0:00:02 I still think the big opportunity in the media space,
0:00:03 if someone wants to take a big swing,
0:00:07 someone wants to go build a billion-dollar company, it’s…
0:00:09 I feel like I can rule the world.
0:00:11 I know I can be what I want to.
0:00:14 I put my all in it like my days off.
0:00:16 On the road, let’s travel, never looking back.
0:00:18 Wait, so say, what were you saying earlier, how you hated me?
0:00:20 Or no, you didn’t hate me.
0:00:21 No, I didn’t hate you.
0:00:23 Like, I hated you.
0:00:24 Just to be clear, I hated you.
0:00:27 I did not hate you.
0:00:30 Like, I feel like also part of, like, my shtick has always been, like,
0:00:31 I don’t hate anyone.
0:00:33 I try to kill people with kindness.
0:00:36 I try, like, people have to feel like douchebags for hating me
0:00:37 because there’s no way to hate me.
0:00:39 Like, I feel like that was my MO for a while.
0:00:43 But I remember, yeah, I remember being on the phone with Tim Shaw.
0:00:45 And he was an investor in The Hustle also, right?
0:00:49 Yeah, I was so mad at him for investing in both of our companies.
0:00:49 I was so angry.
0:00:51 Yeah, and I remember being on the phone with him.
0:00:55 And I was like, we’re talking about you for some reason.
0:00:58 And I was like, yeah, like, I would love to talk to Sam.
0:01:00 But I don’t know if he wants to talk to me or us.
0:01:04 And Tim was just like, yeah, I don’t think he likes you guys very much.
0:01:07 But anyway, I didn’t hate you.
0:01:11 But I was jealous of certain things at The Hustle.
0:01:14 And one of the things I was most jealous of was the welcome email.
0:01:17 Like, I remember reading the welcome email and being like,
0:01:18 this is so freaking good.
0:01:22 And I’m so angry that we don’t have one that is as good as this.
0:01:27 I would have traded you the welcome email for your guys’ ability to be like financially,
0:01:30 like, just you guys are far more than competent.
0:01:31 But I was barely competent.
0:01:34 So I so like the envy went both ways.
0:01:35 All right.
0:01:36 So here’s what I want to do for this show.
0:01:37 So here’s the deal.
0:01:40 So wait, do you guys say what you sold for?
0:01:41 Is that public or not?
0:01:46 Yeah, we could say 75 million, I think is the public number.
0:01:50 So collectively, The Hustle and Morning Brew, we sold for like hundreds of millions of dollars.
0:01:56 And we were sort of like the graduating class of like 2020 or whatever.
0:01:58 We were the early people in the newsletter game.
0:02:02 We didn’t like invent it, but we kind of helped pioneer a little bit of what is popular today.
0:02:07 And now officially, as of a couple weeks ago, we are both, or all three of us,
0:02:08 are officially out of our companies.
0:02:09 I’ve been out for a minute.
0:02:11 Alex has been out for a minute.
0:02:15 Now Austin is out, and we could finally reveal like a bunch of information.
0:02:19 Sorry, Sam, to be clear, I’m technically executive chairman.
0:02:22 So I’m no longer day-to-day, but I am executive chairman of Morning Brew.
0:02:24 You are no longer operating.
0:02:26 But I think you guys, do you still have equity ownership?
0:02:29 No, we’re both fully out.
0:02:29 All right.
0:02:30 So that’s what I mean.
0:02:35 And so what I wanted to do was I wanted to go year by year when we each started.
0:02:41 And I want to explain to the listener what we were doing in that year, what our revenue
0:02:43 and profit was, what our subscriber growth was, things we learned.
0:02:48 And also, we have to add this, things that we would do differently if we were starting again
0:02:50 today and things that we wish we had done.
0:02:51 Does that sound good?
0:02:52 Yeah, sounds good.
0:02:55 I’m also excited for it because at the time, I didn’t know any of your numbers.
0:02:59 So this is like the first time I actually know your numbers as we were going through it.
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0:03:33 I think I’ve like shared with Austin, like my whole data room at this point,
0:03:35 the cool thing about having a data room is like you’re supposed to have,
0:03:38 you know, all the information that’s easily accessible.
0:03:39 So you can go like go back and look back.
0:03:42 Yeah, but this is this is the first time it’s all been in one place.
0:03:45 We’ve piecemealed it, but I think it’ll be fun to just side by side it.
0:03:48 So you guys started in 2015.
0:03:50 What was the original premise?
0:03:52 And weren’t you guys both in college?
0:03:53 Yeah.
0:03:55 So I was a senior at Michigan.
0:03:57 Austin was a sophomore.
0:04:01 I mean, both of us were kind of on the finance track.
0:04:02 The general premise.
0:04:06 And it’s so funny because like we’ve told this story so many times about how it started.
0:04:07 I don’t know if it’s actually the truth.
0:04:09 It’s just what I remember is the story.
0:04:12 But basically was I was helping students prep for job interviews.
0:04:17 I would ask kids during these mock interviews, how do you keep up with the business world?
0:04:22 Every single student would say, I read the Wall Street Journal, but my but it’s dry.
0:04:23 I can’t get through the whole thing.
0:04:25 My parents told me I have to read it.
0:04:27 And so at some point I was like, this is crazy.
0:04:31 These kids are about to spend their whole careers in business, yet they don’t have something that they enjoy reading.
0:04:37 So I started putting together the kind of OG version of Morning Brew, which was called Market Corner.
0:04:40 And it was a PDF that I had attached to an email listserv every day.
0:04:42 And Austin was one of my readers.
0:04:44 Can I tell you what I think the real story was?
0:04:46 Because it’s probably the same story as mine.
0:04:46 Sure.
0:04:53 You saw the success of the skim and you just said, I’m just going to do this for finance people or in my case, tech guys.
0:04:55 Definitely possible.
0:04:57 Yeah, I think that’s partly true.
0:05:00 I do think Alex started the PDF version.
0:05:01 There were two versions.
0:05:04 There was the Market Corner and then there was turning into Morning Brew.
0:05:14 The evolution of Morning Brew was totally inspired off of, wow, if these two women in New York City could get millions of people, I think maybe a million people at the time reading.
0:05:16 Like, why can’t we do the same?
0:05:21 There’s a bunch of, you know, at the time we thought dudes in finance who wanted to read about the business world.
0:05:24 And did you have any revenue in year one?
0:05:26 No.
0:05:26 No.
0:05:31 Which, by the way, I’ll say was a huge advantage for us that I don’t think you had with the hustle.
0:05:33 Is Austin and I were still in school.
0:05:39 So we basically had a year and a half to two years of like fake timeline where we didn’t have to worry about bringing in revenue.
0:05:46 So, in 2015, I think I was 25, it wasn’t the hustle.
0:05:47 It was just an event called HustleCon.
0:05:55 And that year, I think it had made around $400,000 in revenue and like $200,000 in profit.
0:06:04 Like, it was like a good event, but we, and it was basically like a TED Talk for entrepreneurs, but I was so scrappy and I honestly regret it.
0:06:13 One of my biggest regrets in life is buying the supplies that I needed for that event at Costco and returning the stuff that we didn’t use.
0:06:17 And I didn’t realize that you throw things away once, like Costco throws it away.
0:06:24 And it was like the most shame that I’d ever felt was like being that like cheap and horrible.
0:06:26 Was the hustle that profitable?
0:06:28 Like when you did it that first year, was it profitable?
0:06:34 Yeah, yeah, because it was just me and then I, and then I asked my buddy John to help and it was just us two.
0:06:38 And yeah, it made it so like it when we started in the year 2015 or sorry.
0:06:44 So the next year in 2016, I started the hustle because I was like conferences suck.
0:06:47 I want to create a newsletter because I’d saw the skim.
0:06:52 I read about Thrillist on Mixergy.com and a bunch of other and like a bunch of other newsletter businesses.
0:06:58 And when I started that business, I had $500,000 in my bank and it was all from conferences.
0:06:59 It’s pretty wild.
0:07:02 I think what you said is interesting about the math, right?
0:07:10 I think at the time, and we have a funny story we can tell now that we’ve held back for a while about John Steinberg and our first interaction with him.
0:07:15 But so many people came to us and they would say, like, this is so stupid.
0:07:17 Why are you doing this newsletter thing?
0:07:18 It makes no sense.
0:07:21 But Alex and I would sit there every night and we’d go through a spreadsheet.
0:07:28 And it was the most basic spreadsheet of, you know, newsletter subscribers grow five or 10% a month and CPM stay flat.
0:07:32 Over time, you can get to hundreds of thousands or millions of dollars of revenue a month.
0:07:35 And I think it was really that simple.
0:07:36 I had the exact same spreadsheet.
0:07:40 I listened to every interview with Ben Lear and I’m like, tell me what the CPMs are.
0:07:45 And then I met with Business Insider reporters and I said, tell me how many people visit your tech part of your website.
0:07:46 Oh, 80 million.
0:07:46 Okay.
0:07:47 Then, yeah.
0:07:49 Like, you’re giving me some numbers to triangulate.
0:07:50 Yeah.
0:07:54 And like at the time, everyone was spending millions of dollars putting video on Facebook.
0:07:58 And, you know, I don’t think we were actually that smart.
0:08:02 I just think the people around us were really dumb.
0:08:09 I do think one of the big advantages, you know, they say at a poker table, if you look around and you can’t find the sucker, you’re the sucker.
0:08:13 Well, I think we picked the industry with a lot of suckers.
0:08:17 There were a lot of people who started five or 10 years before us and they just weren’t smart.
0:08:24 They were doing the same thing that they did for 10 years and, you know, even in 2015, 2017, we were like, yeah, PuzzFeed, it just doesn’t make sense.
0:08:26 It’s not worth a billion dollars.
0:08:29 And for five years, I think people didn’t believe us.
0:08:34 And over time, I think we proved that our model, while it seems silly, it actually works.
0:08:35 It worked and it made us a bunch of money.
0:08:36 All right.
0:08:38 So fast forward to 2016.
0:08:39 Where are you guys at?
0:08:42 How many subscribers do you have?
0:08:44 What was your revenue in 2016?
0:08:45 What’s the business?
0:08:59 Yeah, so 2016 was the year when, at this point, I’m working full-time on Wall Street, doing the brew in basically, you know, let’s call it 7 p.m. to 11 p.m. every night, falling asleep with my laptop on my lap.
0:09:00 Where were you working?
0:09:02 I was at Morgan Stanley.
0:09:02 Was that miserable?
0:09:03 Yeah.
0:09:04 Yes, it was.
0:09:07 My entire life was, like, built up to that point.
0:09:10 Because remember, like, my dad was a trader on Wall Street for 20 years.
0:09:12 My mom was like, this is all I knew.
0:09:13 But it was horrible.
0:09:24 And going back to what Austin was saying about just, like, there not being a lot of smart people in media, I actually think the best thing we did is, like, I call it, like, IQ arbitrage.
0:09:26 Where I was on a trading desk.
0:09:28 Everyone was a PhD in math.
0:09:30 I was the dumbest person on my desk.
0:09:32 Like, not even a shadow of a doubt.
0:09:35 And just by moving to media, I became not the dumbest person.
0:09:39 September of 2016, I quit my job.
0:09:40 Also, it was hilarious.
0:09:47 Right before that, I almost got fired from Morgan Stanley because they were worried I was insider trading through Morning Brew’s newsletter.
0:09:56 So, so, they basically, HR found out about Morning Brew, which I was supposed to have permission to work on.
0:10:02 The guy who was supposed to give me permission and told me he would got fired in a massive layoff at Morgan Stanley.
0:10:03 So, I didn’t get permission.
0:10:13 And they basically had me meet with Morgan Stanley lawyers, two litigators that were defending Morgan Stanley, saying, you can never tell anyone about this meeting.
0:10:21 But, um, we are concerned that you are trying to make investment decisions, uh, and get private information using your newsletter.
0:10:23 So, that was kind of, like, the last straw for me.
0:10:24 Made me really not enjoy the job.
0:10:25 Quit my job.
0:10:29 We raised a small round in 2016.
0:10:33 2016 is also the year when we talked to John Steinberg as he was starting Cheddar.
0:10:37 And John Steinberg is, uh, like, a media executive.
0:10:39 Did you guys see the Facebook message?
0:10:40 Yeah.
0:10:41 That he sent me?
0:10:41 Yeah.
0:10:42 So, this guy named John Steinberg.
0:10:44 At the time, I think I’m 26.
0:10:49 And I’m just, like, a guy in a shitty apartment trying to do this newsletter.
0:10:55 And John Steinberg is the president or CEO of BuzzFeed.
0:10:57 And he’s about to start a new company called Cheddar.
0:10:58 He was at BuzzFeed.
0:11:01 Then he went to Daily Mail North America that he was the CEO of.
0:11:03 He stepped down from Daily Mail.
0:11:06 And then he sent Austin and I an email.
0:11:07 Austin, what was the subject line?
0:11:08 Like, what did the email say again?
0:11:09 Yeah.
0:11:11 So, it was from his, we had no idea who John Steinberg was.
0:11:12 We didn’t know the media industry.
0:11:14 And we get an email from it.
0:11:17 It’s like, John Steinberg, some numbers at gmail.com.
0:11:25 And he emails us, subject line, intro to founders, body of the email, like what you’re doing, period.
0:11:26 That was the whole email.
0:11:30 So, we looked the guy up on LinkedIn and we’re like, holy shit, this guy’s a big deal.
0:11:32 You know, we give him a call.
0:11:35 And I mean, Alex can tell the story better, but he turns it.
0:11:36 He flips on us.
0:11:38 He makes us think that he’s excited in us.
0:11:40 He’s going to, he’s going to invest in us, all this stuff.
0:11:44 And then he brings Alex to his office and I’ll let Alex take it away.
0:11:45 What happens?
0:11:45 Go ahead.
0:11:46 Yeah.
0:11:54 So, I go to John’s office, which at the time was a tiny, like, closet of a WeWork space.
0:11:59 And it was him, Peter Gornstein, who was his co-founder and the chief content officer.
0:12:00 And I get there.
0:12:11 And I think the conversation is going to be about how John is going to invest in Morning Brew or how Morning Brew maybe will have a segment on cheddar that would create, you know, audience and distribution for us.
0:12:13 Instead, he starts interviewing me.
0:12:15 Yeah, because he wanted you to work there?
0:12:15 Yes.
0:12:17 So, he started interviewing me.
0:12:20 He’s like, okay, so Fitbit earnings come out.
0:12:24 You need to get an expert on the story to talk about what this means.
0:12:26 Who are you talking to?
0:12:27 How are you finding them?
0:12:28 Let’s go.
0:12:31 And I was like, well, I’m going to figure out a way to get to the CEO of Fitbit.
0:12:32 Oh, you fell into it.
0:12:43 And then at some point in the conversation, I was like, you know, to be honest, I’m, you know, I’m not interested in a job at Cheddar.
0:12:47 Like, I thought we were going to be talking about a partnership with Morning Brew or you guys investing in us.
0:12:49 And I will never forget this line.
0:12:52 Honestly, I have some respect he said this because he wasn’t wrong.
0:13:00 He goes, to be totally honest, the cost of the legal fees to do this deal would be more than what I would pay for you guys.
0:13:05 And I was like, damn, he’s right right now.
0:13:06 He’s right right now.
0:13:07 Dude, I have a very similar story.
0:13:11 First of all, related to John, I just found an old message on Facebook that I got.
0:13:13 So here’s his opening two lines.
0:13:15 Have we met?
0:13:16 We should meet.
0:13:20 Dude, he’s amazing.
0:13:22 He’s done it like four or five times.
0:13:24 And that guy’s motor just runs.
0:13:25 Like, he is just unbelievable.
0:13:28 So this is, we’re in the year 2016.
0:13:34 I get an email, or maybe I cold email Ben Lear, who started this thing called Thrillist, which became Group 9, like a billion-dollar company.
0:13:39 And then he’s one of the co-founders of Lear HIPAA, which is like one of the most preeminent VCs in New York.
0:13:44 We start talking, and I think he’s going to buy the hustle right out the gate.
0:13:47 And I’m like, hell yeah, like $5 million.
0:13:50 That’s how much I have right now already.
0:13:51 Like, the offer is going to happen.
0:13:59 And he brings in the president of the company, and it turns into an interview.
0:14:01 The exact same thing.
0:14:04 And I was like, oh, I thought you were going to buy us.
0:14:07 He’s like, brother, this is a newsletter.
0:14:09 This will never make more than like $2 million a year.
0:14:11 And I was like, well, I don’t know, man.
0:14:12 Like, if you do the math.
0:14:15 He was like, no, like, you should come and join us.
0:14:17 Like, you know, we’re a real company.
0:14:19 Like, if you want to, like, make this work, you have to join our company.
0:14:22 And forever, that has been a chip on my shoulder.
0:14:31 And just think about, like, how valuable it was that we were all kind of, like, both had conviction and were, like, irrationally confident in what we were doing.
0:14:38 Because, like, you could see so many other scenarios where someone’s, like, you know, googly-eyed by someone who’s super successful and goes and joins their thing.
0:14:43 And then it basically cuts all of the possible upside that, you know, we ended up experiencing with our businesses.
0:14:45 So this is, all right.
0:14:46 So we’re in the year 2016.
0:14:49 The hustle launched on 4-20-16.
0:14:52 And so that year, we did 400K in revenue.
0:14:57 I think we had, at the end of the year, we had, like, 100,000 subscribers.
0:15:04 I had this strategy where I was writing these crazy blog posts and getting, like, 500,000 to a million people a month coming to our website.
0:15:07 And that’s how we grew.
0:15:13 And I think of the 400K, I think 100,000 was advertising revenue.
0:15:15 And I think it was four of us at the time.
0:15:17 Where were you guys?
0:15:23 So that’s amazing because in 2016, we did our first ad deal.
0:15:26 It was a watch brand called Emla Heart, I believe.
0:15:31 It was about a $3,000 deal for three, we used to call them exposures.
0:15:32 We were so naive.
0:15:34 We called them ad exposures.
0:15:36 It was three of us.
0:15:39 We had a writer who, ironically, we poached someone from BI.
0:15:41 I think, I’m not kidding.
0:15:42 I think he made it, like, seven days.
0:15:44 Like, he barely made it at the company.
0:15:47 He quit because we wanted him to work more than a nine-to-five.
0:15:50 But, you know, we did 25,000 that year.
0:15:51 You did 400,000.
0:15:52 We were three of us that.
0:15:53 I was still in college.
0:15:55 But ours were events, though.
0:15:58 It wasn’t advertising, which is way less important.
0:16:00 Yeah, but you guys did, what, still 100,000 of ads?
0:16:01 That’s pretty good.
0:16:04 Yeah, we started advertising, I believe, in June.
0:16:05 And I looked up my first deal.
0:16:06 It was $4,600.
0:16:10 I cold emailed a guy named Chris Martinez at Wealthfront.
0:16:16 So funny, that’s the funny thing is, it kind of reminds me of, like, if you go to my LinkedIn
0:16:21 and look at my DMs from the last 10 years, I have basically DMed every human being that
0:16:24 has worked in growth marketing or media over the last 10 years.
0:16:30 And I remember that name, Chris Martinez, because I probably emailed him 12 times over that year
0:16:31 to try to get him to do a deal with us.
0:16:33 I don’t know who Chris is anymore.
0:16:33 I haven’t talked to him.
0:16:35 But if you’re listening, thank you.
0:16:39 The things I would do differently from 16 is we raised a little bit of funding.
0:16:41 I would not have done that.
0:16:47 I thought, and in fact, I tried to raise way more money, but no one invested, which ended
0:16:51 up being a blessing because I made a lot of money because I owned the majority of the company.
0:16:54 But that’s what I would do differently.
0:16:57 So if you’re listening to this, if I were starting today, I would not raise funding at all.
0:16:58 Would you agree?
0:17:02 I think raising funding is all about your business needs, right?
0:17:04 I certainly wouldn’t have raised more money than we did.
0:17:06 But we did need the $750,000.
0:17:11 I actually specifically remember, this is now fast forwarding to 2017.
0:17:15 It was December like 27th, 2017.
0:17:21 And I didn’t realize that payroll goes out early if it’s New Year’s Eve because they don’t do
0:17:22 payroll on holidays.
0:17:25 And I had a check in my hand that was going to make payroll.
0:17:29 And I had to sprint to JP Morgan because they were going to close at five o’clock.
0:17:30 It was like 4.55.
0:17:35 And, you know, when people say you were close to missing payroll, I was literally two minutes
0:17:36 away from missing payroll.
0:17:41 So we didn’t need every penny from a cash flow perspective, because obviously media companies,
0:17:46 the accounts receivable on them, you might need 30, 60, 90, or 120 days just to get paid.
0:17:52 But yeah, for a media venture, I don’t think you should raise as little as humanly possible.
0:17:57 I will say there is one thing I would have done differently and like one big lesson from
0:17:59 that period and the raise.
0:18:02 The first is we had 28 individual investors.
0:18:07 So we had 28 people who wrote checks from $2,500 to $100,000.
0:18:08 Same.
0:18:11 If I was to do it again, I would have way fewer.
0:18:17 I would also try to suss out if these people are going to be difficult because we’ll fast
0:18:20 forward at some point, but there were some very difficult investors when we sold the business.
0:18:27 The second is time is a crazy thing in startups and you always think you can get more done in
0:18:28 a shorter period of time.
0:18:32 And I remember we had a slide in our investor deck that showed our one-year plan to investors.
0:18:37 And that slide, looking back on it now, took us nine years.
0:18:41 We tried everything in that slide and took us nine years to try everything.
0:18:42 And most of those things did not work.
0:18:45 But yeah, it took nine years to accomplish our one-year plan.
0:18:46 All right.
0:18:49 So now we are in 2017.
0:18:51 Do you remember we ended the year?
0:18:54 I tell the story differently.
0:18:57 I tell the story that we went from 100,000 to 500,000 in subscribers.
0:18:59 I think I missed a year because I went back.
0:19:03 In 2017, we ended the year with 250,000 subscribers.
0:19:04 We had 2.2 million in revenue.
0:19:06 400K was events.
0:19:08 1.8 was advertising.
0:19:12 And my big learning that year was hiring a sales team.
