Million Dollar Exits Ep.7 with Joe France: From Millionaire To Zero To Becoming A Millionaire Again

Hello everybody, welcome to yet another episode of Million Dollar Exits podcast segment, and I'm your host KP, and I'm super thrilled to invite a fellow entrepreneur from Auckland, New Zealand. Welcome to the show, Joe.

Hey, g'day KP, it's great to meet you. Excited to be on your show.

I read about, about you and kind of learned about your background and was really fascinated about sort of both the length and the depth of your career chapters. I like to call them sort of inflection points that you've had, you know, in your career, some parts in ad tech, so now all the way to creator economy. But can you quickly share a little bit about what is latest with Joe Franz? What are you doing now? What is keeping you up both in the night and in the morning?

Sure. So, thanks, KP. The thing that I'm focused on at the moment is my newsletter called The Independent You that comes out weekly on Fridays, just up to issue 10 this week. Nice. So, that's the key thing. And the idea is that for people who want to create their own roadmap to financial freedom, I write about my experience, particularly about mindset and the mindset shifts that I've had in my life, um, that I think can help other people. Um, so that's what I'm working on right now.

That's awesome. Um, and, and it's called, uh, theindependentyou.com, right? That's right.

Yep.

I'm gonna plug it in the show notes as well. Thank you. And let's back up to the sort of a couple inflection points in your career where you experienced the million-dollar exit or becoming a millionaire as a, as a milestone. And a lot of our audience, you know, especially for this segment, are either halfway through or all the way through, or they just became one. And I think it's a meaningful topic that I keep coming back to because it's not so much the particular 7-figure number, but it is about the state of, you know, financial freedom, like you said, right? That is the ultimate state that we, we all wish for everybody to be in. So I'm curious, how did you experience that? In what form in your career?

So the million-dollar exit, is that the—

Yes.

The key thing? Yeah, sure. So, so I was in a tech startup and I was a co-founder. It was a Hong Kong holding company. We were operating in Southeast Asia and we took on about, um, I guess it'd be around $14 million of investment from SoftBank, a company called IDG Ventures, which is part of Barry Diller's organization, and angel investors. And we were doing, uh, advertising agencies. We were focused on Facebook, Google, and I was responsible for building an ad network. And that was the background to that. It was about a 5-year chapter. Yeah. And over the course of 5 years, I went from not knowing anything really about ad tech or online to having a million-dollar exit. I sold my stake to SoftBank and IDG Ventures.

Right, that's brilliant. Um, and in your current, um, chapter, and you, you mentioned that you like to teach people about, you know, the financial freedom, the mindset that it takes to get there. I'm actually very curious about, um, some mindset differences that you noticed personally, um, many years ago when you were getting started versus, you know, when you went through That inflection point you just touched on, which is, you know, the million-dollar exit. What were the things like, what were distinct differences that you felt, especially about your mindset?

Yeah, cool. So I'll preface it by saying I've always been optimistic, and that is probably, I guess that's a product of your environment. And maybe, you know, I grew up in a positive household, so maybe that's where I got my optimism from. So, I was optimistic and that I think over time has got me into trouble because I've listened to an idea and I've gone, that's great. I think that could really work. So, I think the optimism helps. It also gets you into crazy places as well. But the thing that changed was I literally thought that business was about luck. Hmm. I thought that it was a product of that business would you'd be a successful business person if you happen to have an amazing idea or if you're in the right place at the right time. And I thought it was a product of luck. And what I learned in that 5-year period was that you can actually predict, you can create a financial model and predict how a business should fare. Wow! You can work out the key factors and levers in a business. And I had this real financial awakening. I had a mentor. who taught me how to do basic financial modeling. And I remember he was showing me over the course of a few days and I was just saying to him, wow, I literally thought that everyone was just lucky and you just had to work really hard but get yourself into a fortunate position. And so, we had, I guess we would have opened around 19 different entities. We had around 300 people working across 6 different countries.

Wow.

And we had 4 exits actually, 3 $7 million exits and an $8 million exit. And that was very much down to hard work but a huge change in at least in my understanding of how business was structured and particularly the ability to financially model. So I called it my lottery mindset that I had before I went into it. where I thought everything was just, you know, luck and I was optimistic. I thought I could be a lucky person, but I came to understand that business is actually something that you can strategize and you can model and predict.

Oh, that's brilliant. Do you have a counter to balance the lottery mindset? What do you— did you come up with a new term for this?

I think no, I haven't thought of the counter to it. I guess it's the way we should think if you want to be Right. I feel

like there has to be some— there is a metaphor here brewing, and I think your newsletter audience will enjoy when you come out with it. Because you're right that there's so many people who think it's blind luck or the right timing that manifests itself as this big outcome. And that has been my sort of like shocking sort of Not shocking, but like startling discovery as well, where I'm, I think the 8th episode here, Joe, with you. And privately I've done maybe like 20 other conversations that haven't been recorded. And every, you know, former or current millionaire I talked to really blew my mind in how methodical they are about, you know, creating wealth. And it's almost like they want to shift the conversation to creating value. And it's like they keep bringing me to remembering and reminding the main, the core tenet here, which is wealth is a lagging indicator of the value you create. So be obsessed about value creation, and then, you know, don't worry about the wealth creation, it'll take care of itself kind of thing. And it's been, to me, that's been a very refreshing realization because it puts a lot of pressure off of your chest, and you're not worried about when the number's gonna hit the bank or What big lucky break am I gonna have? And the locus of control is within you. You wake up and you get to create value and help people. So with that said, let's touch on a few other misconceptions and myths. I think we touched on some limiting beliefs, but what are some big myths that people have about having, I guess, a million-dollar exit or a million dollars net worth?

