Million Dollar Exits Ep.3 with JK Molina: From A Free Twitter Account To $1.4M Acquisition

Hello everybody. I'm KP and welcome to Million Dollar Exits, a special segment on my main show, the Build in Public podcast. In this interview series, I sit down with founders who went from an idea to building a business and then eventually selling it for over $1 million. Hence the name Million Dollar Exits. This is something I'm very passionate about and curious about at this point in my career. I wanna learn and share all the insights, mindset shifts, lessons, and non-obvious tips that are part of this unique journey journey with the next wave of founders who wanna take this path as well. So buckle up and get ready to be inspired and informed. Here's a special shout out to our episode sponsor, paralect.com. Billion-dollar ideas come from every possible niche. If you're a busy domain expert in marketing, sales, finances, or healthcare, and don't wanna spend 6 months just to build an MVP, you'll find Paralect super valuable. Paralect is a venture studio built to design, build, and launch a product for you that is ready to sell in under 2 months. Start with no-code or go full-stack right away. Simply focus on growing your early adopter community and build in public, and they'll take care of the rest. Build your million-dollar startup with paralect.com. P-A-R-A-L-E-C-T.com. Hello, everybody. Welcome to the Building Public Podcast. I'm your host, KP, and I'm excited to continue this special segment that I started called Million Dollar Exits on the podcast. And today, I'm super, super thrilled to have a really young and dynamic guest joining us from Guatemala, Jacob Molina. If you're on Twitter, you know his name, you've seen him say his favorite phrase, likes saying cash. Welcome to the show, JK.

Thank you for having me. Welcome to the Two Letter Names Podcast.

Right, right. KP and JK. That's right. Well, do you want to? Did you ever discuss what JK really means, or you want to keep it as a suspense?

Nah, I don't disclose it.

Yeah, I at one point I had shared. You know, now a lot of my followers know my name Karthik Puvvada is what KP is. But there was only one tweet that's mysterious that I tweeted like maybe two or three years ago that has my full name, birth name because I'm Indian and we have a lot of first names. I mean, a lot of names. I have actually ten names. Before Puvvada, which is my last name.

You have 10 names?

Yeah.

How does your passport look?

Well, by the time I got to middle school, I was wise enough to go talk to my parents and said, please stop this nonsense. This is crazy. Like, so they let me just pick one, which is Karthik, my first name now, and Puvvada is the family name. But yeah, I tweeted about all the names in one of my previous posts. But no, welcome to the show. Excited to have you here, man. So We were just chatting before we turned this on and sort of hit record about your million-dollar exit, right? With Tweet Hunter. So you want to give the audience who may not be privy to what happened a quick, I don't know, 30, 40-second recap of especially the exit and whatever you can share about the exit. I think you can share a lot. So whatever you can share about the exit.

Yeah. So a little bit of context is I grew my account and it was like fairly big about Twitter growth and monetization. And I met up with these 2 guys, Thibault and Thomas. Now we've never met, but they had this really cool product that I enjoyed called Tweet Hunter. And Tweet Hunter allowed you to grow and monetize the audience fast, and I liked it. So I asked to partner up with them. That was around May 2021. We grew it, we started building together, and then around September is when we launched it to the Twitter community. That was making around $4,000 a month at the time. And then we got to like $14,000 and like $20,000. And we reached around $100,000 to $125,000 a month by May 2022-ish. And around that time was when we sold it. So we sold it to Lempire. If you're not familiar with Lempire, it's kind of this cold email company. It's cold outreach legion company. And Guillaume, who's Lempire CEO, was really interested in a tool that allowed you to Build your personal brand because like if you send me a cold email, first thing somebody's gonna do is they're gonna check your profile out. Like, who are you? They're gonna go on your website and they're gonna see that you're not a scammer, right? Or they're gonna go on your socials. So cold email is great, but it works even better when you pair it with a personal brand. And he was really interested in that combination. And that's where Tweet Hunter came into place. He bought it and now they're just growing as part of Lempire. So kudos to Guillaume. He's a smart guy.

So for folks who may not know some other facts, you're 22, right? Dude, that's young as fuck. I'm 34 and I feel like Yoda talking to you, like all that shit. But 22, million-dollar exit. What I really appreciated about the way you sort of shared the day after how you felt and everything, I think you made a video which I was talking about earlier. And in the video you were just being grateful and then you talked about buying an apartment, which is where you're joining us from, right?

Correct? Yeah, that's right. Congrats. Thank you. Thank you. They asked me for what kind of Wi-Fi speed do you want? I'm like, what's the fastest?

Give me the fastest.

They're like, well, how many family members do you have? I'm like, it's just me, but I still want the fastest.

