My 6-Step Process To Find +$1,000,000 Business Ideas (#479)

And when you see a big company like 1-800-Flowers or Heineken, so a company that has millions of customers, when they say one or two lines like that, that gets me really interested. All right, we're live. Sean is not here, so I'm going to do a question and answer session. I tweeted out that I'm gonna be doing this, and we have a bunch of questions. Jonathan's gonna be reading, uh, the first ones. What are they? Which, where do you wanna start? All right.

This one is from Jimbo Slice @jgilly3. He goes, would love to learn how to develop ideas for businesses to start and how to test said ideas.

So basically because of this podcast, I have to research cool companies But what a lot of people don't know is I've been doing research on companies before I worked on this podcast, before I started this podcast. And this is how I created The Hustle. We ended up selling The Hustle for tens of millions of dollars. And this is how I created Hampton, which is going to be a huge company, I think. And I've done a bunch of other little projects based off of this research model. I'll do a quick plug. Basically, if you go to ideationbootcamp.co, everyone kept asking me about this process, so I like made it into a course. You can go and buy it if you want. I'll just kind of give you a little preview now. I've got this way of researching where I look for 5 or 6 different things, and it's almost like the way that I compare it to a song. So there's a song called, you know, like a Guns N' Roses song, like Welcome to Paradise. Is that what it's called? Sweet Child O' Mine. That's what I'm thinking. Sweet Child O' Mine. Sweet Child O' Mine has this amazing guitar solo. In that song. And the band said that they, someone asked them how they write songs. They're like, well, sometimes like with Sweet Child of Mine, I heard this amazing guitar riff that Slash was tinkering with and I wrote lyrics around it and then we created the bridge and the hook and whatever. Other times I've got this really cool one-liner, this lyric, we're gonna turn it into the song. I do the same thing with business. And so those little hooks that I look for are the first thing is, demand. So I'm constantly seeking out what problems people have. Uh, the second thing is I'm constantly looking at, uh, how many people share that particular problem, and I'm gonna give examples of all this. The third thing I look at is who are the leaders in that space? So what's succeeding and why? The fourth thing I look at is of the leaders and the people in the space, what shortcomings do they have? Next, I look at which business models are most effective. And then finally, I look at what problems aren't being solved. And I'm going to give you an example of this. And so I have all these tools that I use. And so like, here's a, here's an example. So there's, there's this company called 1-800-Flowers and, um, it's a phone service where you call and you order flowers. And I was just like probably buying Valentine's Day flowers on their website one time. And I noticed that their traffic, I use this tool called SimilarWeb. I use that all the time. It's a plugin. It's free. They have a paid version. The free version's totally fine. They have this plugin where it tells you a guesstimate of what the traffic is from a website. And 1-800-Flowers, as predicted, it had like pretty great traffic. Like it was like 5 million people a month coming to the website. And then in February it like peaked to be really, really big. That's easy to guess because it was Valentine's Day, but basically it was, that told me that, wow, a lot of people are using 1-800-Flowers on a regular basis and it peaks in February. And it also had a big jump in whenever Mother's Day is, May or June. And so I was like, all right, that's interesting. I kind of knew that, but let me read a little bit more about this. And so I use another tool called annualreports.com. And I love reading annual reports because it teaches me about the company. So an annual report, if a company is public, they have to release this quarterly report where they talk about their earnings and all these interesting things about the company. And a lot of time they appear boring, but I'm reading them to find insight. And I found this one insight that said, we are noticing that the succulent plant, It's a very particular plant. We are noticing that amongst our millennial consumers, it's the fastest growing trend. I also did this with Heineken, the company Heineken. They, in their annual report, they said, um, Heineken Zero, so which is like a non-alcohol version. They are, uh, it's our fastest growing segment. It's still really small, but it's fast growing. And when you see a big company like 1-800-Flowers or Heineken, so a company that has millions of customers. When they say one or two lines like that, that gets me really interested. When they say something's fast growing, I'm like, oh, I'm intrigued. And so I'll read these reports just for looking for one or two lines that say that. Or I'll use, I'll go to like every website I go to, if it's like really weird looking, um, and it grabs my attention, I go to SimilarWeb and I just look at what their traffic is because I'm looking for these one little tidbits that catch my attention. And in this case, for the 1-800-Flowers, it, they