0:19:16 I think I did the first year of ad sales and I was horrible at it.
0:19:18 I didn’t realize how uptight you had to be.
0:19:19 You had to be like buttoned up.
0:19:19 I didn’t know.
0:19:20 I didn’t understand this.
0:19:23 Where were you guys at the end of 2017?
0:19:24 Yeah.
0:19:29 So 17 was the year that we were both full-time or I was only full-time half the year.
0:19:31 We ended at 100,000 subs.
0:19:34 We did $300,000 of revenue.
0:19:36 We finally started taking a salary.
0:19:38 We were taking 60K each.
0:19:40 But that was the first real year.
0:19:41 We hired our first.
0:19:43 We hired Tyler Dank, who now is the CEO of Beehive.
0:19:45 I’m sure everyone listening knows Beehive.
0:19:47 And he was transformational for us.
0:19:48 What was his job?
0:19:50 Everything.
0:19:53 Dude, do you remember his first title, Austin?
0:19:53 Do you remember?
0:19:54 No.
0:19:55 Growth engineer.
0:19:56 Growth engineer.
0:19:57 Yeah.
0:19:57 Yeah.
0:19:58 Yeah.
0:19:59 I mean, he did everything.
0:20:04 And between him and then we had Michael Schwartz, who also now works at Beehive, who was our
0:20:04 first writer.
0:20:08 And then we had, he brought on Neil Freiman, who still works at Morning Brew today.
0:20:13 He is, I mean, like, look, Alex was the visionary of the Morning Brew voice.
0:20:18 But I do think Neil was really the executor and took it to the next level.
0:20:21 Neil is, I think I spoke about him last time I was on the podcast.
0:20:23 Neil was huge for Morning Brew.
0:20:28 He really did what Alex and I couldn’t do, which was take this idea in our head and put
0:20:33 it on paper every single day, 365 days a year for now 10 plus years.
0:20:38 I also think Neil is a great example of what we did well at the Brew and what you did well
0:20:44 at the Hustle, which is, I think about our first three writing hires, Neil, Michael Schwartz,
0:20:48 and then this woman, Nikki, and all of them were non-traditional hires.
0:20:53 Like, I think both the Morning Brew and Hustle were really good at finding undiscovered talent
0:20:56 and seeing a ceiling in them that other people didn’t realize.
0:20:57 And it was the same thing for you.
0:21:01 Like, I remember, we’ll talk about it later, but like, I watched your writers like a hawk.
0:21:06 I could read a Hustle story and knew who wrote it without seeing a name attached to the story.
0:21:08 And I knew their backgrounds.
0:21:12 And none of these people were what media companies would traditionally hire as talent.
0:21:16 Dude, I tried to recruit media people and they laughed at me.
0:21:20 Like, I emailed this one famous journalist and she said, that’s cute.
0:21:21 Thank you.
0:21:24 Like, I tried to.
0:21:36 And so the only people I could A, afford and B, convinced to do this stuff were like, for example, Lindsay Quinn was a blogger at like a procurement startup or something.
0:21:40 Or I don’t even, like, she was not a writer, but she could write and wanted to write.
0:21:46 And you sell them on the dream of like, wouldn’t it be fun if you could do this hobby all the time and make money from it?
0:21:48 And that’s the only people we could convince to join us.
0:21:49 She was, she was my writing hero.
0:21:53 The number of times in my career I’ve tried to poach her is very non-zero.
0:21:55 Yeah, she was fantastic.
0:21:57 And this really fast forward to 2018.
0:21:59 But Alex isn’t kidding.
0:22:03 We knew every single writer you had.
0:22:09 We knew, and Alex in particular, knew every single story who wrote them.
0:22:21 And we would come to work every day, end of 2017, 2018, we would, for the first two to three hours, print out Morning Brew, print out Axios, print out The Hustle, print out The Skim.
0:22:26 And with a paper and pen, and Alex led the charge, we’d go through every single story.
0:22:27 He’d circle what he’d like.
0:22:29 He’d X out what he didn’t like.
0:22:32 And look, Alex is the most likable person on the planet.
0:22:33 You now know this, Sam.
0:22:36 I’m sure a lot of listeners know how likable Alex is.
0:22:51 The only person on the planet I know who doesn’t like Alex is our first writer because Alex would sit there and just, you know, cross out half the words he put in the newsletter and be like, look, Lindsey Quinn wrote this same story better than you did.
0:22:52 Like, be better.
0:22:54 And, I mean, we were maniacal.
0:22:55 We were, you know, we lost our minds to the game.
0:22:58 We were crazy about this newsletter thing.
0:23:01 And for the record, I didn’t do that.
0:23:02 And that’s a regret.
0:23:11 Like, now that I’m older and understand how company building works, like, I would, like, if you told me you were doing that, I’d be like, you guys are insane.
0:23:11 Just have fun.
0:23:12 Do what feels good.
0:23:20 But that does not, like, once you get past, I don’t know, 5 million in revenue or something like that, you could, and that means you probably have some type of product market fit.
0:23:24 You could absolutely iterate your way to being, like, wonderful.
0:23:29 You know, starting, like, you’re at a B or a C plus, you can get yourself to an A plus through iteration.
0:23:39 And honestly, I think a lot of me being maniacal with the content came from, like, what Austin had taught me along the way around standard setting.
0:23:43 And basically, the standard of your business is what you allow.
0:23:48 And so, like, if you allow suboptimal content to be written, that is the new standard you set.
0:23:54 Like, basically, you’re implicit, by saying, not saying anything to something, you’re implicitly saying that that is okay.
0:24:01 And to me, that was my biggest fear, is if I said okay to things that were not exceptional content, that was the new standard of my business.
0:24:03 How old were you guys during this era?
0:24:04 In 2018?
0:24:07 I was 22?
0:24:08 23, right?
0:24:09 Yeah.
0:24:12 And, yeah, I mean, I’m, what, a year and a half older than you?
0:24:13 Yes, you were 24.
0:24:20 Dude, you guys were, like, I’m like what you guys are when you were 22.
0:24:23 Today, I am now a 22-year-old Austin and a 22-year-old Alex.
0:24:25 Like, I totally buy into everything you’re saying.
0:24:28 Back then, I completely would have laughed at you.
0:24:31 And your way is 100% the right way.
0:24:35 Like, being, it’s crazy how mature you guys were at such a young age.
0:24:42 Yeah, when we sat down at first to set our core values, two, and at the time, I thought
0:24:44 core values were fluffy.
0:24:48 Now, in hindsight, I actually regret that we didn’t, you know, write those in stone and keep
0:24:48 those.
0:24:50 We messed around with them a bunch.
0:24:52 But two core values were really important.
0:24:55 It was one, have an ownership mentality.
0:24:56 Act like you’re an owner.
0:24:58 And if you own something, you’re going to, every day, critique it.
0:24:59 You’re going to give it feedback.
0:25:01 You’re going to care a ton.
0:25:03 You’re going to drive every single day to that.
0:25:05 And the second is underdog mentality.
0:25:11 We came into work every day, a group of misfits, a group of people who had no idea what they
0:25:12 were doing in the media industry.
0:25:14 And we just act like an underdog.
0:25:15 It’s March Madness right now.
0:25:20 And you just see that the way these underdogs show up to games, they’re loose, right?
0:25:22 They don’t have this weight on their shoulders.
0:25:25 And every day we came into work and we were like, screw it.
0:25:30 We are going to kick the shit out of all these legacy media companies who raised these, let’s
0:25:32 see, $100 million of funding.
0:25:36 Alex and I would sit down and say, what could you possibly do with $100 million of funding?
0:25:40 And what they did is they burned it on fire and flushed it down the toilet and added no
0:25:40 value to their companies.
0:25:41 Yeah.
0:25:49 I also just think it’s like, at the time, Austin and I, we just had such a fire.
0:25:56 And I think for Austin, similar to you, Sam, Austin kind of creates an opponent in his head.
0:26:01 And that is enough to basically just create this like insatiable drive to win.
0:26:03 I think for me, I actually have less of that.
0:26:06 But the thing that compensated at the time was like the two things.
0:26:10 It was like my, my dad dying and feeling like I needed to provide for my family.
0:26:15 And I told you this last time when we saw each other in person, Sam, like me being bullied
0:26:20 from fifth grade to 12th grade and feeling like I just wanted to prove that I was like
0:26:21 worthy.
0:26:27 That was more than enough where I think even when the brew is small, Austin and I had this
0:26:30 like deep in our bones feeling that we were going to succeed.
0:26:32 Like the business would ultimately sell.
0:26:33 And it was just a matter of time.
0:26:38 That’s what I have always admired about you guys was you have this really cool combination
0:26:43 of optimism and pessimism where Austin is like afraid all the time yet.
0:26:45 Like is logical enough to be like, I’m going to do this, this, this.
0:26:48 And then like the likely outcomes are A, B, and C.
0:26:50 I did not feel that way.
0:26:52 I, I was, I was a scarcity mindset.
0:26:56 And so in 2018, you guys did 3.1 million in revenue.
0:26:57 You had 10 employees.
0:26:59 And how many subscribers did you have?
0:27:03 So 2018, we went from a hundred thousand to a million subscribers.
0:27:10 All right, my friends, I have exciting news for that business idea that’s been sitting
0:27:10 in your notes app.
0:27:16 The Hustle, which is my old company, has partnered with IndieHackers, one of my favorite websites,
0:27:17 to launch a pitch competition.
0:27:20 It’s called The Hustle’s Big Break.
0:27:22 And it’s a pitch competition with a simple premise.
0:27:27 You tell us your business idea in 60 seconds or less, and the winner gets $5,000 to turn it
0:27:28 into a reality.
0:27:29 Here’s how it works.
0:27:32 Record a 60-second video pitch of your business idea.
0:27:35 Include your business name, description, revenue model, and tagline.
0:27:40 And finally, submit it at thehustle.co slash bigbreak.
0:27:42 And it all has to be done by April 4th.
0:27:46 The winner gets $5,000 in cash to kickstart their business journey.
0:27:50 Plus, we’re going to feature them in The Hustle’s daily newsletter, which is read by around a million
0:27:51 and a half people.
0:27:54 And these are the smartest business and tech folks out there.
0:27:57 The winner will be announced on April 11th.
0:28:02 So again, if you have a business idea, go to thehustle.co slash bigbreak.
0:28:04 All right, back to the pot.
0:28:12 So in 2018, I think we ended the year at 500,000 subscribers.
0:28:14 We had 5.1 million in revenue.
0:28:16 About a million was from events.
0:28:21 And I paid my—we had $160,000 in profit.
0:28:25 And that was the first year that we spent on advertising.
0:28:26 I went and looked back.
0:28:29 So we got to like $200,000 organically.
0:28:30 And then we spent money on ads.
0:28:32 And I spent a million that year.
0:28:35 Did you guys spend money on ads that year to get to a million subscribers?
0:28:39 We spent every penny we possibly could.
0:28:43 I would track daily cash flow to make sure that we had enough money.
0:28:46 And we put—I mean, 2018 was the year for us.
0:28:51 That was the year that—I mean, there were days in 2018 we were growing 20,000.
0:28:52 You know this.
0:28:53 We would do these MacBook giveaways.
0:28:58 We would grow 25,000, 20,000, 25,000 subscribers in a day.
0:29:01 So, yes, we spent every dollar we could possibly find.
0:29:07 And my only regret is we couldn’t figure out a way to find more money to put more money into Facebook ads.
0:29:12 If I remember, by the end of that year, we were spending like $500,000 a month on ads, right?
0:29:13 Yeah, at least.
0:29:14 At least.
0:29:15 That’s crazy.
0:29:20 I was being—I had such a poor mindset where I didn’t look at it.
0:29:25 You guys, because you had this finance background, and also I think you are just more like this naturally anyway,
0:29:33 you had this mentality of like, well, I will spend $1 to make—like, if $1 turns into $1.1, I will spend every $1 I have.
0:29:36 For me, it was like $80,000 a month.
0:29:37 That’s astronomical.
0:29:39 It doesn’t matter what the return is.
0:29:40 Like, you know what I mean?
0:29:43 Like, that was a failure.
0:29:44 That’s an immature mindset.
0:29:48 I also feel like part of it was like Austin and I were younger than you.
0:29:56 We also like, you know, at the time, we were only making $60,000, or I think we had upped our salary that year to $120,000.
0:30:09 And I don’t like—I think part of maybe your mentality for the hustle was like, this is kind of just like a cash-flowing lifestyle business for me that I’m going to just like—I can continue to pull money out of the business as like the vast majority owner of it.
0:30:14 I feel like Austin and I, at the time, weren’t thinking about monetizing it for ourselves in the same way.
0:30:17 Yeah, and Sam, I knew you thought that, right?
0:30:23 Because, you know, a deal in rippling, that whole thing just happened, and we certainly didn’t have someone in your slap.
0:30:25 But we would talk to all your former employees.
0:30:29 We would get every bit of information we possibly could.
0:30:32 And I knew that you had a profit threshold.
0:30:34 You’re like, I want to profit this every month.
0:30:36 And I said, well, that means Sam’s taking his foot off the gas.
0:30:39 And so if Sam’s taking his foot off the gas, I’m going to do the opposite.
0:30:40 Which is funny.
0:30:42 I didn’t make a lot of profit.
0:30:43 I didn’t actually make a lot of profit.
0:30:50 Like, we grew revenue like 50% most every year, but like I did not—so I—yeah, and I think that you were talking about values.
0:30:55 I wish I would have—so, you know, I think you guys matured earlier than I did.
0:30:59 I was still really immature, and I didn’t codify my values, and I didn’t codify the culture.
0:31:05 I started the company when I was 24, 25, and I think I evolved to where I am today when I was like 31.
0:31:09 You guys were kind of like 31-year-old Sam when you were 21.
0:31:15 But had I done it over again, and if you’re listening, I would codify your values early on and stick to it.
0:31:18 Also, what a lot of people do is they buy ads.
0:31:21 Because so back then, this was only, you know, a handful of years ago.
0:31:27 Back then, it felt like buying ads was more—like there weren’t that many experts now to buy ads.
0:31:30 It’s like commonplace, like you—it’s way more common.
0:31:36 And so people buy ads way earlier for their products now, and I actually think that’s a huge mistake.
0:31:37 Totally.
0:31:38 Yeah, I totally agree.
0:31:46 I mean, that’s the part of the story that we didn’t talk about is like we didn’t do paid acquisition until 2017, really.
0:31:52 So 2015 and 2016, to get to 100,000 subscribers, it was entirely organic growth.
0:31:57 So by the time we actually were paying for subscribers, like we knew we had a great product.
0:31:59 We knew how long subscribers were staying.
0:32:04 We also knew how to like work within scarcity of not having money but finding ways to grow regardless.
0:32:07 And I think that muscle, if you skip over it, is a really bad thing.
0:32:12 Okay, and another thing that I learned that—well, I learned—so I’ll say it in 2019.
0:32:13 So we’re in 2019.
0:32:17 You guys did $3.1 million in revenue with $3 million in profit.
0:32:19 $13.1.
0:32:25 Sorry, $13.1 million in revenue, $3 million in profit, a salary each of $250, a team of $25.
0:32:30 We did about $8 million in revenue with $640 being from events.
0:32:37 We did profit of $200,000, but we did cash flow of $1.6 million, and we had—and I’ll explain why.
0:32:43 So at that point, I sort of switched the business to caring about cash flow, and I had subs of about $1.2 million.
0:32:46 And that year, we launched this podcast.
0:32:49 Sean, under the hustle name, launched my first million.
0:32:57 This year, in 2019, the thing I learned was that—you know how a lot of social media companies are like,
0:32:58 who cares about revenue?
0:32:59 Who cares about profit?
0:33:00 Just grow your users.
0:33:02 This was the year that I learned that to be true.
0:33:10 That if you know that you make a certain amount of revenue per advertising—via advertising or subscription per user,
0:33:12 that’s the only thing that matters.
0:33:13 It’s just getting more users.
0:33:14 And I wish I would have understood that a little bit earlier.
0:33:25 Yeah, I think what we learned this year was we started to see the plateau of not just newsletter growth,
0:33:28 but of the economics of newsletters.
0:33:30 Morning Brew got to a point where we started to ask ourselves,
0:33:33 how much could you make on a single newsletter?
0:33:36 I think it was $18 for us per subscriber, right?
0:33:39 $0.50 a month for advertising, maybe?
0:33:41 That sounds right.
0:33:43 I don’t know exactly.
0:33:44 Or $0.75?
0:33:46 Something like that.
0:33:48 I think that makes sense.
0:33:52 But what we learned was, at some point—and the answer ends up being far, far down the road—
0:33:56 but we started to ask ourselves, do we just want to be a single newsletter?
0:34:01 Or are we going to get to a place of diminishing returns from pumping more and more money?
0:34:05 And we were spending—this year, we probably spent $6 to $7 million on paid acquisition.
0:34:09 So we spent what you did in revenue almost, just pumping growth back in.
0:34:12 And we started to ask ourselves, does this make sense?
0:34:14 And that’s where we learned about industry dives.
0:34:19 And we started to really take the approach of, wait, our audience works in retail.
0:34:20 They work in marketing.
0:34:23 They work as CFOs or in finance.
0:34:25 What if we took that path?
0:34:26 The CPMs are higher.
0:34:28 You don’t need to grow as fast.
0:34:29 It’s not a race to the bottom.
0:34:31 It’s more of an engagement play.
0:34:34 And so that’s when we went into our industry verticals.
0:34:39 Yeah, and what I would say is also that year, I actually think of all the years in the business.
0:34:48 2019 was the most important year because that was the year when Austin and I—I can’t remember what month it was.
0:34:54 But basically, I would say Austin and I really never got in big arguments or fights in the history of the business.
0:35:05 But in that year was the year that I could tell Austin was—or a single day, Austin was most upset with me because basically what I remember is Austin and I were still working in the business.
0:35:07 Like, we were in the freaking mud.
0:35:13 And all we could think about was, like, making sure the newsletter went out tomorrow, making sure we were getting an ad deal for Friday.
0:35:17 Like, we could not see a month or a quarter ahead of us.
0:35:19 That’s a really stressful time.
0:35:22 Yeah, and I remember one day, we were in WeWork.
0:35:33 I got a message from Austin on Slack saying, hey, one of our investors, who is this guy, Scott, who created the Snuggie, and he has a bunch of other products.
0:35:42 He told Austin—because Austin had asked him about, like, what are things—what are resources you have to, like, operationalize your business and run your business?
0:35:47 And he goes, I use this book, Traction, and you’re going to read it, and you’re going to adopt it in your business.
0:35:50 Austin read it, and he gets back to me.
0:35:57 He messaged me in Slack, and is like, dude, you need to read this book yesterday, and this is what we’re going to do.
0:36:02 And I remember a day goes by, and I didn’t—or a few days went by, and I didn’t read the book.
0:36:05 And Austin messages me and says, did you read the book?
0:36:05 And I said, no.
0:36:13 And he says, it’s something along the lines of, I don’t understand why you’re not doing the thing that is the most important thing in our business right now.
0:36:17 And I could tell for the first time that, like, he was actually pissed at me.
0:36:19 So I went that day, and I read the entire book.
0:36:20 I did not work.
0:36:23 I went to the highest floor of our WeWork and just read the book.
0:36:25 And I think a few things happened.
0:36:29 One is Traction was a game changer for our business.
0:36:39 I also think that really became the inflection point where Austin really took over as CEO of the business in kind of—not in title, but in action.
0:36:44 And, like, I think it was a transformational year for the company.
0:36:50 I read that book around the same era, and it had the exact same impact on me.
0:37:00 And, in fact, on Tuesday, it’s Wednesday—yesterday, I hired an EOS implementer, and I met with him yesterday to implement it into Hampton.
0:37:05 And so for those listening, EOS, it’s called Entrepreneur’s Operating System.
0:37:06 It’s a framework to run your company.
0:37:07 It’s based off a book called Traction.
0:37:11 That’s so funny that we all came across this at the same time.
0:37:17 Yeah, I’d love for you to do a full episode of My First Million, I think everyone would, where you kind of do a postmortem.
0:37:22 And talk about how you implemented it, reveal as much as you could, because we didn’t hire an implementer.
0:37:24 I thought it was a waste of time and money.
0:37:25 It’s totally worth it.
0:37:29 And that’s my biggest regret, is not hiring an implementer, because I didn’t want to be the bad guy.
0:37:30 I didn’t want to be the bully.
0:37:34 You basically spend, you could say, I don’t know, probably thousands of dollars.
0:37:34 $60,000.
0:37:37 Usually, the guy I talk to, it’s $60,000 a year.
0:37:38 Wow.
0:37:41 Which, by the way, is why it’s an unbelievable business.
0:37:44 It’s basically like a digital franchising business.
0:37:46 It’s such a cool business.
0:37:48 Yeah, but it’s worth it.
0:37:49 It’s basically, it’s $60,000 a year.
0:37:52 It’s basically an executive coach slash organizer.
0:37:57 But it’s so funny that it happens, if you’re running a company, once you get to like the
0:38:02 5 to 10 million mark, that’s where it’s like, all right, what we’re doing is mostly working
0:38:04 at least good.
0:38:06 Let’s do more of it.
0:38:10 And how do I do more of it without killing myself and creating redundancies and building
0:38:13 a company and transition from going from a business to a company?
0:38:15 And that is where that book helped me.
0:38:16 A hundred percent.
0:38:16 Yeah.
0:38:20 I kind of thought about it at the time as like, first chapter of Morning Brew was newsletter
0:38:21 as a hobby.
0:38:24 Second chapter of Morning Brew was newsletter as a business.
0:38:28 And third chapter was like newsletter business, meaning multiple newsletters.
0:38:32 And there was no way we were going to be able to do more than one newsletter unless we
0:38:34 figured our shit out because we were too in the weeds.
0:38:36 How many subscribers did you guys have at the end of 19?
0:38:39 I’d say probably about two, right?
0:38:42 We probably went from one to two, maybe from one to 1.8.
0:38:45 But again, that year was defined as us maturing as a business.
0:38:52 So Sam, at The Hustle, where were you in terms of maturation?
0:38:54 You were doing more than we did.
