SPEAKER_01
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SPEAKER_02
In this class, there was one guy who was always talking. He would raise his hand, first thing for every single question, he had a big opinion on all these topics, I'm like, dude, how does this guy know about all this stuff? And he was just super into the internet. And at the time, my head labeled this guy as a loser.
I was like, wow, this guy's like this over eager student who's like kind of a no at all and like kind of sucking up to the teacher. And like, why is he so into this? Wow, what a loser. He spends his nights researching the pros and cons of net neutrality.
Okay, now fast forward. Now that's me, I'm that loser. I was just late to the game.
And that guy Dan ended up joining Coinbase as one of the early employees.
SPEAKER_00
I feel like I can rule the world. I know I could be what I want to. I put my all in it like days off on a road.
Let's travel never looking back.
SPEAKER_01
Abraiu, what is your rating of today's episode?
SPEAKER_03
I'd go A minus. We rambled a lot, but I kind of like that, that we go into different topics. We remember everywhere.
Podbro, Hacker News stuff, Crypto for Hacker News, the origin stories of Product Hunt, 75 Hard, Tony Horton, Sean pouring his heart out at the end. We got everything in there. What was your top two favorite things? I like talking about like the origin story.
So Product Hunt, how Ryan kind of hacked his way to growing that, that was kind of cool. The P90X origin story as well, that was kind of cool. I have to look up that YouTube video that Sean mentioned, because that was definitely interesting.
SPEAKER_01
Listeners, let us know if you like having this up front. Let's get to the today's podcast. All right, what's up? What's up? Sorry, I was late.
I was sitting here working.
SPEAKER_02
It's a podcast, bro.
SPEAKER_01
Nobody knows you were late. I'm never the late one. I take pride in that.
And I was just literally sitting here working and I had no idea. I didn't even look at the video.
SPEAKER_02
The funny thing is I was also two minutes late, but when I saw your message that was like, hey, sorry, I'm running out of breather in a minute. I was like, boom, hop it. I need to hop in there now.
So I'm there first.
SPEAKER_01
I'm not typically the late one, but I was. But I will tell you a few things that I was working on. So just a quick recap.
I'm working on some growth stuff. So I want to run out just a few quick ideas by you. This will only take a second.
But first, so in the last, whatever we launched, however long that's been, not including month one to month two, because it was like a 500 percentage growth rate. So not including that. We have grown on average 10% a month.
This month, April is not over. But if you take the average of the trailing three weeks and give it a fourth week, it's going to be about 400, a little bit over 400,000 downloads, which if you take that, multiplied by to January. So we're going to hit a million downloads a month by around January at 10% growth rate.
If we keep going at this rate.
SPEAKER_02
Yeah. So right now we're on pace for about 5 million downloads a year. And then what you're saying is it's more.
100,000 downloads a month. That's 5 million a year.
SPEAKER_01
That's assuming zero growth.
SPEAKER_02
Right. With a growth, it'll be like 6 million or something. More. 8.
SPEAKER_01
Yeah. Because the last, the end of the year is going to be starting to get 800, 900, a million downloads a month.
SPEAKER_02
And dude, if people start commuting, they need a little good good good in their ears while they're commuting. That's what we needed. We took a 20% cut, I think, when COVID happened.
Yeah. I saw the numbers dip and then we rebuilt from there.
SPEAKER_01
So the current growth rate is actually quite good. It's just like, this is the same thing of like, if you just focus and just do the same old same old over and over and over again, it's going to work. But of course, we want to expedite that.
And so the things that we're working on is we've already talked about what we worked on. But let me bring up a few things. First, I actually think that we need to be a little bit tighter with our content, meaning, I don't watch sports, but I know you do.
What are the sports shows where they go through topic to topic and they have a time limit?
SPEAKER_02
Yeah. Pardon the interruption. They do that.
We're like, five minutes. It's like, all right, we're talking about. And they always have the shit people care about.
Or they have these little names on the side. And it's like, you kind of want to tune in to hear what they're going to say about X. And what are they going to say about Y?
SPEAKER_01
So I think we should start doing that. And I'm trying to figure out how to do it. But I would like us to start.
I'm going to try it for an episode and I'll coordinate it. Next, everything that is on Instagram and on YouTube, we have to drive all traffic to iTunes, not to Spotify. Even though a lot of people say they listen to Spotify, the numbers are more people.
Just barely they'll listen to iTunes. But if you click Subscribe on iTunes, it automatically downloads. And we get credit for that.
Whereas Spotify, it doesn't do that. So gaming the system and playing within the rules, that's the way to go. And we currently are not linking to any of our iTunes stuff.
Finally, or no, second to last thing is recapping old stuff. So we have 170 episodes. Did you know that? I didn't know that.
That's a lot. And so what I'm going to do is go through all the old ones and bucket them into categories. And we can re-release them just with the new intro.
Because I think they'll be great.
SPEAKER_02
That's really smart. If we basically take our best episodes from earlier when we had half the size of the audience, and maybe we cut off some bullshit if it was like there was something done. But we just take the, you know, in the month of like last year, this month, if we had three good episodes and we just say, boom, we're bringing back those business ideas and repackaging them in a way that's better.
And we sort of re-release our greatest hits. I think that's a good idea.
SPEAKER_01
That's not what I was thinking. Trim's the fact. I think that will work.
But what I was thinking of is grouping it. So let's say that in episode five and then 34 and then in eight. There was a religion-based thing, like a church.
SPEAKER_02
Make a religion-based, composite episode.
SPEAKER_01
Yeah, yeah, yeah. So you do that. And the reason why is so you can create a how-to title.
Because what I've looked at, all the data, anything that's how-to related gets more than pass, more than other stuff. Speaking of which, and this is one of the last things, we can retitle old ones to be more click, I'll fucking say it, clickbait headlines. And then last but not least, Alex Garcia on my team, who's been going wild on Twitter, is going to join the podcast team a little bit as growth.
And then we also are hooking up with HubSpots. They've got an outsourced production company that I want to look into. And they have claimed that if you get a lot of, like if you increase the production value significantly, even on shit like this, it increases downloads.
I don't believe it, but it's interesting.
SPEAKER_02
Right. Well, we're going to throw it all at the wall, and we're going to see what happens. Speaking of growth, can I transition to an app that's growing that I want to talk about? Or we can actually, we can do your rundown of the things we're going to talk about on this episode.
So I'm going to talk about some things that are in the fitness space. So this app 75 Hard and how it relates to P90X and a whole bunch of different fitness things trends that I've seen. So I'm going to break that down in detail.
We're going to talk about hacker news and basically niche news websites. And you have an opinion on that and so do I. And then we might talk about MVNOs.
I'm not sure if I'll get to it today. Did you have any other ones that you wanted to talk about? And what was your last one? MVNOs, this is when you basically can start your own cell phone carrier company.
SPEAKER_01
It's pretty cool. There's a bunch of stuff. I think that that actually probably might be a lead for, I think, the next one, because that's a pretty big idea.
I think it's really interesting. And what I did this week is I actually just researched everything you had. And I have points and counterpoints.
And I didn't research that one because it's very interesting. Can we wait for the next one?
SPEAKER_01
It takes a lot, yeah. Right. And instead, go to this Teachable for Devs thing, because I have some intel for that. I went and got some intel on that.