said succulents were growing. And so I'll look at, um, you know, what they say and, and, and then I try to find shortcomings. So with 1-800-Flowers, they said that their shortcomings are they, uh, that most of their revenue comes from holidays. And so they're trying to get revenue and business between the holidays to make their business more steady. They also said that, I believe this was a few years ago, they said that most of their profit comes from not the flowers, but from vases. So that has the biggest margins. And they also said, uh, that they were trying to think of ways to get people to buy more accessories like vases, chocolates, and things like that. And then, um, so that kind of like gave me this idea of like, okay, 1-800-Flowers is a big business because the revenue is huge and it gets tons of traffic. I know that. So that's like proving me that there's demand and a big audience. I know that they're succeeding at least to some point because they're a publicly traded company and they're very profitable. I know their shortcomings or the problems that they're trying to solve for are that they, uh, can't get people to buy stuff on a regular basis and they want people to buy more vases. So what other problems are consumers not being, uh, not— do consumers have that aren't being solved? And where's 1-800-Flowers failing? Well, in my head I was like, well, if you could figure out a way to get people to buy regularly with different vases, how can I do that? And so I wrote this report for Trends, Trends.co, and then someone eventually launched a company. Where they created this succulent plant that you like smack on the wall and it's like, has this like hydroponic system, ponics system where it like, like watered itself. And then there was another company that launched and they, and they created the coolest, it was a succulent plant and some of them launched these companies based off our, that report I wrote. Another company created this, uh, business where they had these like amazing pots and vases where it had like artists on there. So like Frida Kahlo was on one. Or they would create like really funny pots and plants. Like some of the pots were like state themed. So like an Oregon plant, like had, had like an Oregon flag on the vase, like things like that. And that was their way of solving it. And a bunch of these companies, a few of them went on to raise millions and millions of dollars. I think there's Bloomscape and I forget the other one, but it basically came from this like research methodology of Finding demand, finding the audience, looking at the leaders, the shortcomings, and it's this like cycle that I use and I try to find like one hook or one line for each of those things that get me interested. So I use SimilarWeb a ton to do that. So I look at where someone's getting a lot of traffic or how much traffic's getting. There's this another amazing thing called Companies House. It's a, so basically if you're based in the UK and you're a company that does at least 10 million in revenue, you have to file your, um, your, uh, financials. And so if I find a cool company that uses the word LTD, I guess that means like limited company. If I find a company that does something like that, has that on their website, I immediately go to Companies House. So for example, I found this amazing website that basically, basically was reviewing, um, VPNs. You know what a VPN is? It's like a thing that hides like where you are when you're using the web. And they had like 12 million visitors to their site. And I was like, oh, that's interesting. And the company was called like something company name Ltd. So I go, all right, I'm going to go straight to company's house and see what the revenue is. Their revenue was like 18 million and their profit was like 16 million. And so that told me that A, there's demand for people who want to, uh, get reviews for VPN. That shocks me. I didn't realize that market was that big. B, it shows me that that business model of affiliate, so they made money through affiliate, so they would write review on a, um, they would write a review on a VPN. If someone bought it, they got a little cutback. That business model, super fascinating. So in my head, I'm like, oh wow, what other tech products are, have this big affiliate fees and can I create content for them? That business model was really fascinating. And C, I learned that they were the leader in the space. And so like that just like opened up my mind to like a different business model and a different niche. And I didn't do anything with that, but I thought to myself, Man, I wonder if I could do this for payroll software. I wonder how many people are having payroll software problems. Uh, I bet you I can get a big affiliate fee with that. I bet you I could rank on search for that. And then I never ended up doing it because I wasn't passionate about it. But anyway, I go through all these different examples and of like these different tools that I use to research on Audiation Bootcamp. It's audiationbootcamp.co. But that's like a very scattered example of how I do that. All right.

This one is from Mike Terravella. He asks about the evolution of your health journey while being an entrepreneur. He goes, I've been lifting to get back in shape and just curious of lessons or future roadblocks to watch out for.

