When I talk to 12 founders a week, I'm seeing six of them are crushing it with iOS apps.
There's a guys that we interviewed on the channel that have an app that forces you to do pushups.
They're doing 30K a month.
I feel like I can rule the world.
I know I can be what I want to.
So Pat is here from Starter Story.
Pat, HubSpot just bought Starter Story.
That's amazing.
Congratulations.
Thank you.
Is the news out?
It is technically not closed yet.
So I'm going through a whirlwind.
I'm going to try to put on a good face for you guys.
You're seven days out right now from selling.
And when this goes live, it is presumably closed.
And yet you are nervous.
What's that about?
Well, the deal is supposed to close tomorrow.
But, you know, it's the psychology of it needs to be signed, closed, wired.
Otherwise I cannot take myself to that place.
Yet that place to you know, celebrate or tell people or anything like that.
And it's kind of weird.
You know doing the production process because you know content needs to be recorded early to go out.
So it's super weird to do an interview before it's done.
How did you do with the negotiation?
Do you feel like walk us through how you approach that and how you think you did give yourself a score there?
I had a number in my head before any of this conversation happened when it just came to my head.
I started talking to chat GPT about it having a little conversation of like what is before, even the sale or anything.
Conversations happen.
She said, like, what would be my walk away number?
And I just remember thinking back what that number is and when i went back to the negotiation and then it sort of was that number, i was like okay well, i made up that that would have been my number before any sale influenced me or anything like that.
I negotiated to that number because i wanted to be like authentic in my negotiation of like that was like truly my number, not to make up something for whatever that was actually the number.
Do you feel any bit of regret because you're like oh, i got my number.
I should have asked for more.
Yeah, Hundred percent.
You haven't made it.
If that doesn't happen, that's the final stage.
Maximum regret.
And then it turns to maximum relief when it's done.
All right.
So let's let's explain what is starter story.
People don't even know.
Starter story is a lot of things, but it started out as a side project while I was working in nine to five because I couldn't start any successful business.
So I said, why not just start interviewing founders and sharing their stories online?
And maybe I will find a co-founder through that or I'll find a good idea through that.
Long story short, it took off.
We found other mediums.
We had the blog with the case studies.
We had products.
We had community.
We had a YouTube channel.
It is all built around interviewing founders doing anywhere from 10K to 100K per month.
Let me ask you, what did you get right?
Because this idea of hey, I'm going to interview founders about how they did it, that's not a new idea.
You did this only a couple of years ago.
How many years has it been?
Three, four years?
How long has it been?
No, I've been in the game longer than you might think.
Eight years is when I officially started the business.
Even eight years ago, that wasn't a completely novel idea, but you did well with it, right?
You separated yourself from the pack.
You made it a success.
What do you think you got right that others didn't?
And I really hope it's not just like I worked hard, you know.
Yeah, I think one thing that now I'm looking back, what did we get right is that we were you had to share your revenue to get on the website.
So a lot of founders at the time.
They didn't want to share those things because they had investors, it was private or whatever.
We made it a requirement to share your revenue on the site.
This is something that we got from indie hackers at the time, which was big on that too.
Shout out Cortland who built that.
But Once you could see like well, you don't want to read a story about a business and you don't know how much revenue they're making.
You want to know how's this business doing?
Okay, now I want to learn from this business.
So having that revenue number at the top, that was really, really big.
If you guys Google like starter story, case studies, and you could find one or, and you could find this thing
It's called the full case studies database.
And so early on, you were really interesting because you would interview people.
And I always thought that I was like within a very small niche of people who like this.
But I think it's actually a lot of people who like it where I love numbers.
I'm obsessed with numbers.
And you would do these interviews with people.
And they very clearly were not interviews of you speaking.
It was as if you just sent people a Google Doc, the same Google Doc over and over and over again.
And you ask questions and they typed out the replies.
And then you created a graphic at the top and it said.
Here's one.
It says, Brewmate.
I think it's called Brewmate.
Yeah, Brewmate.
I grew a drinkware brand to $1.1 million per month at 23 years old.
And it said, Jacob.
And it said, his revenue per month is $12 million.
There's one founders.
There's 53 employees.
You did such a good job of just outlining those numbers.
And then what you did was, once you had 100 of these, I could sort through D to C numbers.
Uh sass, i could sort through all these things and frankly, if i was just trying to clone someone's company yep, that's probably not the right word.
But figure out what business model i want to do and like well, if you wanted to clone someone's company, some asshole was gonna do that yeah, but like, if you wanted to like research that's a better word uh, you were like you you, you and indie hackers were like the best.
But like you had like a bunch of legends, like you had David Houser from Grasshopper and a bunch of people like that on early on.
And it was really cool.
Every single week.
I talk to founders, as I mentioned, that are doing between 10K and 100K per month and people that have sort of their businesses have took off recently.
So I like I get to see, I get to have these conversations every single day and see like what's working like right now.
We can go over some of that if you want to.
Yeah, give us one.
Yeah, sure.
What do you guys want to talk about?
I have a couple options for you.
We can talk about iOS.
We can talk about YouTube SEO.
We could talk about APIs.
We could talk about B2B video.
What's exciting to you?
Let's do iPhone apps because to me that sounds like 10 years ago.