I went and got intel on 75 Har. And I think the most interesting is the hacker news stuff. I went and talked to a friend, Andrew, your friend, our friend, who owns a company in the space.
And they got all those numbers. OK, great.
SPEAKER_02
Where do you want to start? We can start on any of those topics. Hacker news. OK, so I was looking at, I saw this tweet from this guy, Dan Romero.
And Dan Romero, actually, it's kind of a funny story. I'll just lead in with a personal story. So when I was in college, when you were in college, were you trying, what was your strategy? Were you trying to take the hard classes, the easy classes, what you're interested in? Yeah, so if you could take, so some people do the hard ones.
Some people do what they're most interested in. And some people, like me, were just looking for the easy way out. And it sounds like you're the same.
And so I took.
SPEAKER_02
Rate my professor. I used rate my professor. And I would find the easiest classes.
I would find out what classes the football players and the basketball players got to take, because those are the easy classes. So like Rocks for Jocks was the code name for this class. I was like geology, but it was like the easiest fucking class ever.
I got into this class. Rock. I don't even know how. I was genuinely trying to take a like an interesting class about sports, sports, psychology, sports medicine or something like that.
And it turns out this was a class only the female basketball players at Duke were in. So there was 10 students. They were all the female basketball players at Duke.
The class never I looked at the schedule. I was like, oh, there's no classroom. Where does this? Where do I go? Where do I go for my class? I even know the teacher is like, there's no physical meetings for this or side of how you got it.
Oh my gosh. But he's like, you just need to read this one book. It was the Lance Armstrong book, lifts whatever his book was called.
And at the end of the year, so read that one book, which is like the easiest fucking book to read, by the way. And then at the end of the year, you write a two page report on it. And that was the whole class.
No, you're kidding me. Sorry, Duke, you know, you definitely do the thing that all schools do with education.
SPEAKER_01
I get that why it's cool when you're a kid, but also as a kid. And now I was an adult who's going to send his kids to college. I'm like, what a waste of money.
SPEAKER_02
What? What? Yeah, well, dude, I thought I had hit the lottery.
SPEAKER_01
I was a one athlete in college and they made me take. I was a runner, mind you. They made me take Jim and the gym class was a rope walking.
SPEAKER_02
It's like if you got to the classroom, you're done. You do.
SPEAKER_01
You show up and then you go for a walk that it was called a rope.
SPEAKER_00
And I was a one athlete.
SPEAKER_02
So, okay. So anyway, so in that process, one class that I took that I was just trying to find an easy class was called like the internet or something like that. I was like, oh, bingo.
I know about that one. Let me give that one. And at this time, I'm not thinking like I'm not who I am today.
Right. I don't, I wasn't thinking about business. I didn't think I was going to go into the tech space.
I thought I was going to be a doctor. I was a pretty, I was very average student, like be minus student, very lazy. And that's who I was.
And so I go to this class and in this class, I'm basically just there again, because I'm trying to coast to an a and some easy class that's called the internet. It can't be that hard. And it really wasn't that hard.
It was a discussion about like internet topics, like net neutrality and stuff like that. And I didn't really give a shit. I just sat there quietly, like doing the crossword puzzle in the like school newspaper eating Chick-fil-A in this like classroom, hoping the professor never calls on me.
But in this class, there was one guy who was always talking. He would raise his hand. First thing for every single question.
He had a big opinion on all these topics. I'm like, dude, how does this guy know about all this stuff? And he was just super into the internet. And at the time, my head labeled this guy as a loser.
I was like, wow, this guy's like this over eager student. Dork. Who's like kind of a no at all and like kind of sucking up to the teacher. And like, why is he so into this? Wow, what, what a loser.
He spends his nights researching the like pros and cons of net neutrality. Okay. Now fast forward. Now that's me.
I'm that loser. I was just late to the game. And that guy, Dan ended up joining Coinbase as one of the early employees.
And he basically helped Brian Armstrong, the CEO of Coinbase, was kind of like, did this tweet storm the day they went public, right? They go public at a hundred billion dollar valuation. And he's like talking about the journey. He's like, when we started this, you know, it was such humble beginnings.
Nobody knew about the space, blah, blah, blah. He's telling them, and then this happened. And then Dan Romero came on board and like, how did he get this? Like how break us into Europe? And that was a pivotal moment for the company where we became like the only crypto company that was like partnered with banks in Europe.
And I was like, oh my God, it's that fucking guy from my classroom. Holy shit, he made it. And, you know, I bet this guy, you know, banked tens of millions, if not a hundred million dollars plus easily just on Coinbase.
And if he owned any Bitcoin along the way, which of course he did because he, he joined in 2014. And if you're a believer at that time, you probably grab some. So anyways, that's my short story of like, wow, if you're a college student listening to this now, just be the nerd now.
Trust me, you're going to want to be that nerd later and really think through, what are you, what are you optimizing for? Like ease or like learning something, like doing something interesting.
SPEAKER_01
I make people. I think we have to send this podcast to Dan. I think you should apologize.
SPEAKER_02
I will issue. He doesn't even probably know who I was. Cause again, I was this fucking silent guy eating to play in the back of the class, never said a word.
I was just judging him in my head and I do apologize to Dan for judging him. And clearly I was wrong and he's done amazing. So anyways, he, he put out a tweet, I follow him and he was like, why isn't there a hacker news? So if you don't know, hacker news is this website that people just post links.
It's like Reddit. And it's based for engineers.
SPEAKER_01
Reddit, but only one forum and well, it's not a forum. It's like you post links and it's all nerd culture, internet startup culture.
SPEAKER_02
We, you know, back in the day, we used to get the newspaper every day and open it up and like my dad would go to the business and politics section. I would go to the sports section. Well, the internet just made it so that there's an infinite number of sections.
And so now if you're an engineer, you would wake up and you would maybe go to
SPEAKER_01
hacker news every single day.
SPEAKER_02
Same. And so anyways, it's cool website. It's, you know, started by Paul Graham and sort of baked into Y Combinator.
I've done an exercise, by the way, I'm trying to like, what would you value hacker news at? And I think it's sort of priceless. I pretty much think there's no price where Paul would sell hacker news. No, it is that valid.
SPEAKER_01
Because it's probably a billionaire and he loves it. But if you were just like a normal guy and you had a valued off revenues, I think it would be worth 50 to $100 million. I bet you it can make $8 million a year in revenue with no employees.
And I bet you it's been capable of doing that for about 10 years.
SPEAKER_02
Yeah, I would say easily $100 million because it's also the category leader. It's the end of one in its category. Anyway, so Dan tweeted this out.
He goes, why isn't there a hacker news for crypto? You know, like any like discussion for all the interesting things that are happening besides the price, which I think is like the key distinction here, which is that almost all the conversation, there's a lot of places that talk about crypto and they're almost all just tracking the daily price moves. Like over the weekend, crypto went down like 17%. And so everybody was like talking about the price.
And in reality, there's a whole lot of other interesting developments, technologies, kind of like usage that's happening that's not price related. And you almost need a firewall to say, look at this. And in this forum, you don't talk about price because otherwise price is always going to dominate the conversation.
That's just the nature of crypto. And so I thought that was kind of interesting. I started looking into some of these.
