He launched a sweaty startup in high school. Now he'll be a millionaire by 18

All right, today we're trying something new. We have 3 high school students, 9th graders, 10th graders, 11th graders, that all are running their own business while they're in school. And not just like, oh, here's my idea. These guys have real revenue, tens of thousands of dollars in profit that they're making as, I don't know, 14-year-olds. It's crazy. And so we invited them in, we're doing office hours with them. So they bring us their biggest problem and we try to help them solve it in like 10 minutes. And whether you're a high school or college student or you're just running your own business, I think there's gonna be something in this for everybody because there's a beauty in these kids who they're like, ah, I just don't know anything, but they're crushing it.

Yeah. There's a lot of people who listen to this podcast that want to start something and they overthink it. And there's a beauty to being ignorant. And these kids are ignorant. And because of that, they create amazing stuff. And I think that you should steal that attitude.

All right. We're doing something fun today. We have high school students who have existing businesses. They're running businesses, they're making a lot of revenue, they have making money, and they're here for office hours. And this is all part of our buddy Anand, who's here with us. He, um, he's running this new thing called the Formidable Fellows. Uh, I think Anand, this is like a precursor. You, you wanna launch a school someday, a new school for entrepreneurship, and this is kind of your, your MVP. Is that right? You started giving out grants to middle and high school students?

Yeah. So we're building a national network of schools of entrepreneuring. It takes a while to build physical schools, so my friend Raj and I started something called the Formidable Fellowship. And yeah, we kind of— I think like Gen Z is probably going to be the most entrepreneurial generation. And we saw a lot of them out there. And so we started a nonprofit with $500K. We're giving $1,000 grants to middle and high school entrepreneurs. And so we kind of just had our first class, had 23 grantees. You'll meet 3 of the great ones today. And yeah, you know, kind of along the way, other awesome entrepreneurs, Dharmesh from HubSpot, Sean Griffey from Industry Dive, a bunch of other folks have been contributors. So, so now we've got, you know, even more capital to give out to these young entrepreneurs.

This is like your second mountain. So basically you started a company called CB Insights that is in the range of $100 million in revenue or something like that. Now, is this like your— this is what you do after you've made a bunch of money and you want to impact the world? Positively besides creating, you know, business intelligence tools?

Uh, yeah, it's, it's the second, it's, it's the second mountain. I think that's a good way of putting it, right? I think like if you could build a system that increases human potential, like that's a pretty tremendous thing to do. Um, and I think we can do it in a way that will make money and eventually rival the public school system. That's our goal.

All right. Well, $500K. And how did you find these kids? So they reached out, you reached out to them. How'd you find all these founders?

Yeah, we reached out to a lot of entrepreneurship teachers at schools. And that was, I think, primarily the way, a little bit of social media, some parents who found us on Twitter and LinkedIn. But yeah, I think a lot of them just, you know, word of mouth. Um, and so yeah, we got a few hundred applicants the first go around, you know, qualifications where you had to have revenue. Uh, so that was kind of a hard filter we had. There's a lot of folks who have sort of a dream or they're starting something to burnish a college application. And we didn't want that. We wanted people who were actually building. Um, and so yeah, we narrowed it down pretty quickly and found some good—

Sam, did you have any revenue in middle school or high school? I barely had facial hair.

Yeah, it's pretty insane. Like when I was a kid in, uh, in grade school, uh, it was like make a business plan and like fake present it to a board of directors. And you think that like, like, you know what I mean? Like dear board of directors. And it was nonsense. And I'm seeing their bios and this is so much more interesting. than what we were doing. What were you— I mean, at 14, I don't even think I knew what that word entrepreneur meant.

Yeah, definitely didn't. My business plan was like mac and cheese, but with double the cheese.

That was the whole thing. All right. So I have this notebook here and the reason I have here is I take notes whenever we have a guest, not because it's my job and I'm a podcast host, but because a lot of times what the guests are talking about, it's just so interesting to me as a human. I just want to go and like implement it in my business or my life. And the person I took the most notes for was Jesse Itzler. If you haven't heard that podcast, it's the best. Like, it legitimately changed my life. And so I thought, let's share our notes. And so with the help of the team at HubSpot, we went and took all of the notes from that episode and we turned it into a 10-page document. You can download it for free. It changed my life, that episode. I think it might change yours. So check it out. The link is below in the description. Again, notes with Jesse Itzler down below.

All right, so we're going to do this. We're going to see what we got. Uh, they're calling in literally from school, by the way, which is hilarious. Like, someone came on and their lunch— the bell for like recess came on or something. That was amazing. All right, so let's try this out. Let's go, Lincoln.

All right, uh, my name is Lincoln Snyder. I'm a senior at Lake Dallas High School. My business is Sunshine Exteriors, so we clean windows, gutters, power wash, fence staining, and holiday lighting. We're located in Denton, Texas. The main goal is to help the homeowners protect their investment, obviously, to have a clean home year round. My business is 2 years old. Last year we did $60,000 in revenue at about just above 50% margin.

Hold on. Pause real quick, Sam. You know why he's good? Did you hear what he did there? That was some sophisticated, high-level stuff he just did where he goes, He's talking about cleaning gutters and he goes, we help homeowners protect their investment. He didn't say we clean your gutters. What's the biggest investment in your life? Your home. Wouldn't you want to protect it? Wow, Lincoln, I'm already impressed. Continue.

Yeah, so last year we did $60,000 at just above 50% margins. This year I plan to grow by 150% to $150,000.

So you made $30,000 as a junior in high school. Is that about right?

I was a senior. It was this year.

This year. Okay.

Well, yeah. School year. Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. Okay. Wow. All right. That's, that's wild.

Just, just to recap, you go to homeowners, you'll power wash, you'll clean their gutters, you'll clean the windows, you'll put up Christmas lights, whatever you got to do, home services. And you did $60,000 last year as a high school senior. And you think you're going to do $150,000 this year. That's, that's the correct.

Correct.

All right.

Yes. And then so it's me and I have two 1099 subcontractor employees. So right now I'm completely off the field. So that means that they're doing all the jobs and I'm the one in charge of booking, scheduling, finding the clients.

And how do you do that, Lincoln? How do you get customers?

So primary acquisition source right now is Nextdoor. It's a neighbor platform with surrounding communities.

Hey, look, we complain about stuff all the time on Nextdoor. You know, there's no need to explain.

Yeah.

Yeah. Um, uh, so yeah, I kind of go on there. My angle is I'm a local high school student. Um, I own a window cleaning, pressure washing. We do those services. Um, if you'd like a free estimate, check out our website. We'd be happy to give you a quote.

And Lincoln, how do you do that? Because my understanding is you can't post on Nextdoor unless you've been verified as having an address or you've got a postcard that shows you live in the neighborhood. They don't want people from outside the neighborhood messaging. How do you do that? Is that a new feature or am I just out of the loop?

So I post in just my neighborhood. So I guess in that area I am confined to my, my neighborhood on that app, but it's been enough homes to keep me busy. I think we got maybe 90 customers last year off of Nextdoor just between March and September.

If you're listening, how many people have we had on this pod saying, I don't have an idea, I don't have this, you know, this doesn't scale, all this bullshit. He's 18 years old. He made $30 grand and it was from posting on Nextdoor in his neighborhood, in his own personal neighborhood.

Yeah, that's insane.

That's good. And by the way, how did you hear about, uh, you know, Anand is a tech guy in New York City. How does someone, uh, in Texas who does power washing hear about this internet shit? Like, what are you doing?

Oh, it's very fortunate. Um, so there is a teacher who's a part of a teacher blog, and I'm not well known, but some of the people at my school know that I own my own business and do, uh, kind of power washing, window cleaning, things like that. And so she told me about it, and then I submitted my application and Wow.