Yeah, um, I— a lot of the feedback that I get currently, you know, on my— on Twitter and in my newsletter when I talk about, um, becoming a millionaire, for example, one of the things that, um, a common response is, um, I wouldn't want that anyway.

Yeah, I'm curious why.

I think so. I think that there's really 2, um, perceptions of the— of the word millionaire. I think one is from, I want to sort of say the 1980s or 1990s, where it's this idea that you're a high roller, that a millionaire is somebody who's got yachts and they could never spend all their money in a lifetime. I think that probably didn't really— wasn't actually that common then and it certainly isn't now. I think the literal meaning of millionaire is somebody with $1 million or more of net worth. So, their assets and take away the debt and liabilities and what's left would be $1 million or more.

So,

I think that what people don't realize is that to retire, in many countries, in many cities, you probably need more than that or more.

Or more. Yeah.

So, I think one of the perceptions that people have is, oh, I wouldn't want to stop working. I wouldn't I don't want all the headaches that go with being a millionaire and these sort of things. And when I see this, it really makes me want to help people understand that the word millionaire, the term millionaire, it's not the point. And when we talk about financial freedom or financial independence, for me, what that really means is that your costs, your living costs are covered. by hopefully pretty passive income.

Right.

You have a lot of choice about what you do. Right. And that's what motivates me. That's what inspires me to do what I do and to work. And so yeah, just even the idea that you're going to keep working after becoming a millionaire, I think that's one of the things that's a misperception. People immediately say, Give me money, or, um, why do you keep working if you're a millionaire? Uh, so these are kind of some of the common misperceptions that I hear.

I resonate with both of them, and, and, uh, I think I was also in that boat for a while where I kind of, uh, uh, villainized the word millionaire, or at least like looked at it with like a sense of cringe, um, for a while. But then like with many things in life, you know, when we're in growth, uh, many things that point you to the right direction require you to overcome your own cringe about certain things. And I realized that either I had a choice— I was at crossroads. The next 40 years of my life I could spend at the mercy of some mega corporation who could lay me off in a day, or, you know, emails notice, you know, and like me slaving away for them and also being just a number on their spreadsheet. And like, okay, is that the path I want to go down? Or is there a path where I control my time I control my energy, who I'm, you know, what, what kind of thoughts I'm nourishing, what kind of ideas and, um, you know, meetings I'm nourishing and things like that. So it really became very obvious that, okay, I needed to be in the path that's opposite to the corporate path. And for this path to be sustainable, you need definitely more than a million dollars if you're living like up to, let's say, the next 40 years. So I'm like, oh, this is just inevitable. Like, if you're self-employed or if you're independent, you're a founder, you are gonna have to get through the path. And the, the thing that comes to mind, Joe, is, um, these words and terms and labels have very strong meanings and sort of predetermined, um, predisposed affinities for all of us. Um, I remember, I remember, uh, I didn't want to be a husband because I felt like it was such a pretty heavy word. I was like, I don't want to be a husband. Husbands are lame, right? But then I married my best friend. And so when you say it that way, when you said, I married my best friend, it's a different thing. So I don't think that I became a husband, but to the world, of course, I'm, you know, I'm a husband. Same thing with dad. I thought it came with so much baggage, so much worry, so much fear that I was going to struggle with this. It's going to be a baggage or whatever. And now I have the most fun with my son, 2 years old. He's like incredibly fun, both of us. And so I feel like so much of this, even the millionaire status, to your point, it's not so much of a status or a label. If you approach it as it is a sustainable way to keep showing up for what energizes you in the long run, I think a lot of people might take it up instead of trying to, you know, self-select themselves out of it.

Yeah, I really, really relate to what you're saying, KP. For me, it was actually this idea of dad, I have 3 teenagers.

Wow.

God

bless.

Yeah. It's funny because I think that at their age, kids think that your parents, it's just a mission that they have and their whole reason for existing was to have these kids and do— I call them the worst flatmates in the world because they don't pick anything up and you've got to drive them around and you have to pay all the bills.

They're a bit around.

Yeah, they're a bit around. But yeah, that feeling for myself of using that word dad, it still feels unfamiliar to me today. It's still an odd thing. So, I can really relate to them. And just onto that idea of why you'd want to become a millionaire or be financially free. And I think that after— I think the 2 most common responses that I get from people is, you know, how do I do it? How do I start? But the other really common one is just, know, go away. I wouldn't want what, you know.

Yeah,

don't tell me about it. I wouldn't, you know, why are you bugging me? I don't want to hear about it and things like that. And so for me, I grew up in a pretty poor background.

Same, me too.

Yeah. And the experience that I had was, first of all, was wanting things that I couldn't afford and just really, you know, and that actually led to in my 20s, you know, Overspending. Yeah, same.

Oh my God, me too. By the time I was 30, I had like a mountain of debt. I just got out of it, but yeah, all my mistakes in 20s I had to pay in 30s.

