SPEAKER_00
Sweaty startup, Nick Huber, the man who needs no introduction. Greg, what's up, man? You need no introduction because you are a staple of the Internet. You've upset enough people on the Internet that the people that hate you hate you, but the people that love you love you.
SPEAKER_02
I think in order to get people to really be a fan, you have to take a stance on something, right? Middle, down the road, everybody thinks you're decent and nobody really likes you that much. It's kind of a tough, I think that's a tough position to be in if you're going to, you got to pick a side online, I think, right?
SPEAKER_00
You do have to pick a side if you want to say something worthwhile and interesting, but you on the other hand seem like you're, you know how to rile up the crowds. Is that fair to say?
SPEAKER_02
I think the, one of the most fascinating phenomenons to me is that a human being could be going about their day doing whatever they want. They live in their life. Most of them are in America where you can literally do whatever you want to be doing.
You're either with people you chose to be around, you're in a place that you chose to move into, you're working a job that you took a job offer to do, and you're going to open up Twitter and you're going to see something that some stranger named Nick Huber put on the Internet, and you're going to get upset by that. To the point where you're going to take time out of your day to just spew out a bunch of mean things or tell your friends or talk about it or just have these negative thoughts floating around your head. Totally mind blowing to me.
I didn't know that such a large percentage of people were that easily influenced by things that just don't matter at all and are not in their control.
SPEAKER_00
It's not that it's Nick Huber saying it. It's just that people have strongly held beliefs. And then when you say something that's against that belief, that really upsets people.
I think it goes back to human beings or tribal. It feels like you're attacking them even though you're always joking about it. For example, tell people about the deck tweet.
SPEAKER_02
Yeah, I made a tweet that said, I found this stupid picture of a contractor who put a deck on half of a slide glass door on a second level. So literally half the slide glass door, the window part of it was facing outside straight to the ground. There was a deck where one 200 pound person would take up the whole deck.
I would get out there and nobody could stand there with me on that deck. And I made a tweet that said, hey, just installed this at one of my rental properties. I raised the rent from $900 to $1,500.
The tenant moved out, of course, but I was able to release it at the new higher price right away. This is the key to value creation and wealth building or something stupid. And also just a lot of people hate landlords, man.
A lot of people think that residential real estate should be an entitlement and not a for-profit business. So that one really took off.
SPEAKER_00
And took off, how many people saw it?
SPEAKER_02
20 million people saw it. So I don't know. A third of the daily active users on Twitter probably saw that tweet at some point or the
SPEAKER_00
other. And what does that translate into dollars and business? Why do a tweet like that? Are you doing it for fun or are you actually like, this will get my name out there? It'll translate into dollars.
SPEAKER_02
So there is something to be said for the fact that the tweet after, if you add value, if you teach somebody something, it will be seen by more people. Because if you're scrolling down through Twitter and you see a Nick Huber post but you just continue to scroll on, Elon is a lot less likely to show you the next Nick Huber tweet, for sure. Like, hey, you just saw one of these.
You didn't click on it so we're not going to show you. But if you go through and you click on somebody's tweet, you're going to see more of that person. It happens all the time.
So even my true followers, the people who are in the business, the people I'm after, they'll click on the deck tweet just to read the replies because the replies are hilarious. So the next tweet then, if I add a lot of value or if I pitch something or something or the other, it'll get seen by more people. There's kind of an afterburn of engagement.
But yeah, there's no massive follower gain. And now, unfortunately, on Twitter, you have a ton of people trying to do it and they kind of just, maybe that's what I look like too, but they kind of look like idiots when they don't do it right.
SPEAKER_00
So we have a friend, Julian Shapiro. He tweets like once a quarter now. And the reason why he got Twitter is because he was like, there's a bunch of really smart people on Twitter and I want those people to read my tweets.
It's the same reason why we all got on. And not even to read my tweets, but also that I can go and reach out to these really smart people, send them a DM and be like, hey, do you want to grab coffee or whatever?
SPEAKER_02
It's a network accelerant.
SPEAKER_00
Network accelerant. Now, when you're creating tweets that upset a lot of people, you might get blocked. And some of those people that might block you, those are the people that you set out to attract initially.
So I think Julian will use Twitter very differently today than he would a few years ago because he's like, I'm only, when I drop something on Twitter, it is going to be fire. Like it is going to be super well researched. It's going to be like nothing else out there.