0:38:56 You had events and you had an ad business and you launched My First Million.
0:38:58 Like, how is the business actually being run?
0:39:02 Oh, and I have to say, we launched Trends that year.
0:39:08 And so Trends was basically a $300 a year subscription where like I had this woman named
0:39:12 Julie and Steph Smith write a weekly email.
0:39:15 And then we had a Facebook group where you could talk about like interesting companies.
0:39:20 That’s why we started measuring cash flow because I learned the importance of building $300 up
0:39:21 front versus monthly.
0:39:27 So at that point in the company, I just had so many like demons that I was still just getting
0:39:27 out of.
0:39:32 And like what I learned about running a company at that era was that the issues that you have
0:39:34 as a person transcend into like the company.
0:39:39 And I went I didn’t have like you guys had each other each other as like right hand man.
0:39:43 And I didn’t have that like at the company where I could like confess to someone all the things
0:39:44 I’m nervous about.
0:39:50 And so I ran the company using EOS and I had Brad, Adam, Ryan.
0:39:52 So Brad did content, Adam did sales.
0:39:55 I think I had Scott Nixon who did growth.
0:39:58 And I think we had one person who did events so I couldn’t remember.
0:40:00 And then I had Steph Smith who did Trends.
0:40:02 So I had five people who reported to me.
0:40:07 And I was kind of beginning to get a little checked out because I was so exhausted at this
0:40:07 stage.
0:40:12 You know, exhaustion kicks in around year four or five, and I was starting to get dead
0:40:14 from running the company and I just did not care anymore.
0:40:16 Like Sean came to me wanting to launch MFM.
0:40:18 And I was like, that’s stupid.
0:40:19 Like I hated everything.
0:40:22 And I was like, this is stupid.
0:40:25 But if you really want to do it, you know, we’ll be the publisher.
0:40:25 So we own it.
0:40:28 But show me an episode.
0:40:31 And he sent me the episode and I was like, fine, we’ll do it.
0:40:33 Like, but there was no, and I published it the next week.
0:40:34 There was no planning.
0:40:35 There was nothing.
0:40:40 And I really was immature for not doing planning, not having longer term thinking and for exhausting
0:40:41 myself out.
0:40:41 Yeah.
0:40:47 One thing I’ll say is I think in that year that you kind of felt like mentally toast and
0:40:51 like a little lost, like that, that was the year that I felt the same way, I think for
0:40:52 different reasons.
0:40:57 The other thing that’s, I think just an interesting observation is like you, you mentioned like
0:41:01 Austin and I had each other as right-hand people as we’re going through the business.
0:41:05 And I think that’s true to some degree, but I also think Austin and my relationship has
0:41:12 evolved a lot over the years because I think we started the business so young that the way,
0:41:16 like when I co-found a company now and the kind of the level of direct communication and
0:41:21 feedback to each other that I have with like, even for story yard with my CEO, it looks very
0:41:25 different than the way that Austin and I would give feedback to each other in the brew.
0:41:30 And it’s not because like, it’s not for any other reason other than we didn’t have the
0:41:33 maturity to speak with like radical candor and speak openly.
0:41:36 I think we were like afraid about critiquing each other, giving feedback.
0:41:40 And so I actually think, at least for me, a lot of my growth honestly came through like
0:41:43 things like therapy or like dealing with it on my own.
0:41:44 I, it’s funny.
0:41:49 I think Austin and I as co-founders today will look so different than us as co-founders, you
0:41:51 know, in 2016 through 2019.
0:41:59 I will say for me, I think my big maturate, like I matured a lot during the sale process,
0:42:02 we dealt with so much and so many different stakeholders.
0:42:05 And look, Alex and I are really lucky.
0:42:14 Like we grew up with, with nice families and we started this business and basically from day
0:42:16 one, everything took off.
0:42:24 Like we had no hardship and the hardest part of running the business professionally, the
0:42:28 hardest part of running the business was when we had the sale process and we had some investors
0:42:31 who were pissed at us for selling too early.
0:42:34 The same investors who six months early were begging us to sell.
0:42:39 We had employees who felt as if they didn’t own enough of the company.
0:42:44 And, and what you learn is when it’s, when you sell a company, there’s a huge lump sum of
0:42:45 money that’s in a paper.
0:42:49 And when everyone sees that lump sum, everyone starts thinking like, oh, how can I get mine?
0:42:51 How can I get my money?
0:42:51 Sure.
0:42:56 I only own 0.25% of this company, but actually I kind of view myself as a co-founder.
0:43:00 I kind of view myself as more than worth 0.5% of this company.
0:43:03 And I think I took that very personally.
0:43:05 It was very hard.
0:43:07 It was very hard for me.
0:43:10 And at the time I was, I was a bull in a bull in a China shop.
0:43:10 Right.
0:43:17 And I remember taking these calls and my, my now wife was in the other room and I’m on
0:43:18 the calls, these people.
0:43:21 And my wife goes, Austin, you’re an asshole.
0:43:23 And I’m like, what do you mean?
0:43:24 She goes, you’re a total asshole.
0:43:26 And I’m like, but I’m right.
0:43:31 And she goes, you’re totally right, but you can be right and not be an asshole.
0:43:34 And I was like, oh, I didn’t know that was possible.
0:43:37 I didn’t know you could feel like that was, that was a thing.
0:43:40 So I was the total asshole up until then.
0:43:41 And I think I’ve matured a little bit since then.
0:43:45 Well, you’re still a bull in a China shop, but in a great way that, you know, what I was
0:43:47 telling you earlier was I would never want to have an argument with you.
0:43:52 I don’t want to fight with you because you will win a lot of times because you’re so smart
0:43:55 and you’re, you’re, uh, you’re just like intense.
0:44:02 And so let’s go to the year 2020, the year 2020 is the years we both sold, or I think
0:44:04 my deal technically closed in February of 21.
0:44:11 But, um, that year, you guys remember the first half of the year we, so the first Q1 of
0:44:13 2020 COVID hit, I’m sure.
0:44:14 Well, actually let’s recap.
0:44:17 So 2020, you did 20 million in revenue, 6 million in profit.
0:44:23 We did, uh, uh, 12 million in revenue and I forgot how much profit we did, but we had
0:44:26 about 3 million in cash and we had 1.5 million subs.
0:44:27 I think you had three.
0:44:31 And the beginning of that quarter Q1, we were probably in the same spot.
0:44:33 I thought we were going out of business.
0:44:34 COVID hit.
0:44:35 We thought, I thought it was over.
0:44:36 Did you think that?
0:44:37 Yeah.
0:44:39 I mean, I, it’s very interesting.
0:44:45 Like I can remember with these big moments, like exactly where I was pacing in a room, talking
0:44:46 to Austin.
0:44:52 Like I literally remember pacing back and forth in my now in-laws main room, talking
0:44:52 to Austin.
0:45:00 We were talking about one of our biggest sponsors, who is a financial services company that I can’t
0:45:05 remember the exact number, but let’s just say it was like they had a $75,000 sponsorship
0:45:06 coming the next day.
0:45:09 And the day before as COVID was starting, they canceled it.
0:45:10 So right.
0:45:12 $75,000 gone in one conversation.
0:45:15 And then basically the floodgates opened.
0:45:20 And I can’t remember the exact amount, but let’s just call it like in a period of a few
0:45:24 weeks, 30% of all revenue that we had booked vanished.
0:45:31 And I remember Austin and I going back and forth being like, how the hell are we going to make enough money to just not fire people?
0:45:37 I remember the first lever we pulled is we basically turned paid acquisition, paid marketing down to zero.
0:45:46 But him and I literally like we brainstormed everything from starting a Patreon and asking people to donate all the way to our education business.
0:45:49 Like we ended up launching an education business at the brew, which we’ve since shuttered.
0:45:52 But the reason that started was to bring in short term cash.
0:45:58 And that first education thing was a partnership with Scott Galloway when he was starting section for his section four.
0:45:59 We did the same thing.
0:46:05 We did a course and it made $300,000 in one month and it helped save us.
0:46:08 And that was the year that I learned what the word force majeure meant.
0:46:12 And it was crazy.
0:46:15 I thought we were going out of business.
0:46:20 And I remember you guys had just signed like an $80,000 a month like office lease.
0:46:25 And I was like, yeah, I hope this breaks them down.
0:46:26 I hope this is their downfall.
0:46:33 And I remember during this era, I remember I got one of our advertisers who we shared.
0:46:40 Because when we got going, something we didn’t say earlier, advertising and newsletters wasn’t really much of a thing.
0:46:43 We had to convince like early adopters to give it a shot.
0:46:45 And so we had a lot of this.
0:46:46 We had shared advertisers.
0:46:50 And I would beg them, like, show me their click-through rate versus our click-through rate.
0:46:53 And what I learned was like it was basically like the same for a lot.
0:46:54 Like it wasn’t like significantly different.
0:46:59 But the first half of that year, I thought we were going to go out of business.
0:47:02 The second half, everything fucking boomed.
0:47:03 It was crazy.
0:47:07 The business was booming.
0:47:10 Like our trends thing was selling like crazy.
0:47:12 People were spending like crazy.
0:47:14 It was a boom.
0:47:19 And we ended up getting, like I remember we got, what was that called where the government gave you money?
0:47:20 Like P something?
0:47:25 Yeah, we like got some of that money because our events business got shut down entirely.
0:47:28 And I was like, I don’t know how I’m going to make payroll.
0:47:33 And then it turned out, I’m like, damn, I kind of feel bad because we killed it.
0:47:34 We killed it that year.
0:47:35 Like it felt great.
0:47:44 I remember the emotional journey of the acquisition was crazy for Austin and I because our, I don’t know how long your sale process was.
0:47:46 But our 90 days.
0:47:55 It was LOI, LOI to closing was 90 days, but then there was like 30 or 60 days of flirting.
0:47:56 Yeah.
0:47:58 So ours looked completely different.
0:48:02 Our process like end to end was 11 months.
0:48:10 So the first conversation with the person at, um, on the Axel Springer side of things was November of 2019.
0:48:14 And I remember we first got deal terms.
0:48:17 I can’t remember when it was, but let’s just call it like January or February.
0:48:19 March.
0:48:21 From Axel Springer or from who?
0:48:22 Yeah.
0:48:22 From Axel.
0:48:23 Yeah.
0:48:27 And I remember what happened was in March, world shuts down.
0:48:32 There’s a period of three weeks where Austin and I are like, forget a deal.
0:48:33 We don’t even know if we’re going to have a business.
0:48:37 And then after those three weeks, starting in April, everything ripped.
0:48:42 And we went from Austin and I being like, like we, not that we don’t even think we’re going to have a deal.
0:48:44 We don’t even know if we’re going to have a company after this too.
0:48:46 We’re way underpriced.
0:48:47 We’re doing so well.
0:48:52 Are we even being, uh, paid appropriately for how much the business is ripping now?
0:48:54 And that rollercoaster in those three or four months was insane.
0:48:59 New York city founders.
0:49:05 If you’ve listened to my first million before, you know, I’ve got this company called Hampton and Hampton is a community for founders and CEOs.
0:49:11 A lot of the stories and ideas that I get for this podcast, I actually got it from people who I met in Hampton.
0:49:13 We have this big community of a thousand plus people and it’s amazing.
0:49:19 But the main part is this eight person core group that becomes your board of advisors for your life and for your business.
0:49:20 And it’s life changing.
0:49:27 Now to the folks in New York city, I’m building a in real life core group in New York city.
0:49:34 And so if you meet one of the following criteria, your business either does 3 million in revenue or you’ve raised 3 million in funding,
0:49:38 or you’ve started and sold a company for at least $10 million, then you are eligible to apply.
0:49:41 So go to joinhampton.com and apply.
0:49:44 I’m going to be reviewing all of the applications myself.
0:49:47 So put that you heard about this on MFM.
0:49:49 So I know to give you a little extra love now back to the show.
0:49:56 So we both sold that year, the sales process.
0:50:01 That was the most intense part of my life.
0:50:02 It was horrible.
0:50:05 Like it was so miserable.
0:50:08 I was so bummed for like almost every day for three months.
0:50:11 This woman who works with me, her name’s Edie.
0:50:12 She still works at HubSpot, I believe.
0:50:17 I hired her earlier that year or maybe a few months before COVID hit.
0:50:21 And she was probably 63 or 65.
0:50:26 She basically had birthed her daughter a little bit later in life in her 40s and was like,
0:50:30 now that my daughter is 20, I’m going to go back to work to prove to her that young women can kick ass.
0:50:32 And I was like, hell yeah, you’re the best.
0:50:34 I’m going to, I would love to hire you.
0:50:36 And so she was like our HR person and our accountant person.
0:50:37 And she was great.
0:50:42 But then I learned during the deal process, like I would, we would be on a meeting with like me,
0:50:48 HubSpot, which had like six people, KPMG accountants, six people, and then six lawyers.
0:50:54 So it’s like, that would have been like a $20,000 meeting.
0:51:00 And I hear Edie and I kind of see her bring her iPhone up.
0:51:01 And take a picture.
0:51:04 And I was like, Edie, what the hell are you doing?
0:51:06 And she was like, I don’t know how to take a screenshot on my computer.
0:51:08 And they’re talking about Dropbox.
0:51:09 And I don’t know how to use Dropbox.
0:51:11 So I’m trying to like take pictures.
0:51:14 I’m like, Edie, I got to teach you how to use Dropbox, man.
0:51:16 So she’s like brilliant.
0:51:17 She like nailed it.
0:51:18 And she was so good at her job.
0:51:21 But she didn’t know some of the technical stuff like using Dropbox.
0:51:23 So I had to teach her during this process.
0:51:26 And I’m like, I can’t tell them that.
0:51:28 Like, this is how scrappy we are.
0:51:29 Wait, did you use a banker?
0:51:31 Dude, I hired a banker.
0:51:34 So the first time I tried to sell, I hired a banker.
0:51:36 And we ended up getting an offer from Vice.
0:51:37 And it was an all stock offer.
0:51:39 Thank God I didn’t take that.
0:51:41 And I did.
0:51:43 You’d be working at McDonald’s.
0:51:44 Oh, my God.
0:51:46 It was like I went to tour the office.
0:51:47 And like no one was there.
0:51:48 And I was like, where is everyone?
0:51:50 And they were all in sexual harassment training.
0:51:52 Because like incidents there were like so common.
0:51:53 I’m like, you guys suck.
0:51:55 And so I hired a banker for that.
0:51:56 And I hated it.
0:52:00 And then I always thought that HubSpot or a company like that should buy us.
0:52:02 And they reached out to me.
0:52:05 And I was like, I don’t need a banker.
0:52:06 Like, I’m going to negotiate this.
0:52:09 When I started the company, my goal is to make $20 million by the age of 30.
0:52:11 I was like, as long as I make that, I don’t care.
0:52:13 And the deal allowed that to happen.
0:52:14 And so I didn’t hire a banker.
0:52:18 And I actually talked to Kip, the CMO of HubSpot.
0:52:20 And he told me that he tried buying you guys.
0:52:24 And he was like, I wanted to buy both of y’all and own the business newsletter space.
0:52:26 And he’s like, but they were too far along.
0:52:28 And you guys hadn’t talked to anyone.
0:52:31 So I knew we were going to be able to buy you, but not them.
0:52:32 Yeah.
0:52:36 So I don’t know if Kip is totally being truthful there.
0:52:38 I think Kip wanted to buy us.
0:52:46 I got the impression at the time that they were going to make a $120 million bet on email
0:52:47 newsletters.
0:52:48 They were really interested.
0:52:55 But because we did a better job of monetizing each subscriber, you know, we were more expensive
0:53:00 and the hustle didn’t care or HubSpot didn’t care about that extra revenue.
0:53:02 Like, you know, okay, it’s or a profit, right?
0:53:05 What’s $10 million of profit to the HubSpot?
0:53:07 They cared about our users, right?
0:53:09 The classic and vertical integration.
0:53:12 And I think that you, you know, you said you always thought you were going to sell the HubSpot.
0:53:18 I always thought we were going to sell to Fidelity or E-Trade or Robinhood.
0:53:23 I thought it made so much sense as an acquisition play and as a retention play.
0:53:29 And, you know, we pitched, Alex and I were talking about this last night, Sam, I don’t think I’ve
0:53:30 ever told you this story.
0:53:31 I definitely haven’t told it on the podcast.
0:53:33 But we pitched SoFi.
0:53:33 SoFi.
0:53:40 And the CEO of SoFi at the time was formerly the CEO or COO of Twitter.
0:53:41 I think Anthony Noto.
0:53:44 And he really liked us or at least liked the business.
0:53:48 And we went, we pitched a group of executives at SoFi.
0:53:49 And it’s over Zoom.
0:53:49 This is during COVID.
0:53:51 And I’m like, Alex, this is our pitch.
0:53:53 Like, this is our moment.
0:53:54 We’re going to sell for hundreds of millions.
0:53:56 We’re going to get all this stock in SoFi.
0:53:57 It was going crazy.
0:53:59 And we pitched him for 15 minutes.
0:54:04 And the woman, I’m not kidding, deadpans, looks at Alex and goes, I don’t get it.
0:54:09 And I’m like, which part?
0:54:12 And she’s like, why would we buy you guys?
0:54:14 I don’t get the whole thing.
0:54:16 And I was like, well, you know, content to commerce.
0:54:17 We have an audience.
0:54:23 And the other guy, like the head of business and all that, flips the background of his screen.
0:54:26 And he shows SoFi Stadium, right?
0:54:27 He shows that they’re big stadium.
0:54:32 And he goes, 300 million eyeballs a year.
0:54:34 I’m like, what?
0:54:37 He goes, that’s how many people see this stadium.
0:54:40 You think we want 3 million emails?
0:54:42 What are we going to do with 3 million emails?
0:54:44 And that was the entire call.
0:54:45 What a douche.
0:54:47 Your wife should have talked to them.
0:54:51 That’s insane to me.
0:54:56 But I think, Austin, I feel like you made a good point about like just the lesson in incentives there.
0:54:57 Yeah.
0:55:04 I mean, at the end of the day, we were telling the marketing team of a company, we can market your product better than you can.
0:55:12 You know, what CMO, what head of marketing is going to buy a company unless they have a ton of humility if they believe that our pitches, we can do your job better than you can.
0:55:13 And I think this issue is pretty fearful.
0:55:16 And so that’s why that’s why that deal didn’t go through.
0:55:20 So, you know, and we couldn’t even get in touch with the Fidelity’s of the world, the E-Trade’s of the world.
0:55:22 They didn’t, like, that wasn’t a conversation.
0:55:29 So that’s when we went to more media buyers like Axel Springer, who already had made the offer, and a few others.
0:55:31 And, look, we shopped.
0:55:31 I don’t know about you.
0:55:33 I’m curious how many conversations you had.
0:55:34 We shopped it to everyone.
0:55:35 We got no—
0:55:37 I shopped it to all traditional media companies.
0:55:38 No one was interested.
0:55:39 Hearst.
0:55:41 Hearst wasn’t interested.
0:55:43 Like, New York Times wasn’t interested.
0:55:45 No media people were interested.
0:55:48 And, frankly, I hate the media industry, so I was kind of happy.
0:55:54 Yeah, and that’s part of the reason we sold, is we were—I mean, a couple hours before we signed, we were unsure.
0:55:57 I was talking to all these people, getting all this advice.
0:56:05 But we came back to we own the vast majority of the company, and we didn’t get a single offer in writing from another company.
0:56:07 And that was just terrifying to us.
0:56:11 We said, what if Axel Springer goes away, and we’re never going to be able to sell this company?
0:56:14 Of course, in hindsight, that’s not true, but at the time, you’re so scared.
0:56:16 It was a—you know, we made a decision.
0:56:20 I think it was the right decision in hindsight, but we did it partly because we were scared.
0:56:21 Can I—all right.
0:56:25 I want to rattle off the—so my story ends there.
0:56:26 In 2020, we sold.
0:56:31 You guys sold half the company and then later sold the rest.
0:56:37 I’m going to rattle off the future numbers, but then I want to talk about, like, future stuff, like what people listening can learn.
0:56:41 So 21, you did $46 million in revenue and $10 million in profit.
0:56:45 22, $70 million in revenue, $10 million in profit.
0:56:47 23 was the same numbers.
0:56:52 And so I imagine the business now is in the $70, $80, $90 million range, something like that.
0:56:55 But you guys aren’t owners anymore.
0:57:01 What do you think people doing—now newsletters are really popular.
0:57:05 I remember when Substack started, I thought it was the dumbest idea ever.
0:57:07 I chose not to invest in Beehive.
0:57:08 I thought that was a silly idea.
0:57:09 I was wrong about both of those things.
0:57:16 What do you think that the people starting now are getting wrong, and where’s the opportunity, in your opinion, in this space?
0:57:27 I think the number one thing that people get wrong is they view this arbitrage that we had in 2017, and they think it exists today.
0:57:33 They think the same economics exists today because they read a blog post that Tyler Dank wrote in 2018.
0:57:40 The value of a subscriber is significantly less than it was when we started because there are so many newsletters out there.
0:57:45 And people forget that the most important thing, it goes back to what did we do in 2018?
0:57:50 We printed the newsletter out every day, and we were not maniacal over the content.
0:57:57 Every person out there I see now on Beehive, 99%, like, oh, here’s an untapped market.
0:58:05 Let me write, like, C-plus or B-minus content, and let me use all these growth hacks, and I’m going to get to a million subscribers, and I’m going to sell all these ads.
0:58:11 And I think they get to half a million or a million subscribers if they can, and their ads don’t sell for $50,000.
0:58:13 They sell for $3,000.
0:58:18 And the economics don’t work because there’s not enough engagement because the content’s not good enough.
0:58:20 And so just people aren’t focusing on the content.
0:58:21 It’s all about the content.
0:58:27 That’d be like selling a SaaS product and the code not being very, or the product not working that well.
0:58:29 Like, you have to focus on the content first.
0:58:30 Everything else follows.
0:58:32 Yeah.
0:58:38 I would just add on, and Austin and I have obviously talked about this at length, but the more niche, the better.