Yeah, that was probably the most surprising one on the list, right?
It's like, wait, that's the now opportunity?
I feel like that was the 2010 opportunity.
Right, right.
So, yeah, it might it might feel like it's an old opportunity or is too broad.
But again, this is all this is not something I read on Twitter.
This is not something that I just came up with through chat.
This is what.
When I talk to 12 founders a week, I'm seeing six of them are crushing it with iOS apps.
This is where this is coming from.
So a couple of examples, there's a guys that we interviewed on the channel that, uh, have an app that forces you to do pushups for, you can go on social media, like you scroll, it blocks you.
And then you have to put your phone out there and prove that you've done pushups.
They're doing a call 30 K they're doing 30 K a month.
And actually they're doing a lot more.
Can't disclose it exactly.
But after we interviewed them, they told me some crazy numbers.
And there's another one that does basically the same thing, but it makes you pray, makes you do a prayer to God before you can go on TikTok.
Yeah, yeah.
Just like-
Yeah, there's like a feature in the iOS API or something like that that allows you to screen, block apps.
So there's tons of apps like this or just, you know, basic blocking apps.
There's a bunch of productivity related apps that are popular like that, that have some sort of sort of almost a gimmick element to them.
But you see it on TikTok, you see it on social media and you're like, oh, let me try it.
OK, I want to do so.
I want to get a little healthier or whatever.
And are these – okay, so I see it.
Push-up time blocker, right?
Push-up app blocker.
Is it push-scroll?
Push-scroll?
That's the one.
Push-scroll.
Okay, gotcha.
So you go push-scroll.
Okay, push-scroll screen time control.
So you replace doom scrolling with a healthy habit.
It literally has a picture of a guy doing push-ups like with AI watching him.
And then it says it can limit the apps you're addicted to and basically you earn it as you make progress.
Now, here's my question.
Are these doing the same kind of like you make a fun kind of novelty app?
And then you do like massive TikTok content by giving paying influencers or affiliates or basically getting like a hundred or a thousand pieces of content posted every week.
They'll come up with their own hooks.
Like, oh my God, y'all, check this out.
I haven't used Instagram at all this week because of whatever, right?
Or here's where these gains came from.
Instagram, what?
And then it's like, is it that?
Is that the playbook that they're all doing?
Sean, you should become a TikTok affiliate.
That's pretty good.
That's kind of natural.
What was really cool about this app and this is a cool story worth telling is that they didn't actually build the app first.
They created the viral video first.
And this is a really cool story that we told is basically they created a video about them having to do pushups before scrolling.
They pretended that the app exists and they showed them having to do pushups or whatever.
And they created a bunch of other videos about other app ideas.
This is the one that went viral.
And then when it did, it got some hundreds of thousands of views.
They went and scrambled to create the app and then it took off.
So they were able to validate the idea through TikTok and through their marketing channel they're going to use and then build it, which I thought was super cool.
Were they technical?
Uh, one guy, there was two guys.
One guy was the technical guy.
The other guy was the kind of the marketing guy.
Yeah.
One guy's just great at pushups.
So this is the opposite of field of dreams, right?
Instead of, you know, if we build it, they will come.
It's like, if they come, then we'll build it.
I guess I got to build it then.
And they just went viral first.
Exactly.
They reversed the whole process, which I think is the right way to do things now, because imagine creating 10 apps and having none of them work.
That would take you a year or creating one video in one day and having it work.
And that takes one day.
All right.
So Pat is giving you guys something straight out of his playbook, which is his method to finding a one million dollar business idea.
It's a template that guides you through seven proven methods to identify 21 problems that you can solve.
It gives you real, fonder case studies so you can build and validate your ideas fast.
If you want the template and case studies straight from Pat, you can download it right now.
Just click the link in the description.
Now back to the episode.
Are there other apps that you're seeing and other genre of apps that you're seeing that are working?
Apps are the new info products, I think.
So anything in health, wealth relationships productivity self-improvement, these are all great spaces.
And the reason why I wanted to share the dumb apps because they're the most funniest when you think about them.
I'm not saying go build a dumb app, but build anything in these sorts of spaces right now.
Health, so fitness, gym apps, these sorts of things.
Wealth money productivity, these sorts of things.
That is a great space to be building right now.
What are you seeing in wealth?
Well, there's not any kind of the silly apps, but anything that's in like crypto trading, these sorts of things.
Those are really, really popular.
What's a stop vaping app?
Yep.
So that would be another one of the health.
I think the health one is a good space.
There's a guy that just built an app that helps you track.
It was called Puff Count.
And I think you just track how many puffs you took.
And then once you get to a certain low amount, it sort of gamifies the process of quitting nicotine.
That was a cool one.
He sold it for a lot of money.
And that was a really cool example.
Did a lot of TikTok.
Who bought it?
Like Philip Morris and they shut that sucker down?
Yeah.
Get that out of here.
And are these kids built?
I assume?
I watch your channel and it's mostly young like 20-somethings.
Are a lot of them actually technical?
Or are they just using AI to make this stuff?
That's the thing.
Is...
They're using AI coding, and this is why it's big now, and you're thinking it was big 10 years ago.
It's big now because in order to build an iPhone app, you needed to have a team of four.