This is cool, dude. Okay, so what's your question before I start brainstorming? Because I'm fired up.

All right, so it's a pretty deep question. I'm trying to figure out how to reliably acquire customers through paid advertising. My current struggle is advertising on a small budget and not having the skills. My question for you guys is, should I pay to acquire those skills through paid courses? So far what I've been doing is kind of trying to learn on YouTube. I don't think that it's in-depth enough to learn fully, so I think that I might get more out of paid courses and content, seminars, whatever that might be. Or do you think that it would be smarter to just allocate a semi-large budget to paid advertising and learn the skill on my own and kind of have to figure it out as I go?

All right. I got a bunch of opinions. Sam, you want to go first? Do you want me to go?

I have a bunch of opinions. I think yes to all, uh, basically. Yeah. Uh, do all, I don't know what your definition of a large budget is. The best way to learn is to do it. Uh, and a lot of people will shit on online courses. I think that's nonsense. Most of what I've learned in this internet world has been buying an online course. Uh, I bought a copywriting course that changed my life. Uh, I would, I would, I would suggest you do that. I don't know what the course offerings are, but if there is a local services uh, uh, paid marketing course, 100% do it. I don't know what a lot of money for you is, but if you have to spend up to $2,000, as long as it has good reviews, do it.

By the way, I think if you emailed anybody who runs that course, you say, hey, I'm 18 years old. I badly want to learn this. I don't have the cash to be able to put that up, or, you know, I'm willing to pay it kind of next year using the profits of this, and I'll be your best testimonial for you. You know, I, I think you can get those courses for free out of goodwill. So, so I wouldn't even let cost be a barrier. But like Sam said, I think learning is an attack on all fronts. So you've, you've, you've done the right thing. You figured out what to learn. And if you're committed to being obsessed with it, it's do it yourself. Then it's watch free YouTube stuff. Then it's do a paid course of some kind, buy a book, whatever. And then the, the last one you didn't mention that I would do is what helped me when I went into e-commerce. So, uh, 5 years ago, I had never done an e-commerce physical brand before. And I had never done paid ads before. And fast forward to now, you know, I've probably run $40-50 million of paid ads and gotten pretty good at it. And so what's— what was the learning curve? One thing that really helped me was instead of just going straight to a course, I started doing it myself. So I had my bearings and I knew what I didn't know on a very low-scale budget. And then what I did was I found somebody who already was winning with that method. So I found either a friend or somebody nearby and I said, hey, I really think what you're doing is great. I'm young, I want to learn. And I basically went and I said, can I come by for the day? And I just want to ask you a couple of questions about paid ads. And they're like, yeah, sure, come over. And then they come— you come over and then you end up opening up their Facebook ad account with them and you start asking them questions. And if you do it right and if you're an earnest, genuine person, you're likable, like it seems like you are, you'll find somebody who will also give you that kind of like real-world, real-time type of mentorship. and they'll just tell you the ins and outs and they'll also tell you, oh, uh, your ad account got shut down, email this guy, or hey, that's normal, here's what happens, right? So they'll tell you stuff that you can't find just, you know, generically on the internet. So I would also do that, but it's a war on all fronts when it comes to learning. You should be doing all of them and then the ones that are giving you a more rapid rate of learning, do more of those and less of the others as you go. You'll figure out what's gonna work for you.

I would also suggest, so I'm looking up Nextdoor. Nextdoor is not a big company. if I had to guess, they have 1,000 employees or less. I would Google Nextdoor account manager, or I would go to the top. I'd Google Nextdoor CMO or Nextdoor director of marketing, something VP or above. Uh, and I would email them and I would explain, this is what I did. I got, I just built a business that is about to, is doing 6 figures as a senior in high school. I'm gonna advertise on Nextdoor. Do you have any type of first-time customer credits. And I would bet a lot of money that they will give you $1,000 to $2,000 in ad credits on Nextdoor to learn their platform. And then I would do the same thing for, uh, what's the other one, uh, Sean, that the guy who started Athena started? Thumbtack. Uh, I would do the same. I would do Nextdoor, Thumbtack. I would email as high up person as you can in marketing. Probably start with—

Have you run Nextdoor ads?

Yeah, so That was kind of part of my question. What I did last year for Christmas light installation, I ran—

Oh, you do that too?

I do. If you need Christmas lights, hey, I can fly out if the price works out. But yeah, so I ran the ads and they did extremely well, which kind of— it's almost frustrating to see that it worked and then now I can't get it working again. But I think that's kind of with paid ads. It doesn't work for a while, but when it does work, it explodes.

Paid ads is a constant game of cat and mouse. It's constant iteration, constantly trying things, constantly goes up and then goes down. That is completely normal for paid ads. But it's a, you know, you just have to zoom out and say, wow, this is a magic money machine. I'm putting in a dollar and I'm getting 3 back out every day. This is incredible. How do I do more of that? And so that's totally normal. Yeah, I think Sam Parr's idea of like reach out to their marketing team and find their account rep and be like, hey, I'm a kid. I got this great story. I want to learn this. Where do I, who would I learn from? Who's the smartest at this? How could you help me? Do you guys have ad credits available? I would love to be a testimonial for it. Same sort of thing. Again, use your assets to try to get it, to make it happen. If you need help, by the way, I think I know people at Nextdoor that I might be able to connect you with. Um, so, okay. So that's, by the way, hold on.

But before we move on from that, uh, don't do what we're saying first. The first thing you should do is you should type out a letter and you print 1,000 copies on your printer at home and you get an, and you want to make this look not professional. I don't want this to be professional. I want it to be a typed letter from you. That's fine.

Like a paperclip photo of you, like on the, on the thing, or like, do not act like a big company.

Act like a senior in high school. Act like a mature senior in high school. Uh, and print it out, fold it up, put it in an envelope and go and put that in 1,000 homes.

Uh, and I want that. I want you to Google the Gary Halpert dollar letter. So it's the, there's a famous copywriter, Gary Halpert. And he wrote this letter and he stapled or paperclipped a dollar bill to the top of it. And that was very attention-getting. People had to put, what is this? Why is there a dollar on this thing? $1, right? $1 took his like open rate and his read rate from, you know, 0 to 95% type of thing. And then he wrote this letter. You could do your version of the dollar letter. I think that would be tremendously successful. So I think Sam's idea is great here, but I think there's even a thing you do before that, which is you already have something working. We're giving you new ideas. Why don't you advertise? Why don't you go do Yelp ads, Craigslist, whatever? You already figured out that you could go into a community's Nextdoor, type something, and, and, uh, what was this, $60,000 came out the other side. So how do you just do that again in the neighborhood next to yours? Can you find a friend or a kid in that neighborhood and say, I will pay you $100 and you are going to type this message in your Nextdoor on this sequence? Because they, they can post because they live there. Right. And so go get— activate basically your brand reps, your affiliates to just clone the script you did in your neighborhood in the two neighborhoods next to you and see if that gives you another $60K per neighborhood.

Yeah. So I'm doing something similar. I'm not sure that I would say it exactly the way I'm doing it because I'm not sure that's necessarily the right way to do it, because I know that Nextdoor, you're really supposed to be a neighbor. In the community. But to your point, I am doing—

I—

this hat is gray, my friend. This hat is gray. I'm good with that.

I mapped out a region. I'm kind of going by radius of different Nextdoor neighborhood communities and going from there.

Yeah, you're hacking the system. That's good. You're hacking the system.

Can we just become your angel investor real quick? And like, I kind of want to see where the story goes over the next 2 years. This is going to be kind of insane.

Lincoln, have you heard of, um, do you know a guy named Brian Scudamore? Have you ever heard that name?

Sounds familiar, but I don't know.