And I guess like for me, I would say like there is an opportunity for somebody to create the hacker news of crypto. And so I'll throw out a couple that were pretty cool that I found. One is casebitcoin.
com. And this is basically a website that's just, it's just a dashboard of stats. So it's not like news and links.
It's just dashboard of stats. That's basically saying this is the case for Bitcoin. It's like Bitcoin is now 10% of gold market cap.
Here's the top headlines about pro Bitcoin. It's just a pro Bitcoin dashboard.
SPEAKER_01
Do you remember that time that you made Bitcoin headlines? Because you tweeted that you're putting 20% of your net worth into Bitcoin. And someone wrote like entrepreneur and investor Sean Prairie. And then you didn't, I don't think you did, but 20% of your net worth.
No, no, I did.
SPEAKER_02
I did. I tweeted I was putting 25%. I ended up putting 20% and then it grew.
The price started going up so fast that that quickly became it's now like almost 50% of my net worth or something. So it's, you know, it ended up being more, but, but it was ridiculous that there was news about it. Cause I think they thought I was much wealthier than I am.
Like I'm not going to move the needle crypto. I could put a hundred percent of my network in it. It was not going to move the needle of crypto.
Crypto is too big. And so that was funny. My, actually my college friends texted that news article to me this week and they were like, whoa, what, what is this? By the way, what have you become? Yeah.
SPEAKER_01
And that was like before you actually got famous fame. I mean, you're like kind of a big deal now. And that was like pre big deal.
SPEAKER_02
Well, that's part of the strategy of becoming a big deal was a care yourself like you're a big deal, right? Me announcing how I'm moving my net worth around is sort of like carrying yourself like you're a big deal even before you are. And people started to like, they just accepted my, my implication that I'm a big deal for tweeting.
SPEAKER_01
I was calling like my car, my furniture assets and just start using words like that. Exactly. That's what I'm doing in liquidation.
SPEAKER_02
It's like, now you're doing a garage sale.
SPEAKER_01
Well, we're going to, yeah, we're having a fire, a fire sale on some of the assets. Exactly.
SPEAKER_00
That's the garage.
SPEAKER_02
So I was looking at some of these websites, CryptoPanic.com is a cool one. Anyway, so there's some of these, nothing I would say has broken through as like the place where people who care about this long term and are not, they don't want to get caught in the price roller coaster day to day where they go.
All right. So I'm going to pause there. That was just the idea.
Hey, I think somebody can create this. I think maybe Pomp or somebody who's like a central figurehead in crypto, similar to Paul Graham, maybe Pomp should be creating the hackeries for crypto. That is specifically not about price.
I think that would be a smart move. If I was Pomp, I would consider doing that. But you had some thoughts on these types of businesses and I think that's where more value will come.
So go into that. Yeah.
SPEAKER_01
So let's call these aggregators, I guess, because you're not actually creating anything, but you're aggregating and the hustle is like a, is a little bit of an aggregator. We create stuff, but we aggregate a lot. So I know a little bit about aggregating, aggregator businesses.
And I think that they're really, really great if you can have them, if you can make them. I was with Ryan, what's his name? Ryan Hoover, the day before he was launching Product Hunt, which is ultimately kind of like an aggregator. Totally.
And he was telling me about it and I go, Oh, this is really dumb. This is not going to work. I was wrong.
It worked out wonderfully. He did a really good job. Financially, it was mildly successful, but it was culturally incredibly successful and could have been even more successful if you owned it for a long time.
But anyway, now I went and talked to Andrew Wilkinson, who's going to be on the podcast actually tomorrow, which I don't know for the people listening, when that actually airs tomorrow, the next day, something like that. He bought this thing called web designer news. So it's actually just web design.
I think it's just designer news. Oh, just, is it just as that? Are you sure? I think it's just designer news.com.
SPEAKER_02
Yeah, I'm pretty sure it is.
SPEAKER_01
Let's see. Oh yeah. Sorry, not web designer designer news.
Okay. So basically this was a hacker news thing. It was just for designers.
SPEAKER_02
It's like it was literally a clone. Like it looked almost the same, except for then hacker news kind of ugly. They just cleaned up the design a little bit, but it's the same idea.
SPEAKER_01
Yeah. And it was pretty, pretty good when he bought it. And I asked him, how's it going? And he said, it's basically dead.
It's done. So, I think he got the money back from what he paid for it, as in he earned that much back, but he, I don't think he anticipates making a lot more money. And what I thought was his case, his opinion and what happened, my opinion and what happened to his site is actually kind of the same.
But basically, here's what he told me. He goes, the issue is you have to get a whole bunch of people to visit daily. And you're only as good as your posters because it's social news.
And there's endless amounts of way to gain the system with a bunch of bots, which oddly people do it a lot. So you need constant moderation and algorithms, which is very expensive to hire the devs to make that. And then you also need real live moderators, which also is expensive.
And then if you have any period where the content gets bad, then everyone just moves to Reddit. So it's a little bit like lightning in the bottle. And it has this kind of magical network effect, but it's hard to catch lightning in a bottle is what he said.
And I actually agree with that. And so my point is I actually think that if you can build this, it is one of the greatest things that you couldn't own. And there's a few examples of this.
So there's TechMeme, which is all these are all things I'm fan of. So it's all going to be a little bit.
SPEAKER_02
But TechMeme, I can't submit to it as a user, right? It's not social news. They curate it themselves.
SPEAKER_01
Well, it solves the same problem.
SPEAKER_02
Yeah, it's all the same problem for the end customer, which is you go to a place and you see all the interesting links of the day in my niche that I carry.
SPEAKER_01
It's the same habit and the reason why it's important to mention TechMeme because with hacker news, as with Reddit, the creators or the owners of the site can actually just submit a ton of fake stuff that you wouldn't even know they submitted and it would look populated. And that's in fact how Reddit got started.
SPEAKER_02
So the hard part is there's a great video, by the way, on YouTube, if you want to see the how Reddit got started, their fake until you make a strategy where they had 20 or so accounts of different names and they were posting every day on the subreddit like from 20 different personalities to try to make it look like there was this great young community of interesting people. And then they described they would do that for like, I don't know, a couple months or something. And then they described the day where they went on it and just it was all happening before they went with their fake accounts.
Like the real people had built up enough steam and had learned like Monkey See Monkey Do they had learned how to behavior. And they were just posting the links and commenting. And it was like, wait, dude, that's not my account.
There's a real account. Holy shit, this is actually working. And so that's how they started.
SPEAKER_01
It takes a lot of time and Reddit was 10 years old. So when they were getting, I mean, like the amount of websites that existed versus then, then versus now, they had a lot less competition. It was still really hard.
But what I have found with this, okay, so there's TechMeme. TechMeme just automatically pulls headlines based off what's most shared on the internet. And then another example is Let's Run.
So Let's Run.com. The listener or the owner of Let's Run.com is actually a listener of our podcast.
And I'm a big fan of Let's Run.com. And it's basically the same thing. If people submit articles and they comment on it.
That's in the running niche. Yeah. Is that why you go there? It's like dorky runners, long distance runners, very dorky.
SPEAKER_02
So, so let me tell the story of Product Hunt at the beginning. How, how Ryan did it, right? Because I think for a lot of these, it's one thing to hear. Oh, it's like, I would agree with you.
