So that's step number one is just testing ideas on social media.
Stop thinking about it as writing content.
Start thinking about it as testing ideas and the more ideas you put out with writing, the more data points you have because certain content is going to do well, certain content isn't going to do that well.
So start broad, talk about your interests, talk about your expertise, your opinions, anything that you would want to monetize, talk about it and allow the market to tell you what they want based on engagement.
And then as you can filter, okay, this tweet did better, this didn't do as well, double down and laser in on the ones that do well.
And then the more you do that over time, the more you can assume that those ideas are going to perform well in other areas.
So you can turn them into a product or a coaching offer or something of that nature.
And then if those do well, you can turn that into the software or the startup itself and can be sure that that is a good idea.
This past weekend, I spent in Toronto, Canada, visiting the developer team for Cortex.
If you don't know what Cortex is, it is our startup.
It's a second brain app for creators.
It is not launched to the public yet, but I want to start building it in public and sharing the strategies we use to monetize it, build it.
So you can do the same because I'm assuming many of you want to not only start a business, but potentially build a software or build something more than a digital product.
So I want to get a bit vulnerable with you.
I want to talk about how we generated $759,900 in six months without launching to the public.
Because the problem is that most people dream of building a massive company, but they go about it all wrong.
They think they need startup capital, they think they need investors and VC money, they think they need to pour a bunch of money into marketing.
They build the product without thinking about how they will get users or if the idea is good to begin with.
I feel like that's a major problem in the space is that there are so many talented programmers and there are so many talented marketers, but the marketers don't know how to build a product and the coders don't know how to market the product.
So you have a bunch of apps that don't have users, so their dreams go down the drain and then you have a bunch of marketers who don't know how to create a product.
So they turn into scammers because they're very good at making big promises but not delivering on them.
Now we took a completely different approach.
The good thing about this approach is that anyone can do it.
The bad thing about this approach is that it takes some time.
When I landed in Toronto to visit the developers, I wanted to ask the core team members what their biggest lessons have been while building cortex.
And I wasn't expecting the answers that they gave.
I also think that you'll benefit a lot from what they have to say if you listen to them.
We will start there and then we will dive into how to come up with a profitable startup idea and how to fund it without external help.
You want me to wear the mic or something or just hold it?
What is what is this? So earlier I was showing you one option for the pain management system where it's like you have what is the pain management system?
Okay let's show the we're iterating on different ideas for how to make a writing app that's a bit different right?
So one thing that writers want to do is reference information from like other things they've written in the past or research so on and so forth.
So you want to have multiple things open at once.
You have your primary pain here, you have your secondary pain over here, and then the pain management system is how do we manage multiple secondary pains open at once?
Right? So it's like one thing that we came up with here is having a stack kind of like Apple Wallet having like a stack of cards at the bottom where if you come and hover over it then it'll expand out and show you all the other pains that you have open.
And on the blackboard over there what we were just discussing was one way to do it is when your mouse hovers over to that stack it expands out fully to take up the full height of the screen and the main secondary card kind of shrinks back down to its original spot.
And then whatever other one that you click on say this one that then rises out and the others cascade back down.
So that's one way of doing it.
Another way of doing it that's very similar that I was thinking about was when you hover over this stack area it expands out just a little bit so that you can see the title of each card and then whichever one you click that one comes out fully.
And in this version when you hover over this stack doesn't expand out to take up the full height it just takes up like roughly half the height of the screen and this main secondary pain would just like shrink to take up the top half so that you can like kind of see here are the other cards that you have click one and then it takes you back to the view where you have like a card
open taking up most of the space so you can read the information inside copy it manipulate it whatever while working on whatever you have in your main pain right.
So that's that's what we were talking about.
Yeah. Before we get into the lessons of the developers there are actual interviews with them coming up.
I want to go over my biggest lesson.
I didn't realize how complex and costly software development can be because it's just a note-taking app that we're building right not so much and along with that even if it was just a basic note-taking app there's so much that comes along with that.