It's going to be a unicorn. You're going to love it. And he doesn't want to play those algorithmic games, whereas it feels like you are playing a little bit of algorithmic games when you're tweeting.
SPEAKER_02
I should absolutely be more disciplined on Twitter. Absolutely. I'll say that.
Like there's not a method to this madness all the time. I have the tweets are doing nothing for Nick Huber brand. There's nothing to gain by making a lot of these tweets.
That's for sure. But like the people who block me, I think that's also kind of, there's an advantage there. Like I'm weeding out the people who don't get my sense of humor for one thing.
They get to personally politically totally disagree with me and people that I wouldn't maybe drive with over time anyway. I'm kind of weeding those folks out. So I don't mind, I don't mind having a couple of true fans and a lot of people who just okay, Nick's not for me.
And that's perfectly fine. Perfectly fine.
SPEAKER_00
And the truth is, even if you're not saying anything controversial, like I don't consider my tweets to be controversial, but people block me all the time. So this morning, a buddy of mine sent me a tweet and so I go and click on the tweet and I see I can't see it. That's the best.
And I'm like, who's this guy Tom? Because I can't see it. I had to check it out in incognito mode. It's Tom Sweeney.
And I was like, who's Tom Sweeney? He's the CEO of Epic Games. It's like a 20 plus billion dollar company. And all of a sudden I'm like, why did Tom Sweeney block me on Twitter? Like, what did I say such that Tom Sweeney, a guy I've never met with, A, I've never met with him before, B, I've never replied or liked any of his tweets.
And also he's, you know, Epic Games up until very recently was a client of late checkout as well. And it was a great experience. So it's like, don't go on Twitter unless you're, you're, you're prepared to have some of your heroes block you.
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Thank you. Enjoy the rest of the show. So I want to shift gears a little bit and talk more about the Nick Huber world because it isn't just at sweaty startup on Twitter anymore.
There's a bunch of accounts that you're a part of and businesses that you've created on top of it. I've talked a lot about recently about multi-pronorship, which is this idea around how do you create a company that creates companies? And that's something that you're doing and doing really well.
SPEAKER_02
Just like you, I'm a huge fan of stuff that doesn't scale. Entrepreneurship, everybody talks about scalability, everybody talks about raising capital, about moats, about world-changing ideas. I think that if you have a competitive advantage in one area, you can do regular things that other people do and make really good money.
And it can become life-changing money, as you've seen with some of the agencies that you've built. And I think it's been really interesting to see our group of friends, you, me, some of our other friends, six other guys who are similarly driven, similar growth strategies, all supporting each other, and all shift towards repeatable, boring, not that scalable businesses, but that when you play the game at a big level and you know how to delegate, you know how to market, you know how to sell, and you have distribution, and you can attract talent, you can build teams, just amazing things can happen. I think you and me have been cheering each other on since the very beginning of like people are sleeping on agencies, people are sleeping on these businesses that don't scale, so you and I both are kind of seizing the opportunity.
SPEAKER_00
Yeah, and we can say who's in the group. So it's me, you, Sahil Bloom, Sean Porey, Sam Parr, Nikita Beer, and Austin Reef. That's it, right? Julian was a part of the group and he left, but it was amicable.
So it's interesting because a lot of that group is traditionally been like a venture-backed type mentality, like I raise venture capital, Sam raised money for his, you know, for the hustle, Sean has raised venture, Austin raised venture, Sahil was in a P fund, and it's interesting that we've all kind of just had a collective aha moment, which was distribution matters and just building trust as much as possible on these platforms. And then what's a non-venture-backable business, at least to start, that you can build, you know? People call it boring businesses, people call it not scalable, but you know, Shepard is a great example of something that could scale, right? Like that's a business that could be really big.
SPEAKER_02
Yeah, it's not that we're not starting businesses that could be really big. I think there's examples in everything that we are doing, from Sam, to Austin, to you, to me, to Sean, all the businesses that we're going after, there's examples of massive companies. There's examples of companies that do, you know, $25, $50, $100 plus million a year of revenue.
So we're not necessarily talking like a small one-man solopreneur journey here. We're just talking about stuff that's already been done before. Like, this stuff has all been done.