Yeah, um, and so one of the things I want to write about and help people is there's much easier ways to do it than the way that I went through it. And, and if you, um, you know, have composure and if you know what— if you understand things, um, it can be know, very much easier. Um, but I, I think the other thing was the, the lack of choice. And, uh, that, that's what motivated me, uh, was that what I really have, and I believe it firmly today, is that you, you really can't do what you want, say what you want, and be what you want without the money to do it. And, and that's what— so the independent you is becoming the best version of yourself, achieving your potential. And the only way that I'm sure that you can do it is by becoming financially free. And for most of us, if you're not born into wealth, that means you've got to work out a way to beat that system that you're talking about, that 40-year 9-to-5 system that the global economic system is geared for. Yeah. That system needs us to work until we're 40. That system will find all kinds of ways, whether it be tax or other economic regulations to make sure they encourage us to spend. They want you to spend so that you have to keep working because the global economic system needs us to keep working. Right. So to get out of that, you have to think differently. You have to act differently. And if you don't, you can have a great life and you can even be wealthy, but you might not necessarily be free. So, for me, independent captures more than— it's not about being a millionaire so much as it's about having the financial resource to make the choices to do what you want to do.

Yeah. Wow, I love it. And I would love to take a look at some of your stuff, take a look at some of the newsletter stuff because I think this is something very, very close to my heart and it resonates deeply and would love to amplify and share with my audience when I can too. One of the final sort of touchpoints there in your previous statement was about freedom and getting to work on what you want to work on. I think that's another aspect of independent founder life that again blew my mind. Again, something that you have to live through it to really understand the magic and power of it. I say this because my wife has a very strict regulated job where she's a school teacher at the government, the district, and every step of what she does is regulated and sort of predetermined and set to— and this is just how it is, you know, that's just how she's accepted it. Meanwhile, nothing what I do is structured, nothing what I do is, um, you know, regulated now because I'm living the founder life. So I could Sundays just say, um, I'm gonna do 4 recordings of a podcast today, and some days I go and write 15 threads on Twitter, or some days I just Do four coaching calls with helping somebody else, and so it's so flexible and agile and sort of predicated on what I want to do that week, what energizes me that week, which constantly blows my mind and her mind all the time. She's and she's like that's why she knows that you're not gonna stop working even after you're financially free. I'm like yeah, of course not, because I want to be even at seventy eight. I want to be helping some founders. You know, I want to be. some capacity, right? Maybe it's virtually, maybe it's teaching or coaching or whatever. And I think that is something I wish. I know you share the same desire that more people saw that this is possible for them in their own scale. I'm not by any means minting, printing money right now, but I'm definitely at a more fulfilled and free place than I was when I was in corporate America. Um, and this is so approachable, reachable with the rise of the internet, AI, and no-code and all these tools today more than ever in history.

Yeah.

Um, with audience building and so on. So anyway, your reaction to that, I'm curious.

Um, yeah, I can, I just relate to it, uh, so closely. Um, you know, for me, um, you know, your examples say of doing 4 podcasts in a day, or you can choose those things. For me, it's about doing The thing that will make the most impact today? What is the thing that will get me the greatest progress? And I can push aside things that won't. And when I'm— I've worked almost equally as an entrepreneur and a 9-to-5. So 13 years as an entrepreneur and about 11 in a 9-to-5. And what I just experienced in the 9-to-5 was you do something and you'd say it doesn't make sense. You do it anyway. And you said, this isn't going anywhere, it's not going to work, do it anyway. Um, and then they'd come and say, okay, um, this project you're working on, um, we're going to change it. So the work that you've done, completely wasted, right? And you're going to start doing this new thing. And, you know, I, I wasn't so much that I didn't want to work, I wanted to work on things that were going to make a difference.

Yeah.

And so the, the overwhelming experience that I had working in other people's companies, they, um, the companies were often And I think in most cases, it's, you know, a company that still operates and people say things like, hey, it pays a salary, so it must be working, right? That's not a metric of whether a company is successful or not, but a lot of people will take that as evidence that a company is working so that it's still paying the bills.

Right.

So companies can be often quite poorly conceived and even poorly managed and the strategy is not great. And I found that going to work and knowing that what I was doing wasn't going to produce something successful, um, just, it drained me.

Yeah.

Because, you know, life is too short to do things that are pointless, and I just didn't want to do that.

Yeah.

And, you know, so now I'm doing my own thing, it is, it is something of a, um, a burden or pressure. Um, and for me, I actually have this challenge, you know, um, I'll respond to external requests and people ask for things and so I tend to help others first and then focus on what I need to do. It's quite a learning curve for me to go through to be able to push everything aside and just do this one thing that I know that I've got to grow my newsletter and therefore I have to do these actions and then prioritize. Those are, those are fun things. It's a fun challenge, but I know where it's going and I've worked out a strategy.

