible. What does ASAP or sooner mean? And he's like, I don't know, we just always say that in investment banking. And I was like, what a, what a like fight or flight, what a cortisol phrase to just keep injecting in your company.

Yeah. You know, everyone has that friend when you hang out with them and they're always on their phone, they're always on work emails, they're dropping out to take calls. I remember when I was a kid, I was on a hike with my buddy and his dad was on the hike. I'll never forget this. I was probably like 9 years old or something like that. And his dad was just on the phone for the entire hike. We were like in this really nice hike. And I was like, man, I just never want to be that person. Like you said, it's a bad— it's a choice. It's more typically around a bad business or a flaw, systems flaw, or an overextension of yourself. It's usually not like you're just handed that.

What's that EOS thing up there?

Yeah, EOS is cool. Entrepreneur Operating System is— you guys are probably familiar with that, right?

Yeah, I've never actually done it. Do you, do you do it, Sam, at Hampton? Do you pay for EOS?

Well, you don't have to pay for it. You could read a book and just make your own sheet.

No, no, but like people pay for the implementer and all that stuff.

Yeah, I paid an implementer for a one-day seminar with our leadership team.

And that was like $20 grand or something.

No, no, it was like $3,000 for one day.

Oh, you got like the clearance integrator or what would you do?

No, like I like someone who was like a certified like implementer or something. I was going to hire him and then I showed him my pre-work and he's like, well, you guys are actually almost there. Let's just meet with your whole team for 6 hours and I'll teach everyone how to do it and then we'll go over your current rocks and I'll show you the right format and then you're good to go. It looks like—

is this the first company you did it at?

No, I did it at The Hustle as well.

EOS specifically?

Yeah. Oh, wow.

Yeah, I'm a fan of it. I think that I'm—

Are you like an I swear by it kind of guy or where are you at with it?

I swear by a— we use like a transformer version. So for example, EOS, for those listening, it's an operating system. Run your company. The book is called Traction by this guy named Gino. Gino, by the way, Sean has asked to come on a whole bunch. So if we want, we can invite him on. But basically it's the crux of the whole thing is your L10 meeting, which happens every— for us, every Monday at 3:00. It's a 2 or 1.5 or 2-hour meeting, and each team has some number or metric or goal that they are assigned to and then tasks below to reach that goal. And we go over each week what's going well, what's not going well, and how to improve. Typically, EOS is divided quarterly. We actually at Hampton do ours every 6 weeks. So we do rock planning every 6 weeks as opposed to quarterly. I think quarterly is too long for a startup. But, and so you can kind of like manipulate it to like fit your needs. But over the course of many, many years, we've kind of made our own.

I like the 6 weeks that we do it quarterly, but I already like that idea.

6 weeks is too long. Because like with a startup, like with a startup, like you get, you can get new information relatively quick. And so what we do is we actually, each team actually only, we try to limit it to 2 rocks. So each team just gets 2 important rocks and that's 6 weeks. And then we change them or or keep them, but whatever we want to do every 6 weeks.

Yeah, yeah.

And then you have a scorecard and what we're looking at is your scorecard where you go over every single week what's going on. So this looks like the scorecard that you go over at your L10 meeting.

Yep. It gives you nice— for someone like me with no management experience and I have an MBA, I don't know how to manage people. It was nice. We've been doing it for like 2, maybe over 2 years. It's nice to just have a basic I don't think it's the perfect system, but I think it's a system for someone who's a creator, like we talked about earlier, who wants to start building more of a business, or someone who's going from solopreneur like me that didn't intend to build a business. It's a good rails or system for KPIs, planning, and it's not perfect by any means, but it is a system and most people just need a system.

Can I say a quick disclaimer? Because I used to be the kind of guy who somebody I'd be watching something or I'd hear a talk and somebody would be like, oh, I use this system, EO. And then they give me some acronym and then they're like, yeah, this is what I do.