So this is around fitness and health. So let me give you guys some background. So I was an exceptional high school athlete. I was one of the best in the state of Missouri where I'm from at the 200-meter and 400-meter dash. And then I went to a Division I school where I was a scholarship athlete. For 2 years, and then I quit and I got into business. And between the ages of 20 to about 28, I was fat. I was pretty lumpy and I was pretty disgusting. Now is a good time to put the— my before picture. So if you're on, uh, listening to this on audio, you can go ahead and see— you can go to our YouTube and see those pictures. But I got pretty fat and I got disgusting. And then about 3 or 4 years ago, I said, This is it. I'm going to get my act together and I'm going to become a fitness model. That's what I said. It was a joke. I'm not actually that, but it was a joke and I did it. I got pretty fit. And so I basically created this rule. General Mathis, he's this general in America. He's got this great line that says, figure out your flat ass rules and stick to them. And the reason being, and I stole this from Ryan Holiday, who's an inspiration to me. He said, the person who decides every day what choices they have to make for each decision that person will be exhausted and burnt out. And so about when I was 29, 28 years old, I made the decision that I will never, ever, ever miss a workout. And so at first I basically created programming for myself, which means I created my own schedule, my own lifts, and like how much I should lift. I did that on my own for a little while, and then I hired a trainer. His name is Jesse O'Brien at Central Athlete. I think if you go to centralathlete.com, you could see him. I'm not affiliated, I'm just a fan. And he created all my training for me, and I meet with him monthly, and I do the workouts remotely. But basically I don't miss a single workout. And I have, I work out 5 days a week and I, so that's 5 days times 52. I think that's 260 workouts in the last 2 years, 3 years. I've probably have missed 5 to 10 a year and that's usually only because of sickness or like if someone dies and I have to take a flight to a funeral, but basically 95% of the time I don't miss. And so I believe big, big, big, big time into consistency. And so I don't miss. The second thing that I do, and by the way, that like, that I'm fairly extreme about it. So for example, I drive a ton. So like when I go and I take tons of road trips, when I take a road trip and I can't get my workout in the morning before I leave, I pull over on the side of the road and I tell Jessie, today's a travel day. I'm gonna be driving and I bring bands with me and I pull over on a truck stop. I got lots of pictures and videos of me sending my wife saying, I'm at this particular truck stop, I'm doing pushups, burpees, sprints, things like that. I'll pull over on the side of the road for an hour and do it. I do not miss workouts. The second thing that I do is I set very specific goals. So each quarter I have a new goal. So those goals have included, like, I wanted to bench press 330 pounds and I wanted to squat 430 pounds. And I, I'll take a quarter, sometimes two quarters to get there. The next time I've had a goal of doing a combine and I wanted to score average for an NFL receiver. Uh, which I think was like a 4'5" 40, a 34-inch vertical, a 10'4" broad jump, and then bench pressing 225 pounds times 16 times, I think, whatever it was. I pick goals every quarter and I stick to them cuz I, I need to have a goal. I don't always hit my goal. Sometimes I, most of the time I do, but I, but I, I always have a goal that I'm trying to do. For me right now, and I imagine for the rest of my life, it's gonna all be centered around weightlifting. Because A, I want to live to like, I'm 130 and there seems to be a strong correlation between living long and having muscle. Like because it, I can just not break my hip when I fall because my bones will be stronger and I can get up when I get hurt. And also B, because I want to look good naked. I'm vain, so that's why I do it. So I lift a ton of weights and I have a coach that tells me what to do and I basically don't question them. I also use MyBodyTutor. No affiliation with them other than I've become friends with them and that helps me with my dieting. So I spend roughly $300 a month on training and I think $250 a month on My Body Tutor. It's basically a nutritionist. They call me once a week and they keep me on track. And then finally I write down everything I eat and I write down every workout. So I use an app where I track all of my workouts because I want to know what I did the previous week so I can improve. And then I track everything I eat because it's really easy for me to overeat. And so tracking it helps me. This person asked what future roadblocks will be. Everyone, I don't have a kid yet, but we are pregnant. Everyone says that that will be a roadblock. I'm in a very fortunate situation where I've been able to hire some help, like a night nurse and things like that. I have a feeling that it won't be a roadblock, but it will be more challenging, but it's not going to prevent me. Did I answer that question?