Right. That must have felt good. Now I want to ask you something further than that, which is when the news came out and of course the money hit the bank and all that, I'm sure your family must have been proud and thrilled. What was the nicest thing you've done for anyone that's Not you.

Well, this kind of goes back a little bit. When I was like 11 or 12 years old, I remember I was like watching a movie with my grandma. Now, my grandma never asked for anything. Like, she's the kind of person who, like, if you have the salt at the dinner table, she will stand up, get the salt, and sit back down. She won't ask you for it. But that day she was kind of a little sleepy, and she mentioned that ever since she was a kid, the one thing she wanted to do was she wanted to go to Venice. She always wanted to go to Venice, and I was a kid, but I told her, "You know what, Abuelita? One day I'm gonna make money, and I'm gonna take you to Venice." And when the money hit, I was like, "Yeah, we're running this." So I bought tickets for my dad, my family, my mom, my grandma. We all went to Europe. We went on a trip, and that was just really gratifying to me. Like in a way, yeah, obviously I did it for her because she like wanted to accomplish that dream because she saw it in a movie when she was a kid. But to me, it felt like, yeah, like this is why we do all these things. So it was cool because I don't want to say I did it only for her. I did it for me and for my family. And when like we all won at that time, it was kind of really special. And that's when I, after that, I kind of been a little bit more calm and patient in business because that's like the one thing I wanted to do. So now that that's done, now I'm just building other things, but way more patiently.

Yeah. You know, I can relate to that, by the way. I also, I'm very close with my grandma. I grew up actually being watched by my grandma because my mom and that were in a different city hustling and they didn't have time for me. And so I spent the first 12, 13 years with my abuelita, my grandma. And one of the things that I am driven by is like, as I get more and more successful, is being able to solve the money problems for her, for my family. Because of course, money can only solve money problems. There's still other problems you still have, right? But just the solvable money problems is such a gratifying thing. So back to your exit. I mean, the last sort of the part you touched on, which is you came back from the trip, now you're feeling a little calm and patient. What do you What do you think has changed mindset-wise post-exit about you?

That was a big one because I believe that I exited early, I sold early, and, you know, it's not a— like, yeah, it's an exit, but it's not an impressive multiple, right? So a big thing for me was if I'm gonna do something, I'm gonna do it with the mentality that I'm gonna be here for at least 5 years, at least 5 years in a business. When we partnered up with Tivo and Thomas, like, call one, I told them I want to sell this within a year. Because I wanted to be a millionaire before 22.

Yeah. I

didn't get there before 22. But anyway, I wanted to do that. And it was a bad move because it made me make worse decisions. It made me do things like now. And when you think like you want things now, things have a way of even expanding themselves further into the future. So you won't get it. When you need things, they don't come. So now I partner up with Ryan, who's my new Business partner after Tweet Hunter. You know, I thought that I was just gonna stop and not build other businesses, but I was like, I just built another business.

Yeah, it's impossible to stop.

I think yeah, you don't stop. You just you just want to keep doing it. At some point, you don't get addicted to business or money. You get addicted to winning and progressing. And I told them, dude, we're basically married. We're gonna be here for five years. So I just want you to know, I'm not gonna start any other business. And I expect you to not start any other business. It's like, sure. So now it's way longer term. I don't really think in months or quarters anymore. It's more like in years. Maybe one day, hopefully one day we'll get to the point where I think in decades. And just like that, just expanding my time horizons after that, that's the biggest change.

You know, I've been watching Alex Hormozi's stuff a lot. I don't know if you know him well or you follow him.

I love that guy.

Yeah, I love the guy too. He's way smarter than people give credit for him, I think, at least in my circles. And I've been watching his stuff. And one of the things he's been reinforcing a lot is to really think in the longest time horizon possible, like really make it a personal driving factor to think in decades. It's very uncomfortable, right, to think that long, to think like 13, 14, 15 years because people are so impatient. We want that Uber Eats today, right now. We want that Amazon one-day delivery. So people like are so impatient about gratification. So if you just broaden the horizon and say like, I'm gonna think in 5, 10, 15 years, by default you're playing in a whole different league because you're gonna make very thoughtful decisions that are not going to be, you know, made in a rush.

I feel called out because I just ordered Uber Eats after this podcast.

I think, I think, uh, you can have a little, a few Pleasures in life.

I'll ask you one thing. I want to cover one thing if you don't mind. But, like, another obstacle I feel to thinking long-term, which when you're a solopreneur, I think it's easier to think long-term. Challenge comes a little bit when you have to manage a team and they depend on you because, like, for you it's like, oh, I get it. I'm going to be here for years. It's fine. But transmitting it to them, Especially if they depend on you for payroll, it's hard. And I understand why you'd like to rush things that way because you don't wanna disappoint them. And I don't know the cure to this yet, but I just wanted to make that point that maybe you're in that situation. You're not the only one. It happens a lot.