And, um, I, um, I run the, you know, I run this fellowship called Building Public Fellowship, right? I don't know if you've gotten a chance to see it, um, but we have weekly masterminds with founders in there, and I'm part of a Friday mastermind. So the last 6, 7 weeks, the one recurring theme that I've seen is every founder out there who showed up and part of their status update, their number one recurring, we have a prompt that says, what's the bottleneck for this week? Or what's been a challenge for this week? And the number one answer has been focus, focus, focus, focus. And so many people, and what's ironic and what's funny there is externally, when I look at their feed or when I look at their sort of tangible outcomes and, you know, 2 of them went into YC, got accepted, and then there's like a couple who are about to raise a pre-seed round, and some of them are like making 6 figures in monthly revenue in bootstrap companies. I'm like, so it's so funny because everybody's saying that focus is the main issue, and they're all at different parts in the trajectory of being a founder. So I've learned to accept that this will be a forever battle because focus Who grades you on focus? It's a self— it's a— you're the teacher, you're the student. You grade yourself at the end of the day by how much I focused today. So really, there's no one external. And we always will have some inner critic in us who wants to say, you know what, today you could have done 4 more tweets to get like 24 more subscribers on newsletter. But at the same time, we lose perspective that, hey, today maybe was the day that was meant for connecting with Joe Frantz on a podcast and having fun. Because I promise you, there's a version of KP out there in corporate America who's doing dumb shit like World Gold Coin Heritage Month or something. And then it's like wasting 4 or 5 hours a day trying to put banners up. You know, like some random dumb thing. So you don't ever question when the group does it. And you don't ever think like, oh yeah, maybe my focus is shit or shat today because of this meaningless corporate whatever thing. But when it's a solo journey, you're always like, man, I should have maybe spent 2 more hours on deep work or something. So I've learned to accept that, okay, there will always be something more to do focus-wise, and trying to be easier on me.

I totally relate to that and understand. And I think we're often our toughest critics.

Yeah.

So one of the things I talk about is failure because I experienced I have experienced plenty of it myself. And I think that one of the problems with failure is that society tells us that there are signs to look for, like reading the tea leaves or so that a sign is if you've had a failure or a step backwards, it's time to stop. And this idea of sort of reframing how we look at failure. But so I think we're our toughest critics. In terms of focus, one of the things that I think is if you get your strategy right, if you have your, you know, and people talk a lot about business planning and what's your plan. So a plan is a set of factors that you already know. So it's, you know, the cost and hopefully income and you project it in a forecast for the future and that's a plan. A strategy is to take things that you don't know, that you can't know, and you say, well, if this hypothesis, if I'm right about this, if people really would like to have this thing, if they like it so much, they would pay this amount of money. If I'm right and I go through and I execute, then that's going to get me into an amazing position.

Right.

And potentially a position for greatness. You know, one of the other things that motivates me is to do great things, not to do the ordinary. Yeah. So, I think when you have a strategy, then it starts to get easy because the plan that comes from that strategy is— it makes things clearer. And I think that gives you more focus. So, I think a lot of people are working, you know, we tend to want to work hard and working hard, we go, oh, I had a great day today. did so many things, you know, and I see people— there's a guy in my network who has a pie chart every day and he says how many hours he spent on this. And I said to him, have you ever, you know, put a dollar figure on that stuff you're doing, like your side hustle? You spent 2 hours today, have you worked out what that's worth? And he's actually— productivity is his thing and he's going like, no, I'm going to get onto that. And so I think a lot of what we're doing when we say focus, and I actually think there's a higher level within our own brain, within our own mind, which knows when we're moving the needle and moving things forward or not.

Yeah.

And we give it good information or bad information. And I think strategy, a clearly held strategy that gives you an opportunity to do something great, Um, changes how you feel about what you're doing as well. So I, I often think getting that right is worth more than a lot of work, for example.

Yeah, wow, that's well said. And, and I wonder, that level of clarity and sort of strategy makes the following plan feel effortless because you're so clear about what you're doing. And I've often been in those places, but then I've also been Not in those places, and I could, I could feel the difference.

Yeah, totally. I think it's, I think it's difficult, you know. Um, for me, it was, uh, say around 6 months ago I started, um, you know, I kind of this creator, uh, opportunity that I see, and then you touched on it before, and I think it's an incredible opportunity. Um, you know, really the internet is a lot like the steam engine.

Yeah.

And that, that created the Industrial Revolution. And I don't know if you know that the the major derivative of the steam engine and the Industrial Revolution was cotton and cotton clothing.

Wow.

So we, at that time, they were, you know, wearing one set of clothes for a week. It was coarse hair and you'd wash it once a week. And then suddenly with the steam engine and with cotton clothing, you could have different colors and you could put it in the wash every day and you, you know, you could produce a lot of clothing quickly. So it was exponential for 50 years. the growth in clothing and cotton clothing. Um, and I think that the internet has produced— and I think the primary derivative was advertising. Um, and so I still think that what we are— what we have now with the internet, we're just 20 years into it. And I think impressions, and I think the value of those impressions, and it's gone from being, you know, a typical banner ad into, you know, sponsored content and lots of other different sort of models with it. But I think the opportunity for creators to have a following and to generate impressions. It's just, it's incredible. And, and I think that, that, um, that we're seeing the same kind of revolution that you saw with the Industrial Revolution. Um, but so for me, about 6 months or so, uh, committing to this and getting into that, you know, for me it was a lot about what, what was the, uh, business model that I would pursue. And I've tried, you know, many, tested out many different things. And I tried, you know, affiliate marketing and different kind of, um, looked at doing coaching and things like that. And I think those are hypotheses, you know. Um, I've had entrepreneurial experience, maybe people would like to, um, you know, learn from me. And so what if I create this offer and you test out these sort of these offers and all that kind of stuff? So that's testing hypotheses. And a lot of that, um, for me, what I find is, um, I usually waste a lot of money on new tools and, um, new apps and subscriptions to this and that, thinking that this is going to help me produce. So, once you kind of clear through all that and now I have my path and I'm doing my newsletter and I'm doing a low-ticket sales course, a course on selling, then it becomes— what I think it's about is you create your own grind.

Yeah.