Yeah, for sure.

All right.

This one is from John Murphy @ecomceo. He asks when to embrace shiny object syndrome and when and how to keep it under control.

This is a great question, and this is something that I think holds back 90% of people from really big success. So I constantly ask myself, what can I do this week, this month, this year What can I accomplish in a certain time period that will make every other task not important? And so there's this idea of like procrastination. Paul Graham wrote this great article. If you Google Paul Graham procrastination, he talks about there's actually good procrastination and there's bad procrastination. Procrastination. The bad type is, um, you're just not gonna, you just don't start working. But the good type is that it's like the idea of this crazy scientist who's a genius and he forgets to shower or he forgets to wear two matching socks. And the idea being is you can actually ignore most things as long as you're getting the big things right. And so I ask myself all the time, what is that one thing that I want to accomplish? Most people, they try to jump from thing to thing to thing because something's not working or because they feel pressured into doing something. I actually think that you should do one thing for an extended period of time. The reason being is because Every time I say yes to something, I'm ultimately saying no to something else. And that means I'm saying, if I'm saying yes to a new project, I'm saying no to either things like family time, or I'm saying no to focusing on the thing that matters, or I'm saying no to having, like, I'm basically giving worry, uh, or, uh, worry time, and I'm giving, uh, space in my brain for something that isn't essential. And so saying no is really important. It's very uncomfortable, but I think it's necessary. I think most people do multiple things at one time because they are guilted into it because what they see online. And I try to remind myself that I don't care about another person's opinion more than I care about my own opinion. And also most people don't know what they're doing. And so I'm not going to put too much judgment on their opinion because they don't have any idea what they're doing. I also try to remind myself that strong men, they don't like give into fear. And I think a lot of people have shiny object syndrome because they're fearful that their main thing's not going to work. I try not to give into fear. Of course, I'm human, I do every once in a while, but I try my hardest not to do it. And so I think that when you're starting a business, because it's a business podcast, we'll talk about that. I, I have to ask myself, well, I wish that I have If I'm stuck with this in 10 years, will I look back and say, I wish I would've done this one thing? And if the answer is consistently yes, then I'm going to stick to that one thing. That said, it's definitely an art to figure out what to say no to and when to bail on what's working. But I've met a lot of successful people and I have noticed that the people that have huge outside outsized results and have massive, massive wealth, typically comes from one thing. And then once they get incredibly successful, it appears as though they have a lot of things going on, but those lot of things are like 5% of the 100% when it comes to net worth creation. And so I have to remind myself on a regular basis that big results typically come from one thing. And the people who appear to be doing a lot of things, they actually kind of are doing one thing. One of my good friends, Andrew Wilkinson, he owns a private equity company, or he owns a thing called Tiny, where they buy businesses. And so he owns technically like 40 businesses, but his one thing is buying companies or investing. And so you have to remind myself, I have to remind myself that's his one thing and he's doing that well. And that's what makes everything else work. Additionally, he also had one agency, MetaLab, for I think 12 years, and then he started investing into other companies. And so you have to make your one thing work, otherwise the rest of the stuff doesn't really work out. And so I think more people should focus Even though it's quite challenging and it doesn't appear as fun, I think it's better results.

Okay, this one is from Gabe Finnema, @gabe_finn on Twitter. He asks, how to be interesting as a podcaster? You're essentially a professional entertainer. What are the key skills you've learned over the years that allow you to be entertaining to listen to and talk to?