Yeah. I think it's a good balance. It's a good point, right? It's like to your point around when you have dependents, when you have folks like that who have paychecks and like responsibilities, it's, yeah, it's not that easy to say that, yeah, I'm gonna play here, play a game for the decades. So let's talk about sort of the journey of TweetHunter, right? I know you joined kind of at the point where it was $4K MRR, and then you remember the other inflections of like $14K and so on and so forth. So tell me what you remember viscerally about the first 3 months of you being there. What were some struggles that the team was having, including you, and what were some lessons from that period, the first chapter?

Yeah, there's a few good ones. The biggest one was Knowing, like, not having too many cooks in the kitchen, knowing exactly who cooks what. I think we did a pretty good job of that in the beginning when we separated as in— I'm gonna be like, you ever watch the Avengers? Avengers 1? And you know how Captain America, there's a scene where he tells like, you take care of that side and you take care of that side and you Hulk, you smash. Right. Yeah. I was Hulk at the team. I was the guy that was just pushing traffic because I had the audience, the highest leverage thing I could do. Just make people click. So, that's what I did for the first 2 months. And I feel like Thibault and Thomas come from more of a branding and kind of brand-building world. I came from more of a direct response world. So, I wanted the sale now. I wanted people to, like, buy on the first try. So, I kind of went against their marketing philosophies in the beginning and they did a good job of, like, letting me do it in the beginning. Right? Then we had to transition more to a brand thing. So, I had to, like, you know, swallow my own ego and be like, you know what? Whatever. Like, let's do that. Let's build a bigger brand. So, that was the main one, like, the record sponsors and branding, kind of finding that balance. The other one was really paying attention to what features are nice to have and which features were must-haves. And we needed to know what to include in the offer. So, for example, you're selling A burger, right? You're McDonald's and you're selling a burger. What does a burger include? It has the bun, the lettuce, the tomato, the meat, the mayo, the ketchup, the seeds, all the things. But if you see a McDonald's ad, it only shows you like the few things that are valuable to you, like barbecue, bacon, Big Mac. So you don't really need to advertise everything about the burger in order to get people to buy. McDonald's knows that, and we had to learn that. We needed to know what were the main things that we needed to push Is it the AI? Is it the scheduler? Is it the time angle? Apparently, the things that people were most interested in, no surprise there, was making money. So, we doubled down on monetizing fast, monetizing your Twitter audience fast. But that took a while, like finding what is it exactly that's the most valuable thing to you. So, I don't know if you've ever seen this picture. It's a very fairly common, like, mind trick. So it's like a 6 drawn in the ground. There's one person standing and there's another person standing on the other side. So one person sees 6, the other person sees 9. 9. And they're both right. And it happens a lot with marketing. You see one thing, but your customers see another thing. Your job as the entrepreneur is going to the other side and really seeing it through your customer's lens. What do they want? Like sometimes people will like stuff and you don't even know that that's what drove the sale. I had a friend in high school, dude. He was a psychopath. But I'm gonna explain to you why he was a psychopath, because he ordered his pizza every time at lunch, and he was the most popular guy in school for 5 minutes. And the reason why is because when he ordered his pizza, the guy took the cheese out and he gave it away. He just ate bread with sauce. He's a psycho, right, dude? He's crazy. Why? Yeah, I don't know. He just didn't like it. And then, like, It reminds me of what I learned on Tweet Hunter, which was sometimes people will buy your stuff for the most random reasons. Yeah. Imagine you see an ad, cheeseless pizza, like I wouldn't buy, you probably wouldn't buy. Right. Nobody would buy listening to this, but for that guy, that's a perfect product. Right. He would just get it. So sometimes you just don't know what's the most valuable thing. That was another lesson.

What seems to me as a theme here is this sort of being open-minded and curious about Seeing things from customer's perspective versus making any kind of assumptions. You know, I think that's a pretty hard skill. Now let me follow up with that. How would you, back in the day and even now, I think my question is about how to get through that, how to get to the other side. What were some things you did to really get a strong grasp of what customers were wanting from you?

Yeah. And I love that you asked that because I had a call about this this morning, but prospects are not liars, but they are dishonest. They will rarely tell you the truth. So, let me explain to you. I sell Twitter monetization. When I ask somebody, what do you want to do with Twitter? 99% of the time they'll tell me, I just kind of want to grow the account.

Right.

But in reality, what they want is they want to monetize the account. If you ask somebody in fitness, what do you want? I just kind of want to see some traction and I'm just kind of stuck. No, you want to be lean. That's what you want.

You want to sit back? You

want to be lean.

You want to be lean, yeah, yeah.