To build a good iPhone app, you needed a designer, you needed a product person, you needed an engineer, probably a backend and a frontend engineer.
But with AI coding tools, you can just have an idea.
It's not perfect, but it's like 95% of the way there. you can just build it with zero.
Basically a team of zero.
Apps that couldn't have existed before because it wouldn't have been cost effective.
You couldn't have built a stop vaping app with a team of four people getting paid 100000 a year or 200000 a year.
It just wouldn't have been feasible.
But now there's this opportunity for all these little kind of weird fun apps that blow up on social media, because you don't need anybody to build them anymore.
You know what's interesting is?
You said that apps, the new info products, that didn't hit with me until just a second ago.
Do you guys remember the police scanner app?
I think it was called 5-Radio or 5-0 Radio.
Do you remember that, Sean?
Sort of.
Not really.
I've heard of these.
Like Citizen is the one I know about.
This was before that.
So I'm part of this forum. where this guy is a poster.
And I knew he was kind of a celebrity to me a little bit.
And his name's Alan Wong.
And he started this thing called Five-O Scanner.
So if you guys Google him, he kind of was famous because he created this iPhone app.
And I think his story was that he was an immigrant from another country.
He came here with nothing, his family.
I think they worked in a restaurant, something like that.
He created this thing called the Five-O Scanner right when the iPhone got started.
And he made eight figures.
I think he was making like five million dollars a year repeatedly for a very long time and he like wrote the story about how he was able to retire his mom and dad.
Then he like bought a lamborghini and he took a photo of himself in the lamborghini when he was like 24 and he kind of went viral for that.
But he never actually taught how to make apps.
He was like kind of like true to like, just making apps and uh, i remember this guy and he was like one in a million.
There was like not other people doing like these iphone apps that were making five or eight million dollars a year with one employees.
He was one in a million and it was so cool and he's like a celebrity a little bit to me because i kind of grew up.
He was kind of like my tai lopez and it is kind of interesting to say that these the the, they are the new info products, because info products when i was growing up, when i was 19 and 25, trying or 1921, trying to get into the internet, it was always info product people that like i didn't, i didn't exactly look up to because i thought they were sleazy a little bit, but i was like i want that life, i aspire to have that like i can make money anywhere anytime, be on a beach, type of lifestyle.
And it is funny that you're saying that the apps weren't even on my radar because I didn't know how to make them.
I couldn't.
I physically couldn't do that.
But now I probably could.
And that is kind of an interesting way to look at it.
And then we saw we had this one.
What was the kids who we had on here, Sean?
Calorie Tracker, Cal.
Cal AI.
We had Cal AI.
Guys, have you guys seen how big that business is now?
So he talked to it.
This guy, Zach, talked to us literally, it was noon on a Tuesday.
I go, what are you doing here?
He goes, I came home.
He goes.
I came home for lunch during high school to do this interview and I have to go back to school.
And at the time, I think it was a $30 million a year business.
How big is it now?
I saw on X, so it's not verified or anything like that, but they said they did 6 million in January alone.
So 70, what does that put it at?
70 something million?
That's incredible.
Well, he launched a thing called App Mafia, which is like a course on how to make apps.
And I don't think it landed.
I think people kind of mocked it.
But anyway, it was cool to see that this is the new info product.
Well, it's cool because it sounds like there's two trends coming together, right?
Apps are getting easier and easier to make with AI and vibe coding.
And, on the other hand, you have a new discovery platform TikTok, that you can get your app downloaded from, and both happening at the same time.
Like Charlie Munger calls these like Lollapalooza effects, where multiple factors kind of conspire in your favor.
And then suddenly you get this like crazy sort of Lollapalooza effect out of it.
And so you get one, two, three, four variables, all pushing in the same direction unintentionally.
And it creates like a new opportunity.
So we were joking like, dude, iPhone apps is, this is like 2010.
Like, well, what do you mean that's the opportunity?
Well, There's something that changed.
Apps got way easier to build and apps got way easier to be discovered.
There's a new way to get discovered as an app.
So the playing field reopened in a way that the window was sort of closed over the last, let's say five years ago.
It was less juicy than it is currently.
Yep, that's right.
Okay, you want to do another idea?
What else you got?
Let's do this B2B video.
I'm curious what you have there.
Yeah, I don't have like crazy business ideas here, but I have just some Intel on how big this opportunity is.
And there's so many business ideas you can do off of this.
So I know this and you guys know this is that video content is hard.
Doing anything on video is hard.
It doesn't matter if it's long form, short form, paid ads organic, getting authentic, non AI.
No, we're not talking about AI generated stuff like video to work for your business that gets views and converts customers there.
It's really really hard.
At companies, there's lots of functions, right?
Design, that's pretty much solved.
You get good designers, they do good stuff.
Product, that's a little tough, but kind of generally solved.
Engineering, kind of solved, especially with AI.
Sales, there's lots of playbooks for all of these, right?
But there's no playbook right now for video.
I'll stop there.
Let me know what you guys think immediately about that.
I think you're Spot on.
I've said before, video is now the native tongue of the Internet.
It's the language that the Internet speaks.
And so if you can't make good video, you essentially it's like moving to America and not being able to speak English.
You might be able to get by, but it's not going to be easy for you.