This question is, I think, particularly interesting for young men, single men, because when I was a single guy, when I was 14, 15, and 16, well, basically until I was not single, all I cared about was meeting girls. And what I learned, and I wasn't very good at it, arguably was never great at it, but I, I improved. The best thing for meeting a partner was to be an interesting person. I imagine this works for women as well, but I only know a man's perspective. It works awesome for men is to be interesting. Um, I made a few points about how to be interesting, at least what I think how to be interesting, because I like figured this out. I wasn't like good at this. The first thing is that you have to find something that interests you and you have to turn it into a passion, even if it's not popular. The reason being is people like people who, uh, are passionate about stuff and who are really great at explaining why they're passionate about things, and they don't need to be popular. Thing. So for a long time, I'm, I was really interested in denim. That's like a hobby of mine. I love jeans because jeans are part of American history and I would like buy like $500 or $1,000 jeans just to store them and keep them and only wear them occasionally because they're historical and important to me. I was really, really, really fascinated in that. And I noticed that when I would meet a girl and I would say something like, hey, I'm going to this swap meet. They got really cool denim. Just having something to do and like being passionate about it, it attract— she was more attracted to me because of it. And then my male friends as well were like, oh, this sounds interesting. You just got me interested in this topic. I'll go with you and you could explain it to me. And thus people were attracted to me. This works for business, for meeting someone, whatever. Right now it's fitness. I'm super fascinated in fitness and having like a goal and having something I care about. I've noticed people are drawn to me. The second one is when I cons— I consume a ton of information. So I listen to podcasts. I, um, watch a lot of TV, like documentaries. I read a lot of books and I read Wikipedia every night. I love Wikipedia. And when I'm consuming information, I consume it from the perspective of I try to find a hook. So I'll hear like, or I'll read something on Wikipedia and I try to find a fascinating hook. And I think in my brain, how can I retell this that can capture people's attention? And whenever I consume information, that's what I do. So for example, I just watched the documentary on Arnold Schwarzenegger and he has this great line where he calls the schmee, which basically means bullshit. So like when he was talking about being the spokesperson for supplement brands or whatever, or wining and dining people, he goes, I got the schmee. I know how to like grab people's attention. I'm just bullshitting with them. I got the gift of gab. And he told the story of the schmee. And I remember hearing that line, I go, that's brilliant. The schmee. I'm going to talk about that all the time. I love the schmee. And that was that one little line I took from that documentary. And I'm gonna retell that story all the time. I'm gonna talk all about the shmee. And so whenever I consume information, I'm just, or a comedy show or anything, I just look for like lines or hooks of a story that I'm gonna retell to people constantly. I'm gonna steal it basically. It does it, it's, I consume information as if I have to write a book report at a, at another time. The third thing is I ask people all the time and I ask them this in a very nonjudgmental way. And a lot of people aren't used to being asked this. But I basically ask them all the time, whenever they— I'll ask them about what they do for work or where they're from or whatever, and they'll say something and they'll say an opinion. And I always ask them, why do you think that? And I always try to ask that because it gets people to open up. And when I ask them all about themselves, there's this great book called How to Win Friends and Influence People, and Dale Carnegie wrote it in the 1920s. And he says this tells a story about This kind of nobody young guy talking to this big shot executive and the nobody guy, the young guy, he asked the big shot executive all about himself and the executive spends 95% of the conversation talking all about himself. The young guy spends 5% of the conversation. At the end of the conversation, the executive goes, wow, you're a great conversationalist. And the truth is that that's because people love to talk about themselves. And so oftentimes when I'm with new people, I'll ask them questions like, why do you think that? Or why do you do that? Or questions like that, these open-ended questions. And that gives them an opportunity to talk about themselves. And thus they think that I am more interesting because ultimately they find themselves probably more interesting than anyone else. Another thing is I have tried really hard to learn how to tell stories. My partner on this podcast, Sean Perry, he's one of the best storytellers I've seen. I've tried to learn from him and I've tried to tell stories and I'll retell the same stories to different groups of people as if I'm a comedian and I like to see what hits and what doesn't. And sometimes I'll alter the story while keeping the truth in there, but I'll alter the story in the way I tell it in order to capture their attention. The last two things are I am constantly trying to improve myself, which is great because to be interesting, you just make yourself better. So I'm constantly trying to improve myself and I explain to people what I'm trying to do. So for example, if I'm trying to get fit, if I'm trying to read a certain amount of books. If I'm trying to, uh, build a business, I'm always trying to improve myself. And I talk about that with people, not in an obnoxious way, but I let them know and they find that interesting. I found most of the time. And then finally I say my opinion and I usually research opinions that I have. So for example, it could be like political stuff. It could be health stuff. I, uh, it could be in business. I try to come up with well thought out opinions and I'm very, uh, not afraid to say that opinion. And even if it rubs people the wrong way, I have found that when you explain your opinion and you stand firm on it, people find you interesting because most people are vanilla and they don't have strong opinions. And so that said, I'm still open-minded. I think there's a phrase. What's that phrase? It's strong beliefs loosely held. And so I can be swayed for sure, but I have strong opinions and I try to let people know about them. And then when I don't have an opinion, I haven't researched a topic, I try my hardest to say, I've not thought about that, or I don't know. And so that's how I think you'd be interesting. When we have different podcast guests come on, even if they're not in my world at all, because I've like consumed so much information, I'm pretty good at relating to them. And that is just comes down to, I just read a ton of Wikipedia and when they talk, I'll reference things in that field, even if I don't know a ton about them. And then I'll ask them why they think that, because I read on Wikipedia that this, this, and this. Um, is that true for you? Is, does that, uh, is that one of the reasons why you think X, Y, and Z? And they'll say no, actually, or yes, actually. And that's a great way to get them to talk more about it. And it gets me involved in the conversation. Our software is the worst. Have you heard of HubSpot? See, most CRMs are a cobbled-together mess, but HubSpot is easy to adopt and actually looks gorgeous. I think I love our new CRM. Our software is the best. HubSpot. Grow better. All right.