These social news sites, social news aggregators are amazing when they work and they usually don't. Okay. So how do you get it to work? Well, I actually got to see Ryan build Product Hunt kind of from the inside, from day one. And if anybody doesn't know, like there's a funny article, basically Ryan was interviewing to come work at Monkey Inferno where I was the CEO at the time.
I was trying to recruit Ryan because I loved his blog posts. And he was interviewing with us and he got the final interview and didn't make it. And I kept in touch with him.
I was like, Hey, you know, sorry, I didn't work out, but like, I'm still a big fan of yours. And, you know, I want to give you the feedback why it didn't work. Hope that's not salt in the wound.
But, you know, if I knew I'd be curious, why didn't I get it? And, you know, I really do want to keep in touch. And then the next week he was like starting Product Hunt, literally, I think one week later he launched Product Hunt. And, and I remember like you, I was thinking, Oh, this is like cool, but this is like just some pet projects not going to go anywhere.
Why doesn't he come work on the real shit? And in reality, Product Hunt was more successful than anything we did in the lab. So, you know, he won in the end, but I would say what worked for him. So he started it on this thing called Linky Dink, which was like an off the shelf little social news tool.
I don't even think it's still around. It's not, he started it there.
SPEAKER_01
Yeah, it was like an email. It was so weird.
SPEAKER_02
It was like a, so the way it worked was it was like heck of news. It was a list of links, but then it would send a recap to all the subscribers of that board, like an email recap. So even if you forgot to go to the website, you'd get the wrap up automatically.
That was kind of like a killer feature there because you're trying to build a habit of people coming, but they first like, if you could just deliver them value through email, this will work. So I would say like that was one like nice thing he did. He didn't need a tech, he didn't need an engineer at the beginning.
He used Linky Dink and Linky Dink, the key was that they were, that they were email the recount. Then he only invited like friends that he had developed that he knew were as nerdy about products as he was. So I think I'm user number 15 or 17 of product hunt.
And it's because I was one of his nerdy friends who really like geeked out about new apps and new products, right? That's what this podcast kind of is.
SPEAKER_01
This word product or like now you'll see people like, oh, I'm a product guy. I'm almost, wasn't that popular then? I'm almost positive. People didn't really use that word or phrase or if they did, people were like, what are you talking about?
SPEAKER_02
Well, it was around like product manager was obviously a phrase. People talk about products, but it wasn't as like, it wasn't seen as like an anime fan or a sports fan. Like it didn't seem, it wasn't like a thing.
And he really said it a lot. This is for people who geek out on a product. That was his tagline at the beginning.
That's why you should join this.
SPEAKER_01
And I had never heard about phrasing. I knew what he was talking about, but I'd never heard anyone say that. And so he definitely kind of created a little bit of a category.
He made it cool. I love you from that.
SPEAKER_02
I think that he made it cool to do this thing. That's what I mean. So then he, he curated the initial people and they were cool people.
So it was like, cause he had been blogging for four years before that. He had built up a nice network at Silicon Valley. So that again, that's the hard work that happened before that prepared him to succeed.
So then he invites Kevin Rose. He invites, you know, a bunch of interesting people onto this thing. And so people share and he set out some rules.
So just like I was saying for crypto, hey, this is for all crypto news, except price. He said that for product. And he's like, this is for cool new products.
Don't post Facebook and Instagram. Like we all know about that. This is for the shit that you don't think the rest of the group has seen yet.
So that's where the real value came. That's where you would get here. That was different than going to TechCrown, check one of the app store charts or wherever.
It's like, here you were going to discover the new thing first and not going to see shit that everybody already knew about. So it kind of made it an insider. Like it set the level playing field of like, it's like, if you were creating a wine club, you would say like, you know, this is for people who actually know about wines, don't bring, you know, the $7 yellowtail wine here.
And so anyways, I thought he got that right. Then he made it where you had to be whitelisted to participate in the community, meaning the average person could not just go post. So that solved the bots problem and the moderation problem because he was only letting trusted people post and anybody could view.
And that in this double effect of it was now exclusive. People wanted to get in. They would beg to get in.
They would prove themselves. And if they got in, they would be on their best behavior. So they wouldn't get kicked out.
And the last thing he did was he was pretty maniacal about curating the community and the products. Like every morning he would wake up. I don't know.
He's like kind of a robot. He like wakes up at 5am or 6am every day. Like he's one of those guys who's like super productive type of person and good habits.
You know, he would go to Phil's coffee shop, he would sit down on his laptop, and then he would immediately be scouring Twitter. Anybody who mentioned product time, he would thank them. Anybody who posted a cool product, he would say, Hey, I'd love for you to post this on product time.
He wouldn't do it. He would tell them. Hey, this would be really cool if you post a product.
I just gave you access. And so that built this habit. And he did that every goddamn day for like, I don't know, nine months or something like that before you hired a community manager.
And it still probably crushes.
SPEAKER_01
I use product time regularly. I don't actually know the numbers anymore because I'm not sure. But I bet you it's still quite successful and it could potentially be successful for 10 years.
Plus. Right.
SPEAKER_02
If you've ever seen somebody build a fire without matches, like I watch Survivor. So that's something I'm not a camper. I don't know how it works.
But on Survivor, this is like one of the mainstays is build a fire. That's how I view building a community. Like when you build a fire on Survivor, it's like, first, you're going to like take the flint and you're like, just got to shave the magnesium off the flint.
Boom, boom, boom, boom, boom. All right. Now you got enough of that.
And now you're going to like, you know, add the next piece. You're going to like try to get that to catch. And then as soon as it catches, you got to very carefully don't let it like extinguish.
It's so like fragile at that time. You got to start adding the little like brushwood or whatever. I don't know the words, but like, there's a certain type of thing.
You add next, then you add the sticks, then you build. And now all you have is raging bonfire. To me, that's like what building a community is like.
I've seen the people who actually do that, that like really hard work of shaving the flint first. And I'm like, oh, shit, that's what it takes to do these like, once these communities are actually up and running. I've seen it once or twice now.
I've seen you do it as well with trends where you were posting every goddamn day in the trends group for, I don't know how many months. A lot. That was your flint phase where you were just shaving magnesium onto the wood.
SPEAKER_01
So let me tell you about something that we're launching at the hustle. You guys can use it or not. I don't care.
I'm not pimping it out right now, but it's related to this. So what we are launching tomorrow on Tuesday, this pocket comes on Wednesday. So it's actually already live, but I don't even know if you're going to be able to find it yet.
But anyway, it's called Hustle Plus. And what we're doing is we're kind of launching something just like this, because I'm obsessed with these types of products. And I love these things.
And so when a user signs up or they can click out of the email once they're already a subscriber, and they can tell us, they can either explicitly tell us what they like or implicitly, we can see some of your behavior. And then we're going to have a section of headlines. And in order to get those headlines, we built this tech that crawls the internet and finds the most shared stuff and shared headlines.
And then let's say that you tell us or you click on a bunch of articles related to media. And we've tagged all the links like this is a media and a bootstrapping story, whatever. Right. You're going to get those links in your email. So you're going to get the hustle, which is like 2000 words of like editorial stuff, but you're going to have one huge section with 10 or 20 just headlines.
Then we're hiring a team of editors to write a one sentence description of that article. So it's part human, part machine telling you interesting stuff. Very, very similar to hacker news, tech meme, things like that.