And so you're right that the way you just put it is really great, which is that companies don't even have really the job function yet at the majority of companies to be able to produce video.
Who in the company should be able to produce video?
Right now, it's like kind of the youngest employee maybe is going to do it.
You know the guy who happens to have a camera and understands TikTok a little bit.
I guess you can sort of do it.
The social media person is supposed to be expected to do this.
But it's probably going to elevate up to the level of product design, project management, like there's going to be one of these functions at companies where you need to be able to produce good video, because that's how we communicate with the world.
Now yeah, what's gonna be the person who's least embarrassed?
What's funny is like so, starting in december, i started doing uh and i tried.
I wanted to learn instagram, so i was like i'm gonna make a video a day.
I was so ashamed to be doing this.
Yes, and like that, i like started learning how to do this and i was like This is so manipulatable.
I know how to do this now.
It took me about 30 videos to master, but what was holding me back was just the shame.
Just the shame.
It's just so embarrassing to be walking down the street and talking and be like hey, so here I'm gonna Wait, hold on.
Gotta redo it again.
Hey, so here I'm gonna.
I was like well, if I hold it a certain way, I could just pretend that I'm on FaceTime.
But
People hear me repeating the same thing over and over again.
Like this is stupid.
Like I'm acting here.
It was horrible.
Well, that's actually why it's a huge opportunity.
And I have this on one of my other ideas, which is around YouTube SEO, but that's also related to video.
But I talked to a lot of founders or people that want to be founders and people are afraid to put themselves on camera.
That's actually why there's one of the biggest opportunities, because 99 of people would rather write an article or do something with like Google SEO, or just do something that doesn't have to put themselves out there and put their face out there.
And that's actually why YouTube, I think, will be a huge opportunity, because most people are too scared to actually put a camera in front of their face and start yapping.
It's also hard, right?
Like it takes a lot of work.
Compared to a podcast.
A podcast is so much easier than doing planned scripted edited, packaged YouTube content.
And then you get the big view number in your face and you get immediate like slap, or you know that that quick high that you're then going to chase right and and that's a very tough cycle.
On youtube, i think you know short form is sort of similar.
There's like the phrase like 200 view jail, where a lot of people will create tiktoks and they just sort of never get past the 200 view number.
You just stay stuck in that state right, but there's a huge amount of i don't know self-consciousness as well as actual work that goes into doing this.
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So what's the solve here?
How do you actually solve this?
What are different angles you could take?
Sam, let's say you believe this was the problem.
I think Pat has accurately described the problem and the value that's there, but you still need a key to unlock the door.
What would be the key?
What would be an idea that you would create in space?
I could show you a couple ideas people i one guy that i think is cool he does so big companies they want to get into video hubspot obviously wants to get into video big fortune 50 fortune 100 fortune 500 companies they need to figure out youtube and they need to figure it out fast and i know a guy who has an agency that he goes for the big boys he goes for like the microsoft's the figmas and he basically just sends them He helps them build YouTube teams and he sends them packaging ideas.
Do this title, do this thumbnail, do this title, do this thumbnail because you are Microsoft or some massive company.
He charges, like it's different, probably per client, but he's told me some crazy numbers like 50 to a hundred thousand dollars per month just for YouTube strategy.
And that shows you how much B2B this is a B2B specific play here how much they're willing to pay for to have this problem solved.
And I still don't like, that's like one example.
I don't even know a lot of people that are solving this problem.
I don't know what you guys think.
Well, there's other people who are doing like done for you, right?
So we've we've talked about the guy I think his name's Josh who does the street interviews for companies.
So it's like Oh, like you know what.
You know what's the most shameful and awkward and difficult version of video is like man on the street interviews.
So he's like, just niche down into like, I'll give you that format.
You give me money.
I will walk around New York and I will stop people on the road and I will ask them, you know, three goofy questions to try to get you know.
Try to get you some clips.
Okay.
So that's like one guy who's doing the done for you service.
I know these other guys that do, they fly to companies and they, they podcast interview them.
They're like, look, Forget even getting booked on an actual podcast.
I'll just interview you.
Chop it up like you were on a podcast.
Nobody even needs to know that there's no long form podcast actually underneath this.
And I'll just give you the clips.
And for you, that's a lot easier.
Usually the CEO or the founder is pretty comfortable just sitting down and being interviewed about their company in a podcast format.
Right.
And they just do it, the whole thing turnkey.
And it's like wait, let's just cut out the part of helping you get booked on actual podcasts and cutting it.
We'll just fake the podcast.
It's great.
And so that's like another.
We will deliver this format to you for tens of thousands of dollars a month, type of thing.
Now you only need 10 customers and now you're cooking at over a hundred grand a month.
Yeah.
I like the idea of taking one popular format and then turning that into a business.
Like you said, the street interviews, do that one format for one business.
And I actually met that guy who started that business and he told me some pretty wild numbers about his revenue.
We talked about it.
Yeah.
It was doing, I think this year he's going to do 10 million in revenue.
Yeah.
One format.
It's great.
Well, here, do this, Pat.
Let's show.
Okay.
So do me a favor.
You sent me a thing where you have your Google sheet or sorry, your Google doc that you have for every single video that you made.
I want you to show it to Sean.