0:58:45 Like, the internet is just this long tail of millions of niches, and the more niche you go, especially if you pick the right niches,
0:58:54 not only can you get higher CPMs, and I would argue that, like, in this advertising pullback that has happened for, like, the brew or just media companies in general,
0:58:56 B2B has been less impacted.
0:59:03 But the other part about it is, you know, the trouble we had at Morning Brew, which I think you had less of at The Hustle,
0:59:07 is we didn’t know, we could not figure out how to monetize our audience directly.
0:59:09 We tried everything.
0:59:11 We tried selling merch to them.
0:59:13 We tried the education product.
0:59:15 We couldn’t figure out a good solution.
0:59:20 For your audience, like, I think Hustle Trends was a really smart product for your audience.
0:59:25 The more niche you go, I think the more clear it becomes how you can directly monetize your audience.
0:59:35 I think a big thing to learn for people starting now is my strategy was partially right, partially wrong.
0:59:37 The strategy that I had, I hated advertising.
0:59:45 I remember, do you guys remember how, like, the sales guys always wear jeans and a plaid shirt and these bright brown shoes?
0:59:51 I remember I bought a pair of those brown shoes and I wore them to one meeting in New York and I took them off at the end of the meeting and I threw them away.
0:59:53 And I, like, went home in my socks.
0:59:58 I was like, I’m never wearing these fucking brown shoes that tech salespeople wear ever again.
1:00:01 I will never wear these brown shoes.
1:00:04 I just, like, distinctly remember that because I hated it.
1:00:07 And so I was like, I want to create products to sell to my audience.
1:00:13 And what a lot of people get wrong about that is they go outside.
1:00:19 So, like, you know, I think Adam and Becca at work, we wanted to sell, like, software products or something like that.
1:00:30 And that strategy that they and many other people, or I don’t even know if they did do it, but whoever wants to try and do that, it will almost always fail.
1:00:42 Because in order to make a business like this work, where you sell stuff to your audience, you almost always have to be within your core competency of content.
1:00:51 And if the founder is not, like, what Mark Zuckerberg was to Facebook of being, like, a tech wizard, you need to be that about content.
1:00:54 Otherwise, it’s not always, but almost always.
1:00:57 Otherwise, the business sucks.
1:01:06 And so I think that for the people listening, if you are going to build something, go super hard on content, make money via advertising, which is the right thing to do.
1:01:18 And then if you do make money in other ways, you will almost always want to make money in ways that fit within, like, the ikigai of, like, your company’s core competency and what the world wants is some type of content-y media thing.
1:01:29 Yeah, we see it all the time, where people start a media company, they try to sell a product, and it’s really hard because you’re pivoting from a content company to a product company or software company.
1:01:31 It’s really, really tough.
1:01:38 It’s like BuzzFeed, like, doing, haven’t they tried, like, making ovens or something like that?
1:01:41 Yeah, with Tasty, they have, like, their entire cookware brand.
1:01:50 Yeah, I think at the end of the day, it’s like, basically, you just are adding so much complexity to your business, especially the more you get out of your core.
1:01:55 Because it’s like, like, a media company and content, like, content is the product.
1:01:56 A media company is a business.
1:02:00 Then what you’re basically saying is you want to create an entirely different business.
1:02:04 And now what you need to figure out is the entirely different business, is the product exceptional?
1:02:07 Do you have someone who understands it deeply, who can run it?
1:02:10 Then the media side, can you keep that going in the right way?
1:02:18 And then also, is there an intersection where your audience not only trusts you, but trusts the thing that you’re now selling them that’s a different product?
1:02:20 Like, there are so many more moving pieces.
1:02:25 What else for a different opportunity?
1:02:28 You guys had on here that you being based in New York helped.
1:02:30 I agree with that.
1:02:31 It helped you guys a lot.
1:02:36 I think being, like, if you are an AI company, being in San Francisco is beneficial.
1:02:39 If you are a media or content company, being in New York is beneficial.
1:02:40 I think that was huge for us.
1:02:47 I think if you want to build a big brand in media, you have to be where the ad agencies are.
1:02:51 I mean, Alex was just grinding, going to ad agencies, meeting with people, talking to people.
1:02:54 If he lived in Austin, those people weren’t there.
1:02:55 He was never going to be able to meet with them in person.
1:02:56 Yeah.
1:03:01 It’s like your way, you’re not in it to win it if you are not in New York.
1:03:02 Yeah.
1:03:10 One other thing I would say is, like, I think actually, Sam, you and I feel differently about newsletters now.
1:03:15 Like, I know kind of your perspective is, like, newsletters are so much harder, you wouldn’t necessarily do it today.
1:03:22 My general view is, like, I feel like we’re, like, past early of every media channel on planet Earth.
1:03:24 Like, I don’t think anything is early anymore.
1:03:26 Like, podcasts have been saturated.
1:03:27 YouTube’s been saturated.
1:03:29 Newsletters have been saturated.
1:03:31 Like, everything is harder in my mind.
1:03:34 So, I think, like, the game overall has become harder.
1:03:41 That said, I still think there are going to always be opportunities, especially in a niche that you know a lot about, to succeed.
1:03:47 So, like, I would say I am still bullish on newsletters as a way of owning your audience.
1:03:52 I just think the level you have to play the game is higher than where we had to play the game.
1:03:56 One other just random thought is I used to always hate the news business.
1:04:04 Like, I thought the news business was such a bad business to be in because you need so many people to crank out content.
1:04:06 The economics are horrible.
1:04:15 I would actually argue with kind of where we are in society now and, you know, like, general distrust of news broadly, of traditional news broadly.
1:04:19 I think there’s a ton of opportunity to actually disrupt news as an upstart.
1:04:23 And I think we’ve seen that with, like, Barry Weiss and the free press.
1:04:25 And I think we’ll see more of that over the next few years.
1:04:30 So, here’s one of my takes on is for, like, where interesting opportunities are.
1:04:33 I would bet my life, I bet my life you guys agree with me.
1:04:42 Quarterly or monthly hardcover magazines or some type of physical newsletter.
1:04:44 Yeah, I love that.
1:04:51 I almost made, so we did Money Wise, a podcast about, it’s like a personal finance podcast for high net worth people.
1:04:53 I almost made that.
1:04:58 I was going to make it a $500, $2,000 a year.
1:05:10 shows up quarterly in a manila envelope, stapled printer paper, but really well-written articles to keep it, like, to feel like a mom-and-pop type of, like, underground zine.
1:05:12 That’s what I thought about doing.
1:05:13 And I still think someone could pull that off.
1:05:16 Have you seen Arena Magazine?
1:05:18 Is that the thing you love?
1:05:20 Yeah, so I think it’s really cool.
1:05:22 It’s this guy, Max Mayer.
1:05:25 I believe he worked at 8VC with Joe Longsdale.
1:05:27 And he started this magazine.
1:05:28 It’s quarterly now.
1:05:37 I don’t, I can’t tell you if it’s going to be a big business, but they tell the coolest stories, and it’s beautiful.
1:05:50 Like, this thing is done, you know, like a magazine from 20 or 30 years ago, where you’re selling super high-gloss paper, and the graphics are amazing, and then you’re probably charging a $7,000 CPM to some beauty brand.
1:05:51 It’s amazing.
1:05:54 And Stripe is making these really cool ads and ramp.
1:05:55 It’s awesome.
1:05:56 Everyone should check out Arena Mag.
1:05:59 What I would do is, so you said beautiful.
1:06:00 I would make it the opposite of beautiful.
1:06:15 I would pick an industry that has a lot of employees, whether it’s like the financial advisory industry, or the advertising world industry, something where there’s like a hundred or a few hundred thousand people, but you are only one or two degrees separated from each person.
1:06:21 And the whole name of the game would be name as many names as possible, and as many companies as possible in it.
1:06:31 And so you would want to, like, buy it for all of your staff, and you would have, like, rankings, like, the top, this person, this quarter, and it would, because it was almost like the difference.
1:06:35 Do you remember when Oscars started advertising in the subway versus on, like, a computer?
1:06:40 For some reason, when you see Casper out in the open versus on Facebook, you think, oh, wow, this is, like, way more legit and exciting.
1:06:46 I would do that right now for an industry, and I would name as many names as possible.
1:06:53 So they would just be paying money, an annual fee per year, just to have their name on paper.
1:06:55 Yeah, I like that.
1:06:57 The par 30 under 30?
1:07:01 Something like that, but for, like, financial advisors or something.
1:07:06 But I hate financial advisors, so it would be like, like, you all suck, but here’s the least sucky ones.
1:07:08 Any other interesting opportunities that you want to bring up?
1:07:14 I think that’s, I mean, the media space, I think that’s it for, like, the newsletter stuff.
1:07:26 I still think the big opportunity in the media space, if someone’s taking a big swing, someone wants to go build a billion-dollar company, it’s to do what we’re talking about or what the hustle did, right?
1:07:31 Use content to build something like a trend, but do it to the extreme.
1:07:35 So I think the best example right now, look at what Overtime’s doing.
1:07:40 Dan Porter, who’s been on the show, is amazing, right?
1:07:43 And for the first three years of this business, I didn’t get it at all.
1:07:45 I thought it was so stupid.
1:07:46 So dumb.
1:07:47 I was like, this guy’s an idiot.
1:07:49 He left all these awesome jobs.
1:07:49 He could do anything.
1:07:54 And he built another company off a ton of funding, and all he did was just put sports on social.
1:07:57 And next thing you know, he’s doing basketball tournaments.
1:07:59 I’m like, huh, that’s, like, kind of cute.
1:08:03 And then he’s running a league that’s trying to compete with college basketball.
1:08:05 And I’m like, holy shit.
1:08:07 This guy is on a different level.
1:08:09 He’s trying to compete with the NCAA and the NBA.
1:08:11 That’s a big swing.
1:08:17 Like, you know, if in a couple of years, I build another big company, I would think like
1:08:17 that, right?
1:08:22 Whether it’s, you know, basketball like that, or Padel, I think is really interesting.
1:08:24 Or there’s people now thinking about doing tennis.
1:08:29 There are so many interesting niches where you can go take a massive swing and try to compete
1:08:31 with, you know, the biggest organizations in the world.
1:08:34 Yeah, I have a few I want to add on top of that.
1:08:39 The first is a media company focused on alternatives.
1:08:40 What’s an alternative?
1:08:41 Alternative to what?
1:08:42 Like alternative investments.
1:08:45 So like real estate, private equity, venture, et cetera.
1:08:50 Like my whole thing is alternative investments are becoming a bigger part of people’s portfolios,
1:08:52 but they’re more opaque.
1:08:53 They’re harder to understand.
1:08:59 But they’re also really interesting ways to monetize people who are investing in alternatives.
1:09:06 I think basically a company that becomes like the go-to source for figuring out the complexity
1:09:10 of investing in alternative assets is going to make a killing.
1:09:12 I think that’s the first.
1:09:22 And second is basically for a long time, Austin and I talked about how an amazing way to monetize
1:09:26 our audience and we could figure it out would be like our version of Motley Fool.
1:09:30 And the reason we never did it is like Motley Fool’s built an incredible business.
1:09:32 But it doesn’t feel good.
1:09:37 Yeah, but our thing was like the marketing just does not feel good to us.
1:09:44 And so I think if someone can figure out how to support retail investors in a way that
1:09:49 makes them smarter about not losing their money in the markets and media is just like, you
1:09:50 know, the funnel to it.
1:09:54 Even like when we were at that newsletter conference two weeks ago, right?
1:09:57 And James Altucher was talking about what he makes on his premium.
1:09:59 He said he made a hundred.
1:10:00 He said it on stage.
1:10:02 He said $120 million a year in revenue.
1:10:03 Yeah.
1:10:06 And so I think that is still a massive opportunity as well.
1:10:09 Um, this is awesome, guys.
1:10:10 Thanks for doing this.
1:10:11 Um, how do you feel?
1:10:13 Feel good.
1:10:14 That was like therapy for me.
1:10:16 That was the most therapy I’ve done in my life, I think.
1:10:21 But for the record, you know, I, I never hated you guys.
1:10:23 I hated the story that I made up of you.
1:10:28 And, um, for the listener over the past, like three or four years, Austin, I have become
1:10:31 very, very close where our families are hanging out on Saturday.
1:10:36 Um, Alex, you and our, we did a family hang two weeks ago.
1:10:37 I have nothing but love for you guys.
1:10:40 I consider you guys family and you’re some of my closest friends.
1:10:46 And so it’s, it’s been fun to, to get soft instead of like, you know, wanting to, uh, compete
1:10:53 because now that I know more about you guys over the past, like 10 years, I don’t want to
1:10:54 ever compete against you ever again.
1:10:57 You guys are very formidable and not people I want to go against.
1:10:58 It was horrible.
1:11:00 Nothing but love from our side.
1:11:01 Yeah.
1:11:02 Quite the one 80 from 2018.
1:11:08 It was all the story, which by the way, I think if you’re listening to this and you have a company,
1:11:11 having that story was so helpful.
1:11:12 Yeah.
1:11:17 Like going, having an enemy was so helpful, even if it’s made up.
1:11:22 Um, it’s funny you say that I will use this time, uh, to plug my new newsletter that’s launching.
1:11:26 And one of my first newsletters that I I’ve written is about enemies.
1:11:29 And I think having an enemy, whether it’s real or fake, right?
1:11:30 For us, it was the skin and the hustle.
1:11:32 I think it’s really, really important.
1:11:34 Um, you know, beehive has convert kit.
1:11:37 Uh, and I think it just motivates everyone just a little bit more.
1:11:40 And I know Nathan and he’s the sweetest guy ever.
1:11:43 I’ve gotten to know Tyler a little bit and he seems like a wonderful guy.
1:11:48 And I’m like, I’m not going to start, stop you guys from fighting because I think a fight’s good.
1:11:51 And also I know that you’re both wonderful people and you would love each other in a different world,
1:11:55 uh, or when this is all done, but you have like, you have to have that.
1:11:58 So I’m on board, which just six, six years from now,
1:12:00 one of them is going to have a podcast, my first email,
1:12:03 and they’re going to both be on it and it’s going to be all hugs.
1:12:04 What’s your thing, Austin?
1:12:05 Where do they get it?
1:12:06 You can just find it.
1:12:08 My Twitter DMs or sorry, my Twitter bio.
1:12:11 Well, I appreciate y’all.
1:12:13 And, uh, thanks for doing this.
1:12:17 If you Google your name, Austin, by the way, it’s that stupid photo of you guys on the white wall
1:12:23 that you’ve been using for like 15 years and it’s your last episode of my first million.
1:12:26 So it’s funny how we have all come to work together.
1:12:27 Um, all right.
1:12:28 We appreciate y’all.
1:12:28 That’s it.
1:12:29 That’s the pod.
1:12:30 Thanks.
1:12:32 I feel like I can rule the world.
1:12:36 I know I could be what I want to put my all in it.
1:12:38 Like no day’s off on the road.
1:12:38 Let’s travel.
1:12:40 Never looking back.

0:00:13 Last week, in the first episode of this two-part series, the Nobel Prize-winning economist Richard Thaler described one of the most common afflictions of our time.
0:00:22 If you make things harder, I call that sludge kind of a fun word for stuff that’s the opposite of fun.
0:00:40 We heard how insurance companies use sludge to ration health care, how subscription services use sludge to avoid cancellations, and how governments are full of sludge because, well, because sludge is an almost inevitable byproduct of bureaucracy.
0:00:55 Today, in part two, we look at ways to fight sludge through better legislation, through the use of artificial intelligence, and maybe by hiring a personal sludge coach.
0:00:56 I’m not available.
0:01:01 That’s okay. We are available starting now.
0:01:19 This is Freakonomics Radio, the podcast that explores the hidden side of everything, with your host, Stephen Dubner.
0:01:34 It is a natural temptation to think that your problems are worse than other people’s problems.
0:01:39 Also, to think that the problems of our generation are worse than previous generations.
0:01:46 But, as it was written way back in Ecclesiastes, there is nothing new under the sun.
0:01:48 And so it is with sludge.
0:01:53 For many years, it went by another name, a prettier name, Red Tape.
0:01:56 Do you know the story of how Red Tape got its name?
0:01:58 Here, it’s a cute story, I’ll tell you.
0:02:08 It apparently dates back to 16th century Spain and King Charles V, who had his most important legal documents bound in red ribbon.
0:02:16 Eye-catching and expensive ribbon befitting a king versus the plain ribbon used for less important documents.
0:02:19 This tradition spread through Europe and to America.
0:02:25 And as governments and legal institutions expanded, there was ever more need to go back into the archives
0:02:29 to find these important foundational documents.
0:02:37 This meant that lawyers and clerks had to constantly untie and retie those red ribbons, later called red tape.
0:02:40 Okay, that concludes our history for today.
0:02:42 Back to the sludgy present.
0:02:50 In last week’s episode, we met the Stanford economist Neil Mahoney, who spent time in both the Biden and Obama administrations.
0:02:58 He is particularly interested in consumer finance, which often means protecting consumers from financial exploitation.
0:03:05 At some point, we should talk about my work on subscriptions because it fits in to all of this.
0:03:07 Okay, let’s talk about that.
0:03:13 The starting point for this project is I had a general impression that nobody can keep track of their subscriptions.
0:03:19 Meaning it’s easy to sign up for something and forget about it and keep paying for it.
0:03:22 For example, a digital subscription to a newspaper.
0:03:29 So me and my team, we took a list of the 50 highest circulation newspapers in the U.S.
0:03:33 And we signed up for subscriptions and we canceled them.
0:03:40 And we did it in Massachusetts, where there are no special consumer protection laws on the books.
0:03:46 You’re saying these are 50 newspapers spread out across the country, but you’re doing the signing up and canceling in Massachusetts.
0:03:47 Exactly.
0:03:50 And why is it relevant where you’re doing it from?
0:03:54 Because the laws apply to where your IP address is.
0:03:56 Not where the firm is.
0:03:58 Not where the firm is.
0:04:09 So we did it from Massachusetts and then we did it from California, which is where we’re based and where there were consumer protection laws on the books, which say it should be just as easy to cancel as it is to sign up.
0:04:12 You should be able to cancel online.
0:04:17 You should be able to cancel without unnecessary impediments.
0:04:22 And that’s just because California has always been pretty consumer progressive in that way, correct?
0:04:22 That’s right.
0:04:29 OK, so you’ve got a team, some are in California, some are in Massachusetts, and you’re doing the same thing from those two places.
0:04:29 Is that right?
0:04:31 We’re doing the same thing from those two places.
0:04:35 In Massachusetts, 100 percent of newspapers you can sign up online.
0:04:36 I don’t think that’s surprising.
0:04:42 Less than half of them, only 45 percent of them, can you cancel online.
0:04:46 The rest you have to call during business hours.
0:04:49 You get passed from operator to operator.
0:04:51 They ask you for reasons.
0:04:53 Sometimes the call drops.
0:04:54 They try to upsell you.
0:04:56 They try and upsell you.
0:04:57 While you’re trying to cancel.
0:04:57 Exactly.
0:05:02 And even when you can cancel online, it’s not click to cancel.
0:05:06 It’s, you know, what is your reason for canceling?
0:05:07 Would you like this other offer?
0:05:10 What’s your favorite color and type of dog?
0:05:12 And then you can cancel.
0:05:18 So what did Mahoney and his team learn from this research?
0:05:25 Remember, in Massachusetts, fewer than half of the biggest newspapers in the country let you cancel online in the first place.
0:05:34 Of those that did allow online cancellation, the vast majority slowed down the process with the kind of sludge that Mahoney was just describing.
0:05:43 And how about in California, consumer friendly California, which already has laws that are supposed to make it as easy to cancel as it is to sign up.
0:05:49 Even there, only 64% of the newspapers actually allowed online cancellation.
0:05:54 And of those that did, 83% made the process sludgy.
0:06:05 The most infuriating thing we discovered is there were newspapers, they wouldn’t comply with the law, but sort of gesture to comply with the law by allowing you to cancel by chatbot.
0:06:10 These are chatbots that would sometimes take 10 minutes to respond.
0:06:17 My guess is they’re sort of throttling the response of the chatbot because people get busy and they run outside and they forget to cancel.
0:06:25 In other words, firms purposely sludge up the cancellation process in order to discourage customers from canceling.
0:06:29 But soon this should be a thing of the past.
0:06:37 Thanks in part to Mahoney’s research and his work in the Biden White House, the FTC recently enacted a rule known as click to cancel.
0:06:42 Here’s how then FTC chair Lena Kahn put it when the rule was proposed.
0:06:49 Some businesses too often trick customers into paying for subscriptions they no longer want or didn’t sign up for in the first place.
0:06:59 The proposal would save consumers time and money and businesses that continued to use subscription tricks and traps would be subject to stiff penalties.
0:07:04 The penalty phase with potentially large fines begins in May of this year.
0:07:10 Click to cancel is part of a bigger agenda on what are called junk fees that Mahoney worked on in the White House.
0:07:15 Yes, I think we called it the junk fees agenda and there’s lots of documentation.
0:07:18 Including in the 2023 State of the Union, I believe.
0:07:21 Yes, that was the apex of the launch.
0:07:27 The junk fees agenda was meant to address problems like the one that Mahoney described in last week’s episode.
0:07:37 There’s this phenomenon where you think your concert ticket is going to be $70 you go to check out and there’s a $35 service fee, shipping fee, etc.
0:07:42 The FTC recently issued another rule that forbids this type of fee.
0:07:44 Those are going away.
0:07:48 The North Star in the space is all in upfront pricing.
0:07:54 There shouldn’t be any mandatory charges on the back end or in the fine print.
0:08:00 The FTC finalize a rule that will make this the law of the land for every player.
0:08:03 Presidential administrations, of course, change.
0:08:08 And there’s no guarantee that a regulatory agenda like this one will continue as planned.
0:08:15 But for now, both click to cancel and all in upfront pricing are set to become the norm.
0:08:19 Mahoney says there is broad support for this kind of thing.
0:08:28 The policies were championed by progressives that wanted to take a strong stand against what they saw as bad behavior by businesses.
0:08:38 But these policies also had this grounding in decades of behavioral economic research, in research of market competition.
0:08:50 These policies were about getting markets to work, getting rid of the sludge so that consumers could actively choose the good or service that was best for them.
0:08:53 We’ll see what the Trump administration does.