There's marketing agencies, there's pay-for-click agencies, but if you do it well, you're a good salesperson, you're good at building teams, magic happens. And all of us kind of got that, it hit us all at the same time, and we were kind of on a race to do boring shit and make as much money as possible. It's been really fun to watch everybody crush it.
SPEAKER_00
I feel like the majority of people in this group chat now have, now have like off-shoring agencies. Yeah.
SPEAKER_02
Austin's got one, Sean's in the shower with us. It's a, yeah, I mean, there's great business models and there's poor business models. And we can all tell the difference.
SPEAKER_00
Totally. I want to talk about buying a business for a second. So at the end of 2022, we bought a business and out of that business was incubated, our fastest growing property right now, which is boringmarketing.
com, which started off as an AI technology that we ended up spinning up to help brands with SEO. And now I'm hooked on this idea around what else could I buy? Because not only are you buying the assets, but you're really buying a team of operators who have systems and processes. And you can just like on day one, lean into it.
So my question to you is you want to be buying more businesses. Like what's your framework for thinking about what to buy, how to buy it, what price to buy it at and as much detail as you're willing to share.
SPEAKER_02
Buying a business is exciting to me because there is nothing harder than the first seven or eight months of a service business start. I own RE Costsegg, which is doing 150 grand a month now and has reached escape velocity and is going to be an amazing asset. It's a life changing business that Mitchell Baldridge, myself, Dan and Mitchell's wife, Mel have started.
But still at the six month mark, the six month mark, we had a phone call where our operator is near tears. We're selling 50 grand a week of Costseggs and we can only deliver 10 grand a week of Costseggs. We're having massive bottlenecks inside the organization of actually delivering.
We had overloaded the company with business. We were doing a good job promoting on Twitter and it was exploding. But that was really, really hard and really, really stressful.
The sleepless nights for me as a non-operating partner. And hell for our operating partner, which is Mitchell's wife, Mel, we got through it. She's a badass.
The company's going well. But the idea of buying a company that has got that part covered, that is extremely intriguing to me. So how I will think about buying businesses will be the same way that I'm thinking about starting them, which is turning my cost centers, like looking at my profit and loss statement and looking at where I'm spending money.
And the interesting part is, if you look at the 10 businesses that I've started, eight of them were businesses that I was spending money on at Bolt Storage. Property and casualty insurance, debt brokerage, Costseggs, SEO link building, performance marketing, website development, recruiting, all these things were things that I needed as a business owner. And it turns out that if I need them as a business owner, then a lot of the business owners who follow me on Twitter for the management advice, and trust me because they listen to my words, they read my newsletter, they listen to my podcast, whatever it might be, they'll need the same kind of things that I need.
So it's a comfort thing. And I also needed the personal cash flow. Like the personal cash flow is new to me.
Like having liquidity, having money in the bank is new. A way to risk it all, in my opinion, was to buy a business that was too big and the turnaround fails. And all of a sudden, I'm personally guaranteed that people that I raised money from are pissed.
I've ruined a reputation. So I'm just now getting to the point where my personal monthly cash flow started to stack up enough where I can take some swings. But I also, I'm kind of thinking about my, you know, Mick Huber holding company as an accumulation of talent.
I'm trying to get talented operators in. I'm trying to get to know them, get to know their strengths, get to know what they're good at, how good are they at building teams, how good are they at, you know, doing these things inside these companies. And over the course of a year, two years, three years, while we're collecting money, while we're building the bankroll, I'm building this Rolodex of operators that I can, you know, okay, maybe Webrun didn't work, but I know that Will at Webrun is one of the best, you know, team builders on the agency side that I know.
So I'm going to go with Will. I'm going to buy a company. I'm laying the groundwork of businesses that all companies need.
Every company needs a link building service. Every company needs paid ad support. Every company needs these things.
You know, the cash flow allows me to buy them. The services allow me to accelerate them and I can own and hold them and either sell them or like my five year goal is to build my Rolodex full of badass operators that I know and trust. They've come in, they've showed me what they can do.
And I think that's kind of the underrated part of me starting these companies. Yes, I talked to Andrew Wilkinson on the phone a couple of days ago and he's like, Nick, what are you doing, man? You're starting all these companies. You got to just go buy them.
You're playing the game on hard mode. And he basically said, your ability to go buy these companies is going to be dependent on who and how you can hire the operating, the management teams.