And the idea here is like, your pre-work for your YouTube video was really good.
And it outlined the whole story.
You did a really good job of when you showed me how to make a YouTube video.
And what Sean's describing is basically just doing that, but for companies.
Let's do it.
For the audience, Sean and I have done 750, almost 800 podcasts.
Sometimes they're super well-researched.
Other times we're like, let's just riff.
What do you want to talk about?
Tell me about your weekend.
Let's just talk.
And it requires no work.
And occasionally those will get seen by hundreds of thousands of people.
Occasionally there'll be an interview that has little research and we're just friends with the person.
And that could potentially get a million views.
But then I saw yours and it was so much more work, but worth it.
Yeah.
I'm very anal retentive and I want everything to be planned out.
And I don't like off the cuff.
I don't like spontaneous.
I want everything to be there in the doc before that gets filmed.
I was saying that's better or worse, but that's more my style.
But I can pull up.
Uh, let me just find the right one to show you.
Okay.
So This is what we call a prep doc.
I mean, My First Million has something like this too, but this one is a little different.
This is our prep doc for all of our videos that we do at Starter Story.
And we will do a couple things in here.
First, we start with the packaging.
So this is before anything gets filmed.
It's not post-film, it's pre-production.
And we do the title and thumbnail.
So this is this guy here.
It's a different guest.
But we're saying, hey, this is the thumbnail we're going to do.
And this is the video.
This video did pretty well.
I think it got like five, six hundred, seven hundred K views.
So that's why I want to show it's like a good example.
And I learned this when I read this production book.
It was like Hollywood production book.
But when you. sell a script in Hollywood, they have what's called a treatment.
And it's basically a pitch of a video of why someone will want to watch this video.
If you want to sell your script in Hollywood and convince some director to pick it up, or whatever happens in Hollywood, you have to sell this.
You don't give them the 120 page script.
You sell them the sales page of the script.
So we always have title thumb now, obviously, and then we have what's called a treatment.
I'll stop there and let me, you guys let me know what you think about this.
So let's just read the treatment.
So you go, this is Mike, founder from Australia.
Now, are you thinking about this?
Like what, what needs to be nailed in the treatment?
What do you have to, what's the important part to find when you write this pitch?
Yeah.
I always try to think about how, and this might have been written by my producer, but what I like to think about in the treatment is like the vibes and the feeling that the viewer will get when they watch it.
Why should this video exist?
Why will they leave this video and think about it for the next two weeks or send it to their friend?
I like to think about the feeling that you have when you watch it.
Maybe this isn't the best example of that, but what is the viewer going to walk away?
This isn't really like an intro.
This is more like I'm telling my producer right now sell me on this idea so that when we go to record it we know exactly what we're trying to get out of this and that it ends up being how we planned.
So in this case is the kind of the main thing I would be feeling or wanting is oh man, I really want the sort of exact playbook.
Yep.
You know, in this case, the 10-step playbook validated by a Reddit post with 151 comments of how he's built these.
You know he builds SaaS apps to 200K MRR something like that.
That's the premise of this video is that hey, I have this very specific 10 step playbook, and this is something that we found because he had written this awesome Reddit post about it.
And it was really like a simple 10 step playbook.
If I do this, I do this, I do this, I do this, something that our audience really likes.
Um, so we build the whole video around that checklist and that checklist almost becomes like a character in the video that we can further dive deeper on.
And this the whole video.
And this is another thing too I kind of have it down here a little bit is that every video has like a big idea.
Like why should this video exist?
I don't want to tell the entire story of how he was born and how he grew up and all these things.
I want to do it around one idea.
And for this video specifically, it's the 10-step playbook.
And then everything is built around that video because, when the – yeah, that's something that our audience likes and is really valuable because he used it to actually build a great business off of.
Gotcha.
That's very cool.
And then, when you go to interview them, you're trying to extract – you're trying to basically now fill in the blanks of this – skeleton you already think is a winning video.
Yep.
Yep, exactly.
And I like to look at I mean one thing that I like to look at is successful social media posts, successful Reddit posts, successful seminars or like talks that they gave at a conference.
Those are all good bones for a great and this is the checklist right here that he did um, or the 10 step process.
Those are all great bones for any video.
It's like how I like to think about videos if they've done this sort of talk or they've written this before.
It's always a great outline, I guess.
So how many of these videos are you doing a week?
We're aiming for two to three right now.
So you're making two or three of these a week.
That's a lot, yeah.
Yeah, it seems like you kind of undersold yourself at the beginning, when you were like you know, i stuck with it.
I think obviously consistency and sticking with it mattered, but it sounds like also what really mattered was uh, building a system to be able to do this at scale.
Right, a team and a system.
You, you had to do that.
I would say.
Most creators don't know how to build a system right um, and it sounds like you found the, the growth, the growth hypothesis, which was, if I put these types of stories on YouTube, there's always YouTube will keep feeding me more and more audience for this type of content.
And I can grow that way versus SEO versus anything else, right?
Like.
One of the frameworks I always liked that I think has kind of gone out of style was Eric Ries when he did a lean startup.
And he said, basically a company, you really have two main hypotheses.
There's the value hypothesis that if I do this, this will be valuable to this type of person, right?
It will help this type of person with this problem.
And then he goes.