You should Google, you should Google this guy. He, uh, started very similar to you. It took him years and years to get traction, 10 years to get traction. Uh, now his company is called 1-800-GOT-JUNK and he wholly, he wholly owns it and it does a billion in sales a year. So he's a billionaire. Uh, you should, you should, uh, write him. He's a, or I can introduce you. He's a friend of mine and he will absolutely talk to you, but you, uh, You just gotta shut up and do this for about 20 years and the results are gonna be pretty, pretty great. Yeah. That's how, that's how this business works, right? You just kind of put your head down and you get after it.

Yeah. But the beauty is you don't know it's 20 years at the beginning. You just think it's just right around the corner and you just think it's right around the corner for the next 20 years.

Well, he can get rich. You, you're gonna get rich as you go if you own the whole thing. Like these companies can be great if you, if you do it right.

Are you going to college? Sounds like you graduated now, or you're about to graduate.

I'm about to graduate. I'm going to college. Yes. Is that maybe Michigan is the goal? I got introduced through Formidable Fellowship to someone at Michigan who's kind of going to introduce me to people on campus. And so that'll be—

they have a good business school and like chicks or what are you talking about? Who are you trying to meet on campus? What are you talking about?

Like some professors, some deans, some people, because I haven't gotten accepted yet. It's still in.

Do they need their gutters cleaned? I don't understand. Why do you care about the professors and deans?

I have good grades and everything, but the kind of what it takes to get out of state and to that good of a school.

What do your parents do?

Do you have like a Thiel Fellowship part of this where you just pay people to drop out once you, once you realize that they should just keep going as an entrepreneur?

Yeah, I mean, I could probably pay one person, but bank on that. My parents, my dad is a VP at Spectrum, so not no entrepreneurship, but he does kind of in the business realm. My mom's a nurse.

Do they understand? Do they, do they criticize? Not criticize. They probably don't criticize you. Do they say, you know, respect on your name?

Yeah.

Yeah. You get to sit at the head of the table now at dinner. No.

Do they, are they like, like, this is a fun hobby. 'But, you know, maybe you should consider something more serious.' Or do they— and you don't disrespect your parents publicly, but— or, or, or are they like, 'Hey, you got a gift. This is working.

Keep going.' They're very traditional in the way that they want me to go to college, and they think it's a good answer. It's a fun thing to do. I'm in high school, but yeah.

Anand, do you have a service where you talk to these kids' parents?

No, we don't. You know, I, you know, I think so. Yeah. I posted about Lincoln getting into U of Michigan, and I guess Luckily, some people have reached out, right? Because that's where he wants to go. I mean, any of these guys probably could skip college and just go pro in business. But, you know, I got to respect what they want to do, of course. But yeah, no, obviously if any of them wanted to, I'm not sure they would. You know, they could, they could be formidable, you know, without college for sure.

Lincoln, just to put it in perspective real quick, you said you did $60K last year. You'll do $150K this year of revenue.

You're going to make more money than your professors.

Yeah, exactly. Roughly 50% profit margin. 40, 50%.

So last year was $30,000. So a little over $30,000 profit.

Let's say you can roughly hold that. You're getting close to having a million-dollar business already. So let's say you're doing $100K a year of profit right now, grow, and you basically 2x the business. Um, arguably that could be, you know, somewhere between a $400,000 business to a million-dollar business. But it's like one more year after that and you're a seasoning. Exactly. Just to put that in perspective of like the opportunity. And I guess like want to make sure— I wouldn't have known that when I was your age. Well, I wouldn't have known how to do any of the shit you did, but even if I was there, I wouldn't have really had that perspective because you kind of, as a, as a business owner, as a small business owner, you sort of value your business just on what you eat at the end of the day. So you're like, oh, I made $30,000, I did a whole bunch of work. That's great. But, you know, that doesn't even pay for one year of college. Whereas you look at it, you're like, I'm one year away from being a millionaire if I just literally get two more neighborhoods on board or one more neighborhood to, to, to do the same thing that I just did. Right? So you, you are, you are very close to a very meaningful size business and I hope you, you know, continue that as your new angel investor.

I hope. Yeah. Like I, I don't think people truly grasp this, that if you do, this is a huge generalization. If you do roughly $300 grand of seller earnings, or sorry, um, of, of business owner earnings, ballpark, in most cases you are worth $1 million. And I think that if people understood that, they would probably keep going, uh, a lot harder. And I would bet that a lot of the people teaching business at Michigan, some percentage of them, you would be richer, richer than them before you graduate college.

Yeah. And I definitely understand what you guys are saying because the way I think about it is I compare, okay, a $30,000 salary, which is what I made last year, is like an entry-level job anywhere.

But going to the point of doubling it every year, which you're not going to do, you're not going to double it every year, but you're going to double it for a few more years. Maybe you should.

You honestly, based on what you just described to us, you actually have a path where you could probably 4x this business in one year. Because you've done all of this in a single neighborhood. And guess what? Like, you know, a lot of businesses are like this where they're what I call pond businesses. It works in one pond, it'll work in all ponds. Uh, businesses like any, any, uh, app that takes over a high school will actually be able to take over every high school. So Snapchat, for example, when Snapchat got hot, it got hot in two LA high schools. And investors who were smart knew right away that sure, on the surface, that only looks like a few thousand users. But if it works at one high school and two high schools, it's going to work in 14,000 other high schools because all high schools are the same in the same way that your neighborhood is probably similar to 1,000 other neighborhoods or more, um, across the country. And you should be able to sell local services using the same exact blueprint and model that you're doing in those neighborhoods. And so I think that you are— what you haven't done yet is just replicate it. So like you know, do it in another neighborhood yet. But you said that your Nextdoor ads were working and you said that you're starting to be able to post in new neighborhoods. I wouldn't— I would be— I would actually be surprised if you can't triple this business just doing that, just doing that properly.

Yeah. So I mean, the Nextdoor ads from last year, I'll kind of run through the numbers. It was a $9 cost per lead, $30 customer acquisition cost, and a $600, $650 average transaction value. So 21 to 1 ROAS. So I think that just based on 21 to 1, by the end of this year, if I just pump as much as I can into those ads, I think I'll be—

and look, it'll go down. It won't stay 21 to 1, but it doesn't matter. 3 to 1, you're laughing. So you have a huge margin of safety.

I thought you said you didn't know what you were doing.

Yeah, like you said, Christmas lights, I guess. But window cleaning, I don't know, I guess.

Well, the Christmas lights is because there's a time, there's an urgency on that. So that's why it's such an easy sale. But your, your, your website's great. Have you seen his website, Sean? No, I think hhpressurecleanings.com. URL's funky, but I need to work on the domain. Yeah, but the, the website's great.

Welcome to Sunshine Exteriors. Okay, why not sunshineexteriors.com?

I have a Sunshine Exteriors Texas, but it's saying I need 6 months before I can transfer the domain because I just bought it on a different hosting platform because I needed emails with a branded domain. There's a—

you could definitely transfer a domain faster, whatever. That, that part's not right. It doesn't take 6 months, but, uh, okay, great. Let me ask a different question. Do people come back? Do they do it again? Like, do you— have you been in business long enough to know the repeat rate?

Yeah, so didn't do a great job of tracking it and not quite enough to know the repeat rate. I'll start seeing the repeat rate this year because most of my customers were from last year. Um, but from first year to second year, I would say it's probably close. It's low. Probably 10%.

Okay.

Wow. This is great. Okay. Congratulations. Anything else, Lincoln, before we, before we let you go? Because this is kind of great.

One question. So if you guys were in my position, right, and you were going to, against your parents' judgment, not go to college, what advice do you have for someone in that position?

All right. So the pitch is like this. You're going to sit them down and you're going to say, Mom and Dad, let me show you the potential outcome. So what's— what, what, what? You're near A&M, maybe? I don't know where you— Yeah. Okay.