This is—

it's so good for me. And I'd be like, ah, that's what I've been missing. Just that's the tool. I was one tool away. I was one framework away, one acronym away from success. And turns out, spoiler, I was never one acronym away from success. And there's a specific type of person and a specific moment in time when you need a system tool, and that is when you have growth, but you have a growing headache. So the business is growing healthily, but your headache is growing, you know, maybe even more than that or proportionately to that. And I think what most people have is a business that is not really growing enough. And then they try to add systems and processes and it actually slows them down and they don't even grow faster because growth often is like a matter of like striking a vein. It's like drilling for oil. You don't need to be super efficient. You just need to find the oil. And sometimes that's brute force. Sometimes it's a little bit of gut instinct. Sometimes it's a little bit of cowboy-ness to trying different little experiments. But I think, you know, I just want to say that out loud because I wasted a lot of time when I actually needed growth. And then I adopted systems of people who had growth. And I've conflated the two. I thought the system creates the growth. No, no, the system manages your headache as you grow. That's, that's how it's been for me, at least my personal experience.

I'll take the other side of that, which is I think that there are times where the system does create growth because I think typically what happens when you have companies, you can get to $1 million or $2 million or $3 million in revenue through a combination of either luck or you knew how to do one thing well, or for a variety of reasons. But what I have found is whenever I hit those, that like 3, whenever I get to like $3 million in revenue, I then like think like, okay, I need to now go do this new marketing channel or do this new thing. And oftentimes the actual answer is no, you should actually do less things and just do this one marketing thing over and over and over again.

You're saying at $3 million. I'm saying most people are not even at the $3 million. Most people don't get to $3 million. Most people who watch this or are going to watch any type of content on YouTube are pre getting 1, 2, 3 million in revenue. And for those people, I think that's the sucker-like spot where you think you might be a tool away. So I totally agree with you. If you've already got the thing that's— again, you have healthy growth if you've gotten to 1, 2, 3 million in revenue and, you know, from there you need, you need systems to scale, right? But you don't need systems to scale. If you don't have a working thing.

Or even when your team size gets kind of above 4 people, you kind of like have to like have something. But yeah, I hear what you're saying. You want to show us anything else?

I want to ask you a question about this blog post in December 2020, and maybe you can take us back to like how the business was doing back then. You wrote a blog post that says, 2020, I am my own greatest obstacle. Yeah, I already— I haven't even read the post. I already nodded my head. Because I think every entrepreneur gets there to this realization. Can you explain where you were at this blog post and what this blog post means?

Yeah, this all— this blog post all revolves around a single week in my life where I— it's post-COVID. I was about 3 years into building the business. And what most people don't know, they think, oh, you just built Starter Story and you grew that. Well, no, I was the guy with like 10 side projects and I had 2 businesses that were like I was splitting my time on and then other side projects and other personal brand and doing all these things. Starter Story was making $8,000. These are sort of high-level numbers, but it was making $8,000 a month. And then this other business I was building was like a software plugin type app, was doing $2,000 a month. I thought this was going to be bigger than Starter Story because I didn't think Starter Story was going to be big. And I was so burnt out that I said, I heard about this Think Week by Bill Gates where you go off to a cabin, you just think about stuff. So I couldn't afford a cabin in the woods or anything at that point. And I decided, okay, I'm just gonna go get in my car, I'm gonna drive across the country, and I'm gonna think. Through that process, through that week of not being on the phone, you know, this is no social media, nothing, I couldn't even check my email, I realized that Starter Story was the, was the business I should be going all in on. This is the business that I was meant to be building. I'm throwing basically no time into this business that's doing $8,000 a month, and I'm throwing all my time into this business that I'm supposed to be building. This is how I get into YC and I do all these things. I should— I'm putting 20% of my effort into 80% of the revenue. Let's just drop everything else. And in that moment, after that week, after I realized all this, I basically sold that business, stopped working on anything else, and I went all in on Starter Story. And this is 3 years after starting it. Best decision I ever made, obviously. And I don't know if I would have made that decision if I didn't take that week off. And essentially I doubled the business's revenue in a single month after that. And then everything went up after that. And that's probably why I'm here today selling my company and talking to you guys, is that I realized that I was the biggest obstacle, right? If I, I was limiting my own success by thinking I could do everything.