You have the growth hypotheses, which is totally separate from the value one, which is if I do X Y Z, that will create sustainable compounding growth.
And that growth hypothesis can be.
If I run Facebook ads, I can spend this much money, acquire users for this much and generate this much to reinvest to buy the next user.
It can be SEO.
It can be YouTube.
It can be anything, right?
Where you're going to basically have some hypothesis as to how you grow.
And he's basically like, If you get the value hypothesis wrong, there's no company.
If you get the value hypothesis right but the growth one wrong, you've built a very, very small business.
If you get both of those right, you just have to be an idiot to not get the money part right at the end.
And I always liked that framing.
And so whenever I do a project, I sort of try to think about what's our value hypothesis?
And I call it a hypothesis because we don't know until we go test it.
And what's our growth hypothesis?
We don't know until we go test it.
What do you do with the money once you've already made it?
This is a question Sean and I ask our successful guests all the time.
And the reason we ask it is because if you are successful, if you do have a little bit of money, information on how to spend or invest your money, it's actually really hard to come by.
And I know this because inside of Hampton, which is my community of founders, people ask this question all the time.
People have made $10 or $50 million.
How do you spend it?
How do you invest it?
And so, to help solve this problem and answer this question, I actually interviewed 80 plus founders, guys like Scott Galloway, Alex Ramosi, Brian Johnson, people who are worth 50 100, even billions of dollars.
And we got them to reveal everything.
So their net worths, how much they pay themselves, their monthly expenses, their portfolio, things like that.
And we turn these 80 interviews into one document.
And I don't think you can find this type of information literally anywhere on the internet.
And it's completely free.
So if you want to see behind the net worth of people who are worth billions of dollars and their portfolios, their expenses, everything you go to joinhamptoncom slash reveal.
Again, joinhampton.com slash reveal.
Check it out.
I have a feeling you have a bunch of other like system related stuff up in that Chrome window with all those tabs.
And I personally am very interested in seeing you click around.
Can you do that?
Yeah, let's do it.
So yeah, as Sean said, I'm a big fan of systems and processes.
Maybe that's just like my more like logical brain, former software engineer spreadsheet kind of guy.
So I try to build my company around a lot of systems and And I had a note in here that I wanted to talk about, which was busy people are the biggest losers.
I used to be in corporate nine to five and I hated it.
I hated urgency culture.
I hated getting emails and one-off Slack messages.
I worked at Deloitte and you'd get an email and then all of a sudden, you're working a deal the whole weekend.
I hated that.
So I knew that when I started a company, I didn't want to build my business like that at all.
I wanted to build it around systems, asynchronous systems, so that I could play tennis every day at noon, and also my friends.
This is how we operate.
So everything exists on a notion.
So right here we have our all tasks that need to get done in the company are simply assigned out to people and there's no like real, like deadline or meetings about them.
There are just things to get done.
When you are can manage that deep work session that you meant to do that day.
Go and do those and we're good.
As long as you get the stuff done that we plan to and we hit our KPIs and all these things, you can work whenever you'd like and everything is here in this notion.
Additionally, we have all of our production Instagram Twitter everything, everything we post on any sort of social media.
We track it all inside notion here.
And we have freelancers helping edit the content and create the content.
Who manages this board?
I would say well, I have a.
I got a producer like producer light, I call him who's sort of starting to manage this more, but I built this over.
I wanted to get more serious about repurposing.
So I built this over like course of like two, three months, built it it's more just like created the spreadsheet and created the processes and then i sort of handed it over in the last two months to someone else.
So i have a light producer who manages this right now light as in part-time or light as in half a person, a little guy, both a little guy, a little guy who works a little amount.
Yeah, I love the busy.
People are the biggest losers because I think busy is a badge of honor in a lot of different circles.
And what a terrible badge to be proud of, in my opinion.
I remember my buddy came and worked for me and he used to work in investment banking.
And he kept saying this phrase that we were like, dude, Sam, what is this thing you keep saying?
And he would say...
He's like, yeah, he's like, can you get that to me ASAP or sooner?
And I was just like, dude, what is ASAP means as soon as possible?
What does ASAP or sooner mean?
And he's like, I don't know.
We just always say that in investment banking.
And I was like what a?
What a like fight or flight, what a cortisol phrase to just keep injecting in your company.
Yeah, you know, everyone has that friend.
When you, you hang out with them and they're always on their phone.
They're always on work emails, they're dropping out to take calls.
I remember when i was a kid i was on a hike with my buddy and his dad was on the hike.
I'll never forget this.
I was probably like nine years old or something like that, and his dad was just on the phone for the entire hike.
Really, it was like really nice hike and i was like man, i just never want to be that person.
Like you said, it's a choice.
It's more typically around a bad business or a flaw, systems flaw, or an overextension of yourself.
It's usually not like you're just handed that.
What's that EOS thing up there?
Yeah, EOS is cool.
Entrepreneur operating system is, you guys are probably familiar with that, right?
Yeah, I've never actually done it.
Do you do it, Sam, at Hampton?
Do you pay for EOS?
Well, you don't have to pay for it.
You could read a book and just make your own shit.
People pay for the implementer and all that stuff.
Yeah, I paid an implementer for a one-day seminar with our leadership team.