So, the thing that we don't like perhaps, KP, you were talking about corporate America and for me working for 9 to 5. There's a certain monotony in doing repetitive tasks,

right?

But unfortunately, even as entrepreneurs, that actually should be what our goal is because by the time that you can create the repeatable workflow that produces results, you've actually done it. You've actually made it and then it's just a question of scaling.

Scaling it. Oh my God, it's so true and it's so funny you said that because just last week, I was thinking about the fact the last two weeks have been very monotonous for me, but they're churning out money.

Yeah.

So, and it took me six or seven months to get to a point where I can pull a lever and it like I can see a Stripe notification at the end of this. But I was like second guessing, man. Why does this? Why am I like repeating each day? Every Monday looks like I mean every day looks like the previous day, but then. Every once in a while I have to remind myself, and when I talk to founders who are 4 or 5 steps behind me, that it's like catching lightning in a bottle. It's so hard to get the 4 or 5 factors right, like the offering that you have with what market needs, with what energizes you, with like all these 4 or 5 factors, the right price tag. And once you get it, like you— I think that was a good— that was maybe the universe saying, you know, give me a sign that KP, now it's time to lock in. And go hard the next 2 months, you know, just like repeat the thing that's working because it's rare.

Yeah, I think it is. I think it's really— congratulations if you have those and you see those Stripe signals. And I think that's an essential trick, you know, to show that you're on track. These things, these opportunities don't last. Yeah, that too. You need to make hay while the sun shines. And I think that I see entrepreneurs getting really creative again. And then again, like, I've had another idea. And, you know, so the test now, I think, KP, is the ability to scale will be a function of how good your original strategy was, how great that first hypothesis was. One of the things I see a lot on Twitter and I see on the web and people are saying, don't overthink things, just go and do things, right? But I don't really think that there's a risk of people just sitting around, you know, thinking. I don't think that's the risk. I think the much bigger risk is people going down rabbit holes, chasing after ideas. So, I think actually there is, in the same way as I found out originally that business isn't luck, strategy isn't luck either. There's a method to create a strategy. And one of the things that I found over 25 years now is I know that if I get to the point like you're describing where you're getting these stripe signals, If it's something that I don't want to be, you know, if I've created a grind that I don't want to keep doing,

right?

Um, if I'm doing, you know, if I've gone and created a business for myself that I don't love, and let me use coaching as an example,

right?

Um, I, I get every day, I get a direct message saying, hey, you know, um, love your account, um, let me help you create a coaching offer and you can, but, um, I just, I'm not a teacher. I've I've done a little bit of teaching in my life and I just don't love that experience and I feel a burden and I want to create a course that helps hundreds, hopefully thousands of people, but I know that I don't like coaching. But a lot of people just, they'll ask a different question. They'll say, well, how much money am I going to make?

Yeah.

And then the guy, you know, so that's easy. You know, there's a guy that we that you probably know from Twitter who's involved in an app that helps you schedule tweets.

Yeah.

And he's pretty well known. And so he's saying, you know, he's one of the guys and he was saying, hey, you know, you can go from $0 to $30,000 per month in 3 months. And I've been around for 25 years and I'm going like, there aren't a lot of one-people businesses that are seen that kind of growth, you must be talking about an agency. And he said, yeah, man, it's an agency. And I'm going, well, I have actually helped to build agencies and I don't want to do that. It's one of the worst businesses.

Let me tell you, I've built same thing, 2016, '15 through '17 for 2, 3 years. I did an agency on the side, burnt me out, hated it. Actually, I'm so glad that you're self-aware about sort of you in the coaching part, Joe. And That's where it's very important to kind of get to the nuance of any advice, you know, you listen online, including this podcast. If someone's listening to this, hopefully you can parse it out through your own lens of how much of what we are talking about, Joe and I, you know, resonates or overlaps with what energizes you and what gets you up in your chair and just like gets you going along with what's— what makes, you know, money in the long run, right? So for me, it's so weird 'cause I'm actually, I love coaching. I love the manual, scrappy, non-scalable version of coaching. And I get super energized by it. But what I do to kind of counterbalance that is that I charge very high. I mean, not very, very high, but like I charge more than I would probably be comfortable charging because I'm a little like, I'm like you, like I feel a little guilty about sort of, you know, I just wanna help people, right? Yeah. But I use the charge as a, or a price tag as a way to limit the noise and only have signal, the right 4 people in the corner. And I wanna go all in with those 4. Like I've become self-aware and gotten to that point because I tried a course journey and I hated the course journey. I'm sorry. Just, this is my honest reflection. I was like, oh my God, this is talking to a screen and I don't get energized by talking to a screen. I'm very different. about that. And I was like, okay, but like you said, there's so many people who've shined with that, you know, um, business line, including Justin Welsh and some of my friends. And I was like, something's wrong with me, probably. I thought for a while maybe I'm like, I'm broke, I'm not meant to be a, you know, a creator. Which is all funny because as you look back, it's really about what, what energizes you combined with what your audience might want from you. Combined with, you know, what's missing in the market, right? Some portion of that. And there's many paths to doing it.