Yeah, like that's what you want. You don't want to see traction in the gym. You want to be lean. That's what you want. So, it went a lot that way with Tweet Hunter. People told us they wanted something, but in reality they wanted something else. Like, I just kind of want to make thread writing easier. It's like, no, you want engagement groups. You want to get engagement on your threads. You want to get 100 likes. That's what you really want. So, a big part of understanding and going to the other side and knowing what your customers actually I think it's twofold. One is understanding what they're saying verbatim. You cannot assume because when people speak things and you reflect it back at them, they feel understood. Yes. Because there is a big difference between saying you want a more scalable business and saying you got to $5K a month and your income fluctuates and you don't really know what's going on because you feel like, you know, emotional roller coaster. There's a difference between saying things in a certain way. So that's why I have my VA go over my emails, Discord, Slack, Twitter, social media, competitor social media, and I tell her, tell me what they are saying, but say it verbatim. I want you to copy paste. Even if it's a grammar mistake, I don't care. I just want to see what's going on. So then once you have those things, you kind of understand what's the real motive behind it. Like, why are they saying this? And this is where it's more of an art than a science. The science is collecting the things. The art is interpreting the things and saying, what are they actually saying? Right. And the best way you can do this is just be in touch with what they're actually saying. So, for example, I collect those things from my VA and I say it when I go on call on walks. I will listen to sales calls from my sales reps and I'll see what are people saying. And eventually you kind of get a good grasp because these common themes keep popping up. And those common themes that pop up, that's where you go.

Right. Yeah, I love it. I love it. It reminds me of a recent example where I announced this thing. I don't know if you've seen, but I announced this thing called the Building Public Fellowship, right? Like my community, like the fellowship experience and whatnot. And when I announced it, I put it on my newsletter and then I sent it to all these people. And then there was, I had a prompt of a question asking what was hard about your building public journey and whatnot. And there were so many people who were saying like words like overwhelming, it's too scattered, too disorganized. And so I didn't care about trying to convert them because My older gut would've been like, okay, just get 'em on a call and try to tell them like, I'm going to solve these things for you, right? All I did was let them vent out. I took those keywords, what they just said, and I put 'em on the website and that converted more than me trying to say, I got your answers for you. You see what I mean? So just like being able to verbatim listen to what they're saying and then let the work speak for itself in a way, you know?

Yeah. I'd like to add a point to that. If you'd like to interview people or ask them stuff, Well, the reason why this works is because when we hear our language from somebody else, we feel understood. If that language is there, trust is there, and if trust is there, then it's more likely that the sale will be there as well. So this is why it works, because it increases trust. And if you'd like to really get to the truth, I got this from a book that's— I think it's called Getting to Know or Selling with Know, something like that. So it says, don't ask questions that start with verbs like is it, are you, have you. Ask questions that start with adverbs— what, how, when, why, who— because there's a difference between saying, are you getting many leads? And you're saying yes or no, than saying, how many leads are you getting? And you tell me 7. I got to the truth earlier. When you ask questions with verbs, people tend to like weasel out. When you ask questions that start with adverbs, you get to the truth fairly quickly.

Damn, I love that. I think that's a great nugget. We should make a clip out of it. So moving along, right, you talked about sort of being in close contact with customers, making them feel understood, Listening to them. So tell me some of the non-obvious things that were even like non-obvious for you personally, because I feel like a lot of this knowledge seems to me that was apparent for you given your direct sales background. And, you know, like you had some prior expertise that, you know, you could leverage on during Tweet Hunter. But what were some maybe like 3 or 4 things that you learned that you didn't know 4 years ago about the SaaS company?

Well, These things weren't apparent to me, I'll tell you that much. I was like— Really? What the hell is going on? Yeah, I was confused most of the time. Like, 5 years ago I was selling perfume door-to-door, you know, I'm still learning this game. And I make a lot of rookie mistakes often, I miss the fundamentals often, but I say the biggest, like, shift when it came to business came from how much revenue you collect. And the biggest one was Predictable revenue is more important than big revenue, and maybe some people just don't agree with it. Yeah, but I remember there was a point where Tivo in the beginning told me, "JK, stop promoting," and me from a direct marketing background, I'm like, "Dude, are you asking me

not to give you money?" Right,

right. Yeah, like this is my job, dude. Like what's going on? And he's like, "No, no," because it's more important for us to keep like a steady growth, a healthy growth that we can sustain than just have a big peak and then fall. And To me, that was like it was stupid. Like it didn't make any sense. But then we did it again and and again. And I remember there was a month where we crushed our numbers when it came to percentage growth from the last month. And on the call, dude, I brought all the energy, and I was like, "Guys, we're fucking crushing it. We're the best." And I remember Timo and Thomas said, "Let's see you do it next month." I'm like, "What do you mean? I'm gonna crush it next month." Next month comes. It was like horrible. And I'm like. Oh, I get it now. Predictable revenue is more important than immediate revenue. And it happened again at Tweetsome Clients. We used to charge this big fee upfront because we wanted the payment in full now, but then every month was a little bit more stressful, a little bit more stressful. We switched to a recurring revenue model and now growth is so much more steady. We can meet payroll so much easier. And yeah, that was the biggest one, that predictable revenue is bigger for me than big revenue. I