So that's actually we. That's cool. Yeah. And so we're I'm doing that because I love these types of things. So it's basically a hack.
It's very similar to a hacker news, not so much user submitted right now, but kind of a similar idea. So I love these businesses and we've talked about Drudge Report. I think that if you can get this to work, it takes a ton of work upfront, very little work to maintain.
SPEAKER_02
Yes. Yes, exactly.
SPEAKER_01
All right. Everyone, today's episode is brought to you by Imperfect Action, hosted by Steph Taylor. It's a podcast on HubSpots podcast network, the audio destination for business professionals.
Imperfect Action is a bite sized online marketing podcast for business owners. So join Steph Taylor as she answers all your business marketing questions that deep dives into the nitty gritty of online marketing, content marketing, social media marketing, and marketing for strategy for business owners. A few recent episodes include some of the biggest mistakes you can make with your launch.
Another one is why growing your audience feels so hard in 2022. And another one is five ways to make content creation less consuming. So check it out.
It's called Imperfect Action. You can look it up wherever you get your podcasts.
SPEAKER_02
Okay. So let's switch topics. Let's do one of the other ones.
SPEAKER_01
75 hard. 75 hard. Okay. So you've done a ton of research about 75 hard. I've had so many friends talk about this.
Friends that mostly are not fit and this has inspired them to get fit.
SPEAKER_02
Okay. So tell me about that part. I haven't heard any, but only Ben has told me about it.
SPEAKER_01
Oh my gosh. Everyone is talking about this man. So do you remember Van Trump report, the newsletter guy? Van Trump? I told you about this guy who's got this newsletter that crushes it and an Ag Tech.
I became friends with his son. His son lives in Kansas City. He's kind of talked to the southern accent.
He's not like a techie. He came over to my house because he was visiting in Texas. He's like, Hey, I know you have a gym.
I'm on my last workout. I need to come use your gym. Can I use it? And then another friend, Sujan Patel has been doing it and 75 hard has taken over like my friends and they commit to it like a religion.
Like they don't miss it.
SPEAKER_02
Right. So describe what it is to somebody and then I have a bunch of thoughts around it.
SPEAKER_01
So 75 hard. I think what it means, it's only got like six rules. It's basically you have to do for 75 days, two workouts a day.
Each workout needs to be 45 minutes. One workout needs to be outside. I don't think either workout needs to be particularly hard.
The only rule is that you have to sweat. The second rule is you have to have a diet for all 75 days. It doesn't matter what diet you just have to do it.
And that might be it. Is that the only rule? I think that's it.
SPEAKER_02
So, so I had heard about this. Ben told me about this a little while ago. And then today he's like, check out the app charts.
And it's the number three paid app in America right now. I said, wow, that's kind of amazing. And so I started looking into it.
And I actually didn't do a ton of research on 75 hard, but I researched this category. I'm very interested in this category.
SPEAKER_01
Let me finish the story on 75 hard. It started by this guy, Andy, I don't know his last name. You wrote it here.
I don't want to pay for Shilla. Okay. Everyone makes fun of me because I can't say stuff. He's actually based out of right near me, Fenton, Missouri.
He has a supplement company called I think Forma and it does about $200 million in sales. He was in my local newspaper because he they like, they bought a $20 million building and invested it and made it nice. So I think they're, it's legit.
He's had several supplement companies because I was like,
SPEAKER_02
who is this guy? Cause if you see, if you Google him, it's like, it's one of those red flag type of profiles like entrepreneur, speaker, best seller, coach to celebrities, you know, it's like,
SPEAKER_01
oh, fuck, what have you done? Who are you? It's screen, not legit, but he is legit.
SPEAKER_02
Exactly. And I mean, I can't shit on it too much. Like I'm a big Tony Robbins man.
And if you were to describe Tony Robbins, it'd be very, very similar. And like, but you kind of got to dig in and be like, I definitely, what I don't do is I don't take that at face value. Right. Cool. So what are those businesses? Okay, great. What is this book like? Let me, let me check this out.
Let me get a sense here. So this guy's got actually the top, one of the top podcasts in our category, in the business category, as it's called MFCO or something like that. Oh my gosh.
As you know, mother F and C or something. He's got a big Instagram following. So who is this guy? From what I know, which I just did a very quick dive.
Actually, I'd love to have this guy on the pod. He, he basically, he's, he started a couple of supplement companies. I think first was like a brick and mortar supplement company called something supplements, super supplements or something like that.
And he's got, he's done that two or three times. His third one is called form one. And that's I think the biggest one.
It's been the most successful. And then, you know, the hook or the tagline is like, you know, these brands do over a hundred million dollars a year. So okay, he's in the supplement space.
He did well with that break. And then he like translated that into like a life philosophy. And I think he preaches kind of, he's like a bit of the jocco willing, like kind of school of thought, which is just like, you know, it's hard.
You gotta work hard, man up, do it, grind, hustle, blah, blah, blah. Those are the words, right? So he's like Gary Vee. If Gary Vee was like jacked, you know, and so he's like, you know, in that, that fame, that's the outsider.
Haven't got, I have not drank the Kool-Aid of what his stuff is. That's my outsider. Quick point of view.
Okay, great. But I started thinking about this category. By the way,
SPEAKER_01
I just want to, I'm going to cover your ass here. Sean sounded, it's what did I, a little dismissive of this guy. I don't think you are trying to sound that way.
And neither am I. I think this guy
SPEAKER_02
seems like a good dude. I view it very much in the, like, I can have two thoughts at the same time. Yeah. One thought is, Oh, when I hear this stuff, it's usually a bit of hand wavy and usually these people are kind of like stereotyped. They're kind of caricatures.
But also, they're probably like actually giving out good information, inspiring a lot of people have had great success in their life and live up to a lot of these things. And like, I think both of those are kind of true. Like I, I kind of make fun of Gary Vee, but I think Gary Vee is built like kind of an awesome brand and an awesome company.
And he's an awesome guy. Like, you know, like, I don't know personally, but I can simultaneously make fun of the character while also being like, you know, respect, you did your thing. Like you did the thing you want to do.
And that's not easy. Most people do nothing. So, you know, props, props for not, not just doing nothing, but doing something very unique.
So, so this space, so I'm very interested in this for kind of a reason I've actually considered launching something like this. So that's why I looked into it. So 75 bar.
I'm very interested in these time bounded challenges, time bounded programs. So the big one that I personally had experience with was P90X. So I don't know if you, did you ever do P90X course Tony, Tony, what was
SPEAKER_01
the name? What was the guy's name? Tony Horton, Tony Horton, of course. I look at the back story
SPEAKER_02
of P90X. I think it's interesting. There's this company called Beachbody.
And what Beachbody did was it was started by this guy, Carl Deichler. I would consider him our Billy of the week. So he's a CEO.
He's worth about $600 million. And this guy is kind of the king of infomercials and the king of sort of at home fitness. So he created eight minute abs.
He created eight minute abs, which was like, he was inspired by buns of steel. He like loved this like branding of a fitness program. And he was pretty early and jumped on in the kind of early nineties this time, really started hammering infomercials on TV.
That was his main channel. Like today, Facebook ads is I think the infomercials of today, but he was really the master of infomercials back then. And so he's like, all right, I'm going to do, I'm going to create this company.