SPEAKER_00
I was actually sitting in this seat in 2020 when I spoke to Andrew Wilkinson, when I was just starting late checkout and he gave me basically the same advice. Greg, I don't understand. Why are you starting so many companies? Why are you building so many products? Just go and buy them.
And my reaction to Andrew was, yeah, but it's so much fun going zero to one and building from scratch. Like, I love coming up with the name, coming up with the brand, do the positioning, like the zero to one. And while I'll always love that, he was right.
Like it took me a few years to realize, you know what? Okay, if going zero to one is art, going one to N is more science. And playing only in zero to one is a bit of a mistake when there's no reason why you or I can't be doing both. Like we can still be incubating and buying.
SPEAKER_02
If you try to start on third base, if you try to start by just buying a big company and turning it around, when you've never operated a small company, you've never started a company, you've never built teams, you don't have a ton of experience delegating, it's really hard. But I'm looking forward to these new challenges. And Andrew is absolutely right.
You and I are both seeing the light that you can buy companies and you can pull a couple levers and create millions of dollars out of thin air of equity value and cash flow. That's exciting. I think you and I are both going to love that.
We're going to love it. You're already proving that you can do it. I'm excited to challenge myself and try to do it, but I'm not there yet.
SPEAKER_00
How do you think about what is the right size in terms of purchase price for the first deal?
SPEAKER_02
I would buy a company now that has two or 300 grand of EBITDA. I mean, that's enough. That's enough to hire some decent people.
They don't have a management team. At two or 300 grand, the owner is the manager. But they have some people who can execute.
They have some client leads. They have some people who can deliver whatever the service is they're delivering. I think that's a beautiful place to start because it can be really low risk.
You can get a business really cheap and seller finance almost all of it. And if it crashes and burns, then you hand the keys back and walk away. It gets tougher for the first one, especially if you go out and need to take an SBA loan for hundreds of thousands or millions of dollars and you've got to raise money for the equity.
It's not rocket science. And I think that people can do it. We can be done, especially if you know how to delegate and build teams.
But it just seems riskier to me. But it came down to, hey, do I want to buy a business that does two or 300 grand a year? Or do I want to just do the work in six months and get my own business there and save the four, six, 700,000 dollars that I have to buy that company for?
SPEAKER_00
The assumption you're making there is that 100% of your bets are going to make it there, but they're bets, right? We incubate stuff all the time that fails. So we'll often put 250 grand into something and try it and it fails. Now one of the things I'm learning is all these starts and stops that you're doing, 250 grand here, 150 grand here, 100 grand here, 300 grand here, I'm seeing the light where I'm like, actually, I want to do less incubation, reduce that budget.
Still do incubation, but reduce that budget and take that budget to actually just buy something that's working.
SPEAKER_02
I got a question for you, Greg. You know me really well now. We are friends.
We've been talking weekly, almost daily for three years now. You've seen how I've evolved. You read my tweets.
You follow along closely. What could I be missing? What constructive feedback? I love it. I revel in it and I'm not easily offended.
What do you think I'm doing wrong? Or what do you think I could do better? What blind spots do you think that I could have? Or what do you think five years from now, I'll look back and say, damn, I wish I knew that and I would have started doing that earlier now. Because I feel like you are five years further ahead than me.
SPEAKER_00
I think that you could be acquiring one to two companies per year. If you, in five years from now, if you're acquiring one to two per year, you have eight companies after five years, I think two of them could be smashing successes. Way bigger than anything you've incubated.
I think that you're a finance guy at the core. You said seller financing, assuming that everyone listening to this understands what that means. You understand your way around the books.
Because you understand distribution in the books and deals, to me, it makes total sense that you should be buying companies. If I were you, one thing I would do is I wouldn't buy a $200,000 to $300,000 EBITDA business. I would go and just say, how much is it to go to an MBA school cost? I don't know, 50 grand a year.
I'm going to take a budget, my MBA budget, it's going to be 50 grand. I'm going to buy something for 50 grand. I'm going to do the negotiation myself.
I'm just going to manage the whole process from A to Z. I'm going to put an operator on it. Assuming this $50,000 investment goes to nothing, but just a way for you to test and hit the tires on this.
Put it into your audience, see if they like it. I would also not do a service-based business because I would also want to test what are other types of businesses that my audience would like. I tweeted at you a couple of days ago.