think that's something that I'm learning the hard way. way too right now because I come from services background. I think in services, I mean, I ran a design agency. Agency and services and like fellowships, community, all of these things, you get lump sum amounts ahead of time, right? And people either believe you, they like your service, they'll pay, or you move on to the next lead. There's no sense of a recurring component as much. I mean, there's some recurring parts, but like in a SaaS, the whole business model is recurring and it's a very different ballgame. Like a $30 MRR is almost like laughable. In any other business models. Like if I'm building an agency, like $30 to $40 MRR, it's like, what do you mean? Like I would—

You can buy ice cream now.

Right, exactly. But in a SaaS thing, like that is how SaaS is built, $30 to $90 to $100 to $400 to whatever, you know? And because it's not even just, it's not just the one-time viewpoint, you have to think about 12 months, you know, the annual component.

And one big, I guess there's another one. You asked for 3 or 4 and I only gave you one because I didn't have any others, but I have a second one. The second one was at some point it's not just about getting more customers, it's about making every customer worth more. And I—

Does it mean upselling or what?

It's increasing LTV. So, yeah, but actually different. So, it was— I started getting a lot of customers, but then every customer was worth the same every time. And I remember Thibault and Thomas were always telling me, let's push the enterprise package, which was a more expensive one. Let's push the other bigger offers. I'm like, guys, no, let's just keep tweeting, you know, like the Hulk, just smash. But they saw what I didn't see, which was making every customer worth more is also a great way to grow the company. Like, there's only 2 ways, right? You make every customer worth more or get more customers. And I was centered too much on one side, which is why at some point, like, right when I was leaving, we didn't grow as fast as we used to grow because I just wasn't competent enough And wasn't good enough to get people to pay us more, just get more paying people. So another belief that I got from Tweet Hunter.

Yeah, man, I'm loving this refreshing honesty. You know, it takes, it takes a lot of secure confidence to be this open. You know, I appreciate that. So again, moving along, I wanted to know what was your typical week like back? You know, you were the Hulk Smash, you were just going out on Twitter, coming up with all kinds of hooks and tweets and whatnot. But apart from the content creation part, what was your day-to-day or week-to-week like, you know, in the peak of Tweet Hunter?

It was content creation most of the day. Yeah, like, I mean, mostly content creation, but again, here's another place where I messed up. So, I started other businesses while I was doing FeedHunter because I just didn't measure opportunity vehicles. FeedHunter, and I mean, if, like I say, obviously, it's worth nothing, but it could have been bigger, right? If I just dedicated my time to it, like, more attention in it, more work in it wouldn't have resulted in less business. So, I messed up by starting other businesses. So, you were sort of balancing

Couple other.

Yeah, so I'd say I was creating a shit ton of content for Tweet Hunter, that's for sure. But I was also doing other businesses like writing sales page and pitching people and getting on sales calls and coaching and kind of all over the place, which is why I just say no to everything. People come to me for engagement groups. I'm like, no. Other businesses? No. Other SaaS? No. Other groups? No. Other opportunities? No. Because I want to do this one. thing. Like, everything works. The worst business model is hopping between business models. And I learned that the hard way. So I kind of rambled a little bit there, but hopefully that was—

No, no, that was, that was a gem too. I think it's another clip worthy. The worst business model is the one where you're hopping around a lot. Yeah. In terms of advice to someone who is, let's say, who's going through that same phase like you today, how would you ask them to evaluate which of the 5 businesses they should pick and stick with? Like, how does it become apparent that, okay, this is the winner, I'm gonna kill the rest?

Yeah, it starts with not so much a mathematical response because obviously you want to pick the one that makes the most money, but it also starts with kind of the emotional response and spiritual response. The reason why we want to build this many businesses, sometimes we rush them because we log on Twitter and we see people killing it.

Yeah.

We go on social media and we see these guys with the million, $2 million, $10, $100 million exits. And we want to be them. We want to be like them. So our mentality is, if I just started these businesses, I'm going to make money because you want to hit their months and make as much as they make. But a big part of it is understanding that you're not in the beat them game. You're in the make money game. So once you understand that—

Be a better you game, right? Be a better you game.