0:08:56 But there’s really broad support for these policies.
0:09:04 I talked to economists who I would think, based on their politics, would criticize this agenda, and they don’t.
0:09:09 Criticize it as government going too far, government getting in the business of business.
0:09:10 Exactly.
0:09:12 They tend to be skeptical of regulation.
0:09:21 But here’s a place where they understand that we need regulation to make sure that firms are competing the way we want them to compete.
0:09:30 For anyone who is anti-sludge, these junk fee rules are real victories.
0:09:37 But if we’re being honest, they are relatively tiny victories, considering how much sludge there is in the world.
0:09:39 Consider the U.S. healthcare system.
0:09:45 We got into this a bit last week with Ben Handel, a healthcare economist at UC Berkeley.
0:09:54 He told us that a lot of healthcare sludge is intentional, a way for insurance companies to ration care in order to profit maximize.
0:10:02 He also described how sludgy it can be to simply figure out what is covered in the healthcare contract you’re signing up for.
0:10:09 And then once you’re signed up, there’s more sludge in trying to find a healthcare provider who actually has some availability to see you.
0:10:15 So, I went back to Handel and asked if he had any fixes in mind, any solutions.
0:10:31 You could try to allow private firms to develop AI tools to help basically mine the insurance contract and then allow that to interact with consumer data in order to create this almost super decision maker.
0:10:43 You could go even further and require some listing of availability of these doctors, because a lot of times there’s what’s called ghost networks, where the provider is listed, but they have no availability.
0:10:47 And they’re listed why? Just to make it seem like there’s better or more choice?
0:10:48 Exactly.
0:10:52 That is especially prevalent in the mental health space.
0:10:59 This is almost like a crisis level at this point, where therapists have essentially no availability.
0:11:05 Your insurer might list 55 of them, and maybe two of them will actually have room.
0:11:09 There’s a second thing, which is I just kind of made this statement.
0:11:12 Oh, we’re going to integrate consumers’ data.
0:11:16 This is something I’ve been talking about for like 10 years.
0:11:20 This is really, for some reason, really hard.
0:11:23 Is this because of privacy concerns?
0:11:24 Is that the main barrier?
0:11:27 That is one of the key barriers.
0:11:32 However, it’s a surmountable barrier, I believe.
0:11:42 But it takes some minimal degree of cleverness that somehow is a little too high for policymakers and the healthcare system.
0:11:43 Come on, say what you really mean.
0:11:45 What do you mean by that exactly?
0:11:48 What needs to be done that requires too much cleverness?
0:11:50 I am sympathetic to this a little bit.
0:11:51 But it’s not trivial.
0:11:58 You basically have to find a way to anonymize the data in a way that really works.
0:12:14 Right now, medical privacy law, HIPAA, which is the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act, that is a good law that’s designed to essentially say you can’t have this kind of information in data that you’re passing around.
0:12:21 The problem is that the regulation, it’s based on a crude foundation.
0:12:29 The foundation is like, well, we’re setting this up so that the likelihood that someone’s identified is very low.
0:12:41 The problem is that the problem is that if you just follow HIPAA and you have a huge healthcare claims data set, there are versions of that where, yeah, you could still identify a decent number of people.
0:13:04 So the challenge is that you have to set up a system where the data have to be securely transmitted in a way that allows individuals to be identified in the data because the whole value in integrating the data is the individual specificity.
0:13:05 So if you don’t have that, it won’t work.
0:13:07 So if you don’t have that, it won’t work.
0:13:09 But if you have that, then you’re risking violating HIPAA.
0:13:10 Exactly.
0:13:12 It’s kind of a regulatory problem.
0:13:29 You basically want to have a firm or intermediary that hosts this privatized data anonymized so that an individual can go there and opt in and say, hey, I want you to use my privatized data.
0:13:36 I want you to use that and tell me which plan is the best one financially, which one covers my doctors.
0:13:45 If I have a need in this space, mental health, for example, and I check this box, are there two doctors available or 50 doctors available?
0:13:54 You see many industries where lots of consumer data is being used, basically every online sector, including very private data, right?
0:13:56 That’s being used to make recommendations.
0:13:59 This is possible to do.
0:14:00 That’s the way to say it.
0:14:10 Somehow, in the places where there is vast money to be made, in social media and online retail, no problem.
0:14:13 In the health space, there’s not really money to be made.
0:14:22 What Ben Handel just said there, that there’s not really money to be made in health care, that’s not quite right.
0:14:24 There is money being made in health care.
0:14:26 It’s just that the business model is different.
0:14:30 With most products, the more you sell, the more money you make.
0:14:35 But when you sell someone a health insurance policy, you get paid a fixed amount.
0:14:43 And the way you make money is by making sure that you pay the health care providers that you contract with less than that fixed amount.
0:14:49 This is part of the reason why insurers make it hard for you to consume the health care you may want.
0:14:55 So this is a case where commercial entities use sludge to boost their profits.
0:14:59 Coming up after the break, how about government sludge?
0:15:08 We’ve now tried to design processes in which you cannot criticize the judgment of anybody in them because literally no judgment was used.
0:15:09 I’m Stephen Dubner.
0:15:11 This is Freakonomics Radio.
0:15:12 We’ll be right back.
0:15:31 A little while back, we asked you, our listeners, to send in your personal sludge stories.
0:15:33 Here’s one from Paul Gabriel.
0:15:34 Hey there.
0:15:39 I’m a longtime federal employee and applying for jobs is notoriously sludgy.
0:15:45 I was applying for a position that required at least two semesters of physics, college-level physics, to qualify.
0:15:46 I had it.
0:15:51 One of them was called Physics 101, and the other was called Statics.
0:15:54 It was an engineering course studying static loads on structures.
0:15:59 I was deemed ineligible for this position because I did not have two years of physics.
0:16:04 I emailed back and forth the HR person for a long time, and they were pretty unmoved.
0:16:07 I sent them the description of the course.
0:16:12 I sent them a letter from the professor saying that this is indeed a physics course.
0:16:14 Nothing, nothing, nothing.
0:16:21 Finally, I got an email from the head of HR saying, we cannot count a statistics course as a physics course.
0:16:22 This decision is final.
0:16:23 You are ineligible.
0:16:31 At that point, I just picked up the phone, gave her a call, said, listen, it’s not statistics, statics.
0:16:36 And what do you know, 20 minutes later, I was offered an interview and deemed eligible.
0:16:41 You can usually make it work if you’re willing to stand up and fight for yourself, but there’s a lot of sludge to wade through.
0:16:54 It’s probably not surprising that many of the personal sludge stories we received had to do with government sludge.
0:17:03 And when you think about government sludge at this moment in time, you may well think of Elon Musk, the world’s wealthiest man and one of its most unusual.
0:17:11 He has been deputized by Donald Trump to drain the D.C. swamp, to take a chainsaw to bureaucracy.
0:17:12 Pick your metaphor.
0:17:13 There are plenty to go around.
0:17:25 Musk runs a new entity called Doge, the Department of Government Efficiency, which took over and renamed an existing entity called the USDS or U.S. Digital Service.
0:17:33 So we thought it’d be good to speak with one of the people who founded the USDS a little over 10 years ago under President Obama.
0:17:34 I’m Jennifer Palka.
0:17:41 I wrote a book called Recoding America, Why Government is Failing in the Digital Age and How We Can Do Better.
0:17:46 Palka no longer works in government, but she is usually adjacent.
0:17:55 I work with governments, state, federal and local, to increase their capacity to achieve their policy goals.
0:18:00 I founded a nonprofit that helps state and local governments do all that stuff.
0:18:03 That nonprofit is called Code for America.
0:18:06 Palka does some other things as well.
0:18:10 I served on the Defense Innovation Board, trying to help the Defense Department be better.
0:18:11 I do stuff like that.
0:18:12 I write a lot.
0:18:15 I write a substack called Eating Policy.
0:18:19 It was in 2014 that Palka co-founded the U.S. Digital Service.
0:18:28 It was imagined as a kind of anti-sludge strike force, going from agency to agency to help them update their digital infrastructure.
0:18:33 And how did Jennifer Palka become this kind of fixer?
0:18:34 I asked her.
0:18:38 Specifically, I asked what sort of superpower this requires.
0:18:44 My superpower is translating between different languages, but not actual languages.
0:18:47 Intra-English translation, you’re saying?
0:18:47 Yes.
0:18:48 Intra-English translation.
0:19:05 The theme of my life is sitting at the boundary between things and being able to tell people on each side of the boundary what the other is talking about and helping them see it from the other person’s perspective or community’s perspective.
0:19:11 So in the case of a government function, who would be the two parties that you’re translating for?
0:19:16 When I started Code for America, we had people who came in primarily from the tech industry.
0:19:21 2011 was our first year, so it was very much like the startup world.
0:19:24 And then you had people in city government.
0:19:31 And they have very different assumptions about what work looks like, how you serve the public.
0:19:36 The tech industry folks started to understand why government works the way it does.
0:19:41 And the government people getting, oh, these folks are bringing a different approach.
0:19:47 So is government sludgier in a different way than other institutions or firms?
0:19:49 Or is sludge pretty much the same everywhere?
0:19:54 There’s a whole bunch of reasons that it can get more sludgy and more complicated in government.
0:19:57 We have Congress and the executive branch.
0:19:58 We have federalism.
0:20:04 So any sludge problem can implicate state, local, federal, tribal, and a private sector.
0:20:07 I completely agree with all the people who come up and tell me.
0:20:10 But my big company I work for is just as bad as government.
0:20:17 Well, it is frustrating and it is slow, but it is different because you don’t have Congress as your boss.
0:20:26 But I think actually what matters more is not are big corporations or government more sludgy, but that government is a monopoly.
0:20:28 And so it just matters more.
0:20:31 Like you or I can’t decide to give unemployment benefits.
0:20:33 I mean, we could, but we don’t.
0:20:33 Yes.
0:20:36 And when government systems fail, they’re the only system.
0:20:41 When a company can’t get its product on the shelves, there’s a different company there to fill in.
0:20:47 Child welfare, unemployment insurance, Medicare, the tax system, it’s the only one.
0:20:54 I’d like you to talk for a minute about the very not good rollout of healthcare.gov way back when.
0:20:59 That was a website where you could buy insurance under the new Affordable Care Act.
0:21:06 So I was there trying to stand up the USDS when healthcare.gov had its failures.
0:21:10 And my boss got pulled into helping get the site back up and running.
0:21:11 So what happened?
0:21:14 What were the problems that led to that failure?
0:21:16 And what kind of lessons can you draw from the failure?
0:21:23 The HHS inspector general wrote this report that details so many things that were wrong that you’re like, that’s just everything.
0:21:27 And I don’t think that the IG was wrong in any of the things that they listed.
0:21:37 is that we have this concept in consumer tech called a product manager.
0:21:42 And it is always confused in government because it sounds like project manager.
0:21:47 There are thousands of project managers in every department, agency, whatever.
0:21:51 And until recently in government, there were zero product managers.
0:21:52 So what’s the difference?
0:21:55 Project management is the art of getting things done.
0:22:01 And there’s so much to do in government that we have amazing project managers and lots of them.
0:22:05 But product management is the art of deciding what to do.
0:22:09 Healthcare.gov just tried to do all the things.
0:22:12 It didn’t have somebody who was empowered to say,
0:22:22 I don’t think we can launch a system this complex that handles this many edge cases and have it work for everyone on day one.
0:22:25 In Silicon Valley, you would never do that.
0:22:27 It doesn’t have to be Silicon Valley.
0:22:31 Anywhere in the country that’s launching technology that needs to work for people,
0:22:34 that needs to be usable, scalable, and reliable.
0:22:36 You just don’t do that.
0:22:43 You start with a small set of users who sort of help you work out the bugs and then you add more and then you add more.
0:22:47 The people who did propose that at the time were told that it was illegal,
0:22:51 that for equity concerns you have to serve everyone equally.
0:22:54 Well, we serve no one for a while.
0:23:00 And I think we need to have that idea of what is it that we’re actually deciding to do
0:23:04 and then empower someone to make those choices instead of say,
0:23:11 here are literally thousands of requirements and have them all work the first day that the site launches.
0:23:14 I mean, it’s in retrospect insane.
0:23:19 And I wish that the IG had had that language,
0:23:25 but instead they look at the different ways that the project management went wrong
0:23:28 instead of questioning the whole assumption in the first place.
0:23:33 In 2020, early in the COVID pandemic,
0:23:38 Jennifer Palka was brought in by the state of California to help with a similar problem,
0:23:43 a state-run website that was overwhelmed by applications for unemployment benefits.
0:23:50 You had 10x, 15x spikes in the volume of applications for unemployment insurance.
0:23:52 Every state developed a pretty big backlog,
0:24:00 which is a real crisis because if you are four months into having no job
0:24:05 and your unemployment check isn’t there, you are running out of money to eat.
0:24:08 It looks like just a problem of a computer system,
0:24:15 but unemployment insurance dates back to the 1935 Social Security Act.
0:24:26 What happens is that we add requirements and process and procedure and law and regulation every year to that program.
0:24:29 It comes from the federal government.
0:24:30 It comes from the state.
0:24:34 It comes from the executive branch, the judicial branch, and the legislative branch.
0:24:37 It’s all additive and it’s never subtractive.
0:24:42 One commissioner of labor in New Jersey, Commissioner Osaro Angelo,
0:24:46 when he was called up in front of the legislature to explain why they had a backlog,
0:24:53 he brought the 7,119 pages of regulation that he’s supposed to comply with,
0:24:56 put them on the table, and said, you know, it’s a little hard.
0:25:00 How do you address that without starting over?
0:25:06 It’s very hard because the incentives for legislators in particular is to add.
0:25:11 We think we want elected leaders who are going to write bills.
0:25:12 We think that’s their job.
0:25:14 I think their job is actually different.
0:25:19 I think their job is to create the conditions under which government agencies can succeed.
0:25:25 Changing incentives is very difficult and involves the public having a different view
0:25:27 of what they want out of their electeds.
0:25:34 But we now have large language models that can help us sort through those 7,119 pages.
0:25:38 Five years ago, if you said to a legislative assistant,
0:25:42 your success is going to be doing something with that pile here, they literally couldn’t.
0:25:47 It’s too complex to actually understand and then to rationalize and simplify.
0:25:55 So if you set an LLM to work on those 7,000 plus pages of just New Jersey unemployment compensation
0:26:02 regulations, I’m guessing it could do perfectly well at giving you a three-page version.
0:26:09 But I’m also guessing it would point out what are inherent contradictions that are unresolvable.
0:26:09 Yes?
0:26:17 In a best-case scenario, magic wand thought experiment, it would actually give you not
0:26:23 only what the regulation should look like, but it would write the legislation that repeals
0:26:24 the stuff that needs to be repealed.
0:26:27 And just let’s keep with this thought experiment.
0:26:32 What if you, Jen Palka, had the ability and the permission?
0:26:35 What do you think would be the result if you said, let’s actually try this?
0:26:42 Let’s reduce the 10,000 pages of X regulations around whatever it is, voting registration or
0:26:47 unemployment or clearing someone’s felony conviction after marijuana is decriminalized,
0:26:52 et cetera, et cetera, and we can take those thousands of pages and turn it into a one-pager.
0:26:57 Then we just need to take a step back, get rid of the stuff that’s not working and that
0:27:03 we can’t agree on and move forward in a streamlined way with the stuff that is working and or that
0:27:04 we can agree on.
0:27:06 Would that work?
0:27:12 You need not just political will, but you need to counter the interests of the status quo.
0:27:17 There will always be someone who says, wait, if you simplify it, this person might be out
0:27:23 of a job or this vendor might be out of a job or we think that one of the things you’re
0:27:28 proposing to take out is a safeguard that’s important for this constituency or this consideration.
0:27:33 And I’m not saying that those interests, particularly for safeguards, are wrong.
0:27:35 We do need safeguards.
0:27:41 The problem is that oftentimes we have so many safeguards that government just can’t move forward.
0:27:43 Give me some specifics of safeguards.
0:27:46 Let’s stick with the realm of unemployment insurance.
0:27:51 I’m guessing that most of the safeguards are to prevent fraud of different sorts.
0:27:51 Is that correct?
0:27:55 No, there are safeguards meant to prevent fraud.
0:28:00 When I started working on it in 2020, none of those safeguards prevented fraud at all.
0:28:02 In fact, they were enabling fraud.
0:28:09 There’s a lot of safeguards around things like technology development, where you have to do
0:28:12 things in a very prescriptive way.
0:28:19 You are supposed to have your plan set entirely in huge detail up front before you ever start coding
0:28:20 anything.
0:28:22 There are requirements for security.
0:28:23 Security is a good thing.
0:28:24 We need security.
0:28:33 But the way we prescribe security is over-detailed and keeps security professionals from using any
0:28:33 judgment.
0:28:41 It’s a whole set of compliance regimes around these interlocking issues like technology, like
0:28:46 labor, like how you communicate with the public that all come together to create gridlock.
0:28:49 You just mentioned judgment.
0:28:52 I once heard someone really smart.
0:28:56 She used to run universities and she would talk about how she hires people generally.
0:29:00 She said, I don’t want to hire people who are good at following rules.
0:29:03 I want to hire people who have good judgment.
0:29:09 And that really stuck with me because I’ve come to see that a lot of the trouble in the
0:29:15 world, or at least a lot of the sludge, is caused by people who are pretty sure that they’re
0:29:17 doing the right thing by following the rules.
0:29:18 And it’s very simple to follow rules.
0:29:19 It’s kind of paint by numbers.
0:29:21 Do you agree or disagree with that?
0:29:30 I think that in many government processes, they have gone so far towards just following rules.
0:29:34 And for reasons that we should talk about, right, there’s real incentives for that that
0:29:35 the public helps create.
0:29:41 But we’ve now tried to design processes in which you cannot criticize the judgment of
0:29:44 anybody in them because literally no judgment was used.
0:29:51 And the outcomes of those systems are almost across the board poor.
0:29:55 One thing that made me want to do this episode was trying to do something very simple with my
0:29:58 bank that turned into a comedy of errors.
0:29:59 I wanted to buy a CD.
0:30:01 The rates were good.
0:30:02 I had a little money.
0:30:06 I bought the CD online in about five seconds.
0:30:09 It was really easy because I’m logged into my bank.
0:30:09 They know me.
0:30:10 I know them.
0:30:11 I bought the CD.
0:30:15 And then when the CD was getting ready to expire, it was not so simple.
0:30:20 I thought I would have the option to either re-enroll, roll it over, or just move the money back
0:30:21 into checking or whatnot.
0:30:25 And it turns out that, no, I couldn’t do that.
0:30:27 I had to get on the phone with my banker.
0:30:28 He said it would take about 20 minutes.
0:30:30 I said, what are you talking about?
0:30:30 Why?
0:30:35 My first instinct was, well, this is the way companies like to work.
0:30:37 They make it easy to buy and hard to sell.
0:30:38 Easy to subscribe.
0:30:39 Hard to unsubscribe.
0:30:45 It turns out that he needed a lot of identity verification, which struck me as absurd because
0:30:47 I was already identified.
0:30:53 But he attributed it to government compliance laws, know your customer laws, and things like
0:30:54 that.
0:31:02 I do wonder how much government sludge tips over into and infects private firms and all
0:31:03 the rest of us.
0:31:09 Companies are going to complain about that probably a little disproportionately to how much it really
0:31:11 is government’s fault.
0:31:17 But it’s certainly true that that happens, that sometimes government imposes regulations
0:31:22 that it doesn’t quite understand the implications of.
0:31:27 And one thing I kind of want to insert in the dialogue is that it’s really in how you design
0:31:31 the implementation of those regulations that matters.
0:31:33 From the government side or from the firm side?
0:31:34 Well, both, right?
0:31:38 There’s a thing in consumer technology of just testing with users.
0:31:40 And we don’t do that.
0:31:43 This is the thing I wish policymakers would do more of.
0:31:45 And I’ve seen them do it recently.
0:31:48 People are starting to pick this up where they say, OK, this is what we think the regulation
0:31:49 needs to say.
0:31:54 Now let’s go show it to people and see what they heard, first of all.
0:31:56 Because very often they’ll be like, well, we didn’t write that.
0:32:02 And then what is it going to look like when it’s actually hitting the user, so to speak,
0:32:03 when it gets out in the real world?
0:32:06 And then they can go, oh, oh, oh, oh, I see.
0:32:08 Because we said this, you have to do that.
0:32:10 Oh, we can do that in a different way.
0:32:16 That’s part of what I mean by closing this policy implementation loop is that if you can
0:32:21 get out there and test it first, you will end up finding ways to make that same regulation
0:32:22 less burdensome.
0:32:29 The dialogue right now assumes this sort of one-to-one relationship, like this amount
0:32:32 of regulation will be this amount of burden.
0:32:38 When in fact, designing things thoughtfully and testing them thoroughly in the real world
0:32:46 can mean a lot less burden on both the companies and the end user for the same kind of benefit
0:32:46 of guardrail.
0:32:53 So I hate to be impatient, and what you just described about policy implementation is plainly
0:32:57 part of the solution, but I want more solution.
0:33:02 We could talk about the formation of the problem forever, but it doesn’t sound that surprising.
0:33:07 It’s a little bit like, you know, if we were geologists, we’d talk about this sedimentary
0:33:10 accumulation that’s happened over billions of years.
0:33:11 Like, we get it.
0:33:13 There were fires, earthquakes, da-da-da, it all added up.
0:33:16 But now it’s a big rock and we need to move the rock.
0:33:17 So how do you move the rock?
0:33:19 Let me pull apart two parts of that.
0:33:23 One is there hasn’t felt like there’s many solutions.
0:33:25 This has been a sort of intractable problem.
0:33:33 But I think we’re in a particular moment where the models are so broken and people are so frustrated
0:33:36 that we have an opportunity.
0:33:38 Plus, we have new tools at our disposal.
0:33:46 Plus, there’s significant changes in government, like the Supreme Court’s decision and Loper Bright, which is going to force change.
0:33:54 Now, that change could be awful, but it is going to force a change, for instance, in how the executive and legislative branches work together.
0:33:57 And nobody knows what that looks like.