You were tweeting about Jobber and a few other SaaS products. I always see you tweeting about these different SaaS products. I'm like, why don't you own one of these SaaS products? You talk about how you're building businesses for you, but you're probably spending hundreds, thousands of dollars a month on these SaaS products that you could be owning and actually building for you.
As you know, the multiples on SaaS businesses are a lot higher than the multiples on service businesses. If I were you, the number one thing I'd be doing is buying a cheap SaaS product, giving it to my audience, iterating from there, writing my learnings after three or six months, and then say, okay, I did it for $50,000. Now let me try to buy something with $300,000 to $500,000 in EBITDA.
SPEAKER_02
That's good advice. Yeah, I need some SaaS products. I need them.
I know it's on my roadmap. I just need to take it more seriously.
SPEAKER_00
I think you're right. I said it because we're constantly incubating SaaS products. The other thing that people don't talk about in SaaS line that much is that you can literally incubate a SaaS product in 30 days.
I'm old enough to remember five years ago when you wanted any SaaS product, it was $2 million. It cost $2 million to build a SaaS product. That was like pre-product market fit.
That's just like a product. Now it doesn't cost $2 million anymore.
SPEAKER_02
How much would it cost me to build a Google review aggregator? Because I need Google reviews on every single one of my companies. And 63 self-storage facility brick and mortar locations, I need a way to aggregate and automate getting Google reviews from customers. And so does my entire audience.
So should I build that or should I find somebody who would try to build it and couldn't get any customers and wants to sell it to me for under $100,000?
SPEAKER_00
I would start with finding out if that exists somewhere else. One of the ways I typically do that is I go on Product Hunt. And Product Hunt has a CEO failed product.
So 99% of the products that are on Product Hunt have failed. And you might find something from 2015 or 2017 that actually looked really good. It's basically dormant business.
Operator might have just lost interest in it. A lot of people lose interest in these businesses because they're just not seeing traction. So if you can come to them and be like, hey, I'm your traction guy, you're the product person, help me revive this.
I'll give you $50,000 to do it. And I'm going to give you upside. I think it's compelling.
SPEAKER_01
That's a good idea.
SPEAKER_02
I'll be on Product Hunt the rest of the day.
SPEAKER_00
I also think that you could also partner with other people. You could partner with a firm like ours where we've done deals where we'll just take upside. And sometimes a little bit of cash, a little upside and partner with people.
We've partnered with MrBeast has Night Media and they've built some products. And we've partnered and took equity in some of those. So I also think there's groups like ours.
For people listening to this that are interested but might not want to put out a lot of money, cold call different agencies and partners. And even if on their website it says they don't do this stuff, you never know. It's the same thing with hiring a potential employee.
Someone might have a job, but if you DM them or you send them a message, who knows? You might catch them on a day where they're having a bad day and they really like what you're doing and all of a sudden you're able to convince them to come join your team.
SPEAKER_02
I like it. The world is swimming with opportunity. That's for sure.
It's almost like you can't keep your head above water. It's coming so fast sometimes.
SPEAKER_00
Do you ever feel like you're doing too many projects at the same time? Because every time I start a project, the analogy I use is it cuts my brain in another section. So if you think about it as like a pizza, you're cutting it in another slice and another slice and another slice and another slice and it's a bit of mental overload. So sometimes I look at what you're doing and I'm like, whoa, this guy's like working on a lot of projects.
Is that just me or how do you feel about it?
SPEAKER_02
Yeah, I'm an overdelegator to the extreme, meaning I'm not going to interact with any of the customers. I'm not going to have an email address for the company. I'm not going to have a job in the company or I'm pissed off.
And that's a blessing and a curse. It's a curse because it's 80% as good as it would be if I were doing it myself. Like I could do it myself better.
But it's a blessing because I can take more shots and I can invest in an operator who I know is awesome. I mean, an example is my property and casualty insurance company, which could be the biggest of all my businesses in 10 years. The CEO of that company is my business partner, Dan Hagberg, who I went to college with and founded the storage company with and owns half my real estate portfolio.
And I know he's a killer and I have not been on one meeting. I have not done anything at all for that company, except ask him on the fourth hole of a golf course. Oh, hey, by the way, how's Titan risk going? Other companies are different.
Like not all operators are as competent as Dan. But in a way, they're impressing me. These people that are running these companies, they're impressing me.