So I backchanneled a few questions. This one is from your buddy Neville Medhora @nevillemedhora on Twitter. And he wanted to hear a bit about your loyalty to your dog, Sid. He had a quote to share that I thought was pretty great. He goes, I remember Sam vividly saying, I hate when people give away their pets. When you sign up for a dog, you sign up for life. So Neville wants to hear a bit about your relationship to Sid and just if you could elaborate on that quote a bit.

Yeah, so basically I have this dog named Sid. I got him when I was 20 or 22 or something. He's 14 years old now, and I do crazy stuff with this dog. Like for example, I live half the year sometimes in New York And sometimes I'll fly, sometimes I'll drive, but if I fly, I hire a driver for him. So I basically hire someone to drive him from Austin all the way up to New York. And like, I don't travel because of him, uh, overseas typically. Um, and so the reason being is I mentioned, uh, having rules. Another rule in my book is responsibility. And loyalty. So there's a few people in my life, my wife, my dog, my business partner Joe, Sean's one of these folks, Jordan, the CEO of Hampton. I firmly believe that you never, ever, ever speak badly about them behind their back. You don't lie. You don't disrespect them publicly. You don't question them publicly. And I try my hardest not to do that even a little bit. The reason being is I'm a firm belief in loyalty. And so I basically have zero loyalty to most people. And then there's like 8 people in my life who I can write them down and cite them. I will do anything for them and I expect them to do that for me. The second reason is responsibility. So like when I have a meeting on my calendar, I try my hardest never, ever, ever to be late. I try very hard to be early. I don't miss things. If I say I'm going to do something, I do it. I'm a big firm believer in you do what you say. And, uh, following through. And so another rule is when you have a responsibility, you stick with it no matter what. When I got my dog, I said, I'm gonna raise him right. And, uh, I'm gonna like respect this, this like bond that we have. And so I'm crazy about that. So that's a rule that I just don't break is loyalty and, uh, rules. Love it. All right.

This one is from Garrett. His handle's @ggs_garrett. III, and he goes, finding someone to build a company with or finding your first hire. So basically he's just asking how you hire people.