0:34:01 And so we have an opportunity to shape it towards a better model.
0:34:06 And governments everywhere are going to have fiscal crises now.
0:34:16 There’s just all of these things coming together that I think hopefully are going to kick us out of that malaise of just adding policy and procedure and being frustrated with bad outcomes.
0:34:27 The Loper Bright decision that Palka just mentioned is a 2024 ruling that overturned what is known as the Chevron Doctrine,
0:34:32 which required courts to defer to federal agencies on how statutes are interpreted.
0:34:40 Loper Bright will require courts to independently assess certain statutes and sometimes overrule the agencies.
0:34:44 As Palka says, nobody knows exactly what this is going to look like.
0:34:52 Critics say Loper Bright will give the courts too much leverage on issues like health care, the environment, consumer safety.
0:34:55 But Palka sees at least the potential for good reform.
0:34:59 She and Andrew Greenway recently wrote a position paper about this.
0:35:03 The way we frame the problem is the how of government.
0:35:05 Everyone’s focused on the what.
0:35:17 The what is the bill you pass that says we’re going to do industrial policy or we’re going to give people incentives for solar panels or we’re going to do financial aid for students in a certain way.
0:35:22 The how is all of the plumbing of it that’s gotten jammed up with sludge.
0:35:27 So if you want government that can actually achieve its policy goals, you have to have four things.
0:35:30 You have to be able to hire the right people and fire the wrong ones.
0:35:36 You have to reduce the procedural bloat or accretion that we talked about.
0:35:39 You have to invest in digital and data infrastructure.
0:35:44 And you have to close the loop between policy and implementation.
0:35:47 For most people, once you pass the law, that’s the end.
0:35:48 For me, it’s the start.
0:35:57 So today we have this very linear waterfall process and you don’t have these feedback loops that you have in systems that work well.
0:36:07 And so moving from that linear waterfall model to something in which we’re constantly looping back to, wait, is this working as intended?
0:36:08 What do we need to adjust?
0:36:14 That fundamentally more than anything else is going to be the solution to this in my view.
0:36:17 But it is a profound difference from what we have today.
0:36:27 Coming up after the break, Jennifer Palka says that what government really needs is more go energy and less stop energy.
0:36:32 And we circle back to Richard Thaler to borrow some of his go energy.
0:36:33 I’m Stephen Dovner.
0:36:35 This is Freakonomics Radio.
0:36:35 We’ll be right back.
0:36:52 Jennifer Palka is a Democrat who has spent much of her career working on digital transformation and sludge reduction in government.
0:36:58 So what does she think about the current Republican administration’s approach under Elon Musk and Doge?
0:37:03 We spoke with Palka several weeks ago as Doge was just getting started.
0:37:10 And remember, Doge took over the federal agency that Palka co-founded, the U.S. Digital Service, or USDS.
0:37:29 If they come in and put a whole bunch more muscle behind the kind of digital transformation that USDSers have been doing and empower them to this cleaning out of the cruft and working with agencies to deliver better and faster, I have to support that.
0:37:35 And what if on the to-do list is eliminate 30 percent of these government positions?
0:37:38 What’s your feeling about that as a first-order directive?
0:37:41 That’s not how I would do it.
0:37:43 But I’m not in charge.
0:37:46 The folks I voted for didn’t try to do it.
0:37:52 So we’re going to get cuts that are deeper and probably more arbitrary than I would have liked.
0:37:59 I do think we could, in some places, run the government on fewer people.
0:38:05 But I also am a big advocate for more internal competencies of certain sorts.
0:38:10 We need people in-house who actually understand how government works.
0:38:11 We understand our own systems.
0:38:17 I mean, we’ve been outsourcing these things to vendors to the extent that we don’t actually even know how our own systems work sometimes.
0:38:19 And that puts us in a really bad position.
0:38:26 We have a really incorrect balance between what I call stop energy and go energy.
0:38:32 There are lots and lots of people in government whose jobs are to make sure something doesn’t happen.
0:38:36 And there are very few people whose job is what I call delivery.
0:38:37 Give me an example.
0:38:39 Direct file at the IRS.
0:38:46 Fantastic new product for low-income people to be able to file not having to use TurboTax or something like that.
0:38:55 You’ll have this really small group of people doing delivery and then a whole lot of people saying, here are all the things that have to be done for the contract, for the security, for all these things.
0:39:01 One government delivery person said to me once, we were six people trying to deliver the product.
0:39:04 We have easily 60 people telling us what we couldn’t do.
0:39:11 Now, those 60 people are well-intentioned and often very thorough, very bright, very dedicated public servants.
0:39:13 I mean them no disrespect.
0:39:18 It’s not their fault that there’s 60 of them and six people trying to deliver the product.
0:39:23 That’s a problem of leadership to say, that ratio is wrong, let’s fix it.
0:39:32 I’m more interested in switching those ratios of go energy to stop energy than I am, you know, interested in mass layoffs.
0:39:40 But I do think we do need fewer people who are slowing things down and more people whose job it is to get the job done.
0:39:50 For some final thoughts on sludge elimination, I wanted to go back to Richard Thaler.
0:40:00 He is the University of Chicago economist who co-wrote the book Nudge and who helped popularize the word sludge as we’ve been using it over these past couple episodes.
0:40:06 I asked Thaler for his thoughts on whether Elon Musk and Doge are fighting sludge or something else.
0:40:13 I haven’t seen anything that would fall into the category of sludge reduction.
0:40:20 I mean, how is getting rid of USAID reducing sludge?
0:40:24 You can say, oh, we don’t want to give money to poor people in foreign countries.
0:40:30 I can understand somebody having that point of view, but it has nothing to do with efficiency.
0:40:46 Although when he sent some people into treasury to theoretically streamline the payments system, I mean, streamlining the payment system out of treasury would theoretically be an exercise in diluting sludge, wouldn’t it?
0:40:47 Absolutely.
0:40:54 Look, when Elon bought Twitter, he fired 80% of their software engineers.
0:41:01 And as far as I can tell, the site technically works better.
0:41:05 You’re saying 80% of the civil service should be fired?
0:41:07 That’s your statement here, Professor Thaler?
0:41:11 I want to go on record as saying that I did not say that.
0:41:18 But it’s certainly the case that many parts of the government could be streamlined.
0:41:23 Basically, every administration has talked waste, fraud, and abuse.
0:41:29 I haven’t heard of an administration that says, we want more waste, fraud, and abuse.
0:41:31 No one’s ever said that.
0:41:36 What’s your best advice for people looking to cut through sludge in their daily lives?
0:41:40 Is it a cognitive approach, a strategic approach?
0:41:42 Do you need to hire a sludge meister?
0:41:44 Are you, for instance, available?
0:41:46 I’m not available.
0:41:50 You know, I think all of the above.
0:41:56 You do what you can to simplify and hire experts.
0:42:00 If you have a complicated tax return, pay somebody to do it.
0:42:05 But I think most of us have very few defense mechanisms.
0:42:21 If I could wave my magic wand, I would say every government employee, including legislators and executives, should take a one-day course on sludge.
0:42:29 And then take a pledge to leave their job with less sludge than when they found it.
0:42:31 Would you be willing to teach that one-day course?
0:42:33 Yeah, once.
0:42:33 Huh.
0:42:34 Okay.
0:42:40 But I’d be willing to teach a hundred people who would teach a thousand people.
0:42:50 So, Richard, I was hanging out not so long ago with you and Ben Handel, and the conversation came around to choosing a healthcare plan.
0:42:51 Yeah.
0:42:53 Which was not where I thought the conversation was going.
0:42:56 Do you want to take the story from here?
0:42:58 Because if I say it, it may not sound so believable.
0:43:09 Well, so I am about to become a professor emeritus at the University of Chicago, although I am well over 70.
0:43:11 I’ve been plugging away.
0:43:19 Since I’ve been an employee and will be until June 30th, I’ve been on the University of Chicago health insurance.
0:43:23 I will no longer be eligible for that as a retired person.
0:43:34 And so, exactly what I was talking to Ben about was, all right, June 30th, I have to choose a Medicare option.
0:43:43 Maybe you would have thought that two economists, one of whom is a health economist, he would say, just take option J.
0:43:44 That’s the winner.
0:43:46 It wasn’t as easy as that.
0:43:58 But in part, your choices are going to depend on where you’re getting your healthcare, what kind of prescription drugs you’re on, and what kinds of ills you have.
0:43:59 It’s a hard problem.
0:44:17 What does it say about the state of, I don’t know, commerce generally, that an economist, you, who happens to have a Nobel Prize, needs help picking his healthcare plan from another economist who happens to be a healthcare specialist?
0:44:20 It tells us that the system is way too complicated.
0:44:22 That’s what it tells us.
0:44:33 Complicated systems, broken feedback loops, implementation problems, bright red ribbons everywhere you look.
0:44:38 It may seem by now that the war against sludge is unwinnable.
0:44:42 But Richard Thaler has one piece of good news for us.
0:44:53 We, meaning humankind, we have been fighting and winning sludge battles for a long time in domains as foundational as money and time.
0:45:06 Imagine you go to one of these old markets that still exist in various places around the world where you have to negotiate for those luscious-looking fruits.
0:45:11 So that’s complicated enough that the price is not clear.
0:45:24 Imagine if the measuring, if it wasn’t 12 ounces or 50 grams, but it was about this much, and it costs about that much.
0:45:26 That would just make life hard.
0:45:38 I remember looking at the history of this, and certainly the Romans were devising uniform ways of measuring various stuff.
0:45:45 And then, you know, currency solved a big problem, because before currency, we had to do barter.
0:45:52 So societies have developed all kinds of sludge reduction methods.
0:45:56 You know, we all are on the same clock.
0:46:02 And 99% of the world is on the same hour.
0:46:12 You could imagine the perfect time zone for each place would vary every 100 miles by a couple minutes.
0:46:16 But that would be horrific, horrible sludge.
0:46:19 So we make some sacrifices.
0:46:26 We do all kinds of stuff to make it easier to communicate and to make transactions.
0:46:32 There is a moral to the sludge story that Thaler tells.
0:46:36 We reduced sludge before, and we can do it again.
0:46:38 Will we?
0:46:40 I’d love to hear what you think.
0:46:43 Our email is radio at Freakonomics.com.
0:46:49 Coming up next time on the show, we ask a simple but extremely tricky question.
0:46:58 In a time of so much entertainment, so much digital and even virtual entertainment, how is live theater still alive?
0:47:00 We’re not a real business.
0:47:05 We have hits, but in between those hits, we have four flops in a row.
0:47:08 You’ve got to really love something if you’re going to do it eight times a week.
0:47:13 One wrong decision, and you’re dead and you don’t know it.
0:47:15 Are you trying to get me killed?
0:47:19 That’s next time on the show.
0:47:21 Until then, take care of yourself.
0:47:23 And if you can, someone else too.
0:47:27 Freakonomics Radio is produced by Stitcher and Renbud Radio.
0:47:30 You can find our entire archive on any podcast app.
0:47:34 Also at Freakonomics.com, where we publish transcripts and show notes.
0:47:37 This episode was produced by Augusta Chapman.
0:47:53 The Freakonomics Radio network staff also includes Alina Cullman, Dalvin Abouaji, Eleanor Osborne, Ellen Frankman, Elsa Hernandez, Gabriel Roth, Greg Rippon, Jasmine Klinger, Jeremy Johnston, John Schnars, Morgan Levy, Neil Carruth, Sarah Lilly, Teo Jacobs, and Zach Lipinski.
0:47:58 Our theme song is Mr. Fortune by the Hitchhikers, and our composer is Luis Guerra.
0:48:00 As always, thanks for listening.
0:48:10 This studio was described as notoriously difficult to find.
0:48:12 Did it live up to its reputation?
0:48:14 That was an understatement.
0:48:21 The Freakonomics Radio network.
0:48:23 The hidden side of everything.
0:48:27 Stitcher.

0:00:04 The path to $1,000 a month with digital products.
0:00:06 You know money doesn’t grow on trees,
0:00:09 but you do know that you can plant your own money seeds.
0:00:11 And by the end of the episode today,
0:00:13 you’re gonna have a path forward on how to do just that
0:00:16 on one of the biggest marketplaces in the world.
0:00:18 This is the Side Hustle Show.
0:00:20 It’s the business podcast you can actually apply.
0:00:22 Today’s guest is a long-time listener.
0:00:25 He’s a serial side hustler, real estate investor,
0:00:27 digital product seller, online course entrepreneur
0:00:29 from Gold City Ventures.
0:00:31 And The Fi Show, Cody Berman.
0:00:33 Welcome to the Side Hustle Show.
0:00:35 I am very excited to be here, Nick,
0:00:36 and talking with you today
0:00:39 and hopefully drop some knowledge bombs on the listeners.
0:00:39 Yeah, you bet.
0:00:41 It has been a long time coming.
0:00:43 We’ve got three rounds with Cody today,
0:00:45 including donate a business idea.
0:00:48 But we’re gonna start with his latest side hustle,
0:00:51 a brand new Etsy store that started last summer
0:00:55 and a few months in was earning $1,000 a month.
0:00:57 And now, Cody, you’re known online
0:00:59 as like the printable seller’s guy.
0:01:01 And my understanding is you get an email
0:01:02 and you get a comment that says something
0:01:05 to the effect of, well, sure, it must be nice,
0:01:06 you know, having started in 2018.
0:01:08 But what about us?
0:01:09 What about today when the marketplace
0:01:11 is so much more crowded,
0:01:13 all the good niches are already taken,
0:01:16 and you’re like, okay, challenge accepted.
0:01:16 Let’s do this.
0:01:17 Let’s start a brand new store
0:01:19 and see what we can do with this.
0:01:21 Yeah, so as a online content creator,
0:01:24 I’m sure you’re no stranger to this, Nick.
0:01:25 There are haters out there.
0:01:27 And so you get hateful comments on all your videos,
0:01:29 all your podcasts, there’s always one.
0:01:32 And someone on, I think it was on a YouTube video,
0:01:33 or maybe it was a short,
0:01:35 they said something to the effect of,
0:01:36 well, of course you were successful.
0:01:37 You did this in 2018.
0:01:39 The Etsy market’s so different now.
0:01:41 You could never repeat your success.
0:01:43 And I’m like, okay, buddy, like I can do this.
0:01:44 I’m gonna repeat my success.
0:01:46 So I started a brand new shop,
0:01:48 didn’t tell anybody about it,
0:01:49 didn’t post it on social,
0:01:51 didn’t market it to my email list,
0:01:52 didn’t mention it on the website,
0:01:55 like completely in a silo, blank, from scratch,
0:01:56 and was able to get that shop
0:02:00 up to $1,000 per month in revenue in 116 days.
0:02:02 Love it, love it.
0:02:04 So we’re gonna break down how that works,
0:02:07 starting with maybe the high level of,
0:02:07 well, what am I gonna sell?
0:02:10 How do I figure out what the demand is,
0:02:11 the keyword research behind that,
0:02:13 or the product creation strategies behind that?
0:02:14 But where do you start?
0:02:15 What do you say, like, okay,
0:02:16 I’m looking at this blank slate.
0:02:19 What kind of product could I sell?
0:02:21 The best thing with your audience,
0:02:23 and I am catering these answers
0:02:24 specifically to some people
0:02:26 who are already entrepreneurs or side hustlers.
0:02:28 If you’re already a side hustler,
0:02:29 look at what you already have
0:02:30 and what you’re already using.
0:02:32 So some easy examples.
0:02:34 If you’re someone who’s in the personal finance niche,
0:02:37 and you already have this amazing debt pay down tracker,
0:02:39 or you already have this amazing net worth tracker,
0:02:42 or maybe you have a tracker for your side hustles,
0:02:45 you can very easily just kind of white label it,
0:02:47 templatize it, and flip that.
0:02:48 And now instead of just a product
0:02:50 that you’re using for yourself,
0:02:51 like a random Google sheet,
0:02:53 now you can actually go and sell this thing
0:02:55 on marketplaces like Etsy.
0:02:57 And I’ve seen this work so many times over.
0:02:58 We’re both podcasters, Nick.
0:03:00 I’m sure you have a media kit
0:03:02 or something that you can send to potential sponsors.
0:03:03 Like, hey, here’s my downloads.
0:03:04 Here’s my stats.
0:03:06 So a couple of years ago
0:03:07 for the Financial Independence Show,
0:03:08 my podcast,
0:03:10 we put together like this really extensive media kit.
0:03:11 And I’m like,
0:03:13 well, I just spent all this time on Canva
0:03:14 making this like awesome media kit.
0:03:16 What if I just white label it
0:03:18 and resell it as an editable media kit?
0:03:20 And it sold a bunch of times.
0:03:22 So there’s so many examples
0:03:23 that side hustlers like us,
0:03:26 people who are already doing something entrepreneurial,
0:03:28 you might have resources in your own life
0:03:29 that you’re using
0:03:31 that you can just easily repurpose,
0:03:32 turn into a template,
0:03:33 and then sell to other people.
0:03:35 I mean, there’s been six
0:03:37 and seven figure businesses built off this stuff.
0:03:39 I was actually on a real estate show
0:03:39 a couple of weeks ago
0:03:41 talking about digital products and printables.
0:03:44 And you look at a company like BiggerPockets
0:03:46 and they’re selling all these different calculators
0:03:47 and spreadsheets and things like that.
0:03:49 I mean, that’s probably adding six
0:03:50 or seven figures to their bottom line,
0:03:53 just basically taking one template
0:03:54 for a thing that they’re already doing
0:03:56 and then white labeling it
0:03:58 and then reselling it to, you know,
0:03:59 hundreds of thousands of people in their case.
0:04:00 Yeah, it’s an interesting
0:04:03 selling your sawdust type of example
0:04:03 where it’s like,
0:04:05 I already created this thing
0:04:07 and the ideas I’ve kicked around
0:04:08 and like a habit tracker
0:04:12 or a podcast production checklist planner
0:04:13 or sponsorship tracker.
0:04:15 There’s all sorts of these different tools
0:04:16 that you may already be using.
0:04:18 It may be an incremental revenue stream
0:04:20 to the business that you already have,
0:04:21 the side hustle that you already have,
0:04:24 or it could be a completely new thing
0:04:26 that is kind of a standalone entity.
0:04:29 So it sounds like the new shop
0:04:31 was more of that standalone type of variety.
0:04:33 Yeah, the new shop was more of a standalone.
0:04:35 I just wanted to mention the use what you already have
0:04:37 because that’s often the easiest place to start.
0:04:38 Now, if you’re someone who’s listening,
0:04:40 you’re like, well, I don’t already have a side hustle.
0:04:42 I don’t have any awesome spreadsheets
0:04:43 or any cool tools that I’m using myself.
0:04:46 For this new shop, here was my basic strategy.
0:04:49 So I would just brainstorm a giant list
0:04:50 of potential ideas.
0:04:51 This would be for my own head.
0:04:54 I would also use chat GPT to come up with ideas,
0:04:55 although it’s hit or miss.
0:04:58 And then once I would have like a massive list
0:04:59 of product ideas,
0:05:00 and these could be anything from,
0:05:02 I should probably define what printables are,
0:05:02 digital downloads,
0:05:05 just so people aren’t just thinking abstractly about this.
0:05:07 So printables and digital downloads
0:05:09 is basically a digital file that you create
0:05:10 in a program like Canva.
0:05:12 You would then upload that digital file
0:05:13 into your Etsy shop.
0:05:15 And when someone buys it,
0:05:17 the digital file would automatically be delivered to the buyer.
0:05:18 So I already mentioned some of them,
0:05:20 like a media kit template, for example,
0:05:24 but other ones like checklists, planners, calendars, games, invitations.
0:05:26 There’s thousands of different types of printables.
0:05:29 So just wanted to set the stage, what printables are.
0:05:30 So I create this massive list,
0:05:33 like literally 250 different printable ideas.
0:05:35 Again, these are just things that I think
0:05:36 maybe could make good printables
0:05:39 or things that chat GPT thinks could make good printables.
0:05:39 Okay.
0:05:41 And then once I have that monster list,
0:05:42 that’s when I start to plug them
0:05:44 into like a keyword research tool.
0:05:46 So for Etsy specifically,
0:05:49 ones I use, E-Rank and Everbee.
0:05:51 If you aren’t as familiar with Etsy,
0:05:52 or even if you want to sell outside,
0:05:55 like let’s say you want to open up a Shopify store
0:05:56 or WooCommerce,
0:05:58 you can use other keyword research tools.
0:06:00 Maybe you already have Ahrefs,
0:06:01 or maybe you already use Ubersuggest,
0:06:03 or maybe you’re using some of these other tools.
0:06:05 Like you can use any keyword research tools,
0:06:06 is what I’m trying to say.
0:06:09 I will plug those 250 different ideas
0:06:10 into the keyword research tools
0:06:12 to see one, if there’s search demand,
0:06:14 are people actually searching for this thing
0:06:15 that I want to create?
0:06:17 And two, is there a ton of competition?
0:06:18 Because the last thing I want to do
0:06:20 is compete with everyone and their mother
0:06:22 on some generic digital product
0:06:24 that I’m probably not going to stand out with
0:06:26 because again, everybody is selling it.
0:06:28 So that was kind of my general strategy,
0:06:30 my 10,000 foot view of my strategy
0:06:31 for this new Etsy shop.
0:06:32 Okay, no, that’s helpful.
0:06:35 And even I remember talking with Debbie Gartner,
0:06:37 who was selling all these different games,
0:06:39 like holiday related trivia games.
0:06:41 And there’s like, once I’ve got this template,
0:06:43 well, just lather, rinse and repeat
0:06:44 toward the next holiday that’s coming out.
0:06:46 It was like, oh, I was able to create dozens
0:06:47 of these different things,
0:06:48 which I thought was really creative.
0:06:51 And then we talked to Becky Beach as well,
0:06:53 who really leaned into this chat GPT
0:06:55 for product creation.
0:06:56 And I remember prompting it
0:06:57 like while we were live on the call,
0:06:59 like, what are some, you know,
0:07:01 side hustle related digital printables,
0:07:02 digital products?
0:07:03 And it actually came back
0:07:04 with some decent suggestions,
0:07:06 you know, business planning template,
0:07:08 you know, side hustle budget template.