I feel like we take so much of the software we use for granted and how much time and effort goes behind the apps that we use every day that we just think are simple little apps on our phone.
The thing here is we're not just going the no code route you can look up a note how to build a no code sass on YouTube and build one and potentially see some success with it but to me that's not a good long term option.
Maybe it's good to start out with to generate initial users but that just seems like you're building a bad reputation from the start.
So we're not going that route.
We're taking the long and expensive route that keeps us at a weekly burn rate right now of about $30,000.
That means we're spending that much on development our team etc.
And we've iterated so much already we've removed three to four major features that we started out with thinking they would be core and part of the app but we removed those we've added a few we've been changing a lot of things before we even gotten it out.
So my biggest lesson is this be okay with doing things imperfectly.
Yes our costs could be much lower if we didn't recruit top talent.
Yes we could also launch an MVP that we aren't proud of.
We could do a lot of things but throughout my journey I've learned that it's just good to fail hard and fail fast.
Like I have overcome my previous aversion to investing money in things.
Now I'll just throw money at something because I know that I'm going to learn a lesson that will make me that much more.
And I'm not too much of a fan of following other people's path to a tee.
I think that other people's advice and their steps are very good for direction and to start taking action so that you can make mistakes yourself but too many people outsource their success to the advice that other people give expecting it to work fully when you just have to adopt the mindset that you're going to fail and their advice is a way to get to that failure point
faster so that when you reach that failure point you're given an opportunity to create your own path.
Now we'll go into the interviews with the developers and our co-founder.
The first lesson is the importance of being a high agency individual.
I'm Matt, one of the co-founders.
My official title is Chief Product Officer but what I actually do they call me the full-time chaos monkey because I'm going around like coming up with ideas and like oh here's how we're going to do this.
This needs to be done in three days.
Oh it can't too bad. The other reason why they call me the chaos monkey is because every single time a feature gets developed and it's put in front of me new bugs miraculously like just pop out of nowhere.
As for my background and like where this all started I'm in computer engineering at the University of Toronto.
I did a lot of side projects and web development for big clients in the past as well as did some stuff in startups which is what gave me kind of the experience necessary to be where I am today and I went down a rabbit hole of second brain apps, settlecasts and personal knowledge management, came across Dan Coase content, came across Ali Abdel's second brain stuff and realized
that there actually wasn't any app on the market that really served the purpose of a second brain.
I've tried LogZ, Cubsidion, Notion, Roam, so on and none of them really felt quite right so when I met Dan it turned out that he was trying to create something in the space so we decided to come together and build Cortex.
So in terms of the biggest lesson that I've learned I would say that one of the most important things when trying to go from zero to one when building a startup is you need people who are high agency, you need people who are not just highly intelligent and better than you at what they do but also just they will spot a problem and figure out a solution and go and do it.
That kind of describes all of the A players on our core team.
It's like having several one-person businesses come together and build a shared vision together because building a startup is so incredibly difficult.
Building a good software product is an infinite set of design and technical challenges that you need to solve so you can't go into it with an employee mindset that someone has to tell you to do XYZ because first of all the problems aren't even defined.
You have to figure out what the problems are, you have to define the problems and then you have to figure out the solutions and go solve them and there are so many that no one person can handle it all.
Every single person on the core team needs to not be a cog in the machine but be designing the machine and building it from the ground up.
The second lesson is learning how to work with a team rather than a lone wolf.
I'm very good personally at just doing things by myself and not being able to work together with people.
My name is Ian and I'm Matt's friend.
I'm also a student at the University of Toronto and I work on front-end development and product design at Cortex.
One day Matt came up to me in early September and said Ian I'm building a product and I want you to join me.
Now keep in mind that my background with Matt had been limited by this point.
I had met him through a student group at the University of Toronto and his experience with me was essentially me oversleeping meetings, showing up late and writing code five minutes was needed and he looked me in the eye and said I want you on my team.
What the fuck? I couldn't believe it at first honestly.
I said you know I'm still going to be a full-time student.