And that was like 20 grand or something?
No, no.
It was like $3,000 for one day.
Oh, you got the clearance integrator, or what did you do?
No, someone who was a certified implementer or something.
I was going to hire him and then I showed him my pre-work and he's like well, you guys are actually almost there.
Let's just meet with your whole team for six hours and I'll teach everyone how to do it, and then we'll go over your current rocks and I'll show you the right format, and then you're good to go.
It looks like.
Is this the first company you did it at?
No, I did it at The Hustle as well.
EOS specifically?
Yeah.
Oh, wow.
Yeah, I'm a fan of it.
I think that... Are you like a I swear by it kind of guy or where are you at with it?
I swear by a... We use like a transformer version.
So for example, EOS, for those listening, it's an operating system run your company.
The book is called Traction by this guy named Gino.
Gino, by the way, Sean has asked to come on a whole bunch.
So if we want, we can invite him on.
But basically the crux of the whole thing is your L10 meeting, which happens for us every Monday at three o'clock.
It's a two or one and a half or two hour meeting.
And each team has some number or metric or goal that they are assigned to and then tasks below to reach that goal.
And we go over each week what's going well, what's not going well and how to improve.
Typically, EOS is divided quarterly.
We actually at Hampton do ours every six weeks.
So we do rock planning every six weeks as opposed to quarterly.
I think quarterly is too long for a startup.
So you can kind of manipulate it to fit your needs.
But over the course of many, many years, we've kind of made our own.
I like the six weeks.
We do it quarterly, but...
I already like that.
It just takes too long.
It's like with a startup.
Like with a startup, like you get.
You can get new information relatively quick.
And so what we do is we actually, each team actually only, we try to limit it to two rocks.
So each team just gets two important rocks and that's six weeks.
And then we change them or, or keep them, but whatever we want to do every six weeks.
Yeah.
Yeah.
And then you have a scorecard.
And what we're looking at is your scorecard where you go over every single week what's going on.
So this looks like the scorecard that you go over at your L10 meeting.
Yep.
It gives you nice – for someone like me with no management experience.
I have an MBA.
I don't know how to manage people.
It was nice.
We've been doing it for like two – over two years.
It's nice to just have a basic – I don't think it's the perfect system, but I think it's a system –
For someone who's a creator, like we talked about earlier, who wants to start building more of a business, or someone who's going from solopreneur, like me, that didn't intend to build a business.
It's a good rails or system for KPIs planning.
And it's not perfect by any means, but it is a system.
And most people just need a system.
Can I say a quick disclaimer?
Because I used to be the kind of guy who...
Somebody.
I'd be watching something or I'd hear a talk and somebody would be like oh, I use this system.
They give me some acronym.
And then they're like, yeah, this is what I do.
This is it's so good for me.
And I'd be like, ah, that's what I've been missing.
Just that's the tool.
I was one tool away.
I was one framework away, one acronym away from success.
And turns out, spoiler, I was never one acronym away from success.
And there's a specific type of person and a specific moment in time when you need a system tool.
And that is when you have growth, but you have a growing headache.
So the business is growing healthily, but your headache is growing, you know, maybe even more than that or proportionately to that.
And I think what most people have is a business that is not really growing enough.
And then they try to add systems and processes together.
And it actually slows them down and they don't even grow faster, because growth often is like a matter of, like striking a vase, like drilling for oil.
You don't need to be super efficient.
You just need to find the oil.
And sometimes that's brute force.
Sometimes it's a little bit of gut instinct.
Sometimes it's a little bit of cowboyness to trying different little experiments.
But I think you know I just want to say that out loud because I wasted a lot of time when I actually needed growth.
And then I adopted systems of people who had growth.
And I've conflated the two.
I thought the system creates the growth.
No, no, the system manages your headache as you grow.
That's how it's been for me, at least my personal experience.
I'll take the other side of that, which is, I think that there are times where the system does create growth.
Because I think, typically what happens when you have companies?
You can get to a million or two million or three million in revenue.
Through a combination of either luck, or you knew how to do one thing well, or for a variety of reasons.
But what I have found is whenever I hit those that like three, whenever I get to like three million in revenue, I then like think like okay, I need to now go do this new marketing channel or do this new thing.
And oftentimes the actual answer is no.
You should actually do less things and just do this one marketing thing over and, over and over again.
You're saying at 3 million.
I'm saying most people are not even at the 3 million.
Most people don't get the 3 million.
Most people who watch this or are going to watch any type of content on YouTube are pre getting one two, three million in revenue and for those people i think that's the sucker like spot where you think you might be a tool away.
So i totally agree with you if you've already got the thing, that's again you, you have healthy growth.
If you've gotten to one two, three million in revenue and you know from there you need, you need systems to scale right.
But you don't need systems to scale if you don't have a working thing or even when your team size gets kind of above four people, you kind of like have to like have something.
But yeah, I hear what you're saying.
You want to show us anything else?
I want to ask you a question about this blog post.
In December 2020 and maybe you could take us back to like how the business was doing back then.
You wrote a blog post that says 2020.
I am my own greatest obstacle.
Yeah.
I already, I haven't even read the post.
I already nodded my head because I think every entrepreneur gets there to this realization.
Can you explain where you were at this blog post and what this blog post means?