That's another college. Yeah.

I would say, look, the average salary that a graduate of business in the business administration school is this. I don't know what it's going to be. Probably $80,000. I'm already going to make that. And if you go to— what's the, the broker that we like, Sean? Quiet Light Brokerage. You go to quietlightbrokerage.com and you say, here's how much these businesses sell for. In one year, I'm going to already be well above the average in terms of, of, of earnings for a first, second, and third year postgraduate A&M Business Admin graduate or whatever. I'm going to be already out earning that. All I'm asking for is one year. You don't need to support me financially. All I need is your blessing. I just want you to say, get after it, go and achieve your dreams. Because look, if you look at All of the change in the world, it all, a lot of it is, is due to someone who just went out and got after it and made a lot of money. And I'm trying to do that. And if it doesn't work after 1 year, I'll do what you asked me to, which is go to a great school, but just gimme 12 months to make this happen. And I don't want anything except for your emotional support. How's, how's that pitch, Sean? Is that good enough?

It's great. Uh, that's exactly right. You want to ask for the gap year, not the full 4. Um, so, so you, you don't have to make this like long-term life-altering decision. Just say, hey, I'd like to basically, I want to take a gap year and really give this my all. I think I'm going to learn a lot. I'm already learning a lot. And I think this could really grow into something. Um, and that's, you know, after school, school is about learning so that, you know, uh, the way, you know, hey, school's great, but an education is more important. Like the thing I would go to school for is to learn about business. I'm already learning a ton about business this way, and I'm going to learn so much more if I if I just take this year and focus on it. And hey, at the end of this year, uh, you know what, maybe I will actually, you know, decide, hey, college is the right move. I want to be around friends and I want to do all that. And in which case, no harm done, one gap year. Um, and if this really takes off, we reassess at the end, you know, I can go the other way and actually maybe, maybe continue on this path. But I want to take a year. And I think I would start with that. So I think the ask is a year, not to, not to never go to college. Yeah. And then you let them know that like, the reasons why and how you're thinking this through and that you want their support, that they believed in you, you know, all up until this point. You just want them to keep believing in you. You see how that lands? So you got your little emotional manipulation, you have your puppy dog clothes, you got it all under the hood. We got a lot of stuff going on there, but, um, that's what you want to do. And then you see how that goes. But at the end of the day, like, look, sometimes just, you know, it might come to this. I hope it doesn't, but it might come to this where they say, no, you got to do this. This is— you don't know what you're talking about, blah, blah, blah. You may have to decide for you what's most important, right? That's the coming of age, that's the 18-year-old thing. And there are plenty of stories of people who do it and then years later their parents are like, you know, holy crap, I didn't know, I didn't understand at the time, you know, you know, they come around to it. You at the end of the day, you got to take control of kind of like what you want for your life. But I think that the one-year ask should land. I think you got like a 50 to 70% success rate with that.

All right.

The, the, the, the median salary of, uh, an accountant student at A&M is $60,000. Yeah, you're going to beat that this year. That, that's got to, that's got to be the numbers that you present to them.

All right, well, they might not— it might not all be only be about that. You know, people, parents, ultimately they just want your good, right? So they're like, we want you to have this education, you have your degree, that's just like safety net idea, uh, plus we want you to have that experience, you're young, blah, blah, blah. So there's like other factors too. So I wouldn't And I would try to understand. So like, let's say they say, no, you gotta do this. Before you start arguing with them, just ask them, get curious, be like, okay, so like, you know, it seems like school's got a couple different parts, right? There's like the learning part, which I think I'm getting a lot of here. There's friends and social life, and then there's like, you know, the safety net of having your degree. Like, which one is it for you? Why, why do you feel like it's so important? What, what is the part that really, you know, let me, help me understand. And then let them articulate it. And then you know exactly what you need to smack down. Because they've served it up to you about what the reason is that they think you gotta go to college.

That'll work.

That'll work. We're gonna try Ayan. Let's give you a shot. Let's see if your, your audio video's working. So Anand, you wanna do an intro for him? You wanna be his, his Bruce Buffer, his Dana White here?

Yeah. Uh, so Ayan is, uh, a 9th grader. Uh, fun fact, went to the same high school as me. Uh, has built an awesome baking business, but I think he'll, he'll fill you in. He's a, he's a phenomenal entrepreneur.

Yeah, all right. Hi, my name is Ayan, like Alan said. I'm a freshman in Hunterton Central High School in Ringoes, New Jersey. So I'm the founder and CEO of Teens to Table. We sell homemade baked goods to local establishments across New Jersey and school suppliers as well. So my business is 1 year old, and last year I did $4K in revenue. This year I expect to grow over 600% and aim to do at least $25,000. Um, which is really exciting. Um, so in addition to my business, I'm also a competitive chess player. And so right now I'm trying to figure out how to hire people, um, to help with my production while also maintaining both efficiency and quality. And so currently I bake everything myself from cookies to brownies, and that really ensures my consistency, but I'm considering bringing a small team to keep with the growing demand that I'm currently gaining.

So I, um, before, before we go into your question, let's just get a little more context on the business. So it's baked goods. You sell it to who? You said classes and teachers, or who are you selling to?

Yeah, so I sell to local establishments, so bakeries, ice cream shops, and I also sell it to schools. So when schools serve food and lunch, um, there's usually my cookie on the shelf as well.

Okay, gotcha. You're making all the cookies right now. You're going in, you're selling to them. How are you getting that sale? You're going and you're knocking on doors. What's the pitch? Yeah.

So the pitch right now is I usually either go to the bakeries and go to the ice cream shops and just go in person or on the phone. And I say, hey, I'm 14 years old and this is actually something that astonishes a lot of people. And I really find that interesting. So I say I'm 14 years old, I'm the founder of Teens to Table, and I pretty much tell them what I do. Usually when I go in, I bring samples of my cookies just to make sure they like it and everything's good. Then I start with the pitch, either can I sell and put a table up, or can I put it on your shelves?

Gotcha. Okay. And you said you're going to grow the business 600%. So how are you going to get— go from $4,000 to $25,000? Is it just knock on more doors, or is there something more to it? Yeah.

So now it's more into the school suppliers. So I'm supplying currently to Machos and Pomptonian, which are two school suppliers in my local area. Um, so I'm hoping to get more districts and more schools. So currently I just got an order for 700 cookies between the two suppliers. Um, and I'm in contact with two other suppliers, R-Mark and another supplier in the local area for my school. So both of these plus, uh, Mott's and Pomptonian should hopefully get me to $25,000.

Yeah. And why do you have a bunch of, uh, some type of like curry and, and, and other pizza and stuff on your website? Is that just a stock? Images that you, that are placeholders for now, or are you actually going to make more stuff?

Oh, so that's actually the future goal to make more stuff. So those are the things I've made so far. Um, along from baking, I love to cook. So I love to cook like Mediterranean food, Indian food, Mexican food. Um, so apart from the baking, that's just another one of my passions. And hopefully as I go later on to my business, I can incorporate those as well.

Have you thought about putting cookies on your website?

I believe. Are there not cookies on there?

There's a lot of Italian food.

There's a lot of food in Italy.

Tomatoes and avocados and, uh, but, uh, a cookie would definitely be cool. All right.

So, um, so it sounds like you are, you're going full Breaking Bad, dude. You're going up the supply chain. You're finding the distributors. How good are these cookies, by the way? I need to know. What are we dealing with here?

Um, so the cookies. They're really big. Have you ever guys tried Levain cookies from New York? Yeah, that's how they are. So that was my goal to design those recipes. And I think I cracked the code there. Um, so that's how the cookies taste.