I guess make more money. I don't know. Yeah. I mean, just being direct, man. Like, we all want to make more money. But So once you understand that, the second thing is from the businesses you want to take, measure it in opportunity vehicles, like which one could make the most. And this is a platitude and a, like, inspirational quote you see in some dude's wallpaper and your 17-year-old brother sends you sometimes, but still very useful. And the quote is, if you think big or you think small, it's still the same amount of work. Yeah. I got this from the book, I think, What It Takes by Steven Pressfield. And he says, like, if you aim big or aim small, you're going to work the same amount. So you might as well aim big. So from the 5 businesses you're thinking, which one could make the most money in 10 years? And then you just do that. But that comes with discipline of not deviating from the plan. That comes with the discipline of not getting caught up in the I make more money than you porn that you see every day on Twitter. Yeah. I remember I went to play— not play, train at the jiu-jitsu gym, Renzo Gracie in Austin. And these guys are the best in the world, and I'm a white belt, I'm just starting. And every time we sparred with somebody, 2 things would happen. One is they would destroy me, and 2, I would ask them, do you have any advice for me? And every time, dude, people from all belts— blue, purple, brown, black— they would always tell me the same thing. And that was weird to me. They all said the same thing, which was, just keep showing

up. Yeah, I was gonna say, is it Just keep practicing?

Yeah, yeah. Like, I thought they were gonna tell me move this way, control your breathing this way. No, dude, just don't stop because if you're beginning, I mean, that's kind of your only option. So it kind of comes in a 3-way answer. If you're, which business model should I choose? One is don't let other businesses or other people flexing on you affect you. 2 is which one can make the most money and then just stick to the plan. And these— this sounds basic, it sounds like fundamental, and you're like, yeah, sure, JT, I get it. But then tomorrow you'll deviate and you'll do another thing. And then is it really that basic?

I think the third part probably is the hardest. I think a lot of folks I know in my circles, like, it's a shiny object syndrome, right? It's like the discipline to just stick with the plan, trust the plan, I think is the hardest given, like, people second-guess when they're in the journey, you know?

Yeah, they do. And It's not some— they jump between business models, but they also jump between strategies. There's this meme that I love. I love this meme. Eddie at Warren Weakness sends it to the Tweets and Clients coaching channel every week, and I adore it. The meme is about the tactic hunter. So the tactic hunter is the guy that just does nothing all day and looks for tactics. He wants the one thing that'll explode the business, and he always has 2 options. He could either fix the root cause of his problems or look for more tactics. And he always looks for more tactics. And that is the biggest one. Like, I see that all the time. People are like, it's this one thing, man. I'm promising you. No, it's this one. Or it's TikTok organic. No, no, it's Facebook ads. No, it's Discord communities. But no, it's building an email. And then it's like they jump not between business models, they jump in between tactics. And by the time they're done trying all this 100, Optimal tactics, the suboptimal tactic they should have stuck to would have made them so much more money. But they don't see it because they're too caught up in more tactics. They're the tactic hunters. Those are the worst. Like it kills you. Really, it hurts. It hurts.

I love how riled up this gets you. This is funny.

But no, I feel you.

I resonate with what you're saying.

The tactic hunters always have the same question they ask. They always have the same question. And I actually put it on my contract of my coaching. You cannot ask this question because it's so— What is the question? The question is, thoughts? I hate that question. I hate it because it's so lazy. It shows so little discipline and so little accountability of somebody, hey, I'm doing this. Thoughts? Thoughts? Can you solve that problem for me? No. It is your business. Solve it yourself. So I put it on my contract. You cannot ask me thoughts.

No thoughts. All right. But it's true though. It's true. A lot of people— I think the other thing too, I mean, just in the adding one more thing to the list of ridiculous questions people ask is, can I do this? And I'm like, I don't know. Can you do this? Do this. Like, just do it. And I think asking for permission versus asking for forgiveness is a mindset shift that I had to go through like maybe 10 years ago. Because I always thought you had to go get some authority or some approval from some expert or someone. To read your stuff and say, yeah, this is a good plan. Go do it, KP. Like you know, I used to wait for that shit, and I think that was the biggest one of the biggest mindset shifts is that just do it. You know? Yeah, it sucks.

And you kind of got to understand your coach in that situation too, because if you say it's a good plan and they fail, who do they blame?

Right.

And that's an issue.

Yeah.

Right.

So looking for that.

Yeah. Yeah. So I always see I'm doing it again. So I try not to use definitive words. Should, have to, always, never, because these words kind of establish boundaries in people's heads. They're like these chains. I should, I have to, I must, and I hate that. I hate saying I am. I hate saying them because it binds you to invisible things that are just heavy. Instead, I try to use try, could use an option because like everything works, dude. I have this guy in my coaching program. There's people selling ghostwriting, which works. There's this other There's this dude that's selling consulting to fundraisers, works. There's this dude that sells quit porn coaching and he makes a lot of money. Like, if you would have told me some dude's charging $5K to other people to quit porn, I would have called you stupid. Like, it doesn't make sense, but it works. So everything really works.