0:07:09 Like, oh, this is not bad.
0:07:11 One thing I wanted to get your take on
0:07:14 was the idea of static printables
0:07:17 versus a customizable spreadsheet file.
0:07:19 My gut is, and correct me if I’m wrong,
0:07:21 is like the customizable spreadsheet
0:07:22 that may be able to command
0:07:24 a little bit of a higher price,
0:07:26 like higher perceived value for the end user.
0:07:27 You could definitely charge more
0:07:28 with editable printables,
0:07:30 and especially just the bigger
0:07:31 the printable in general,
0:07:32 the more you can charge.
0:07:34 If you have a bundle of a bunch of resources,
0:07:36 you’re going to be able to charge more
0:07:38 than just for one of those standalone resources.
0:07:39 So to answer your question, yes.
0:07:41 But with that being said,
0:07:43 if you do have just like a simple one pager
0:07:46 that you’re selling for $4, $3.99, $4.99,
0:07:49 you can probably make a ton of different variations
0:07:50 very, very quickly.
0:07:52 Whereas a Google sheet,
0:07:53 a very complicated, say,
0:07:56 personal finance tracker with a bunch of tabs,
0:07:57 it’s going to take you a whole lot longer
0:08:00 to create like different variations of that.
0:08:02 So for me, I actually tend to lean
0:08:04 on the side of simpler printables
0:08:05 just because I can pump out
0:08:06 so many different variations.
0:08:09 And for me, and we can get into this new shop,
0:08:10 it was a numbers game.
0:08:12 I was just like throwing spaghetti at the wall
0:08:13 and seeing what would sell.
0:08:16 In E-Rank, and it looks like they have a free version,
0:08:19 which is somewhat limited to five keyword lookups per day,
0:08:20 but pretty affordable plans
0:08:24 if you want up to 200 keyword lookups a day.
0:08:26 So just to get an idea there
0:08:28 of filling demand versus creating demand.
0:08:31 Obviously, I want to go where there is some search volume
0:08:34 versus like trying to create demand from scratch.
0:08:35 If nobody knows you exist
0:08:37 and you create some random product
0:08:38 that nobody’s looking for,
0:08:39 it’s a recipe for disappointment.
0:08:41 Nobody’s ever going to find you on Etsy.
0:08:43 So in these tools,
0:08:45 are there certain metrics?
0:08:46 I don’t know if they,
0:08:47 do they spit out like a,
0:08:49 like TubeBuddy will give you a metric.
0:08:51 Oh, this keyword variation on YouTube
0:08:52 gave you like a 95.
0:08:54 Like, okay, it’s got a good mix
0:08:56 of search volume and competitiveness.
0:08:57 Is there a metric where you’re like,
0:08:59 yes, this is worth going for?
0:09:00 It’s not a numerical score,
0:09:02 but they do make it very easy and color-coded.
0:09:03 So on eRank,
0:09:04 I don’t know if you’re,
0:09:05 it sounds like you’re on the website,
0:09:06 for example,
0:09:07 if you type in a keyword,
0:09:09 you’ll see the search volume and competition.
0:09:11 The search volume and competition
0:09:13 both range with like a color-coded scale.
0:09:14 So for search volume,
0:09:16 green means a lot of people are searching for it.
0:09:18 Yellow is like a couple,
0:09:20 like a medium amount of people are searching for it.
0:09:22 And red means not that many people are searching for it.
0:09:24 Conversely, for competition,
0:09:24 if it’s red,
0:09:26 it means a ton of people are competing on that product.
0:09:28 If it’s yellow, not as many.
0:09:30 If it’s green,
0:09:32 that means there’s like no competition for that product.
0:09:34 Like you might be one of the few players
0:09:35 selling that thing.
0:09:37 So I typically liked,
0:09:38 I mean, in an ideal world,
0:09:39 I love to be green, green.
0:09:42 And we call those unicorns at Gold City Ventures,
0:09:44 where you have like a ton of search volume
0:09:45 and no competition.
0:09:47 Those are very difficult to find
0:09:48 and few and far between.
0:09:49 I usually,
0:09:50 and especially for this new shop,
0:09:52 would create something that has
0:09:53 usually yellow search demand
0:09:54 and then green competition.
0:09:56 So not many people are competing on it.
0:09:58 And like a medium amount of people
0:09:59 are searching for it.
0:10:00 So that’s kind of the two metrics
0:10:02 that I pay the closest attention to
0:10:03 in these keyword research tools.
0:10:04 Okay.
0:10:05 All else being equal,
0:10:06 go where there’s less competition.
0:10:09 You’re going to be easier to find some eyeballs
0:10:10 and some buyers that way.
0:10:10 Yes.
0:10:12 And I love the phrase,
0:10:13 the riches are in the niches
0:10:14 for this side hustle specifically,
0:10:16 because one of the biggest mistakes
0:10:17 I see people make
0:10:18 is they’ll go on
0:10:19 and they’ll just try to sell
0:10:21 a very generic printable
0:10:21 or digital product.
0:10:23 I always use a thank you card,
0:10:24 for example.
0:10:25 If you type in thank you card
0:10:26 to E-Rank,
0:10:27 you’ll see the competition
0:10:28 is through the roof.
0:10:28 Like it’s,
0:10:30 it’s so bright red.
0:10:32 Every single person on Etsy
0:10:33 tries to sell like a thank you card.
0:10:35 But if you niche down a couple layers
0:10:36 and instead of just
0:10:37 a generic thank you card,
0:10:39 you have maybe a teacher,
0:10:41 like first grade teacher thank you card.
0:10:43 You have a soccer coach thank you card.
0:10:44 You have a ballerina instructor
0:10:45 thank you card.
0:10:46 Like these now
0:10:47 that you’re niching down
0:10:47 a couple layers,
0:10:50 you’re competing with far fewer people.
0:10:50 And so,
0:10:52 and even from the buyer’s perspective,
0:10:55 like getting closer aligned
0:10:56 to what the person is searching for,
0:10:56 they’re going to have
0:10:58 a higher likelihood to buy.
0:10:59 Like just imagine somebody
0:11:00 who’s buying a thank you card
0:11:01 for their ballerina teacher
0:11:03 and they type in
0:11:04 ballerina thank you card.
0:11:04 Yeah.
0:11:05 They’re going to choose
0:11:06 your ballerina thank you card
0:11:07 over just,
0:11:07 you know,
0:11:10 Joe Schmoe’s generic thank you card.
0:11:11 So it’s much more aligned
0:11:12 with the buyer.
0:11:13 And again,
0:11:14 you’re competing with less people
0:11:14 because the riches
0:11:15 are in the niches.
0:11:18 If Canva gets better and better,
0:11:20 do you find that like
0:11:21 people would just go
0:11:23 and make it themselves?
0:11:24 It’s always,
0:11:26 and I asked the same question
0:11:27 to the spreadsheet sellers.
0:11:27 It’s like,
0:11:28 who doesn’t know
0:11:28 how to make a spreadsheet?
0:11:29 Who’s buying this stuff?
0:11:31 But what’s your take on that?
0:11:32 It’s convenience
0:11:33 at the end of the day.
0:11:33 I mean,
0:11:35 a lot of it is a skill gap as well.
0:11:36 The average person
0:11:37 does not know how to use Canva.
0:11:38 If we took a poll
0:11:39 of a random people,
0:11:40 a hundred people in the street,
0:11:41 I don’t know what percentage
0:11:42 are actually going to be able
0:11:43 to know how to create
0:11:45 like a nice looking invitation in Canva,
0:11:46 but probably not a huge percentage
0:11:47 of them.
0:11:48 But the ones that do
0:11:49 are often willing to trade
0:11:50 five,
0:11:50 10,
0:11:52 20 bucks just for convenience
0:11:53 and not having to spend
0:11:53 their time on it.
0:11:54 Okay.
0:11:55 Like I can easily go out
0:11:56 and mow my lawn.
0:11:57 I pay a guy to do it
0:11:58 because it’s convenient.
0:11:59 I have the time.
0:12:00 I have the skills.
0:12:00 It’s just like,
0:12:02 I’d rather pay him to do it
0:12:03 than do it myself.
0:12:04 Okay.
0:12:05 And so first grade teacher,
0:12:06 thank you card,
0:12:08 ballet teacher,
0:12:09 school bus driver.
0:12:09 Okay.
0:12:11 So now my thinking is,
0:12:12 well,
0:12:13 once you have this template,
0:12:13 okay,
0:12:16 I’m going to swap out the clip art
0:12:17 or swap out the graphic
0:12:18 and the rest of it
0:12:19 is kind of the same.
0:12:20 So it makes this product
0:12:21 creation process.
0:12:22 Once you have that base template
0:12:23 really,
0:12:24 really fast,
0:12:25 where the,
0:12:26 maybe where the next challenge
0:12:27 comes in
0:12:29 is in the shotgun approach
0:12:30 or this listing approach
0:12:31 to put all this stuff
0:12:33 up on Etsy
0:12:34 because they’re going to charge you
0:12:35 their 20 cent fee.
0:12:35 not a ton,
0:12:36 but it does add up
0:12:37 if you’re really trying
0:12:39 to upload a hundred products,
0:12:40 a thousand products.
0:12:40 Like what was the,
0:12:42 the volume of products
0:12:43 that you had to put up there
0:12:44 to start seeing sales?
0:12:45 I was putting up
0:12:47 about 20 to 30 products per week.
0:12:48 I actually got my first sale
0:12:49 on day three.
0:12:51 And so for those who don’t know,
0:12:52 I actually documented
0:12:52 this whole process
0:12:54 like day one to 116.
0:12:55 I took a video
0:12:56 almost every single day,
0:12:57 kind of just sharing live updates.
0:12:59 I was sharing screenshots
0:12:59 of my shop.
0:13:00 And on day three,
0:13:01 I had my first sale,
0:13:02 which was great.
0:13:02 Wow.
0:13:03 I think I probably only had
0:13:04 five or six,
0:13:06 products up at that point,
0:13:08 but I was adding like 20 to 30 a week
0:13:09 during this whole process.
0:13:10 Yeah.
0:13:11 And that’s cool
0:13:11 because,
0:13:12 because there’s not a lot
0:13:13 of social proof on the channel.
0:13:13 Yeah.
0:13:14 Where it’s like,
0:13:16 it shows zero sales,
0:13:16 zero reviews.
0:13:17 You’re like,
0:13:18 I’m taking a chance
0:13:18 on this guy.
0:13:19 Yeah.
0:13:19 That’s the beauty
0:13:20 of the side hustle though,
0:13:22 is you don’t need an audience.
0:13:23 You don’t need an email list.
0:13:25 You don’t need really anything.
0:13:26 Like if you understand
0:13:27 keyword research and SEO,
0:13:29 that is the most important skill.
0:13:30 You can be a five
0:13:31 out of 10 graphic designer.
0:13:32 A lot of people think
0:13:33 they have to be like this
0:13:34 graphic design wizard
0:13:35 in order to sell this stuff.
0:13:36 You can be a five
0:13:37 out of 10 graphic designer.
0:13:38 As long as you understand
0:13:39 keyword research and SEO
0:13:41 and you go after those,
0:13:42 the riches in the niches
0:13:43 and you go after those
0:13:44 kind of longer tail,
0:13:45 less targeted keywords,
0:13:46 people are going to buy your stuff.
0:13:47 Like I’m,
0:13:49 I’m still not a great graphic designer.
0:13:49 Maybe,
0:13:50 maybe a six or seven,
0:13:51 seven on a great day,
0:13:53 but I’m not the best graphic designer.
0:13:54 I’m just really good
0:13:55 at keyword research and SEO.
0:13:56 So if there’s someone looking
0:13:58 for a dinosaur themed
0:14:00 thank you card for like boys,
0:14:02 like a boy themed,
0:14:03 dinosaur themed thank you card,
0:14:04 like,
0:14:05 and I see that I might not
0:14:06 be the best designer,
0:14:07 but if I’m one of the only
0:14:09 few people selling that thing,
0:14:10 the people who are typing
0:14:11 that into the search bar
0:14:12 are going to come find me.
0:14:13 And the cool thing
0:14:14 about these keyword research tools,
0:14:16 let’s go back to E-Rank,
0:14:16 for example.
0:14:18 If I type in thank you card,
0:14:19 E-Rank is going to spit out
0:14:21 all of the things
0:14:21 that people are typing in,
0:14:23 all of the different variations.
0:14:24 So it’s not just me guessing
0:14:25 using your examples from earlier.
0:14:26 It’s not me guessing
0:14:27 ballet teacher,
0:14:27 school bus driver,
0:14:28 gym coach,
0:14:30 like E-Rank will actually tell me
0:14:32 there’s 116 people every month
0:14:33 searching for gym coach.
0:14:34 Thank you card.
0:14:36 There’s like 187 people
0:14:37 searching for a ballet.
0:14:38 There’s 450 people
0:14:39 searching for nurse.
0:14:40 Thank you card.
0:14:42 Like it’ll actually give me the data
0:14:43 and I’m a very data
0:14:44 driven decision maker.
0:14:46 I don’t like to just make things
0:14:46 willy nilly,
0:14:47 which was a mistake I made
0:14:48 when I first started
0:14:49 the side hustle back in 2018.
0:14:51 More with Cody in just a moment,
0:14:52 including the minimum
0:14:53 search volume
0:14:54 that he might target
0:14:55 a product for,
0:14:56 the power of templates
0:14:57 for both products
0:14:58 and Etsy listings,
0:15:00 and the conversion rate
0:15:00 you need to hit
0:15:01 before you ever spend
0:15:03 a dollar on Etsy ads.
0:15:04 All that and more
0:15:05 coming up right after this.
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0:17:20 Hiring
0:17:21 Indeed
0:17:22 is all you need.
0:17:24 Is there a minimum
0:17:24 search volume
0:17:26 that’s too low
0:17:27 to bother with?
0:17:28 I usually don’t touch
0:17:29 anything under 50
0:17:30 and some people
0:17:31 think that’s crazy.
0:17:32 Some people,
0:17:33 some other Etsy
0:17:34 quote-unquote gurus
0:17:35 don’t touch things
0:17:36 that are under like 200.
0:17:37 But for me,
0:17:37 I’m like,
0:17:38 there’s 50 people
0:17:39 searching for this a month
0:17:40 and there’s zero competition.
0:17:41 Yeah.
0:17:42 And I can scoop up
0:17:43 say even 20% of them,
0:17:45 10 people buy my $5 thing.
0:17:45 Yeah.
0:17:46 I like to think of these
0:17:47 each as like a little
0:17:48 mini passive income machine.
0:17:50 Like that’s 50 extra dollars
0:17:50 per month
0:17:51 and that 50 adds up.
0:17:52 Like if you can
0:17:53 get an army
0:17:54 of these $50
0:17:56 per month products,
0:17:56 even if they don’t have
0:17:57 a lot of search volume,
0:17:58 you get 20 of those going,
0:18:00 that’s $1,000 per month
0:18:01 and mostly passive income.
0:18:01 Yeah.
0:18:03 It goes back to the beginning
0:18:03 of, you know,
0:18:04 planting these little
0:18:05 digital money seeds.
0:18:06 It costs you
0:18:08 a little bit of time
0:18:08 and 20 cents
0:18:09 to create this thing.
0:18:11 And now it’s out there
0:18:12 in the world
0:18:13 and can earn
0:18:14 passive income for you.
0:18:15 I think that’s,
0:18:16 I think that’s really exciting.
0:18:18 Now the deliverable file
0:18:18 itself,
0:18:19 this is a PDF.
0:18:20 This is like
0:18:22 a link to a Canva
0:18:23 template.
0:18:24 I know I don’t want to get
0:18:24 too into weeds,
0:18:25 but like mechanically,
0:18:26 what does that look like?
0:18:26 Yeah.
0:18:27 So it’ll be a PDF
0:18:29 and for a,
0:18:30 I’ll call it done for you
0:18:30 printable,
0:18:31 one that’s not editable.
0:18:33 It would just be a PDF file.
0:18:34 So if you were buying
0:18:35 say a checklist
0:18:35 or a planner from me,
0:18:36 you just might get
0:18:37 the checklist or planner
0:18:39 delivered to your
0:18:40 Etsy inbox
0:18:41 and then you download it
0:18:42 and then you use it
0:18:43 for an editable file.
0:18:44 You’ll have a PDF
0:18:45 and then you’ll have
0:18:47 a hyperlink on that PDF.
0:18:47 Like it could be
0:18:48 to Dropbox
0:18:49 or Google Drive
0:18:50 or to Canva itself.
0:18:52 if it’s an editable thing,
0:18:52 like there’s,
0:18:53 you know,
0:18:54 editable files via Canva.
0:18:55 There’s another program
0:18:56 called Cordial
0:18:57 and Template.
0:18:57 There’s a bunch of these
0:18:59 like editable design softwares
0:19:01 and then on the deliverable PDF,
0:19:03 you just have like a URL.
0:19:03 So they click,
0:19:04 you know,
0:19:04 edit my template
0:19:05 and then they can go
0:19:06 and edit it.
0:19:07 Got it.
0:19:07 That helps.
0:19:07 But,
0:19:08 and then this is all automated
0:19:10 when somebody hits
0:19:11 the buy button,
0:19:13 then Etsy sends them
0:19:14 this thing that you have
0:19:14 set up on the backend.
0:19:16 Everything is automated.
0:19:16 I like to say
0:19:19 it’s a 95% passive income
0:19:19 side hustle
0:19:22 because about 1 in 20 people
0:19:22 will message me
0:19:24 asking for clarification
0:19:25 with a purchase.
0:19:25 They’re like,
0:19:25 oh,
0:19:26 I can’t access my template
0:19:28 or this or that.
0:19:29 So about,
0:19:29 again,
0:19:30 1 in 20.
0:19:31 So 5% of the time
0:19:32 I’ll have someone message me
0:19:34 and ask for some specific advice,
0:19:35 which I’ve built
0:19:36 like a bunch of
0:19:36 what they’re called
0:19:38 quick replies in Etsy.
0:19:40 So I can just basically like click,
0:19:41 here’s how to download
0:19:42 your editable file
0:19:43 and then I don’t have to go
0:19:44 type it out every single time.
0:19:44 Yeah,
0:19:46 frequently asked questions.
0:19:47 A text expander
0:19:47 or a keyboard short.
0:19:48 Yeah,
0:19:49 same exact thing.
0:19:49 Yeah.
0:19:50 I was going to ask
0:19:51 if you’re leveraging AI
0:19:53 on the product creation side
0:19:54 at all.
0:19:54 Yes,
0:19:56 there’s some element here
0:19:57 on the ideation,
0:20:00 but then to make the thing itself,
0:20:01 is there any sort of like,
0:20:02 you know,
0:20:03 prompting chat GPT
0:20:04 or even Canva
0:20:05 to be like,
0:20:06 I’m looking for
0:20:07 a printable file
0:20:08 that does this,
0:20:09 this and this.
0:20:10 I have done some experimenting,
0:20:11 but honestly,
0:20:12 for the printables
0:20:12 that I’m creating,
0:20:13 again,
0:20:13 most of these are
0:20:15 simple type printables
0:20:16 that I can then pump out
0:20:17 a million different variations
0:20:19 based on different niches
0:20:20 and holidays
0:20:20 and trends
0:20:21 and things like that.
0:20:22 I do not use AI
0:20:23 to create printables.
0:20:24 Okay.
0:20:25 Another reason I do this
0:20:26 is because you do have
0:20:27 to disclose
0:20:28 in your Etsy listing,
0:20:29 like this is AI generated.
0:20:31 There’s no hard data on this,
0:20:33 but my gut just tells me
0:20:34 like they’re probably
0:20:36 slightly lowering
0:20:38 the like SEO juice,
0:20:38 the algorithm
0:20:40 for these types of printables.
0:20:41 If someone’s just putting up
0:20:42 like a thousand printables
0:20:42 in a day
0:20:43 and all of them
0:20:44 you have checked off,
0:20:45 like this was made by AI,
0:20:47 just something tells me
0:20:47 that Etsy’s probably
0:20:49 weighting that a little bit
0:20:49 less than the algorithm.
0:20:49 Again,
0:20:50 I don’t have hard data
0:20:51 on this.
0:20:51 It’s just,
0:20:53 that’s just my gut feeling.
0:20:53 Yeah.
0:20:54 There’s something about
0:20:56 the Etsy community too,
0:20:57 where it started
0:20:59 as a handmade marketplace,
0:21:00 people doing business
0:21:00 with people.
0:21:01 So I wouldn’t be surprised
0:21:02 if you were correct
0:21:03 on that.
0:21:04 We’re going to diminish
0:21:05 those in the listings
0:21:06 just a little bit.
0:21:07 Just a little bit.
0:21:07 Okay.
0:21:08 So we talked about
0:21:09 product creation.
0:21:09 We talked about
0:21:11 the power of templates
0:21:12 once the listing
0:21:13 is live
0:21:14 or maybe any
0:21:15 listing best practices.
0:21:16 Obviously we want to put
0:21:17 the primary keyword
0:21:18 in the title of the listing,
0:21:19 the description of the listing.
0:21:20 Anything else that you found
0:21:22 to speed up
0:21:23 that process
0:21:24 or product images
0:21:24 that you found
0:21:25 to work well?
0:21:26 Pricing points
0:21:27 that help?
0:21:28 Do you have to price low
0:21:29 when your shop
0:21:30 doesn’t have any reviews?
0:21:31 Like what have you found here?
0:21:32 So I’ll start with templates
0:21:33 because we did talk
0:21:34 about product templates.
0:21:35 Like you just take
0:21:35 the base template,
0:21:37 let’s use a thank you card
0:21:37 for example,
0:21:39 and then you can go create
0:21:40 a million different variations
0:21:41 of thank you card.
0:21:42 We mentioned that before.
0:21:43 What I didn’t mention though
0:21:44 is that you can actually
0:21:46 have the entire Etsy listing
0:21:47 as a quote unquote template.
0:21:49 So if I’m going to create,
0:21:50 let’s say I already have
0:21:52 a Father’s Day card
0:21:53 in my Etsy shop
0:21:54 and I want to create
0:21:55 a Mother’s Day card.