How much money you have in the bank? You did $40K last year. I imagine you're just doing checking.

$4K. $4K.

That's what I said. $4K. You're doing like checking account accounting, which is basically just like, is my bank account going up? How much do you have in your bank account?

So in my bank account, I have around $2.1K, I'd say.

All right, cool. Understood. That's pretty good.

Okay. And so now your question was something around scaling up or hiring, right? What was the question? Right.

Yeah. So right now I'm trying to hire people because with the new school suppliers that I'm getting and then Machios and Pomptonian, it's really hard to just do this myself now, especially since it's going to be around hopefully projected 1,000 to 2,000 cookies per week. So I'm considering bringing on a small team to keep up with the growing demand. And so my biggest concern for this is I use a commercial kitchen because I can't do this really in my house. So they charge by hour. So if I hire people to work, am I going to lose my profits and all of my money because they're not going to be as efficient as me when I bake the cookies? Um, and then at the same time, I worry that the quality of the cookies could suffer because the people I hire might not follow the exact same process. And if they add one more teaspoon, let's say, of baking powder, that might skew off the whole recipe.

Wait, so you said that you're doing 50,000 cookies a week, so 52,000 a year, and how much in revenue?

Uh, so revenue, it's going to be around $25K projected.

Okay. Cheap, right?

Yes. With the cookies, since they're bulk ordering, I don't make a lot of profit off of them right now.

Let's walk through that. You get an order. Typical order will be how much? How many cookies?

So a typical order is around 600 cookies.

Great. 600 cookies. On that 600 cookies, what are you charging that, that end customer? Or the, not the, let's assume it's not going straight to the customer, but you're, it sounds like you're selling to the school district or the bakery or the wholesale relationship. So how much are you charging wholesale for that?

Right. So for wholesale, it's 80 cents per cookie. So between 700 and 800, I make around $400 in revenue.

Okay. And then what does it cost you to make those cookies?

Yep.

So I make 2 cookies. I make an oatmeal chocolate chip and I make a chocolate chip. Both, the oatmeal costs 27 cents to make. And the chocolate chip costs $0.28 to make.

Okay. Gotcha. So you're basically 66% gross margins on the, on the cookie itself. And that's like includes the kitchen cost and everything, or that's literally just the ingredients.

Yeah.

So that includes everything from packaging to the commercial kitchen and to the ingredients.

And do you have like your Excel file that basically kind of shows your, your unit cost and your percentages? And when you do that, what is it? Uh, What do you see when you're, when you add in the labor? Do you see that the profits go to zero or do you, cause you're, that was your question. You're like, well, my profits go away. That's kind of an Excel question, not a Sean and Sam question really. Right. So like, what does the Excel tell you?

So it really depends just based on like minimum wage, say $15 or $16 per hour. Um, it depends on how many actual people I hire. So right now I've been trying to experiment with 2 or 3. And seeing if that works in the spreadsheet. And right now I'm, my profits are going pretty, pretty much to zero. So I'm making like $20 to $30 per, per order. Um, so I just wanted to see if there was a better, more efficient way to do this, um, without like choking all my profits.

Raise your prices. That's the easiest way.

So basically I think there's like only 2 or 3 ways to grow a business, right? You sell more of what you already have. You sell the same stuff to the current customers, but you get them to buy more, whether a larger quantity or more often, or you raise prices. So you, those are like, so, you know, there's a great book, uh, called Getting Everything You Have Outta Everything You Got. And it just walks through like, those are the only 3 options. Sounds like you're selling a lot more stuff if you're gonna grow 600%. Uh, but you probably should charge more, I would think. Uh, I don't know anything about the cookie business, but I think that sounds really cheap, right? How hard is the sale? Is the sale really easy? If the sale's really easy, you should charge more. How often are you turned down when you're asking these people to buy your stuff?

So it's quite a bit. So right now with Machios and Pomptonian, I signed a contract with them. Um, so that's pretty much going till the end of the school year for me. So till June. Um, so with them, Pomptonian is actually only taking 40 cents per cookie. So to me, that's like, that's a really cheap thing because I'm really making 12 or 13 cents of profit per cookie. So with them, I'm making like a total of barely anything for profit. With Pom— or with Machios, on the other hand, I make $0.80. So they charge—

I hope they're not listening to this. Uh-oh, we're giving out all the leverage.

So I make around $0.80 from them as they charge me for a dollar. So I feel like in my question, like a follow-up is if I raise the prices, do you think there's— they would say we don't want for you to put your products anymore, or is that a possibility?

Well, it's definitely a possibility, but it's one you got to figure out. So there's two ways to figure this out. You can go to your existing customers, assume you have a good relationship with them, assume they're happy, and you could tell them, you could be like, hey, how's this going for you? They're like, oh, it's great. Like, awesome. I really love working with you. You know, I'm 14 years old. I'm figuring this out as I go. And one thing I'm learning is that I'm providing you guys 500, 1000 cookies right now. I cook all of these by myself. I need to bring somebody in. If I do that, I'm not, I'm not gonna make any profit. And so I was wondering, would it be possible, like, for us to raise the price here and go to a dollar a cookie or 95 cents a cookie, whatever it is? That way I'm not losing money providing you business. And see what they say. They might look at you and your puppy dog eyes and they'll just say yes. They might say no. And you'll find out, right? And then when you go to that next bakery, you, you're gonna go cold test them and they're never even gonna know about the 80 cents. You just go to them straight away and you say it's $1.10 a cookie. And then you say, these cookies are amazing. This is an— have you ever been to the bakery in New York? This is a New York City cookie that I'm bringing to you, right? So you have to up the perceived value of the cookie through your packaging, through your story, through, through the benefits that they get working with you. And you could say, hey, I'm going to be able to, you know, tell everybody in our local community that you guys support, you know, this young entrepreneurs, blah, blah, blah. So you got to find a way to be able to charge a higher price. And so I think that's your easiest lever because You're not going to be able to get labor for that much cheaper, but you can get more margin out of every cookie that you sell. And you don't want to grow broke. So if you have the wrong model, right, you have the wrong cost structure today. And let's say you do go get these bigger contracts and you're cooking 10 times more, more cookies. Well, you're just literally going to grow broke if you do that, right? Because you're going to have to hire to fulfill those orders. But if you don't have the margin to support it, you will go out of business. And so, and by the way, I think you could test these things. So first you test it in Excel. Then you bring on one other person and, you know, you can always cut bait with that person if it turns out that you're not able to, you know, optimize them fully to get the cost out, to get the benefits out of it. But, you know, you just go sort of one step at a time. I wouldn't go get 2 or 3 people. I would start with one and then move to 2, move to 3 as you figure out that model.

Right.

Okay.

Yeah, that makes perfect sense. Thank you.

Yeah. You might also want to try to sell to a richer customer. So who is going to be less price sensitive? Right. If you go to local businesses, you go to real estate, you know, the guy who's killing it in real estate down there, you go to the dentist, you go to people who are themselves local entrepreneurs that are making enough money where they don't care if it's $0.80 a cookie, $1 a cookie, or $2 a cookie, really. Um, they like the story, they like you, and they want to be supportive. I think that might be helpful versus going to somebody like Aramark. Aramark, I think, literally provides food to like prisons and school cafeterias, right? It's going to be harder to get wiggle room with them than it is to get, you know, the local dentist to say, sure thing.

Yeah. Or local car dealerships, things like that. That story is so much better when you have your face on it with the, with the, with the story and then your stuff right there.

You should maybe, do you have like a sign so that let's say I am the car dealership and I do carry your cookies. Like they could just give away a free cookie to every customer who walks in, by the way, they're selling cars. I think a pretty known sales tactic is, you know, Sam used to do this, right? You go negotiate with somebody off Craigslist. What's the first thing Sam brings?