I think that element, right, of finding that thing that you actually want to keep doing, because if you do get it right and you go through and there is a demand for your idea, then you better be sure that it's something you want to keep doing. Otherwise, you've created not only a job for yourself, but a job that you don't actually like doing. Exactly. And, you

know, a better— I feel like a better framing for that is to kind of ask yourself, would you be doing this, continue doing this even if you didn't get paid? Like, is this an infinite game? I think with the newsletter creators, Drew Riley is a good friend of mine, and his advice has always been like, KP, pick the game that's like an infinite game for you. Like, you would go do the game or play the game for 40 years even if you were not getting paid. And I was like, oh, that's a pretty strong— because he built Trends.vc based on that philosophy. And of course, wealth will find you when you're constantly creating value, you know, as we talked about earlier.

I think it's hard for— so, a lot of the people I'm talking to are reasonably desperate. They urgently want to get money and they want to know how do I get started. And so, I think it's very hard to have that conversation with someone, you know, oh, you know, do that thing that you would like to be doing. I guess there's a learning curve to be able to appreciate that point. And so, a lot of the people I'm sort of talking to and trying to help, Maybe earlier in the starting point, you know, when we talk about mindset.

Yeah.

And see, how do I get started? And it may be your 9 to 5. And then you create a system.

And I think to me, another thing there, sorry, Joe, is I feel like a lot of people think of either of these 2 lifestyles we just talked about, the 9 to 5 and the founder life, as they're binary one-way doors. Like, it's like you're just going into a portal and you're escaping to space to a different planet. Forgetting the fact that they're completely reversible decisions. So there have been times in my career where I've been a founder, burnt out, took a job, enjoyed it for a while, burnt out, didn't like it. But I knew deep down that I was gonna be a founder eventually. But doing what's practical for you is so key. So the 6-month journey I was talking, telling you, like before the Skype notifications kept showing up, 3 months ago I had a coaching call with someone who was my coach and I told her, look, I'm in this tremendous stress right now. Like, I've been doing— I'm doing all these, um, one-off, like, consulting projects, and they're not— they're not energizing me. They're money. They're giving me big chunks of money, like decent chunks of money, but they're not energizing me. And I don't know what's my thing yet, like the thing that has both energy and money. And she said, KP, like, there's no harm in giving yourself a deadline, saying, okay, here's my deadline until which I will try Because you're a dad and you have family, you have bills to pay. So I was really ready to go back to the 9 to 5, and my only hope was find a job that sucks less, right? But that's the best you can hope. But I was fully ready March 22. I was ready, committed to go there. But I tried my ass off to make sure that scenario never comes. So that really lit a fire under my, you know, in my belly, and. Of course, by March 1st, I got to what I wanted to do and then never had to worry about it. But I think people confuse that to our initial point where it's like a one-way irreversible decision that you've taken to be a founder, which means you can't accept a job and pay for your family.

Yeah, no, I think you're right. It's not a binary choice. And I think, you know, so I actually, I wrote a book a couple of years ago called 5 Steps, uh, How to Create an Online Business in 5 Steps. And I actually want to— I'm working on that to republish it again this year because a lot of things have changed and I think I'm a better writer now than I was a couple of years ago. But I actually think the second step that you want to take is, is to establish, you know, when you know what you want to do, is to actually make sure you've got the, the money to do it, how to fund it. Yeah. And, um, you know, my experience as a, as an entrepreneur, I wasn't in the Silicon Valley, but we had investors from the Silicon Valley and I went And to Silicon Valley a number of times and that idea of just, you know, I've got an idea, so I'm gonna get investment. And then, you know, that was another metric that people used, how much money they'd raised. You know, the 2 that I saw was how many staff they had, you know, so we're doing great, you know, and I'm going like, oh man. Headcount. Yeah. Is not a good thing. Yeah. And it in no way reflects how good your business idea, how few staff you need. I saw someone post, I think it was Sam Parr posted the other day that Craigslist still has 50 employees and they're doing $1 billion. Now that's a good business. We actually did, I did a classified site and it was sold a few years ago. So I know a little bit about that business.

So actually I had one more point about failure and the role it plays and the way to bounce back from failure. I'm curious to hear about your date with failure and how your romance with failure and how it went and how did you recover from there?

First of all, it took a long time to recover and I didn't even talk about it. When I was a kid, my family went through a fairly big upheaval. My dad had a, I guess, like a sort of business or whatever failure and we had to suddenly move as a family. So, I was 10 years of age and we suddenly moved. Like over the weekend, we moved to a different city and huge change. And I think ever since that time, I felt at any time, you know, the rug can get pulled out from underneath you. So when I did make it, I had a million-dollar exit. I actually didn't take it. I wasn't like an NBA basketball star who just, you know, just spending the money. I was scared. I was really fearful that—

You went into protection mindset, I think. Yeah.

Yeah. I actually, protection mindset isn't one of my strong points. I probably don't have that. I probably need more of that. But what I wanted to do was sort of a similar thing to what I'm doing now. I wanted to create a lifestyle business. And so, I invested into a company that it was a sports company, it was golf actually. And they were building indoor golf centers. And people at that time were wanting to practice golf in a lot of cities. It was built up. Traffic and all that kind of stuff. So you couldn't get to the driving range or the golf course. So we had these little indoor centers and it was an okay idea. And I thought there was an online component. This is right back in 2011, '12. Wow. So getting into the idea of video wasn't easy to do at that time and it would take a lot of bandwidth and cloud computing hadn't really kind of taken hold yet. So it was still a little bit early, but we were building an app and those kinds of things. The problem was the strategy was okay. The idea was that we would take a profit each month and collect a salary and have a lifestyle business. The other person I was working with just expanded. We just suddenly had 9 centers. We borrowed money. We raised $5 million and we were right in and we had, I think, around 70 staff. Wow. And the problem with that, it started burning Cash. That mindset shift was a pretty interesting one because until that point, it never really occurred to me that a business could fail. A company that you set up, what happens with it? Wow. It's very much like owning a house that's about to fall down and you're still living in it and you don't know which room to put the bed in, you know, where I could eat my meal because the whole thing's falling down. But you can't— you own that house. You can't walk away from it and you can't give it to somebody else. And what do you do? And that was— it was sort of like a clanging sound ringing in my ears because it was the first thing I understood. And, you know, you start getting the paperwork out, you get out the articles of association of the company. and you see what the actual decision-making that's set in law, in company law, and who makes the decisions and what is the order that you get rid of staff and you go through these kind of processes. And it went on for about 18 months and I felt a responsibility and I actually managed that process for 18 months.