So I'm not like a religious person, but there's this, uh, thing from the Bible. I went to Catholic school my whole life. There's this like a line from the Bible where like Jesus is trying to like get disciples and he tells one of his disciples, Peter and Paul, he goes like, I think they're fishermen, and he goes, come join me and you are going to be fishers of men. And I love that line. That's an example, by the way, of being interesting. You just find like interesting lines and you, you know, you retell them. That's a beautiful line. And the way that I'm able to hire good CEOs and hire great people, I mean, if you look at The Hustle, I don't know how many people we had when we sold the company, maybe 40. So we probably have hired 60 or 70 people. A lot of them are really successful now. Like we hired them when they were like 23 and a lot of them, maybe like 15 or 20 of them have went on to start successful companies, help grow other successful companies, have a name for themselves. And the reason they did that is I wanted to be a collector of people. Fishers of men. That's a weird line. I call it collector of people. So I worked really hard at collecting people. And so when I find someone that's interesting to me, I try to make a mental note of who they are and how I can use them. And the line that I tell them, and this is the line that I believe, which is like, hey, do you want to hang out? Like, let's say I meet someone, I'll follow up with them, or I cold email someone and I'll say, hey, look, the best case scenario here is that somehow we work together and we create magic. The worst case scenario is that you have a new friend in the industry and we'll just help one another. But our world is small and I have a feeling that it's going to be nice that we're going to be on the same team in some capacity, whether just as friends or literally at the same company. So take this phone call. And that's what I believe. And so for years, so like, for example, for years I would host events or create excuses to meet people. So for example, I had this thing called the Anti-MBA. It was my book club. I started it in San Francisco in 2012, and basically the way it worked is I would pick one book per month. We would read a quarter of the book each month and then we would meet up and talk about the book and I would bring experts on that book's topic to come in and lead the conversation. So it was kind of like an MBA, but it was free and I organized it, hence the Anti-MBA. A bunch of my great, great, great friends, Sean and Perry, we came in each other's orbit via this book club. Sieva, who Kaczynski, who's got a really successful PE firm now. Came, he was one of my first members. I posted ads on Craigslist for this book club. That's how it got popular, by the way. I posted an ad on meetup.com and on Craigslist, and I would host this book club like one, I think I did it for 2 years straight every week. And that is how I developed a network. And then from there, I hosted a conference called HustleCon. And the whole idea was, I'm not sure what I'm going to do next after selling my previous company, but I'm going to host this event called HustleCon. And in doing so, I imagine I'm going to meet a handful of people who will inspire me or partner with me in order to create my next thing. And so I'm constantly, I do it less now. Now I jokingly have this rule called no new friends because I have a pretty good network now. But basically I just collected people and anytime I saw someone who was intriguing, I did a really good job of getting to know them and then just filing them away in this bank, or I would check in with them once in a while. And get to know them, uh, and remind them who I was occasionally. And then when I had like an opportunity, like I'm starting a new company, I would think, oh, I talked to this one person this one time, I left a good impression on them, I hope I can just holler at them. And so I do a really good job of collecting people and doing outreach. Um, uh, yeah, I mean, that's kind of like how it works. It's a lot easier now that when you're popular and you have a podcast, it's way easier to do that. But when I was younger and didn't have a network. I hosted book clubs, conferences, meetups, and I was basically wanting to be the center of attention. Not necessarily center of attention, but center of a social circle. And I was the connector and that's how I would collect people. And I, when I see now, when I see people on LinkedIn or Twitter and they write something cool, I DM them and all I say was like, saw this post, this was awesome. And that's all I'll say. And then when I reach out to them again, if I ever have a reason to, it kind of feels like they know me a little bit at least. And so I'm a collector of people. Okay.

This question is from Grant Wilkinson, @GrantFWilkinson. If you're open to sharing about the behind the scenes of running a great community, there's some good stuff there. So I think Grant's referring to, uh, your community building over at Hampton.