And originally, he wanted to call it, I think like, so he's like, I want to start this company. He goes to his friends and family. He raises $500,000 from Angel, Angel investor friends and family.
He says, all right, I'm going to test five products and I'm going to see what sticks and they're going to be in this like fitness space. And the whole idea was like, I have this distribution channel, infomercials, and I'm going to create products that are sticky that people that help people lose weight, essentially get more fit. And so he starts with the very first one, I think was Tony, he goes to Tony Horton.
Tony Horton at the time is a celebrity trainer. So he's training Bruce Springsteen and like all these kinds of like musicians and actors and actresses in Hollywood. So he goes to Tony and he says, let's create a product called Great Body Guarantee.
And he's like, oh, I love it. Great Body Guarantee. How can it miss? And he goes to, he tries to get GreatBody.
com and it's taken. And so he's like doing his thing. He's walking around on the beach in LA walking home one day and he's like, he's on the beach.
He just thinks BeachBody, BeachBody.com. He runs home, checks BeachBody.com is available.
So he grabs it. And so he starts trying to produce these infomercials with Tony for this program. And they produce many, many programs.
And he realized at the time, okay, like I can't afford celebrity endorsements, right? Like that's why Tony had a good name was because he was trying it for celebrities, but he couldn't really afford celebrity endorsements. So they start just trying to do like, like kind of like infomercials without that. So customer testimonials.
So he comes up with this idea that the customer is the celebrity. How do I make the customer celebrity? And so what he, the initial batch of infomercials had all actually failed where he was just saying, you know, get a great body and it's just super jacked people on screen saying how jacked they are basically. And so instead, you know, it's kind of just money down the drain during that part.
And instead they try one version of the infomercial where they took a few testimonials that had been sent in from their buyers that said, hey, look at, you know, this was me before and this is me now. And me now wasn't like, didn't look like a Greek God, but just like definitely looked better than the out of shape overweight person, you know, in the before photo. So they slapped those into the infomercial like real customer testimonials.
And boom, this thing starts selling like hotcakes. And so he realizes, oh, wait, the more authentic these look. And so he started curating.
He goes, I want the customer testimonials to almost look like America's Funnies Home video footage, like somebody at home, their cats jumping on them while they're doing a situp, their plant is, you know, dying in the background. They can barely hold their balance while doing the pose. And then you see the after photo 90 days later that they look great.
And that was his kind of core insight that was working really, really well. And he was very differentiated because everybody else was who was doing at home was really at this time was doing like some gimmick product like thigh master, ab roller, bow flex, like selling some equipment. This equipment will solve your problems.
And it said, he was like, no, no, no, I'm going to make a promise. You do my program for 90 days, you get this result. And that promise marketing was much better.
And that's what 75 hard is too. It's another variant of this promise marketing. Well, there's a difference,
SPEAKER_01
I think. So if I, I don't know, I don't think it's like this anymore. But when 75 hard first started, it was around as a free movement.
So basically this guy would say like, all right, everyone, it's that time of year, we're doing it. And he would do it. It's like no shave November.
Yeah, I forget the months, but I've seen it. I've seen it for a couple of years now. And he would basically, I guess, Instagram, like now's the time for the challenge.
And I think he did it for like, maybe four years before it even became a thing. So P 90 X, I think it's a you enroll and you have 90 days to get it done. This 75 hard thing was a, you know, November 1st, get ready, like, you know, time to get seasonal things.
Yeah. And it worked really well. I guess it's 75 hard now, like a
SPEAKER_02
rolling 75. I think it's, I think so, because they have this app. So I don't think it's just one time of the year.
But and if it's number three right now, and we're in June, or we're in April. So I think, you know, it's definitely not the November thing as it was before. And so just to go back to Beachbody.
So Beachbody, the company does over a billion dollars a year in revenue, just to break down their business. They basically, so he comes up with this concept of a gym at home, instead of a home gym. So it's like, how do you do the gym workout at home? And he's like, okay, we have the, we're going to use infomercials and we're going to use DVDs.
DVDs are going to be great because you're going to be able to put it on your TV and you do it whenever you want, sort of on demand. Great. And so he starts selling DVDs. And the DVDs do well and programs like P 90 X are part of it.
And for P 90 X, it was actually a little bit of a pivot for them. There's actually these cool videos on YouTube of them in their meetings. And he's pitching this.
He's like, okay, look, right now we're all about losing weight. It's all weight loss. It's all like kind of like belly fat.
That's the market we go after for Beachbody. But for P 90 X, I want to do something different. He's like, we need like an extreme program for the muscle builder.
He's like, I noticed there's all these magazines like men's fitness and muscle muscle monthly and all this stuff, where people are really trying to like build huge muscles. And so let's set out the tenants for this thing. And he's like, doing a presentation.
He's like, this is not for beginners. This is at home. This is meant to build muscles, get shredded.
You're going to get shredded in 90 days. And he's like, that's the promise we're going to make to the people. And so he, you know, I like seeing these meetings where people are like coming up with the concept that then takes over the nation type of thing.
And so their model is you have the DVDs. And then he's like, okay, cool distribution through infomercials was good, but we've kind of hit our limit there. So then he took a page out of the Amway MLM playbook.
He's like, here's what we'll do. We'll get our, our most successful customers will become our coaches. We'll teach them how to sell this program for themselves, how to be their own mini Tony Horton.
So they go and they build this nationwide network of 400,000 coaches. And then of course, the coaches can train other coaches and they can keep a share of their revenue, right? Classic MLM, multi-level marketing. Some people call it a pyramid scheme or a Ponzi scheme, but there's a, there's a legal way to do this.
And he's doing it the legal way.
SPEAKER_01
And so the top coaches, I think in his case, it's an, I'm reading all about him. It's an MLM, but it's not, I don't find this to be unethical or bad. I mean, it's just, he's, he's making
SPEAKER_02
customers salespeople for him. So I was once talking to a friend and he was like, dude, we need to create this product and we'll do it. We'll sell it as an MLM.
And I was like, dude, MLM, is it that like, you know, isn't that like a sin? He's like, why is like, it's basically you get your, your hardcore believers. Do I know this? You own them with the ability to sell it. You know the friend.
SPEAKER_01
Yeah. I think I know. And I think they love MLMs because an MLM almost bought them.
Yeah. And MLMs inherently are not wrong. Now, exactly.
The way he described it, he goes, look,
SPEAKER_02
there's a knob. Think about this way. This is a model just like affiliate marketing or any kind of viral marketing.
You basically give people products and let them sell it. There's a knob, though. The knob is like kind of like your evil knob.
And you could turn it down to zero. And when you're at zero, you're basically saying, Hey, if you're a fan of our product, you can become one of our coaches and you can, there's no minimums. You don't have to subscribe to this monthly thing.
You don't have to like, you know, do this the wrong way. He's like, or you turn it up to 12 and you go super evil and you basically say, Hey, dude, you can become a millionaire if you become one of our coaches. Look at this guy.
He's a millionaire. Don't you want to be a millionaire? And then you basically get them to sign up for this thing where they have to pay you $100 a month. They have to buy $10,000 a product.