I don't need to talk to the guy who runs my recruiting company, but once a month and we done $76,000 of revenue in the first three months and recruiting cycle is like long, recruiting sales cycle is long. So I don't know. I think I will pull the plug on some, but none of them right now are like, damn, this is the one I probably am going to need to pull the plug on.
I like it. I like being able to check in. I like looking at the new leads and all the companies.
I like it's kind of addicting to kind of look at the trajectory and the tough part. But yeah, then they're stressful. Then there's stressful parts.
Of course. It's like one of these companies did some work for my company and it didn't go well. And Dan's like, Hey, Nick, I need to give you some feedback.
This was fucking shitty. Like we're going to fire your company here. If they don't get their stuff together, I'm like, Oh, damn it.
That's stressful. So yeah, it's not all without, it's not all without its stress. That's for sure.
But I still spend 10 hours a week on the golf course and 10 hours a week working on my personal brand. And I hang out with my family a lot. So I feel like I have a decent balance, but I'm definitely, I'm definitely working hard right now.
SPEAKER_00
That's for sure. I like the rule of I don't have an email address. It creates this distance between you and the business.
And it's basically, and I think Andrew does this really well. Andrew Wilkinson, which I think he got from Charlie Munger and Warren Buffett, which is it's all about the operator. And we respect and support the operator and we're here to help, but we're not really here to be in the day to day.
Like if we're, if I'm here in the day to day, then there's an issue with the operating team.
SPEAKER_02
And they're varying level of investments too. Like the property and cash insurance is a money suck right now. I'm personally investing 30 grand a month into that one.
The business brokerage is another 30 grand a month that I'm just, I'm investing because I believe in those companies, but it's just a longer sales cycle and permitting and requirements and getting paid on a deal closing when you start a business brokerage, best case scenario is six to nine months after you start the business. So definitely varying levels of personal investment.
SPEAKER_00
What about email, email newsletters as a form of nurturing leads. You have a really big newsletter that I subscribe to. I love it.
You send weekly emails and in the emails, you highlight some of your companies. Are you thinking about having individual newsletters for your companies and is that a big part of the strategy?
SPEAKER_02
No, we've thought about it. I've had operators bring it up that they want to start writing a newsletter and I just can't see the value of building a whole nother audience and being responsible for a whole nother newsletter when I can, you know, yesterday's Monday's email, I highlighted bold SEO and the top of the email, we got 24 leads, 24 leads. Our sales guys booked up for the whole week.
Like his whole week schedule, he's got six calls a day now. So yeah, it's my newsletter is the core strategy like Twitter's awesome. The individual Twitter accounts are awesome.
We can, you know, reach our customers pretty well on Twitter, but email is where I can really, really, really drive value. I don't do any outside advertising on my newsletter. I don't let anybody pay for spots on my newsletter.
I take up all my own space really inside of these companies now and it's so far it's working pretty well. Some services are harder to sell than others, but some of them, just a lot of business owners need, which is a blessing.
SPEAKER_00
Your newsletter is on ConvertKit. Yep. Love ConvertKit. You? Yeah.
So right now I'm thinking about switching from Substack to ConvertKit. Sell me on why I should move from Substack to ConvertKit.
SPEAKER_02
ConvertKit is really good link tracking. I can change the links after I send emails out. I can, you know, stack sequences on.
So I know that if somebody clicks on the bold SEO link, I can then drip them three more emails over the next week about SEO services because I know they're a pretty warm lead, even though they didn't fill out the form on bold SEO.com. So yeah, it's just the customizability. If you're going to start promoting and selling on your newsletter, it's really good for that.
I don't even utilize it fully, but then there's the creator network of like everybody being able to recommend each other that, you know, the quality of the emails aside, and I know that, you know, three out of four might be a total joke. You were bringing up some stuff this week about how it could be getting just a lot of confusion among people not even knowing they're signing up for my email list, but that's still been, I've still noticed like a uptick in like the sales, which are important to me. And at two or three bucks an email, it's worth that.
So yeah, it's all convert kit just does a good job, but beehive, sub-stack, they're all they're all doing similar stuff now too.
SPEAKER_00
So yeah, the beehive, we use beehive for you probably need a robot, which are our AI newsletter. And it's really amazing for, for just like, you want to get a message out there and you want to push it out in a really beautiful way. And I love at the end of each beehive newsletter, you can say like, do you like it? Did you not like it? And there's almost like a comment section.