I won't have much time. Are you sure?
And he's like no I want you to put it up and what I realized about Matt is you know he believes in people ten times more than they could ever believe in themselves.
I respect Matt a lot for that.
One important lesson I've learned while working here is that around working with other people.
A lot of my prior software development experience has been largely solo.
Computer science has always been a hobby of mine, something that I kind of pursued just out of genuine interest kind of on the side.
So these were a lot of my learning just took place through small projects that I worked on just for fun and so this is kind of my I had I had some you know prior industry experience but this is my first time working on a code base with other people and really having to learn how code is written when it's other people besides just you.
And so this came with a lot of challenges just learning how to communicate with other people and you know as as obvious as it sounds like the fact that other people think differently than you you know I think it would be great if everyone thought like me and you know felt the same way about everything like me but you know unfortunately I realized that's just kind of not the case
yeah this is not something that I expected to be doing in never in a hundred years what I've you know expected to be flying out to Arizona or any of no I'm I'm really excited this is a kind of product idea that I've myself even envisioned for a long time and I'm really excited to help build this product to be you know the best example.
Shout out Dan shout out.
Buy his book. Is there enough footage in there?
Can you use something? And then lesson four is how building from scratch can take much longer than building something that's already established like becoming a developer at a company versus a startup.
Hi guys I'm Ari. I'm another developer here at Cortex and I work mostly on the rich text editor stuff so a lot of the features that you'll see in the text editor itself I was brought in here as like through Ian as a connection and it's been great working here.
I think the biggest lesson I've learned while working on Cortex is when you build something from scratch it takes a lot more work than you would realize at first to actually build it up because say when you're working in a company that's already established especially from a software background a lot of the work has been done already for you so you're just adding
on stuff instead of like building the foundations that other people are going to work on so all of that like extra work that you need to do to actually set something up it's easy to like not understand exactly how much work there is but it's been a great time and like we all enjoy it and yeah we have fun doing it so yeah it's my story.
So that is our co-founder and then two other developers out of the nine developers on our team right now but this is the point where we need to go over the importance of building an audience.
Read to collect ideas, write to distribute ideas, build to monetize ideas.
It's 2024. You can read, write and build whatever you want because you have a brain I hope and an internet connection.
Most people don't even think of social media when they're going to start a business.
They don't see how it is the biggest shortcut to their success and by shortcut I mean just a way to do it quicker and smarter.
We aren't building a business in the 2000s.
Technology has advanced.
You don't need to put in grueling hours with direct sales, cold outreach and manually finding potential customers.
Social media is how you test ideas with content that turns into marketing and products that sell without spending any money.
Build an audience of people who want to buy the product when you launch it because most startups can't get users.
Sell a low marginal cost digital product to get results and validate your startup idea before building it and recruit developers, a team and investors if you want to go that route.
Many people think that I just create content to create content.
This is partially true but I've written 40,000 tweets, posted 3,000 plus more to other platforms, sent hundreds of newsletters and posted hundreds of YouTube videos.
Because of that, I have data.
I know exactly what ideas pull in followers, catch attention, spark controversy, lead to customers and get engagement.
I have a database of ideas I can use as products inside my products on my sales pages and in my promotions.
I don't have to do manual market research and I don't have to put time into building the product to test whether it will sell.
By writing and building an audience on social media, you get to skip ahead of most of other businesses that are just trying to do everything manually and don't have a way of testing ideas to see if they're going to work before they do anything further.
So here are a few simple steps to actually start.
First is to create a topic tree.
Now with all of this, if you want to join the Cortex Riders Bootcamp, I actually don't think it will be open by the time this video goes out because we sold out within three days, but the wait list should be up.
If you want to join the next one, that should be in like a month, a little over a month.
So check that out. Write down a list of all your interests, skills and ideas you want to talk about.
Don't worry about getting specific, worry about getting relatable.
Don't niche down too far just yet.
Start broad and applicable to most people.
What I mean by broad and applicable is someone who says I talk about operations for founders, how to be a better operator, you can still frame that to target almost everyone because everyone loves to learn something new.