Yep.
This blog post all revolves around a single week in my life where I this post COVID.
I was about three years into building the business.
And what most people don't know, they think, oh, you just built Starter Story and you grew that.
Well, no, I was the guy with like 10 side projects.
And I had two businesses that were like I was splitting my time on and then other side projects and other personal brand and doing all these things.
Starter Story was making $8,000.
These are sort of high level numbers, but $8,000.
It was making $8,000 a month.
And then this other business I was building, which is like a software plugin type app, was doing 2000 a month.
I thought this was going to be a bigger than Starter Story, because I didn't think Starter Story was going to be big.
And I was so burnt out that I said I heard about this Think Week by Bill Gates, where you go off to a cabin and you just think about stuff.
So I couldn't afford a cabin in the woods or anything at that point.
And I decided, okay, I'm just going to go get in my car.
I'm going to drive across the country and I'm going to think.
Through that process, through that week of not being on the phone, this is no social media, nothing.
I couldn't even check my email.
I realized that Starter story was the business I should be going all in on.
This is the business that I was meant to be building.
I'm throwing basically no time into this business that's doing $8,000 a month.
And I'm throwing all my time into this business that I'm supposed to be building.
This is how I get into YC and I do all these things.
I should.
I'm putting 20% of my effort into 80% of the revenue.
Let's just drop everything else.
And in that moment, after that week, after I realized all this, I basically sold that business, stopped working on anything else and I went all in on Starter Story.
And this is three years after starting it.
Best decision I ever made, obviously.
And I don't know if I would have made that decision if I didn't take that week off.
And essentially...
I doubled the business's revenue in a single month after that, and then everything went up after that.
And that's probably why I'm here today selling my company and talking to you guys is that I realized that I was the biggest obstacle, right.
I was limiting my own success by thinking I could do everything.
I love that.
That's very powerful.
What sounds right on paper and what's actually right for me might be two different things.
Because a lot of people would tell you, you should do the SaaS business, recurring revenue.
It's amazing.
You know, you could do this plugin and it's software and all these great things.
But you kind of realize like, the thing I'm good at, the thing I enjoy, the thing that has momentum, is this other thing.
And if I keep splitting focus, I'll never know.
There's something that I like to call, you have your ego business.
This is the business you're supposed to build, the business that you look up to other people because they built those, or that's the business that you're supposed to start, or whatever.
But actually, follow the money.
What's making money?
What are you truly good at making?
What are you meant to build?
I think it's like a lot of people watching this, maybe think about that.
What's the ego business and what's the actual business?
So for this Think Week, you just drove 3,000 miles?
Just like, I'm looking at the map.
It looks like you started, where'd you start?
Salt Lake City?
Yeah, I was living with my mom at the time.
So shout out my mom for housing me in this time when I was trying to figure things out.
But yeah, I went from Salt Lake down to the West Coast and then up and around back to Salt Lake.
Drove in like a giant circle, basically.
Yeah.
On the West Coast.
From Salt Lake all the way up to Jackson Hole, but in a circle format.
Being 29 and living at home, and I think in this blog you say you met a girl later on.
So I assume you're single 29, living at home, trying to do this thing.
That's definitely not the most glamorous place to be in.
I was more just, I would do anything.
I worked in corporate for five years.
I worked at Deloitte, I worked at some startups, I worked at some big companies.
And my motivation, I was so sick and tired of that.
I think a lot of entrepreneurs just start early.
They start at 17, they start at 18.
I actually went through college and the corporate life.
So starting this business was more about freedom.
And I knew I would do anything.
I moved to Asia because it could be like $1,000 a month.
I lived with my mom because I could not go back to a regular job.
That was my main motivation.
And then obviously the business started working out.
And that's why I live with my mom.
So check this out.
This is your monthly revenue at the time.
So it looks like for the year preceding your think week, you were basically plateaued from August 2019 to mid 2020, August 20, almost August 2020, June 2020.
And you're basically at 8K a month for a year flat.
You do the think week, you make the decision six months later.
You're now over 25000 a month and the trajectory you change the trajectory of the business with that.
Yep.
I think that's a great story.
Also in this blog.
I, like you know you were talking about, like you know how you felt.
You know, like I know, I had so many projects and tasks I know I should do, but at the same time I felt unmotivated to start any of them.
I'm in this really weird spot right now.
I don't feel motivated about work.
Nothing feels super important to work on.
I don't feel like tweeting or writing.
I don't want to read any books, you know, kind of burnout, essentially.
And, you know, the solution to burnout wasn't like I need to take six months off.
It was like I need to do something that's just more in alignment with what I'm trying to do, and simplify rather than keep adding.
Yep, exactly.
That's cool, man.
Well, congrats.
Congrats on all the success.
Congrats on, you know, fingers crossed that this thing closes.
We have to air this episode anyways, and it will be a cautionary tale about counting your chickens before they hatch.
But thank you guys.
Yeah, you guys are huge inspirations to me.
Been listening to My First Million obviously got a lot of inspiration to do what we do through everything that you've done both in My First Million and out of it.
Thank you guys for having me.
I feel lucky.
I feel lucky.
Check out Pat.
Check out Starter Story on YouTube.
And yeah, all the things.
That's it.
That's the pod.
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