It's, uh, the one— Reality is like stranger than fiction sometimes. Like, if you wrote a script about this, People would scoff at it, but in reality, like, there's crazier, wilder shit that's happening all the time in business.

Yeah, it's all these weird things that make money. Like, look around you, there is like steel, there's concrete, there's wood. Somebody got it made. Somebody's a billionaire because of that. And we don't really think about it. Everything works. We just don't really realize it.

Yeah, I love it. So tell me about— so there's the other question I had in line was about your sort of salary or your paycheck. I mean, you don't have to go into super details, but I think what's important there is a lot of founders who are in bootstrapped journeys, like, they always wonder, like, how much should I pay myself? How do I support my family or myself when I'm building a SaaS? What are your thoughts on that?

You asked me for thoughts?

God, I fell into the trap, man.

Cancel my contract, end the podcast.

This is— we're deleting this shit now.

That's what I'm saying. So I was fortunate. No, but Jelly, what? No, I got you. I'm just, I'm I'm just fucking with you, don't worry about it.

Yeah.

I was in a fortunate position in which I was already doing client work and had other businesses that paid the bills. Also, by the way, I lived on $200 a month in Guatemala. Like, I didn't really need much. But back to the point, I don't believe in just like quitting and building from zero. There is a very specific type of people who can do that. If you like work better when you're like against the wall, then there's a specific group But people who can do that. But I don't recommend it because it makes you impatient. I always have this saying, I tell people this, it's better to get rich first and get wealthy second. Like, you're building this SaaS to get wealthy, not to get rich. So I recommend, like, if you're just starting out and you really don't have much money, one is support it with your 9-to-5. And this is like cut back on your cost of living. Yeah, it's hard, but nobody told you it was gonna be easy.

Right.

So, 2 is you could get clients. I do believe that if you're a beginner, client work is like the easiest way to make money. You get the money, but with the money, you not only get the money, but you also get the detachment because you know that even if your product fails, you still have money. Yeah. So, who cares? So, I recommend either supporting with something else. I recommend doing that, and then you're going to be more detached, make better choices, think more patiently. And if you notice how like these questions tend to fall to the same thing, which is be patient, be detached, work in a way that you're not like polluted by other people's thoughts and intrusive flexes. So a lot of that comes from— a lot of our suffering is self-imposed. We want to— we have to get to a certain revenue level. We have to make this much money. And we don't realize nobody set that limit but us. It's us coming up with our own demons. Yeah. So once you understand that, things just sort of work out for you pretty well.

Yeah. Yeah. No, I love that. That's such great advice.

What are your thoughts on that?

I have no thoughts. Man, I'm never gonna look at the word thoughts, you know, and not smile again.

You understand it though. It's kind of lazy. It's a lazy question. Come on.

Of course. No, no, I totally get it. Yeah. But you ruined it for me now. You ruined it for me now. So again, going into the— I got 2 other questions. So this I have to ask because a lot of folks, including me, when you first blew up on Twitter, we saw you, and I'm going to confess that we saw you as someone who just came in like the Hulk, like you said, smashed it, did like a bunch of tweet formats, content hooks, whatever. And you grew so fast. I actually don't remember your early days. All I remember is one where you were like 60, 70, 80K, I think. At the time, by the time I saw you, you were already big and you were not just big, but you were like Had some amazing momentum. So my question to you is that, where did that crazy growth desire come from? One. The follow-up is, and then you're one of the only few people that I think it's almost like a guy who got rich and then became a monk. You just gave up on likes and shit. And you're like, your whole mantra now is likes and cash. And I think you actively now recommend don't go for bullshit attention hacks and shit. And I feel like you don't care Now, my reading is that you don't care as much about growth as you did at 60-70K. That's why you're not doing the shit that some of the 350K people are doing on Twitter. So, was that right? What do you think?

There you go. There you go. I got it. I got you.

We should have a jar. Like, we should have a $10 jar or something. I should put money in it. Yeah.

We should just do pushups every time somebody says that. Be jacked. In like 2 months. Yeah. Okay. So, I— part of it is a marketing angle, of course. Like, yeah, sometimes I check how many likes I get. It feels good to get a few likes, right?

Yeah, dopamine hits. Who doesn't like it? Yeah.