Oh yeah. It's called the, uh, rule of reciprocity. So basically I do something nice to someone, whether it's something really small, like I go, hey, you know, uh, I was gonna meet you to look at this car. Uh, they, I just brought a Coke. I went and got a Coke. You, you want a Coke, a Coca-Cola as well? And then, uh, the rule of reciprocity states that when you do something nice to someone, they will always, or almost always do something nice back. And it's oftentimes not in proportion to the gift that you gave them. So you do one little small thing nice, they'll do something a lot bigger in return because you always want to just like be even, right?

Okay. Yeah. So I would go to like a local car dealer, local car dealer and just say, hey, I want to provide you guys cookies every week that you guys can just give out to customers and they come in. Trust me, there's— have you ever heard of the rule of reciprocity? People are much more likely to want to buy when they're eating, eating a delicious cookie and they feel taken care of. And this thing's going to cost you a dollar. But if you close even one more sale this whole year, This whole year, right? You know, that's a $35,000 sale for you. Um, you know, this, this pays itself back in spades. And so you can make a pitch like that and you can go get actually like, uh, contracts with people who are willing to pay more, right? So simple rule of business is sell to the people who have money.

And dude, I want to see you, I want to see him give like a speech like a Wolf of Wall Street where it just like ends with like, sign on the dotted line for Christ.

You know what I mean?

Like, I want to see him like, like Pitch these hard.

Yeah, actually, that is one piece of advice I'd give you, which is that, look, this, this probably won't be your last business. This is the first business. This is your starter business. And you're going to learn a whole bunch. You're going to get more value out of the story you're creating than the cookies that you sell. My first business was a sushi business. We probably made, I don't know, $14,000 of profit in the one year of operations that we were, we were working on that thing. But the story that I told about how we cold called a Food Network chef and how I went door to door selling sushi, how we, you know, reverse engineer the POS systems to figure out all the sales of all Chipotle stores in the Colorado area. Those stories got me bigger and bigger opportunities as I went. They got me speaking opportunities. They got me into accelerators. They got me other, other doors open. And so one tip for you is while you sell the cookies, you should be building the story. So the story of, yeah, I went into the car dealership and I, I gave a talk called how you can increase sales by 600% like me. And I talked to the car salesman about the rule of reciprocity and how they, they, they became customers of my cookies. Even if it's not a lot of cookies, it's an awesome story. And putting yourself in those positions will build your skill and build your story, which ultimately is going to be a lot more valuable than the cookies that you sell, I believe.

Okay.

Yeah, that, that sounds really great. And definitely for the car dealership, that's a Great thing to put in mind for me, even, even though I have these suppliers, I think it's good to start advancing and thinking about more places to sell. So I think that's a really good, that's really helpful advice.

Yeah.

All right. Thank you, man. Uh, you're, uh, you're killing it. Keep going. Just, it's amazing how far you are at 14. Um, all right. Next, Abigail, where are you at, Abigail?

Hi.

Where are you from?

Um, I'm from Odessa, Missouri.

Oh, nice. I'm from Missouri too. Uh, hey Sean, I posted Abigail's Instagram. I want you to click it and I want you to look at what her hobby is. So scroll down, you're gonna see like, it looks like some prom photos, but keep on scrolling down and you're gonna see that in her free time, she's a race car driver.

What?

Yes.

Okay. Triple threat. Yes. Student, entrepreneur, sprint car driver. How did you get into that, Abigail?

So actually, I'm a third-generation sprint car driver. So my grandpa drove race cars, my dad has driven race cars, and then I kind of just passed it on down to me.

That is awesome.

Amazing. Okay, so Abigail, how old are you and what's your business?

I am a senior at Odessa High School. I'm 17 years old, and my business is growing and selling chrysanthemums. So like mums, which is like something you'd put on your front porch during, um, like the fall season and Halloween. So that's what I do right now. Um, my business is 2 years old. Last year I made $15,000, or this past summer, I guess I made $15,000 in revenue. And this year I expect to grow by 100% and aim to do at least $30,000 in revenue.

Goddamn.

Okay, so explain us the business. So where do the flowers come from? Who do you sell them to?

So how my business works is I actually order the mums, which we call plugs because they're like about this big, and I order them from a company in North Carolina. I also have to order fertilizer so we can make sure the plants get nutrients that they need. I have to order the soil and then the pots for it. So that all goes into the price for the mums. And then we have about a 2-week-long process of putting it all together because we have to mix the soil. and then we put them into color blocks and then put the mums in the color block. It's a really, really long and tedious process. Then we put 'em on our, um, what we call runs, and they're like big tarps with watering lines. And for the next like 3 to 4 months, I spend watering. And then after it's, they're ready to go and they're fertilized and watered and they're grown to about as big as they can get. We market them to schools and fundraisers, and I also do retail at my own house. So I try to post that on social media and try to hand out flyers to, like, local towns and post them at local businesses.

Wow, that is a lot of work. Yeah. I'm looking at this, this picture, which is just like a field or like these, like, long, long rows of these potted plants with the watering system. Is this— where, where do you do this? Is this your backyard? What is going on?

So I live on 40 acres and about 30 acres is leased out for farmland and the rest of it is for my mom's pretty much. So anywhere we can put them on the yard, we pretty much put them there. And right now we're in the process of building a greenhouse. So from my profit with my mom's, I've been able to buy a greenhouse. So that I can have a place to start my mums. And also a greenhouse is a good place to have a steady revenue for the other 6 months out of the year where I'm not growing mums.

So you, um, sorry, so I missed the part of you, you're selling. So you're selling to, you said school fundraisers, businesses, and you're handing out flyers, you said. So who's the core customer? Who's the, who's the main customer?

So right now we're trying to do, um, wholesale as our core customer so that if like What we do is I'm in FFA, so FFA chapters will sell it for a fundraiser.

Sean doesn't know what the FFA is. You gotta spell this out.

Okay, so FFA used to stand for Future Farmers of America, but we've kind of veered away from that because we don't want it to be the stereotypical about cows and like farming. What we really do right now is we promote youth in agriculture and leadership in agriculture. And we're pretty much growing the next generation of agriculture.

So, Sean, if you grew up in a, in a more rural environment, if you're in high school, like you kind of by default join the FFA. There's millions and millions and millions of members. And it was kind of like a thing, like instead of Boy Scouts or Girl Scouts and maybe not instead of, but it's similar to that in rural areas. You join the FFA and you get like your FFA jacket and they're like pretty, they're pretty famous.

What do you do once you join? They go out.

And for me, I currently serve as my local chaplain. Chapter president in Area 6 Sentinel, and I'm running for a Missouri FFA state office. So what I really do is I, um, do public speaking events and stuff like that. So it's really shaped me into who I am, because right now talking to you, like, I am not nervous. And I know that my freshman year I would have been completely nervous because I never did public speaking. And it kind of just shapes you to get those, like, life skills that you need in the long run.

Okay. College acceptance letter. All right. That was a great, great essay. So you, okay, so sorry. So you said your core customer's wholesale. What does that mean? Who's the buyer?

So right now we're trying to do contracts with like hardware stores around us. So we have a couple like hometown kind of hardware stores and then some bigger ones that are all across Missouri. And right now we're just kind of focused on Missouri because delivering my product is kind of one of the hardest parts. So we actually get to use my Sprint car trailer to deliver all of the mums. So that's kind of, that's kind of funny how it clashes.

And how much profit did you do?

This last year we did $15,000.

And, uh, you did $15,000 in revenue, I thought you said.

Yeah.

How much in profit?

So our profit was about, I think, 7 to 8. Wow.

All right.