Wow.

And the company was dissolved in the assets were passed to shareholders and I walked away with nothing. And that whole experience definitely put me off being an entrepreneur for a long time. I just said, you know, at that stage I was 40, my third child was, was 1 year old, and my wife— it was, it was timely because, you know, my wife also is a teacher aide at a school.

Wow.

And she's always liked, you know, the traditional path, and she's always advocated and said, why do you keep doing what you're doing? It's so much easier to, you know. And so, um, that was a really good, I think, time to say, you know what, I've done my thing. I've done my entrepreneurial thing, learned a lot, could write a book on what I did. And so, but you know, I kind of, I actually—

But did you take up, wait, did you go back and take a 9-to-5 job for a while or?

So I was just about to say, I actually did a bit of a trick. It was a 9-to-5 job for a new tech startup that had 100 employees worldwide and I was employee number 5 in Asia.

This is the Taboola?

Taboola, yeah. And they listed on the NASDAQ. So in the time that I was with them, they went from just under $100 million to doing $1 billion in revenue. They went from around 100, I think it was 150 staff to close to 3,000. And we went from 5 to 300 And I opened Japan, Singapore, Australia, New Zealand, those kind of markets. And so, at one point, every 4 days, I was flying to a new country.

Wow.

So, it was a 9-to-5, but it wasn't your normal 9-to-5. And that was my act of rebellion. I was going like, yep, I'm collecting a salary. But I did have a pretty decent kind of commission and performance element to it. And every year, You know, I was able to, I had almost unlimited ability to grow because I would say to my, the vice president of the region, why not open Japan? And he'd say, get on a plane, go and open Japan.

I think that's another thing people don't appreciate enough is when you are a founder and you spend time and even if you have a failure, this is very, very essential to the Silicon Valley culture, you know, that I'm sure you're aware of. where you always fail forward. You know, as long as you are someone with high integrity and like someone who people can count on, there's so many other founders who will look at your failure and be like, you know what, great job. That was still well done. Now join my rocket ship or join my company and help out. 'Cause people know what kind of DNA you need when you're building out a team as a founder, right? You know that you need another founders, as many founders as you can. If you can get them.

Yeah, that might be another thing that I, you know, because now I am an entrepreneur again. I'm 3 years into doing my own thing again and I find, you know, it took me about 10 years to get over that initial shock. So maybe in the future I'll change my mind about this as well. But that whole fundraising and other people's money, that experience of, you know, I had friends who put money into that company. And it's— so I can't even say today, um, wow, that, you know, that was a great experience because people, um, friends lost money. Lost money, yeah. And there were angel investors and friends. And even in that earlier company, uh, a close friend, a guy I used to run with, um, 4 times a week, um, he invested in one of the companies that failed. Yeah, I didn't come out of that experience wanting to, um, go back and take people's money again. And it was, you know, taking people's money is not the right expression, but I didn't want that burden again. Yeah. And so, you know, the Justin Welsh solopreneur, I actually advocate for people, if you're listening to this podcast and you're starting out, I really think that working in a group and co-founding a business and being an entrepreneur for 5 to 10 years is the right path. It's the right way to do it because you'll learn so much quicker. And you'll give your— expose yourself to so many more opportunities and ideas as when you're part of a group. So wait, I would say don't become a solopreneur first. For me, I'm in a great space now where I think that this— the way that the web is set up now where we can go on Fiverr and— Yeah, contractors. Get things done and people with a lot of talent providing services so you can really find amazing things. None of that stuff was around 15 years ago, right? Um, you know, it's when 15 years ago when we had an idea, we would say how much server space do we need to, you know, what, how many racks do we need in the, in the data center do we need to pay for? Everything was so expensive.

Yeah.

You know, so that, you know, when I say I'm wasting money on tools, it's, you know, $40 in a month or something. That the opportunity is incredible. Yeah. The tools are there and the The people are there. It's an exciting time. I think the next 10 years is, is going to be incredible.

I'm on the same path just like you. Same thing. I have— I'm the solo founder, one person, but I have contractors helping me out leveraging both Upwork and Fiverr. And some of them actually, even through my network and connections, when I put out something that I need help with this, and they're like— when you have an audience, another thing that I didn't like, I didn't know before I had an audience, is people love to help you. there are so many talented people who want to work with you because they've read your content or consumed your stuff. And to your point, the next 10, 15 years are going to be amazing for people who want to build a creator-led, creator-centric business. And even just like, I think bootstrapped to me has become like the main path. Yeah. Unless of course, If an idea comes around and you're like so driven to spend 10 years on it, and then that's different, right? But—

Yeah, and you know, to your point about coaching and consulting, I think that that's a great way to, you know, test your idea and fund your own idea.