So I've got this new company, it's about a year old. It's, uh, joinhampton.com is the URL. It's called Hampton. Basically what it is is It's for CEOs who have at least a million in revenue and you apply and then we interview and you get in. We put you in a group of 8 founders who have similar size and types of businesses. You meet monthly and then we host all these events, retreats, and then we have a digital community where you can hang out and talk to all the other members of which we have hundreds of them soon, thousands. I got pretty great at making community because of the events that I hosted. I kind of understood like what motivated people. And then I created Trends when we ran The Hustle, which was like a digital community as well. And there's a few interesting things about community to make them great. The first is you have to create FOMO, so a little bit of fear of missing out. And once they're in your community, they feel excited that they're finally in. And so we create FOMO, not even on purpose. We interview everyone and we turn down most people, so that helps. So there needs to be a barrier to entry. For building a good community, I think. There also has to be a way to create intimacy. And so there's lots of tactical ways that you could do that where you have multiple communities within a community and like you can only join one channel and not the other channels. And the reason you do that is because I think that around like 250, 500 people, things get a little bit wonky in terms of not being able to know everyone. And so you want to do, you need to do a good job of making things intimate. The way you do that is to keep it small. Another way that you do that is you set norms and standards behind introductions. And so at Hampton, we do a really good job of saying, look, at Hampton, we want you to brag about who you are. Because with most, most of the times when you run a company, it's not cool when you're talking to people to say like, oh, I run this company, we do this much in revenue, this much profit, this many employees. It's not that cool. It's a little tacky. In this community, we set lots of like strange norms, of which one of them is it's okay to brag and it's cool to brag because Now I can learn if you actually know what you're talking about and I can ask you advice. I can actually learn, um, about your business so I can apply some of it. And so it's fun to learn that stuff. And so we set different norms and we do a really good job of making people introduce themselves. A lot of times, particularly in Trends, my, one of the first communities that I built, I would seed it by having 10, 20, 30 people who I knew were impressive and I just said, you don't have to pay anything, but you're joining this community. Also on this date, I need you to post this comment or this, uh, post. And so it looked like this particular person was contributing. In reality, I wrote it for them. This is a thing that I stole from Reddit. When reddit.com first launched, the founder Steve Huffman created like 30 different usernames and he just posted lots of different fake comments and it looked like a lot of stuff was happening. Creating community is hard. I think it's one of those things that everyone wants, but few people know how to do. It's really challenging. I think it's more art than science though.

This question is, I'm gonna totally butcher this name, but Sarong Birad, @sarongbirad on Twitter. He asks, how's it going with Viral Cuts? Share some tips for someone looking to start a productized service from scratch.

So Viral Cuts is a company that I'm part of. I don't have anything to do with the day-to-day, but basically if you want footage. Like, if you have a podcast like this, or if you have a bunch of video footage, they chop it up and they, uh, post it on your social for you. So you get like clips. Um, the founder, his name's Hunter, he used to have an agency and he was like, you know, it's cool, agencies are great, but when your agency is really broad and you will do lots of services for lots of different, uh, clients, And it's hard to focus on something. It's hard to operationalize something. Your margins kind of get crushed a little bit and it's just a lot more challenging. And so his whole thing was we're just going to do clips. And then eventually now they're doing more stuff under a different company. Like they're doing, um, they're helping people write, uh, books or, uh, write Twitter threads. I mean, they're helping people do a bunch of different stuff. Um, they're helping people grow their YouTube, but those are all different companies, but Viral Cuts. He was like, I'm just going to productize this one service. And so he did a really good job of hiring like 20 people and he taught them how to make the clips. And then he like created a very strict process on how to get the footage from people, how to chop it up, how to deliver them. And it was like very, very, very, very operationalized from day one. And it's going great. I don't remember exactly what we're allowed to say about how big it is, but it got to 7 figures in revenue in Like 60 days, most of which came because at first I tweeted it and then Cody Sanchez, another partner involved, she started sharing. And so now it's like well into the 7 figures. It's going great. You have to deal with a lot of headaches because it's a people business, but, and we're not sure how churn will be, but it's going really well so far. The hardest part about these businesses is operationalizing the service. So making it so it's like a conveyor belt. So your workers know exactly what to do and have very strict deadlines. And then the second hardest part is getting customers. Viral Cuts, um, solved that problem by talking to me and Cody and we just tweeted it out and within a very short amount of time they had 7 figures in revenue. So it's going really well. All right. So that was my rapid fire Q&A. This is what happens when Sean's not here. We do a little rapid fire Q&A. Hopefully you guys enjoyed it. If you are listening on iTunes, Spotify, whatever, if you go to our YouTube, you'll see some of the links to some of these examples and some of these topics that we talked about. And if you like this, let me know in the comments. Talk soon.