Of course I do. So, but it's more of a marketing angle and it's more of a positioning angle because if you realize what I'm really doing is I'm a social media coach. Like, let's just be honest. But you don't really need better offers, you need different angles. So, I saw what the industry was doing, which was pushing towards more growth, more audience building, which by the way, what's being taught, it's not audience building, it's follower accumulation, which is very different. But I thought, what would my positioning be in this case? And I remember when I got to like 30— no, when I got to like 70,000 followers, around the time you're mentioning, I met this dude who had 900 followers and I had 70K, he had 900. And we were making the same amount of money. And to me, that was embarrassing. Like, that was almost like, dude, like, I suck, right? Like, in my opinion, I was like, dude, I'm horrible at it, right? So it came from a combination of marketing positioning and PTSD because I didn't want to go back. It was embarrassing. It was horrible. And you see this, dude. It's so common. This dude's hitting 50, 100K followers. You check their bank account, they don't make $10K a month. Like, how are you at 50K followers and make less than $10,000 a month? Like, it doesn't make sense, but it's very common. So that's kind of the market I'm tailoring to, and which is people with big accounts that really want to monetize but don't know how, but they keep it secret. Those are my people.

Gotcha. So what do you think these guys are missing in terms of their strategy? Like the folks who are just only focusing on growth, Like, why do you think they're not leveling up in terms of monetization as much? Do you think it's because of lack of awareness and exposure to what's even possible?

That's a part of it. That is a part of it, but it's kind of denial as well. Like, it's like getting jacked and fighting, you know how— again, back to fighting. So, it's you not accepting that you have an issue. So just because you're jacked—

Wait, what is the issue?

You're not making money, you're poor. So just because you're jacked doesn't mean you can fight. So these people think, oh, if I just big the account more, then I'm gonna make more money. Where in reality, you're looking at 2 different skill sets, likes and cash. Growing an audience isn't the same as monetizing the audience. So it's just denial of it because I'm gonna tell you what happens in your head when people do this. They realize I'm not making much money, and they realize that every end of the month. And then what do they do? They go and scroll Twitter, and they post something, and they get a bunch of likes, and then they forget about it. They're like, ah, it's gonna come eventually. They just kind of put it away. That's what happens all the time. It's denial. It's not looking at what's going on. A point of it is humility. A point of it is just like confirmation bias. That's the big one. And big part of why they're not monetizing is because They have like no alignment in their content and they have like no direction. So if you see they tweet about something that gets engagement, but then they see something that's going on in the world and they talk about that, or they see a certain meme and they post that, or they have a political opinion and they post that. So if you're looking at it like you're in a boat and you want to get to another side of the river, the only way you're going to get to the other side of the river, which is money, let's call it the money river, is you rowing in the same direction all the time. But they sabotage themselves and they row in so many different directions. They talk about so many different things that eventually what they do is they end up like going in circles or they just go backwards. They never get to the point of the money because there is no alignment. Like you're always selling a different offer every month and you're like, no, this one is it. And like, if that one's it, I thought the last one was it. So why is this different? Are you lying? And then they talk about so many different things and there's no alignment. They talk about the same thing all their competitors are talking There's no differentiator. So we ask them, what do you think is wrong with you? And they always say the same thing. It's always the same thing. It's always, oh bro, it's the offer. I'm like, it's rarely just the offer. It's the buyer, it's the positioning, it's the lead flow, it's the content, it's the poor pipeline management, it's people not knowing who you are, it's the lack of patience, it's the lack of high status. It's all these things that are like combined. But the main one is the lack of alignment. Nobody knows what to do. You always talk about so many things. You're not aligned. You don't push in any direction. You go for width instead of depth. So, that's the main one, alignment.

I think alignment also takes discipline and I think a lot of people are just not disciplined enough to, you know—

Oh, yeah, for sure, for sure. Yeah, like Twitter is just saying one thing a million different ways.

10,000 times. Yeah, yeah. You know, 4 years ago when I first started talking about building in public, Everybody were like, Kevvy, you tweet too much about building in public. And I feel like in my head I was thinking, well, that's just the beginning. After 4 years, I've made way more content. Like I would have— anybody would have been bored. Like, you know, if they were really judging based on like surface level shit, they should have unfollowed me. I think they did. And that's fine. But it's about figuring out millions of ways. And also you grow as a person, right? So you're like, even the sales lessons you're just sharing right now on this pod are way different than what JK would have shared 2 years ago.

Oh, thousand percent. And the people who told you, dude, you talk too much about this thing, they're not gonna buy anyway. So what are you—

Yeah, right. That's true. I know that you have a community. You want to share about that? And also the course, if you have a course.

Yeah. So if you're a coach or consultant on Twitter, Nuts Ask. We will show you how to add $20,000 to your monthly revenue in 90 days-ish. We'll show you how to monetize your audience with clients, not grow it. Because likes are cool, but likes don't cash.

Once again, that's awesome, man. Thank you so much, JK. This has been such a breeze. Like, I can't believe the time just flew. I had so much fun. I hope you had fun too.

Thank you for having me.

Thanks, man. Have a good one.