I love that. That's, that's very powerful. What sounds right on paper and what's actually right for me might be two different things because a lot of people would tell you, you should do the SaaS business, recurring revenue. It's amazing. Yeah. You know, you could do this plugin and it's software and all these great things, but you kind of realize like the thing I'm good at, the thing I enjoy, the thing that has momentum is this other thing. Yeah. And if I keep splitting focus, Yeah, I'll never know.

There's something that I like to call— you have your ego business. This is, this is the business you're supposed to build, the business that you look up to other people because they built those, or that's the business that you're supposed to start or whatever. But actually follow the money. Where, what's making money? What are you truly good at making? What are you meant to build? I think it's like a lot of people watching this maybe think about that. What's the ego business and what's the actual business.

So for this Think Week, you just drove 3,000 miles, just like— Yeah, I'm looking at the map. It looks like you started— where'd you start?

Salt Lake City?

Yeah, I was living with my mom at the time. So shout out my mom for housing me in this time when I was trying to figure things out. But yeah, I went from Salt Lake up through the— down to the West Coast and then up and around back.

Driving like a giant circle, basically. Yeah.

Yeah.

On the West Coast.

It wasn't my plan.

All the way up to Jackson Hole, but in a circle format.

Being 29 and living at home. And I think in this blog you say you met a girl later on. So I assume you're single, 29, living at home, trying to like do this thing. That's definitely not the most glamorous place to be in.

Yeah, I was more just— I would do anything. I worked in corporate for 5 years. I worked at Deloitte, I worked at some startups, I worked at some like big companies. And my motivation, I was so sick and tired of that. I think a lot of entrepreneurs just start early. They start at 17, they start at 18. I actually went through college and the corporate life. So starting this business was more about freedom. And I knew I would do anything. I moved to Asia because it could be like $1,000 a month. I lived with my mom because I would, I could not go back to a regular job. That was my main motivation. And then obviously the business started working out. And, uh, that's why I live with my mom.

So check this out. This is your monthly revenue at the time. So it looks like for the year preceding your Think Week, you were basically plateaued from August 2019 to mid-2020, August 20— almost August 2020, June 2020. And you're basically at $8K a month for a year flat. Yeah. You do the Think Week, you make the decision. 6 months later, you're now over $25,000 a month. And the trajectory You changed the trajectory of the business with that.

Yep.

I think that's a great story. Also in this blog, I like, you know, you were talking about like, you know, how you felt. You're like, I know I had so many projects and tasks I know I should do, but at the same time I felt unmotivated to start any of them. I'm in this really weird spot right now. I don't feel motivated about work. Nothing feels super important to work on. I don't feel like tweeting or writing. I don't want to read any books. You know, it's kind of burnout, essentially. And, you know, the solution to burnout wasn't like, I need to take 6 months off. It was like, I need to do something that's just more in alignment with what I'm trying to do and simplify rather than keep adding.

Yep, exactly.

That's cool, man. Well, congrats. Congrats on all the success. Congrats on, you know, fingers crossed that this thing closes. We have to air this episode anyways and it will be a cautionary tale about counting your chickens before they hatch.

But thank you guys. Yeah, you guys are huge inspirations to me. Been listening to My First Million, obviously got a lot of inspiration to do what we do through everything that you've done. Both in my first million and out of it. So you guys are awesome. Keep doing what you're doing.

You're the shit. Thanks for doing this, man.

Thank you guys for having me. I feel lucky. I feel lucky.

Check out Pat. Check out Starter Story on YouTube and yeah, all the things.

That's it. That's the pod.