So how would I how would I position content around that topic if I want to reach more people?
I would say if you ever plan to start a business at some point in your life, you're going to have to learn operations.
So not only with that hook, does it allow me to reach more people and attract more of a following, but I still reach my target audience, which is the founders, so to say.
So when I don't use a hook, like if you're a founder and you suck at operations, read this, I'm saying if you ever plan to start a business at some point, you need to learn operations.
So targets more people, the people that follow me, this is why I think a broad audience is better, is because now they know what you do.
And if they know any founders, they can refer you to them.
So rather than 10,000 founders following you, you have 100,000 people with those 10,000 founders still following you because they like your content still, but you have 90,000 more people that can spread your name to more founders, so you have further reach.
That's the importance of this.
Now, if you don't know what to write, here are some examples of just very applicable topics.
Self-improvement, health and fitness, social dynamics, skill acquisition, career advice, business, etc.
Another thing to mention with that, and why you should frame most of your content through those topics is because social media is pretty random.
Most marketers or business owners that come onto social media, they're indoctrinated with the business dogma of, oh, you need to get extremely specific with your niche and extremely specific with who you target when social media is pretty random, right?
It's just about getting reposted to other people.
So they follow you. That's literally it.
Unless you bank on algorithm, which most of the time doesn't work out in your favor.
So you control your growth by getting reposts or shares, and that's pretty random.
You're getting spread to random audiences.
So you have to go fairly broad and position your content in the right way to attract both a random audience and the people that you want.
And then the random audience can learn from you along the way and become a customer down the road because people can become interested in new things.
It's not that, like, oh, these people aren't interested in what I have to talk about.
So I'm not going to try and attract them as followers is that you can't make your interests interesting to them.
It's your fault. They're not a dead follower.
You're a dead account. So that's step number one is just testing ideas on social media.
Stop thinking about it as writing content.
Start thinking about it as testing ideas and the more ideas you put out with writing, the more data points you have because certain content is going to do well, certain content isn't going to do that well.
So start broad, talk about your interests, talk about your expertise, your opinions, anything that you would want to monetize, talk about it and allow the market to tell you what they want based on engagement.
And then as you can filter, okay, this tweet did better.
This didn't do as well. Double down and laser in on the ones that do well.
And then the more you do that over time, the more you can assume that those ideas are going to perform well in other areas.
So you can turn them into a product or a coaching offer or something of that nature.
And then if those do well, you can turn that into the software or the startup itself and can be sure that that is a good idea.
And along the way, since you've been writing content, you can turn all of that good content into marketing and sales ideas that will sell better than if you were to test and fuel, let's say your Facebook ads with a ton of money, just to test the ideas when you can just do that on social media to begin with, build an audience and have a user base from the start.
So step one of how to fund your startup before building it is to test ideas on social media based around the startup that you want to build.
So if I, for example, am building a software, it's called Cortex for writers and creators.
So I need to test ideas related to writing content creation, online business, other things like that.
That's my brand that I'm building on social media.
Now, what you do is you create a value ladder to create a cash flow business.
So what that means is you need a high ticket offer.
So something like coaching or consulting where you work one on one with people and you can charge for client work.
So you can charge 1000, 2000, potentially $5,000, $10,000 per client so that you don't need a large audience to monetize from the start.
So for something like a writing startup like myself, I would coach people on how to write on social media or how to write a newsletter.
That's exactly what I do.
Two hour writer is an example of that.
So what I would do coach people on that, then I can productize it down my value ladder into either something like a cohort based course or group coaching or something of that nature where I can take on more people, charge a bit less but still enough to keep myself alive when I don't have a massive following and fuel that funnel to make even more money and free up more time.
Then from there, as you get results, now that you have results and you've iterated on the product because you know what doesn't work so you can make the product better to get better results for your customers and you create a system along the way, then you can create a digital product out of that.
That's how two hour writer was born.
That is hyper profitable and that makes me a lot of money simply because it helps a lot of people because the results are proven and it gets results for other people.