Because that's good. Just because of like each year it fluctuates, like how much the soil's gonna cost or how much the pots are gonna cost. And our really, our big cost this year was making those runs. And now we already have those. So it's something that we can pack away for like the fall and the wintertime, and then we can put 'em out next year. And that's another cost we don't have to pay for.

So Abigail, let me ask you a question. If you wanted to sell 10 times more mums, how would you do that? Like, not— you said you're going to double your sales. What if you wanted to go 10 times bigger? What would you do?

I think that right now that's kind of what I'm like. My question to you guys was going to be just because I like to do the wholesale part of it, but I also know that I can't grow how much I want to grow just doing wholesale. But I think really right now my biggest thing is going to be just getting my company out there and like promoting it better to other companies so that they would possibly sign a contract for us so we can have that fixed amount that we're going to sell to them.

Like, you know, I went to FarmCon, which was this conference that Sam had told me about. It was actually in Kansas City. And, you know, there was like 5,000 people there. They're all farmers. And if they had heard your story on stage, I think a lot of people would have handed you a card, said, hey, let me know how I can help. Love what you're doing. I'm so excited that somebody in, somebody in this next generation is excited about agriculture. It's great to see it. I want to support that. I think there's a lot of that goodwill. And I wonder if maybe the faster way to 10x your sales would be like, who's the CEO of whatever, Home Depot or whatever, whatever they're like, the wholesale store is that's going to carry your stuff.

Ace Hardware or something like that.

Ace Hardware. Like, how do you go to them and be like, hey, I want to be in your store. Like, that is my goal. That is my dream. And I want to get my mums on your shelves. How do I make that happen? And you just, I think if you hustled more to the top, you could actually get, uh, more growth faster than going bottoms up in this case, because your story is your asset, right? Yeah. The, the flowers might be great, but your story is the real differentiator. How many other people are there with your story? Zero. And so how do you, how are you using your story to unlock the growth is what I would be doing. Whether it's telling your own story on TikTok, it's getting on stage at places like PharmCon or the FFA annual whatever event, or it's getting that cold email, sending cold emails every single day to the CEOs of all of the major, uh, distributors or retailers until one of them takes your meeting and puts you on their shelves. If you listen to, we did this episode with Nick Mowbray. He was this guy in New Zealand, literally like on the other side of the earth, making toys by himself. And he was like, I emailed every retailer in every country every single day. And he's like, I just kept doing that until they finally cracked. And they would tell me, no, I'm not interested, not interested. And one day they would be like, can I see a sample? Or, hey, are you going to be at that show? I'm going to the show. If you're there, I'll, I'll take 15 minutes and meet with you. And he would fly there and make it happen. And I think if you 10x'd your approach towards getting the major distributor, I think you might leapfrog into a much bigger space because otherwise the way you describe this, like, I'm tired just hearing how you grow these things. Like, it is so much work to just get the product made that I feel like you— it's only worth doing that if you're going to be able to have like land some like major sales versus then it's also double the work to go sell to every school for a fundraiser and mom and pops. I think that's just like too much work.

There's also a, for all y'all, uh, there's a small window that you have where you're like this prodigy.

You're young and lovable. Yeah.

That, that's gonna go away, but you've got this like 2 to maybe 6 year window where you being pestering, that's just cute and awesome. And then in a few years it's gonna be annoying and weird. And so, so while that, so while that window is open, take it, you know, take that opportunity.

It's a, we have a friend who was 18 and they got written up in the, in TechCrunch as like the young hotshot prodigy. He's 23 now and he's like, he feels washed up. He's like, I can't use my story. Like my entire shtick was that I was young. He's like, nobody wants to hear about a 23-year-old prodigy. There's no such thing. You're not, you're not a phenom anymore.

Yeah. It's like a, it's like a, it's like a blind painter, you know, like you, you gotta use everything you can. Use that story. Like, you know, you can get away with a lot right now. And, uh, the same stuff that you're gonna be able to get away with now, you're not going to be in the future. And so I would definitely do exactly as Sean's saying, which is go hard on going to the top. And you, you, you, you, you're not really annoying when you're 18 doing this.

Yeah. Abigail, in the next 30 days, do you think you could get a meeting with the CEO of either Ace Hardware or, uh, Home Depot?

I think, I don't know, I think that that is something that like just sounds crazy to me. Like, I feel like I probably could just because I'd like to say I'm a very well-spoken person and very like good with my words. But right now I just have like a lot of other things going on, so it's hard to like focus all of my time on my business because I am a senior this year. So that's just like Kinda hard.

That's the only time I think that this, this excuse is valid. I would say, okay, that, that is the only time that I will accept that excuse. I, I wanna give everyone listening and you guys, uh, a little bit of feedback that I learned when I was a little bit younger, which is the most powerful people on earth are one cold email away. And because of email and because of Instagram, which you guys have grown up on and all these and everything else on social media, you would be shocked at how small the world is. And it sounds insane to say email the CEO of this large billion-dollar-plus, multi-tens of billions of dollar company. That sounds insane. But I think that you are literally, I wouldn't say one email, I would say you're one email and 20 follow-ups away from just about everyone on earth. And there's been times where we, I even emailed, um, jeff@amazon.com and I think I followed up like 20 times and I got a no thank you. But just, it's just proof that you are, you are much closer than you think to just about every single person you want to reach, particularly some type of executive. All right.

I'm going to show you something real quick, Abigail, before, uh, you know, fifth period starts here. So just check this out. All right. There's this guy on Twitter right now. Uh, his name's Sonith. He's, uh, or his Twitter handle Sonith. He's building Z Fellows, which is another young, uh, student program. I think it's at Stanford. But just check out this. This is a cold email that my friend Nico, who's now a famous venture capitalist, he invested in Snapchat really early on, again, off a cold email. Uh, okay. You might not be able to read this. I'll read it to you. It's, uh, him emailing Elon Musk. Okay. So I'm giving you the CEO of Home Depot and Ace Hardware. This guy emailed Elon Musk and he goes, dear Mr. Musk. And he says, I'm a graduate student at Stanford and taking this class, blah, blah, blah. I'm writing a paper about Tesla strategy because I think you're such an innovative company and we're going to. Put together our recommendations on the future of your corporate strategy. Since you're the chairman of Tesla, I thought it'd be great if we could do a short interview with you in person over the next few weeks to talk about your strategy. I'm aware that you receive dozens of similar requests on a daily basis. That's why I'll do my best to make this not only useful, but an entertaining experience for you and your company's execs. Hopefully we're able to contribute first-class recommendations. I'm happy to sign an NDA, blah, blah, blah. I look forward to hearing from you. I would be grateful if you would participate in our research. Nico. And then Elon writes back, okay, if you can limit the meeting to 20 minutes or schedule for late in the evening. And this was Nico as a student. There's another email of him.

By the way, that's not even a good email. That's not even that good of an email.

That was not. And let me show you another one I just saw literally today. So the cool thing about following this guy on Twitter is every day he's tweeting out a cold email somebody sent. Uh, so this is Corey Levy who runs Z Fellows now. So this is him emailing Andy Roddick, the tennis player's mom. So not Andy Roddick, his mom. So he finds his mom's email address and he goes, dear Mrs. Roddick, he goes, um, As you already know from my previous emails, my name is Corey Levy from Houston, Texas. I'm 12 turning 13, and I'm a big fan of your son Andy. I know Andy's playing this tournament in Houston. I was wondering if I could, uh, meet him and/or hit with him before. I've been dying to hit with him for the last 2 years. Please email me back.

Corey.

And then she says, Corey, thanks for the note. Andy's gonna be in Houston. As the tournament gets closer, reach out again. I'll definitely make arrangements for you to meet him. Can't promise you'll hit with him, but I'll try. Um, please keep in touch and keep playing tennis. It's a great sport.

Turns out Corey was like 34 when he wrote that email though. So it was kind of weird when he showed up.