And now their kid's bedroom is full of like this, you know, hair loss, shampoo treatment that they need to sell and then they can't sell, but they bought $10,000 worth of new major money anyways, and then they go broke because they try to become one of your reps. And like you, that knob is like in your patrol to turn how screwed up you want to be with it. And so anyways, I think Beachbody is like somewhere in the not so evil category from what I know, their top, their coaches and trainers make about like two to $3 million a year.
And a lot of that revenue again comes from the coaches that they brought on board. They get a percentage of
SPEAKER_01
their sales. And the company, by the way, Beachbody, I'm reading all about their CEO and he's giving an interview and he says they do this year and 20 they'll do a billion in sales and they do about 10% EBITDA. So a hundred million in net profit on a billion in sales.
Yeah, I'm surprised it's not
SPEAKER_02
better. The way that they probably describe their monobads, the way they describe their model is like they have the DVDs, which now has become streaming, they have the coaches to go like distribute those like that's their sales, their sales force. And they make all their profit on the shakes.
So the whole thing comes out of this like shake product they have called Shakeology. And basically it's like, okay, the streaming or the DVD is the content is good, but it's not like it costs so much to market it. It's not that good.
Okay, you know, the coaches, well, you got to recruit them, you got to train them, they got to sell, they're good, but they're not that good. The shakes, it's like $130 for your one month of nutrition shakes. And that's like pure margin.
It goes back to that Andy for Soil and Guys like supplement company is like, they make all their money on the profits come from the shakes. And the whole thing with the coaches is like, cool, we get you hooked on this program, and then you want better results, better results, you got to trim up that diet. Hey, here's what I do.
I drink these delicious shakes. They're so tasty. And they are, I didn't know they owned technology.
I did not know that. Yeah, so that's their model. So I think Beachbody is a pretty fascinating company.
I think that these, I think that marketing your product as a X days promise is a very smart idea because you're basically saying you're going to get this result. In this much time, whether that's eight minute abs or P90X or 75 hard, or it's that diet whole 30, where you're going to do 30 days of eating whole foods only. Like I've seen this work so many times.
I'm very fascinated by it. I don't know why it works in the psychology of the customer, but it definitely does work. And then the last piece is I think one of the reasons it works is because customers can sort of commit to like, well, I can do this for X days.
That doesn't sound too hard. 90 days. I could do anything for 90 days.
30 day diet. Okay. Like maybe I'm not going to change my diet and become a vegan, but can I eat whole foods for 30 days? All right. That's a challenge.
And I thought it was very interesting the way he talked about this, which was there's two ways to market it. He goes, we've always marketed our products as you can do it. Like this is so easy.
You can do it. And what's 75 hard and P90X do is the opposite. They go, can you do it? It's a challenge to you.
Like, I don't know if you can do it. This is, it's hard. Right. So then they started creating all these products. They have two versions of the marketing.
You can do it marketing and can you do it marketing? And I love that. I thought that was such an interesting way of like thinking about your business. They have a program called insanity.
Why is it called insanity? Cause it's meant to sound super fucking hard and too crazy. And like, why is P90X, it's the extreme home workout. It's not that easy beginner sit ups and push up stuff.
This is the extreme. So I thought that was pretty cool. Okay. So what are we going to launch in this space? So I've been working with my trainer now and I'm actually like, I've hit some tipping point where I'm starting to get results. Like I look at my body, like during the, during our sessions and my, we work out in my garage, there's this one area where the sun like comes into my garage and the shadow is just perfect.
And I look fucking great. And I'm like, dude, this, I need to stay in here. Like, can we do my set over here? It works with exercising.
It's
SPEAKER_01
like no results, no results, no results. Boom. It all kind of, it feels like it happens. Dude,
SPEAKER_02
that's how everything valuable was like slowly, slowly, slowly, then suddenly. And so it's like, all business success works that way. And I'm now saying even fitness success works that way, where there is this tipping point.
And we're now the workouts, I don't dread them. I enjoy them. I'm looking forward to them.
I feel bad if I ever get to miss a day. Whereas before I was like, sweet snow day, don't have to work out, you know, like, I was looking forward to missing it. Now, I'm looking forward to doing it.
So anyways, I was talking to my trainer and I was like, dude, I'm going to help you. I'm going to help you create, because he's always hearing me talk about business and it's like, he's a black belt and fitness. I like to consider myself like really good at business and we're trying to help each other out.
And so I told him, I was like, dude, why don't you do this? Like, why don't you create like, he's a gym to me. He's not like a normal trainer. He's like, I've told many stories about how he helps my mindset and all this stuff.
And he's really cheap too. I'm like, dude, you're a cut above like most people. I was like, we should create one of these where it's like, I was like, just with my friends, like, just the people I know in my life, who if I post a photo of me today, and I post a photo of me like a few months ago before I started working out with you, like, I'm going to post that before an after photo.
That's my own pride moment of like, I did it. I actually turned the corner of this thing that's been forever a really hard thing for me. I've never really considered myself fit or shredded or like been proud to take off my shirt.
And I think I'm going to get there pretty soon. Like a few months, I think I'm going to get there. I was like, when I post that after photo, I was like, we should open up something that says, if you want to do it, like let's create our own 90 day program and like let people in because I was like, the way I was thinking about it was he has this philosophy, which is like, we talked about like, how do you feel when your friends get successful? And, and I told him honestly, I was like, yeah, like it's been hard for me.
Like, when my friend Sam sells his company for 10, all of a sudden, Sam's got 10s of millions of dollars. That's like, I'm happy for you. Yes, I'm not like not happy for you, but there's a bigger part of me in that moment, right when the news hits, that's like, oh, fuck, I'm behind.
You know, I was like, the honest truth was like, I get kind of jealous or like, I'll get kind of envious. And so he helped me sort of reframe that in my mind. This is not about you, but like, it's been this way for decades, you know, like, I always felt this way, if somebody's successful, like good for them, but bad for me.
And he's like, you know, it doesn't have to be that way. Good for them, bad for me. It can be good for them.
It's good for me. He's like, it's just this philosophy you got to have where you're here. Do you carry yourself where you say, it's not just that I'm going to win.
I'm going to help bring up all the people around me. We're all going to win. And it's going to be more fun that we're all going to win.
He's like, you do this with investing, right? You share your deals and you co-invest and you let your, you want your friends to invest in your companies, because when you win, it's more fun to toast together and drink together. He's like, same thing with like, all aspects of life you should be thinking about, I'm not just going to win. I'm going to win so much.
There's going to be so much like success around me that all the people around me are going to be successful too. So anyway, long story short, I heard him tell me about that and I took it to him. I go, I'm going to help you build a business that does this.
I'm going to take the thing you're really good at that you're doing for me. And now I have him working with my sister, my mom, my sister's kids, my sister-in-law. I paint, you know, like we do all of their fitness now through him.
He's like, my family's personal coach. Really? And so I'm like, yeah, he's doing that. We're his only clients
SPEAKER_01
anymore. It's just like my whole family. What can you like, tell me what you pay this person? No, I don't want to put him on blast like that.
You want to say his name or do you want to even hide him?
SPEAKER_02
Yeah, I mean, I call him J. That's his name is John Alexander. So he's short for J.
And he's not being on social media or nothing like that. Like he doesn't try to be like some influencer guy or whatever. A trainer? Yeah, he's a trainer.