Now what this value ladder does is one, you're building an audience.
So your audience is continuing to grow, your traffic source is continuing to grow.
You have a high ticket product that costs a lot of money for the few people that want to buy it and then you have either group coaching or a cohort based course based around that same thing and then you have a digital product.
So you're allowing multiple tiers of your audience to afford different aspects of what you teach and altogether this creates a cash flow business because you're writing content, you're promoting your value ladder, your products and services and that's how you earn an income at extremely high profit margins because you don't need more than one person to do that.
You don't need a team yet.
After this, once you have results and validated ideas based on your social media content and the aspects of your product that works, then you can turn whatever it is that you created in your product into the software or the startup so that you know that it's going to work and then you use your money to fuel that startup, to build a team and do whatever else you need to
do to get it out there and then you have a user base already.
You have a customer base that are going to sign up for whatever it is that you build and you have an audience that you can funnel into it.
So you're not making the biggest mistake that all other startups make by not having traffic to actually get to the product that they spent so much time building.
Now we need to talk about how to fund your startup.
Money is a tool to build what you want but doesn't exist.
So finally, to answer your question, how did we make almost $800,000 in six months without launching the actual app yet?
It's relatively simple and it's the same thing that I keep talking about in all of my business videos.
You've probably watched them but you haven't connected them to like, oh, I can do this for anything.
Now we have a team of nine developers and six creators.
The creators are on the education side of the business.
So Cortex University and Cortex Bootcamp.
That's how we monetize.
Our first priority with Cortex was to generate cash flow so we didn't have to take on investors or continue to dig into our own money.
I invested $500,000 of my own money as an initial safeguard to fuel development.
In essence, we built a digital product that we validated before.
We started building the Cortex social media and email lists and the email list is around 10,500 people right now.
Twitter is almost at 10,000.
Instagram is almost at 10,000.
And yes, we have a shortcut because the creators helping build Cortex have audiences that are fueling that.
But that doesn't mean like you're going to have to start from scratch either way at whatever point you start and decide to do this.
You might as well just stick with it so you can actually reap the benefits and the compounding results that come from this.
We wouldn't be able to do this if I hadn't personally stuck with my own personal brand beforehand.
Digital products cost very little to build and distribute.
I've built multiple under my own brand so I know how to do it fast.
So in short, Cortex is a second brain app for writers and creators.
So we decided to create an education arm of the business for a digital product that teaches writing.
Now, of course, I wouldn't recommend doing this under your startup first.
You can if you want, I'd recommend doing it under your personal brand first so that you have further leverage when you come to build the startup itself.
So what I recommend is what we're going to talk about you build an education business as one person so that you have leverage going into a startup where you need a team and everything else.
The benefit of this is that when you actually build your own business as one person, you learn all of the various skills that sets you up for success when you start the next business.
The first step in doing this is to write content, build a program and do client work.
You need cash flow when you start building your personal brand and testing ideas with content.
As mentioned before, you'll start to get a feel for what you can help people with.
Turn your expertise into a program that helps people do what you've done.
As a writer, I help with writing.
As a help nut, you can help people with fitness.
As a productivity expert, you can help people become more productive.
Yes, you need to actually get good at something before you can help people with a business.
Your job is to build a curriculum and guide people through it one on one with weekly calls, worksheets and tasks that get results.
When you don't have a large audience, it doesn't make too much sense to try and sell a digital product just yet.
Now, you cannot do client work and just focus on building the audience and come back to building the digital product.
But if you want to monetize early and start testing ideas and getting results, that's also very valuable.
So you can do that. This is where you charge between $1,000 and $5,000 per client, depending on your own value and skill set and your ability to get results.
If you don't have results, start at the 1000.
And we'll talk about this process like how to actually sell a service in a future video.
But the second step is to get results, grow your audience and productize your offer.
As your audience grows, you have more leverage.
And we discussed this progression in the $0 to $1 million as one person working two to four hours a day video.