You get to understand how valuable the email was to someone. And that's my favorite part about beehive. But if you're actually trying to sell stuff, convert kit with the automations, i.
e. like what you're saying, you click this, therefore I'm going to put you in this drip FOMO sequence of teaching people about SEO, for example, before they buy it, right? There's so many people who might click on your SEO link or your Ari Kaseg link and just not be ready to buy. So they're in this phase and it's like, how do you nurture them and build trust during that time so that maybe after the five email sequence, they're ready to make the jump.
SPEAKER_02
The most valuable part for me, I haven't even really utilized, like my marketing team, we have a plan to really utilize these sequences to like you're saying, nurture these leads. I don't do it well yet. What's the, like lead magnets are like the best way that I can get high value people on my newsletter.
Like, hey, here's a PDF. It's free. If you got it, it was giving me your email.
Here's some awesome copy on Twitter. Why you should click the link and why you should get it. I wish I could share my screen and just show you like all my, I can track all my pages, all my lead magnets.
I can see how many people visited the page, how many people signed up through that lead magnet. It tagged them. So I know which of my subscribers came from like a really high value real estate, like somebody who signs up through like, Hey, here's the 20 aspects of closing a real estate deal.
I know that the 450 people who signed up through that lead magnet, like they're in the real estate game. They're valuable. Those followers are worth 20 bucks a pop or more.
But I know that the people who clicked on like, Oh, here's a list of 200 plus business ideas. I know that they're all entrepreneurs and that's fine too. But I have all that like separated inside of ConvertKit and I can post these lead magnets on a schedule over and over and over again.
And I can track how many people are signing up on each one, which ones are hitting, how they're hitting different copy changes and stuff like that.
SPEAKER_00
So sub-stack have like, no, dude, like no, not even closed. Like not even close. Sub-stack is the fastest way to get up and running if you want to create a newsletter.
So when I'm doing anything, if I'm trying to post on Tik Tok, if I'm trying to, and they don't post on Tik Tok, if I'm trying to post on Instagram and I don't post on Instagram, if I'm trying to buy a business and I'm not, and I've never bought a business, I always ask myself, what is the path of least resistance so that I can see if I like this thing? So I chose sub-stack, you know, three, four years ago because it was so easy to do. I got set up in 30 seconds. Now, you know, I think it's important for people to, in whatever it is they're doing, to quarterly or yearly ask themselves, like, what is changed between now and then? And for me personally, what has changed is I now have 70 plus thousand subscribers.
I'm also selling some of my services within my email newsletter and my open rate is starting to really go up and my click-through rate is going up. So I'm starting to really build trust with people and sub-stack just doesn't give me the tools I need. You know, the tagline for convert kit should be take email seriously.
Like, if convert kit hired, they check out our design and branding agency, we would probably do something around that and we would try to own the category of taking email seriously. I mean, my dream, to be honest, is a mix of beehives design and like polls with convert kits serious automations. Like, that's my dream.
SPEAKER_02
I wonder when, I wonder, yeah, it was amazing to watch convert kit just take over dream drip. Like drip used to be the one like three years ago drip was the only one people use and it's just been a slow move to convert kit. But I wonder when Nathan is going to add, you know, the design forward front end to convert it would be easy to do those polls and I mean, I hit him up.
SPEAKER_00
I hit him up the other day and I was like, dude, hire late checkout, we'll crush it for you. So maybe soon.
SPEAKER_02
I'll tell him to hire. I'll text him right now. Tell him to hire late checkout.
SPEAKER_00
I got to run, but dude, thank you for letting me and everyone take a peek inside your multi printer brain. I think the world of you and you're doing incredible stuff and I can't wait to see what you build over the next three years and bye.
SPEAKER_02
I appreciate it, man. You're a, you're a pretty serious influence in my life and I look up to you a lot and I appreciate the fact that you want to see me win, man. And I want to see you win and I know you're, I know you're crushing it.
So appreciate you having me on and thanks for everything.
SPEAKER_00
All right, man. I'll catch you later. Where could people sign up to your newsletter?
SPEAKER_02
Yeah. I mean, the newsletter is how you get to know Nick Huber. I mean, I write a 1500 word email every week about management, delegation, hiring, recruiting, building companies, real estate.
So yeah, go to sweatystartup.com and get on my newsletter.
SPEAKER_02
Later. Nah, nah, championship.