Yeah.

And that's actually, you know, the experience that I had with so many people saying, well, I've had a great idea, so people should give me money to test my idea. And they have, you know, I'm sure you have them, but you know, sort of the GoFundMe type pages to fund your business idea. Go and test it out. Help people. You know, you've mentioned value creation. Prove that it works. And

that it works when the rubber meets the road, right? Like, a lot of people are afraid of that truth, but I think that is fundamental to being an entrepreneur, is that you want to be as close as possible to reality. Like, don't ever sleep on assumptions. No, I love that. So, um, one last thought, um, before we wrap up. Joe, this has been such a fun— I can't I lost track of time at some point. It's been such fun. Thank you for all that you've shared. What is in the next few months for you? Like, what is it going to look like? What's your roadmap? Looks like the newsletter is a big focus. But apart from that, what are some other content experiments you're curious to try?

Yeah, thanks, KP. And by the way, it's been great talking to you. It's, you know, love the idea of your podcast. And, you know, it's been brilliant. Yes, I mentioned I had this. So I did a lot of sales. And so starting from zero is something I talk about a lot, and I've just finished doing a 5-part series on my newsletter of how— what do you do? How do I start from zero in 2023? For me, that was actually learning to sell. And I think what we see now in this— I think over this next 10 years with people creating businesses, knowing how to articulate your offer.

Yeah.

Knowing how to become a confident salesperson. People say to me, I couldn't be a salesperson. I don't want to be pushy. I learned sales technique and a sales formula, a process for how to sell. And so I want to help people, founders and entrepreneurs promote their own product or service and promote themselves. So I've created— I started writing in January and I've just been working on the script now. So next month I'm going to produce a low-cost course. It'll be $100 at launch and $150 similar kind of thing to what Justin Welsh and Rob Lin and some other guys have kind of done. But the idea is that if you're an entrepreneur in the next few years, if you, you know, the only course that you'll need to learn to sell. So that's—

That's a unique angle. I don't think anyone's done that or there's, I mean, there are probably thousands of sales courses on the internet, but I think that angle is very interesting, especially if you cater it to maybe people who are exactly in that Bucket of people who think that sales is pushy, you know, but they're creators, so they need to make money. Like they need to like, you know, survive.

In a way, it's that my course—the person I'm thinking of—is has thought of everything else except for the fact when they go to start talking to people, they they realize that actually there is a structure to a sales process. Yeah, there's a five-step structure to it, and people say, well, you know, even if you're like a really engaging person, you know, that's that's where I think that thing of not wanting to be pushy comes in. So to be how to be your authentic self. yourself and be confident and confident in what you're doing and how to articulate it. So, um, you know, I started in door-to-door sales for a couple of years.

Wow.

So, um, you know, I was 20-plus years, 23 years as a salesperson. So, um, that I'm putting that into, into a course and I'm really excited about that. I'm gonna republish, uh, rewrite and republish a book that I wrote. And then I have a new, a new book, a new idea that I've got that I want to do early next year. So the next 6 months for me is, is very much about when I wrote the first book, And I went to— I had to ask friends and family to give me reviews because I had no followers. I had no audience. And that was when I came to understand that, you know, you need to do that first. Twitter's been great. I do plan to repurpose and expand some of my content into different platforms. But for now, it's the newsletter, low-cost course, low-ticket course next month, and then publish a couple of books. I really want to help as many people as I can. And so I want to have a lower price point. And I wanna deliver, you know, hopefully tremendous value for people in a low ticket.

Yeah. Well, I can't wait to check out, you know, the course when it comes out. I love sales and this is one of those things where I feel like, especially if you love sales, you should do more sales courses because it's like the people who know basketball and they love basketball. If you see Steph Curry, he's always conditioning, he's always training. I mean, I actually, I'm a big believer in founder courses. Writing courses, sales courses. We get a lot of, you know, shit in this industry because there are a lot of scammers. Unfortunately, it's like anything. It's like religion. It's like, uh, anything where missionary work— like, there's of course a lot of scammers, but there's also some saints, right? You don't want to miss out the saints because of some, some d-bag who you interacted with 4 years ago on Twitter, right? And I feel the same way, that there's so many great people, like including you. Like, I, I was— I'm blown away by your composure, your empathy. And just like, I could tell that you understand the integrity of like when you— when someone's paying you some money, whatever that XYZ money tag is, you want to be able to deliver 10x the value. And I was shocked when I read Alex Hormozi's, um, $100 Million Offer. You got— did you get a chance to read that? And every page he's screaming the same thing. He's like, I can't believe you guys bought the book, let me give you more value. And the book is like $20. It's not even that expensive. But I realized that, wow, like he's one of the top 1% elite salespeople on the planet. And this guy's constantly screaming every page, like, it's about people, it's about value, it's about them, them, them, not you, you, you. I'm like, wow, this is how you do sales. You know, it's not the pushy, it's not the greasy, like, you know, a car salesman type. So sales is one of my favorite topics to talk about. And I would love to check the book out. That's great. and, uh, you know, promote it with my— to my audience too.

Thank you, KP.

That's awesome. Cool. Thank you so much, Joe. Uh, it's been a pleasure, and I'll, uh, keep in touch with you. Thank you.

Great to meet you. Cheers.