In between these steps that we're talking about, it is your full-time job to improve your program to get better results for the people that are going through it.
Results are all that matter.
Your results are what lead to more customers and a profitable startup idea.
And since you've built an audience around this, you don't have to worry too much about getting initial users.
Your clients, customers and readers are enough validation for the startup idea that stems from building your own brand.
So now that you have built an audience and you've gotten results from client work, it just makes sense to turn the results you've gotten and to turn the curriculum that you've built into a standalone digital product at a somewhat lower price point because you have an audience of people that are willing to pay that much but not as much for the service, the client work,
the consulting. So you can do this in two ways.
First is a cohort-based course.
You have a curriculum, community and live calls to help guide groups of people through the program.
You can charge more money for the structure and launch a cohort every one to three months.
Second option is just a regular course.
This is where you just sell the curriculum as a course.
The upside is that it requires very little work on your end.
The downsides are that you only launch once and charge a lower price.
Under my brand, I've iterated on my products to the point where two-hour writer is just the top-selling product.
It does really well because it gets results.
It also does really well because it's a great skill to learn.
It's a good topic to choose.
So with 15,000 plus students alone into our writer, it just made sense that we turn the system that we taught into there into some kind of software so that we can bank off of that idea because it's profitable for us.
Now, step number three is to build your startup and repeat the process.
You now have thousands of social media posts to pull data from on what works, dozens of clients that you've personally helped get better at what you do, hundreds or thousands of students who can benefit from your startup idea and a hyper-profitable digital product business with enough cash flow to start building your product and team for your startup.
You've now solved the problem that most startups never solve.
They can build an okay product, but they can't get users.
Therefore, they can't make money, and they don't have a cash flow generating business of their own that both validates their startup idea and allows them to fuel its growth.
Now, how did we make $759,000 under Cortex alone?
We did the exact same thing, but under the Cortex brand.
So we have Cortex University, which is consulting slash tutoring slash coaching for people that want to learn to write or build a creator brand.
We are building the social media account where the Twitter account is already at 9000.
The Instagram account is already at 8000.
The email list is already almost at 10,000.
We have traffic going there because we understand how to get traffic quick.
And that's through social media.
It's not through just building Cortex and hoping that it's going to do well.
We're starting our customer acquisition off early.
The 759,000 that we've made is all from a high ticket product.
And next, what we're launching is a mid ticket product, which is what I said that you should build the cohort or the group coaching, we're doing a bootcamp style thing for writers, and then eventually we'll have a product there.
So how we're monetizing Cortex before it's even launched is we created an education side of the business to create our own customers for Cortex before we even launch the product.
Now, of course, we are in a very beneficial situation because we have spent four to five years building our own audiences so that we can fuel that.
But that's what you have to do if you want this to work without going the traditional startup route.
If you have to build cash flow first, if your dreams are to build a startup right now, it may be wise just to put that off and do what you have to do to actually build that.
And that's going to take three to five years of building your own thing and cash flow business first as a creator on social media.
So that's the entirety of what we do.
You can, there's of course, like little strategies here and there that I'll talk about in future videos.
But you can see all of this happening right in front of your eyes.
It's not like this is hidden.
Like you can sign up for Cortex University, you can go and see what we're doing to actually fuel that.
That's how we made the money.
There's nothing secretive about it.
It's wide out in the open.
So hopefully that was helpful and potentially inspiring for people that want to actually build a startup.
I'm going to go meet Matt and the other developers.
And we're going to have some fun.
I'm going to introduce them to you so you get to see who the actual developers are, some of them at least.
And we're going to talk about some of the biggest lessons they've learned so far, building Cortex.
I hope this was helpful in providing a big picture roadmap for building your startup.
I'll talk more about how we build Cortex as we build it.
Thank you for watching and enjoy the rest of your week or the start to your week.
If you want to learn high impact digital writing, check out to our writer.
If you want to build a brand, check out digital economics.
If you want to read a good book, read my book.
Until next time, like, subscribe, do all that shit.
Bye.