That's what he's been doing. He's been fit his whole life
SPEAKER_01
and you know, he's really good at this. I think I see him. Is a shave head white guy? No, I'll send
SPEAKER_02
you his Instagram later. But basically, I want to, I want to help him be successful. I think we can use one of these like, I think we can use this model of this P90X or 75 hard, let people commit to something that's reasonable for them.
That's the way I did it with him. I was like, all right, I'm going to, I'm going to commit. I don't know how good you are, how bad I am.
I don't know if I can do this long term, but like, I'll commit, I'll give you 30 days to get my ass off this couch. Like I'm just, I'm sick of this. Get my ass going.
30 days, I will do anything you fucking say. One hour a day, I will sweat my ass off. And like that got me hooked.
And so I think we're going to come up with some program like that. This is, we're like months away from actually launching something, but I want to do that because I think A, I want to share him with more people and B,
SPEAKER_01
I just think this is a cool business model. Why do you do everything you do? Why, like, why do you not focus more on one or two things? And I criticize you. I don't criticize you.
I challenge you often. Why can continually, why do this, do that, do that, do this? Why not just do one thing and crush it? Because your answer might be, well, because I just want to explore and see everything out there, but it's pretty obvious what you're good at. Which is what? I have a feeling that your rolling fund is going to be wildly successful.
I have a feeling that like you pull a lot of the weight on the podcast because you're, you're very good at content. Why do everything instead of just be the best at this, you're this,
SPEAKER_02
in this little lane? I do think about that. I think I've graduated out of being an operator. I no longer want to operate one entity.
The only entity I want to operate is, you know, Sean Coe, my life. And when I think about like what would be the most exciting version of that, how do I, how do I marry this part of me that's just super curious and every day, you know, I want to go down the rabbit hole and learn how 75 hard works and not, you know, P90X works, right? Before this podcast, I would do that anyways. I just didn't have an excuse.
I didn't have an outlet. I would just do the research, shove it in my head, and then I would go about my job and my life and I would keep running my company, which had nothing to do with fitness, right? This podcast was a cool thing because it gave me an excuse to do more of that thing I'm interested in, I do good at, and now it's a win-win. Now I go down those rabbit holes, I learn those things.
I come here, I share the learnings and cool. We, we get bigger.
SPEAKER_01
You're getting step three, which we're both doing, which is, and then you like, oh, I think this is actually a really good idea. Let's go put money. And then I see the company and then I basically
SPEAKER_02
say, cool, now I'm going to invest my money. I'm going to share my knowledge to an operator who can go start that business. And so my train, this will be my trainer's business.
It's not going to be my business, but I will plant the seed with them that, Hey, this would be great. And I'll do everything in my power to help you be successful, meaning I'll give you seed funding. I'll be your test customer testimonial.
Like that's, that's on me to get, you know, make my after picture better than my before picture. And then lastly, like, I'll, I'll spread the love, I'll spread the word about, about your thing when the time comes, whenever you're ready. Like I wasn't planning on talking about it today.
It's just coincided with, let's talk about Beachbody. So anyways, I would say like that to me is a more fun life. I basically decided, all right, I want my life to be where I wake up and whatever I'm most curious about, I go do because I have a way to monetize my own curiosity.
I have a way to monetize my own learnings. Okay. So how do I, that's what I've decided it is my thing for the next decade. I'm going to push that a little bit because I actually think
SPEAKER_01
that that, that your premise might be a little flawed here, which is I'm going to wake up and
SPEAKER_02
I'm going to do what I want. I'm going to, no, no, no, I'm going to go learn about what I'm most
SPEAKER_01
interested in, what I'm most curious about. And I would actually challenge that a little bit because it's like, well, you're kind of implying that you're each day, you're going to do a new thing.
SPEAKER_02
And I don't necessarily like, I like for crypto, like I've spent months in crypto, right? Because, you know, years of curiosity, but then like months of pretty hardcore curiosity around that. I think that's good. And it's become like a bigger part of my portfolio of time and money.
And so same thing with e-commerce. I got more interested in e-commerce, right? Same thing with live streaming. For many years, it was all about live streaming.
So these don't have to be every day. It's a new topic. I think that would be a bit extreme.
But with the podcast, yeah, we do two of these a week. We talk about three different topics each time. We're by no means experts at any of those.
It's like very kind of like off the cuff type of conversation and research. But I think it's like, the way I think about it is like Tim Ferriss has done this. If I've seen anybody do it, I think that Tim Ferriss has done this where he's, he's very curious about certain things that he wants to go learn.
So then he goes and talks to people in that space. He does experiments on himself. He reads books about that topic.
He reads research papers about the topic. And then he packages it up into something that's sellable sometimes. And sometimes it's not sellable.
And it's just for him. It's just for his own curiosity. I think I could do that.
I think I can create the new business model of being Tim Ferriss. So that would be, what's my one thing? I think it's that. But to the outside, it looks like a lot of variety.
And to me, that's good.
SPEAKER_01
It's, but it's, I'm not trying to criticize you here. I'm just trying to bring in a different perspective because I was thinking about, I saw, I know this guy who's like getting something off the ground and I see him constantly talking about like side projects, day trading, Bitcoin, yada, yada, yada. And this business is really related to something totally separate.
I'm like, what are you doing, dude? Just like, lock yourself in the room. Don't do anything except for like, be with your family, exercise and like work on your thing. Because like it seems almost not impossible.
Some are really good at it. But for most, it seems almost impossible to create anything meaningful without a maniacal amount of focus at least early on for an extended
SPEAKER_02
period of time, more likely than not though. I think that's true. I think that's true.
And it's, it would be definitely true if I said, oh, I'm going to go start a company, I'm going to raise much money and this is going to be, I'm going to make this huge company. I'm not doing that. That's not my thing right now.
So like, if when I was doing that, I didn't have a podcast. I didn't have a fund. I didn't have a blog.
I didn't have a girlfriend. I didn't have many things. I sacrificed on many of those because I was all in sleeping at the office 200 days a year.
I just know that that's not what this next phase looks like for me. I could do that again. I don't really want to.
And so I'm trying to see, is there a better model for me that is more, that feels effortless to me? That always felt like a lot of effort. And I think that there is a version of life that it doesn't have to be so hard. I think it can be speedy and easy.
I think it can be effortless. If you're doing the thing you really enjoy doing on a day to day basis.
SPEAKER_01
I wouldn't use the word effortless, but it's rewarding.
SPEAKER_02
Like when you play, do you feel like you're working hard? No. I can go play basketball. I can be really tired by the end of it.
I mean, fatigue because I've played basketball for three hours. But at no point in it would I feel like I'm having to do something I don't want to be doing.
SPEAKER_01
Oh, no, I actually just agree with that. I mean, if you want to use that play thing, like I don't always, I love to exercise, but I don't always want to go do it. But I'm always happy that I did do it.
And like, I don't want to do it. Because to me, working out is not like play.
SPEAKER_02
Play is a really specific word. Play is like, you know, I could be tired from my job, I'll come home, I could play video games. And video games take actually like, you know, focus, hand-eye coordination, strategy, talking to your teammates, all that stuff.
But because it's fun, it doesn't feel like work to me, right? And so I'm interested in play now. I'm not interested in hard work.
SPEAKER_01
So where do we go from here? I think we might wrap it as it's been a little,
SPEAKER_00
we went on kind of tangents there.