He's still got a baby face actually. So I'm going to say all that to say this, which is, uh, one, you should follow this guy because if you see every day a cold email that works, it'll go from that sounds crazy to this is perfectly normal. And that's one of the reasons why people should listen to this podcast is one of the reasons why you should follow people on Twitter who are inspiring because they will make the crazy seem normal. And that's all you need is to delude yourself into believing it's normal to actually make it happen. The second thing I'll say is you described the process of like a multi-month potting and moving and arranging and watering and kissing and touching the flowers to make them all work. And then I was like, hey, could you send a cold email? You're like, I don't know, I got a lot of class coming up. So I challenge you, which is I think this email is going to be the least of your worries. I think sending a cold email every day will take you literally no, no more than 10 minutes. And I think you've got that 10 minutes. I think so, because you just showed me your 10-acre farm you're doing by yourself. So, so, um, what happens is that familiar work feels comfortable and feels easy. Unfamiliar work feels hard and you, you start to talk yourself out of it. You tell yourself a story about why it's your senior year, you don't have time. In reality, the thing I'm telling you is a lot easier than the stuff you're already doing. So that's my challenge to you, whether you, you choose to accept it.

Pick 100 people who you want, who you wanna reach. Okay. Spend only 30 minutes a day. For the next month and follow up with each of them 10 times until they say no thank you or yes. Uh, and your, your reply rate, if you're any interesting or any good, is gonna be about 10%. So most everyone's gonna say no or not gonna reply, but I promise you 10% out of 100 is gonna be awesome. It's gonna change your life.

One, one more thing. Go Google Sam Parr cold email. Go read Sam's cold emails he sent to recruit speakers to HustleCon. This like, you know, random conference that he was starting and the follow-ups is where the magic is. So there's the initial email, which a few brave people are willing to do. Then there's the 4 follow-ups that Sam was sending that nobody's willing to do. I would go read those. The other thing is there's a great story of, uh, Tim Ferriss. Abigail, do you know Tim Ferriss?

I don't believe so.

Wow.

That's amazing. Sam, she knows us. She doesn't know Tim Ferriss.

Holy shit, dude. Our heroes are their grandparents. You know what I mean? Like, all right.

So, uh, Tim Ferriss has this great— Tim wrote this book called The 4-Hour Workweek, and he's this great guy. He's got a great podcast. So he has a story where he went to a Stanford Business School course and he offered a challenge. He said, I will give a round-the-world ticket. So an all-expense-paid round-the-world plane ticket to anybody here who can get in touch with the, um, whoever could cold email and get in touch with the highest kind of, uh, most hard-to-reach person. So the whole class reach out to whoever you want. Whoever gets the person highest on the food chain gets around the world ticket. And he, um, by the end of the class, I don't, I'll butcher the exact story. You can go read it. But by the end of the class, he, um, he's like, okay, so who, who got who? And I think one person got like, I don't know, Bill Clinton or something like that. And he's like, oh, amazing. Who else did other people get? And most people, like, I think of the class, like only 4 or 5 people got anybody. And he asked, he's like, what, what was the difference? Was it your cold email script? And it was basically that like 85% of the class, 90% of the class didn't even try. They just perceived it to be too hard. Anybody that tried reached somebody. And then within that group of people, some people literally reached like a former sitting president. And so I think that, uh, there's a lesson in there, which is that like most people just won't even try. And this is something that sounds hard, but it's actually not that hard, especially when you have your type of story. Um, I think it will actually be trivially easy for you. You'll be surprised. The CEO of Ace Hardware, if you emailed him, you will be the most interesting email he got that day. Because guess what? There's not a lot of other 18-year-old sprint car drivers, young entrepreneurs who are selling or who are interested in agriculture, who are actually out there doing it and not even just talking about it. There's, there's only, you know, a couple and nobody's emailing him. So I think it's going to be a lot easier than you think.

It's something I'll definitely give it, have to give it a try.

All right, I'll take it.

Hey, thank you. Yeah, thank you. You're, you're fantastic.

Uh, I'm gonna keep cold emailing you every day until you cold email them. All right, I think that's how fucking—

it'd be a good reminder.

And you'll have to invite us to Odessa. I want to watch one of your races. I want to drive the damn thing.

Definitely. Where did you say you're from? Missouri?

I'm from St. Louis. Yeah, I'm from St. Louis.

You're from St. Louis? Yeah, I'm from Odessa, which is just A little bit east of Kansas City.

Yeah. Where, uh, a lot of people, like if you told Sean that he wouldn't know anything, but, uh, you know, the difference between KC and St. Louis is like LA and SF, Sean. So not that similar. Yeah, pretty much. Um, but all right, who we got next?

By the way, just to recap, Abigail, shoot your shot, cold email, use your story to, uh, to go to the top and think about how you could 10x your business instead of 2x your business and follow up until you die. Yeah, Sam cold emailed his way out of Missouri and you can too. All right.

Anand, thank you for bringing these folks to us.

Yeah, absolutely. Um, let me just plug real quick. Uh, March 14th is our next deadline. So formidablefellowship.org. And I think for just generally, this has given me like an amazing amount of hope in like the next generation. Cause I think the stories you hear, like, you know, everybody's just scrolling away on TikTok, ruining, wasting away their life. And like we see. Honestly hundreds of like amazing young people. You met just 3 of them today. So, um, yeah, so, you know, if, uh, if you like what these guys do, please support them by cooking.

Are you just doing good in the world now? Is that what's happened? You're just doing good?

No, I mean, no, this is, I mean, this is fun. This is a lot of fun. You know, he, he put up, it puts a lot of wind in my sails.

He put up about $500 grand or something of you and your partner's money.

He's just doing good. This is amazing.

It's called the second mountain. This is what you do when you, when you—

we got $700 grand with donations now. So I mean, we got lots of money for grants. So if there's young entrepreneurs, if parents are hearing this, you know, we've had a lot of parents who reached out saying this inspired their kids to start a business. So hopefully we'll see them in 6 or 12 months. So yeah. And I mean, it's, it's pretty dope, like what has started to happen and we're only 4 and a half months in. So we're still—

Super, why are you doing this?

That's a great question. That's what I'm asking myself. This is amazing.

All right, you can just join us, Sean. It's all right. All the infrastructure set up, that took the longest.

So just, do you need like a hype man? Because that's kind of my skill.

I don't really have much else, but yeah, yeah, we need a hype man for sure. So, uh, no, but these guys, you know, these guys are great. You know, if you need to buy mom's cookies, you need your, you know, you want your, uh, you want your home beautified and to protect that asset, as Lincoln said, uh, you know where to go.

Dude, it's also awesome not to hear about AI. Do you know what I mean? Like, which is great, which is great. But like, it's like, you know, these guys are actually doing the damn thing, like in real life. And it sounds awesome to hear different, different stuff.

Yeah. I think the other thing we have like a podcast with these guys called Future Titans and like Ayaan goes through a story of like emailing and going door to door like 100 times and getting rejected. Right. And so I think like the things that they learn out of building their businesses are phenomenal. You know, Abigail walks through this like horticulture issue, which is like way above my pay grade where like the mums were getting overwatered in one area. And like just the problem solving they're doing is unreal compared to like anything they might do like in an academic setting. So yeah, no, it's super great.

I'm going to send you guys a copy of our boy Nick Huber's book, The Sweaty Startup: How to Get Rich Doing Boring Things, because you guys are all doing sweaty startups. This is great. I'll send you guys— give us your addresses. I'll send you guys a copy.

You're, you're way ahead of the curve. And, you know, we'll joke and we'll tease you guys and give you a hard time, but you're, you're doing amazing stuff. And I hope you're proud of yourselves. And thanks for coming on the pod. All right. That's it.