0:21:56 I can literally
0:21:57 duplicate the listing
0:21:58 and then I just go
0:21:59 back into Canva.
0:22:00 I just like change
0:22:01 the listing images.
0:22:02 I change the actual
0:22:02 product itself.
0:22:04 I change some of the tags.
0:22:05 I slightly altered
0:22:06 the description,
0:22:07 but I can actually use
0:22:09 a lot of the same features
0:22:10 from that initial listing.
0:22:11 So for me now,
0:22:13 if I were to actually do that
0:22:14 using this real example,
0:22:15 like if I were to have
0:22:16 a Father’s Day card
0:22:16 that I want to make
0:22:17 into a Mother’s Day card,
0:22:18 it would probably take me
0:22:20 like 15 to 20 minutes total.
0:22:21 I might on the actual design
0:22:22 change the colors
0:22:23 from blue to pink
0:22:24 and I’m obviously
0:22:24 going to change
0:22:26 the word father to mother
0:22:27 and some other changes
0:22:28 like the tags.
0:22:29 You can use 13 tags
0:22:30 per Etsy listing.
0:22:31 I would change some of those
0:22:32 to be specific
0:22:33 to the holiday,
0:22:35 but using the entirety
0:22:36 of your Etsy listing
0:22:37 as a template
0:22:38 is something not many people do.
0:22:39 Like even the listing images
0:22:40 you were just asking about,
0:22:41 Nick.
0:22:41 Yeah.
0:22:43 I have eight listing images
0:22:44 that I’m using
0:22:44 for all my products
0:22:46 and it’s just drag and drop.
0:22:47 Like I’m using Canva templates
0:22:48 using like the frames feature.
0:22:49 And so when I create
0:22:51 the new product,
0:22:52 I’m just like dragging
0:22:52 and dropping back
0:22:53 into those same templates.
0:22:54 So I’m not having to
0:22:55 recreate the wheel
0:22:56 every single time
0:22:57 with my listing images.
0:22:59 In terms of what works,
0:23:01 clarity is key.
0:23:03 So something I see
0:23:05 new sellers do so often
0:23:06 is it’s either their title
0:23:07 or their description
0:23:08 or their listing images,
0:23:10 especially that main listing image.
0:23:11 I like to think of that
0:23:12 as the gatekeeper to sales
0:23:14 because like if someone’s
0:23:15 scrolling through Etsy,
0:23:16 let’s say they type in
0:23:17 Mother’s Day card
0:23:19 and your listing image
0:23:20 doesn’t attract them
0:23:21 at the start.
0:23:22 Even if you have
0:23:23 the best product in the world
0:23:24 with the best title
0:23:25 and the best description
0:23:26 and you have an ugly
0:23:27 main listing image,
0:23:28 you’re not going to make the sale.
0:23:29 It’s the gatekeeper.
0:23:29 It’s kind of like
0:23:30 a thumbnail on YouTube.
0:23:31 Like you need a good thumbnail
0:23:33 to get people attracted
0:23:35 in clicking into your video.
0:23:35 Now once they get in,
0:23:36 there’s a whole bunch
0:23:37 of other different things
0:23:38 that you can do
0:23:39 to make them convert.
0:23:40 But if they don’t get in
0:23:41 in the first place,
0:23:42 then you’re screwed.
0:23:43 So I like to say
0:23:44 that clarity is key.
0:23:46 Like you want your title
0:23:47 to be exactly,
0:23:48 exactly what the person
0:23:49 is going to get.
0:23:50 You want that main listing image
0:23:51 to be very clear
0:23:52 on what that person
0:23:53 is going to get.
0:23:54 A concrete example
0:23:55 from our community,
0:23:56 someone posted
0:23:56 a couple weeks ago,
0:23:56 they’re like,
0:23:58 hey, this is my first listing
0:23:59 and they were making
0:24:00 holiday gift tags.
0:24:01 I think it was gift tags
0:24:02 for Valentine’s Day.
0:24:03 Okay.
0:24:04 And for their main listing image,
0:24:06 it was like an 8 by 5,
0:24:07 8 by 5.
0:24:09 It was an 8.5 by 11,
0:24:10 just like a letter size
0:24:11 sheet of paper
0:24:12 with all of the gift tags on it.
0:24:14 Like it was very unclear
0:24:15 what the actual product
0:24:16 that the end user
0:24:17 would be getting.
0:24:19 So we in the community
0:24:20 were like,
0:24:20 oh, actually,
0:24:21 it would probably make
0:24:22 a lot more sense
0:24:23 if you were to mock this up
0:24:24 and like show this gift tag
0:24:26 on an actual Valentine’s gift
0:24:26 and someone is,
0:24:27 it’s a lot more clear
0:24:29 what the end user is buying.
0:24:31 So clarity is key
0:24:32 and far too many people
0:24:33 make the mistake
0:24:33 of just like having
0:24:34 this like abstract,
0:24:35 maybe they’re trying
0:24:36 to like keyword stuff
0:24:36 in the title
0:24:37 or the description
0:24:39 or their main listing image
0:24:39 just looks weird.
0:24:41 There’s too much information on it
0:24:42 and it’s kind of difficult
0:24:43 to tell what the person
0:24:43 is getting.
0:24:44 The less confusion
0:24:45 that your buyers
0:24:46 are going to have
0:24:47 when they see your product
0:24:48 show up in search,
0:24:50 the more likely
0:24:51 they’re going to buy.
0:24:52 And because people
0:24:54 are still buying convenience,
0:24:55 you’re not worried about,
0:24:56 well, just,
0:24:56 you know,
0:24:57 if it’s a simple printable
0:24:58 and I’m just,
0:24:59 I just literally gave it away,
0:25:00 like there’s an image
0:25:00 of the thing,
0:25:02 not really worried about that
0:25:03 because it’s a different
0:25:04 buyer mindset
0:25:05 than the do-it-yourselfer.
0:25:06 So to be clear,
0:25:08 it’s not just a PNG
0:25:08 or a JPEG
0:25:10 of the finished product.
0:25:10 Like that’s not
0:25:11 the main listing image.
0:25:12 It’s usually mocked up.
0:25:13 Maybe there’s like a nice
0:25:14 like wood background
0:25:14 or something like that
0:25:15 with shadows.
0:25:16 You’re still showing
0:25:17 exactly what the printable is
0:25:19 or what the digital product is.
0:25:19 You’re not,
0:25:20 but you’re not just
0:25:21 giving it away.
0:25:21 You’re not just like
0:25:23 having the PDF
0:25:25 as the front runner,
0:25:25 the showcase
0:25:27 of what the product is
0:25:27 because to your point,
0:25:28 you don’t want people
0:25:29 just going in,
0:25:30 screenshotting it
0:25:31 and then printing it out
0:25:31 and using it.
0:25:32 That’s not what
0:25:33 I’m recommending at all.
0:25:33 Okay.
0:25:35 What do you recommend?
0:25:36 I mean,
0:25:36 how do you show it
0:25:37 without showing it?
0:25:37 Okay.
0:25:38 Let me try to think
0:25:39 of a good example.
0:25:40 So let’s just use,
0:25:41 I’m using thank you cards
0:25:42 a lot in Mother’s Day
0:25:42 and Father’s Day cards.
0:25:44 Let’s use a Mother’s Day card.
0:25:45 So a Mother’s Day card,
0:25:46 I might have the
0:25:47 five by seven card
0:25:48 like at an angle
0:25:50 kind of with like
0:25:50 a shadow effect on it
0:25:51 to make it pop
0:25:53 on like a wooden background
0:25:54 or maybe on a table
0:25:55 with flowers in the corner.
0:25:57 And so it’s not just,
0:25:59 it’s not just the piece of paper.
0:26:00 Like it’s a whole mock-up.
0:26:00 Sure, sure.
0:26:02 So like if someone were to go in
0:26:03 and try to like screenshot
0:26:04 at it like and,
0:26:04 you know,
0:26:05 try to crop it,
0:26:06 it’s not going to look great.
0:26:08 It’s not going to look great.
0:26:09 They’re just going to pay
0:26:10 the four or five bucks
0:26:11 for the finished product.
0:26:12 So that’s what I mean.
0:26:12 Like you are showing
0:26:13 the entire printable
0:26:15 or the entire digital product,
0:26:16 but it’s not in a way
0:26:17 where someone can just
0:26:18 like screenshot it
0:26:19 or download it
0:26:19 and use it immediately.
0:26:22 Do you use Etsy ads at all?
0:26:23 Are you relying 100%
0:26:25 on just the SEO
0:26:26 of these listings
0:26:27 or the search volume
0:26:27 that’s there?
0:26:29 For this Etsy challenge,
0:26:31 I tried not to use ads
0:26:33 for the beginning part
0:26:33 when I made it
0:26:35 to $1,000 per month.
0:26:36 But after that,
0:26:36 I was like,
0:26:37 okay, no holds barred.
0:26:38 Let’s see how much
0:26:39 I can pump up
0:26:40 this revenue with ads.
0:26:41 And it was actually
0:26:42 like the week before Christmas
0:26:44 and I started pumping out
0:26:44 my ad spend
0:26:46 like $100 a day
0:26:47 just to see what I could do
0:26:48 because Christmas is huge.
0:26:49 Holidays are huge on Etsy.
0:26:51 And so with this new shop,
0:26:53 I spent just over $900
0:26:56 in 10 days on ads.
0:26:59 And that ended up
0:27:00 bringing in an extra
0:27:01 $2,200 in revenue.
0:27:03 So like $1,300 in profit
0:27:04 if I can do live math
0:27:05 on a podcast.
0:27:07 So yeah, I do use ads.
0:27:09 I use ads in my main shop.
0:27:10 I was trying to use ads
0:27:11 very sparingly
0:27:12 in this new shop
0:27:12 until I hit that goal
0:27:14 because I didn’t want people
0:27:15 to be like,
0:27:15 well, the only reason
0:27:15 you got there
0:27:16 was because of ads.
0:27:17 I was like, no,
0:27:18 I’m getting here
0:27:19 because of keyword research
0:27:19 and SEO.
0:27:20 But then I turned
0:27:22 the ads dial up to 10.
0:27:23 If ads work,
0:27:24 I’ll trade $900
0:27:25 for $2,200 all day.
0:27:26 Yes, ads do work
0:27:27 if done correctly.
0:27:28 But I also didn’t want
0:27:29 to teach people
0:27:29 the wrong lessons.
0:27:30 If people think
0:27:30 that they can just
0:27:32 solve problems with ads,
0:27:33 what I like to say
0:27:34 is ads buy you eyeballs.
0:27:35 So if you already
0:27:35 have a product
0:27:36 that’s converting,
0:27:37 like people are already
0:27:38 buying your product
0:27:38 here and there,
0:27:40 sure, you can throw
0:27:41 some ad money at it,
0:27:42 see if it works.
0:27:43 But if you just have
0:27:44 a shop full of stuff
0:27:45 that’s not selling
0:27:46 and you’re paying for ads,
0:27:47 all you’re doing
0:27:48 is buying more eyeballs
0:27:49 that are probably
0:27:50 not going to buy the thing
0:27:51 because it doesn’t have
0:27:52 any proof of conversion.
0:27:53 So like I don’t want
0:27:54 people to think
0:27:55 or get the idea
0:27:56 that just spending money
0:27:57 on ads is going
0:27:58 to solve their problems
0:27:59 and all of a sudden
0:27:59 this side hustle
0:28:00 that’s bringing in zero
0:28:01 for them is going
0:28:02 to be $1,000 per month
0:28:02 overnight.
0:28:03 Like you have to do
0:28:04 the hard work
0:28:05 of the keyword research
0:28:06 and the SEO
0:28:07 and figuring out
0:28:07 what buyers
0:28:08 are searching for.
0:28:09 Then once you figure
0:28:09 that out,
0:28:10 then you can start
0:28:11 experimenting with ads.
0:28:12 Etsy gives you data
0:28:13 on you had
0:28:15 a thousand views
0:28:16 on this product
0:28:18 and 50 people bought
0:28:19 so you had a 5% conversion.
0:28:20 Like what’s,
0:28:21 do you get any
0:28:21 of those metrics
0:28:22 or what’s good
0:28:22 or what’s a good benchmark?
0:28:23 Yeah, Etsy does
0:28:24 give you those metrics.
0:28:25 I like to be anywhere
0:28:27 between 3% and 5%
0:28:28 conversion rate
0:28:28 on visitors.
0:28:30 So I was actually,
0:28:31 when I was publicly
0:28:31 documenting this,
0:28:32 I was like,
0:28:32 okay, I’m getting
0:28:34 100 visits a day.
0:28:35 Hopefully that means
0:28:37 three to five sales.
0:28:37 Yeah.
0:28:38 And it actually did end up
0:28:39 being around that.
0:28:41 So basically to hit my goal
0:28:42 of $1,000 per month,
0:28:43 I needed to get
0:28:44 somewhere between
0:28:47 like 175 and 200 visits a day.
0:28:47 And so I’m like
0:28:48 publicly tracking
0:28:49 the first day
0:28:49 is like, you know,
0:28:50 12 visits.
0:28:52 The end of the second week
0:28:53 is like 25 visits.
0:28:53 But yeah,
0:28:54 that’s a good benchmark
0:28:55 to get back to your question.
0:28:57 Like 3% to 5%
0:28:57 conversion rate is awesome.
0:28:58 But even then,
0:28:59 to be able to put something out
0:29:00 onto the internet
0:29:02 and get views,
0:29:03 even if it’s just 10,
0:29:04 12, 20,
0:29:04 you know,
0:29:05 the first couple of days.
0:29:05 Yeah.
0:29:06 Compare that to starting
0:29:07 a brand new blog
0:29:08 and shouting it to the void
0:29:09 of the internet.
0:29:10 Google’s not going to rank
0:29:11 your brand new site
0:29:12 right out of the gate.
0:29:13 I think it’s an important
0:29:14 contrast to draw.
0:29:15 You know,
0:29:16 some of the other Etsy sellers
0:29:17 that we’ve talked to
0:29:19 have been trying to collect
0:29:20 emails from their shop.
0:29:21 Oh, get a free bonus template
0:29:22 when you enter your email here.
0:29:23 And they’re trying to like
0:29:25 wean themselves off
0:29:25 or maybe,
0:29:26 you know,
0:29:27 build up their own
0:29:27 traffic source
0:29:29 to their own self-hosted
0:29:30 storefront
0:29:31 or their own Shopify store
0:29:32 for digital products.
0:29:33 You doing any of that
0:29:34 or is it just like,
0:29:35 I just want to take
0:29:35 what this marketplace
0:29:36 is going to give me?
0:29:37 Did this new shop?
0:29:38 No.
0:29:40 I really wanted to just focus
0:29:42 on Etsy generated traffic.
0:29:42 So I didn’t do
0:29:43 the email list stuff.
0:29:45 I didn’t really lean into ads.
0:29:47 I didn’t do social media for it.
0:29:48 For my like main business,
0:29:49 Goal City Ventures,
0:29:49 absolutely.
0:29:51 Like we’re collecting
0:29:51 email addresses,
0:29:52 using printables
0:29:53 as lead magnets,
0:29:54 which is something
0:29:54 I was going to talk about
0:29:55 later today.
0:29:56 But yeah,
0:29:56 in my main business,
0:29:57 I’m all for it.
0:29:58 But the reason I started
0:29:59 this new shop was like,
0:30:00 I don’t want people
0:30:01 to think they need
0:30:01 all that stuff
0:30:02 because you don’t.
0:30:03 You really don’t.
0:30:04 You just need
0:30:04 the keyword research
0:30:05 and SEO.
0:30:06 But if you do want
0:30:07 to scale this
0:30:08 and build a bigger
0:30:08 business out of it,
0:30:10 definitely go for it.
0:30:12 Like there are tons of ways.
0:30:13 And I listened to those
0:30:14 other episodes you had
0:30:14 with Debbie and Becky.
0:30:16 There are great ways
0:30:16 to get people
0:30:17 on your email list,
0:30:18 whether that’s with a freebie
0:30:19 or like a bonus
0:30:19 or a bundle
0:30:20 or other ways.
0:30:21 And then you can,
0:30:22 obviously,
0:30:23 once they’re on your list,
0:30:24 you can then sell them
0:30:24 similar products
0:30:25 to what they’ve already bought.
0:30:27 But it’s not a necessity.
0:30:28 You don’t have to do that
0:30:29 to be successful on Etsy.
0:30:29 Yeah,
0:30:30 or work your way up
0:30:31 the value chain
0:30:32 while you bought this.
0:30:32 So the next thing
0:30:33 you might need.
0:30:33 Yeah,
0:30:34 exactly.
0:30:34 Lots of different
0:30:35 marketing things
0:30:36 you can play around
0:30:37 with once you get going.
0:30:39 There was a question
0:30:40 I wanted to ask.
0:30:40 To the extent
0:30:41 that it matters,
0:30:43 do you need to have
0:30:44 your shop niched down
0:30:44 like, you know,
0:30:45 the thank you card
0:30:45 Emporium
0:30:46 and that’s all we sell
0:30:47 or could it be
0:30:49 a little bit broader
0:30:50 or do you find
0:30:50 that that matters?
0:30:51 I find that it
0:30:52 doesn’t matter much.
0:30:53 Now, if you’re someone
0:30:54 who it doesn’t
0:30:55 make any sense,
0:30:55 like let’s say
0:30:56 you started a shop
0:30:57 for South Hustle Nation
0:30:58 and it was all
0:30:58 about South Hustles
0:30:59 but then all of a sudden
0:31:00 you started throwing
0:31:01 like wedding printables
0:31:01 in there.
0:31:03 That might just
0:31:03 make your audience
0:31:03 be like,
0:31:04 what the heck,
0:31:04 Nick,
0:31:05 what are you doing?
0:31:06 So if you already
0:31:07 have an established brand
0:31:08 and you want to be
0:31:08 like, you know,
0:31:09 the thank you card
0:31:10 guy or girl
0:31:11 or you want to be
0:31:11 like the personal
0:31:12 finance guy or girl,
0:31:13 then it might not
0:31:14 make sense to branch out
0:31:16 but for the average person
0:31:17 it’s totally fine
0:31:17 to have a whole
0:31:18 hodgepodge
0:31:19 different types
0:31:20 of printables in there
0:31:21 and Etsy actually has
0:31:21 what’s called
0:31:23 sections in your shop
0:31:24 so you can silo
0:31:25 different stuff.
0:31:25 You can be like,
0:31:25 oh, here’s my
0:31:26 thank you card section.
0:31:28 here is my planner section.
0:31:29 Here is my
0:31:31 editable template section
0:31:31 and so you can
0:31:33 silo them off like that
0:31:34 but just in terms
0:31:35 of buyer behavior,
0:31:36 most people aren’t
0:31:37 like searching
0:31:37 for a shop
0:31:38 and then browsing
0:31:38 the shop
0:31:39 and seeing like
0:31:40 what’s good in there.
0:31:41 Most people are
0:31:42 typing a product
0:31:42 into the search bar
0:31:44 seeing what shows up
0:31:45 on search results
0:31:46 and then clicking
0:31:46 buying that product
0:31:47 and then they might
0:31:48 not ever see you again.
0:31:50 So it doesn’t really matter
0:31:50 if you have a whole
0:31:51 bunch of different
0:31:51 stuff in there.
0:31:52 that’s fair.
0:31:53 That’s probably
0:31:53 consistent with my
0:31:54 own Etsy buying
0:31:55 behavior.
0:31:56 It’s, you know,
0:31:57 search and discovery
0:31:59 and I don’t know
0:31:59 if I’ve ever reordered
0:32:00 from the same shop
0:32:01 again.
0:32:01 It’s like,
0:32:02 they solved my problem
0:32:03 and now I’m gone.
0:32:03 What are you buying
0:32:04 on Etsy, Nick?
0:32:06 We have a cool map
0:32:08 downstairs that says,
0:32:08 you know,
0:32:09 Adventure Awaits.
0:32:10 It’s like this cool
0:32:11 like watercolor map
0:32:12 about other gifts
0:32:14 on there over the years
0:32:15 like maybe birthstone
0:32:16 jewelry stuff.
0:32:17 A few purchases,
0:32:19 not a prolific Etsy shopper
0:32:20 but I’ve spent some
0:32:21 time on there.
0:32:23 But I’m kind of inspired
0:32:25 to throw up
0:32:25 some of these templates.
0:32:26 You don’t have to clean up
0:32:27 some of the templates
0:32:29 that I’ve been using
0:32:30 but, you know,
0:32:31 there is a Side Hustle Nation
0:32:33 shop with a handful
0:32:35 of t-shirt designs up there
0:32:36 but I’ve failed
0:32:37 to prioritize it very well.
0:32:38 So I’m excited to
0:32:39 maybe take a crack
0:32:40 at it this year.
0:32:41 Why not?
0:32:42 Extra revenue stream.
0:32:43 And for someone like you,
0:32:44 we can talk about this
0:32:44 later or now
0:32:46 but anyone who’s an entrepreneur
0:32:47 or Side Hustler
0:32:48 having an Etsy shop
0:32:50 is kind of a different way
0:32:51 of advertising, right?
0:32:52 Instead of spending money
0:32:53 on say Facebook ads
0:32:54 or Google ads
0:32:54 or YouTube ads
0:32:55 like this is a way
0:32:56 you can get people
0:32:57 into your ecosystem.
0:32:58 Like let’s say you had
0:32:58 the Side Hustle shop
0:33:00 and someone downloads
0:33:01 your Side Hustle tracker
0:33:02 or, you know,
0:33:03 your big list
0:33:04 of Side Hustle ideas
0:33:05 they might not
0:33:06 have ever known you before
0:33:08 and you’re getting these people
0:33:09 not only are you getting paid
0:33:11 to acquire them as customers
0:33:12 like you’re not paying
0:33:12 like a Facebook ad
0:33:13 or a Google ad
0:33:14 or a YouTube ad
0:33:14 but you’re building
0:33:15 goodwill with them.
0:33:16 Like if you deliver
0:33:17 something of value
0:33:17 if you have like
0:33:18 this rock star
0:33:20 Side Hustle income tracker
0:33:21 that’s like five bucks
0:33:22 you got them
0:33:23 into your ecosystem
0:33:24 you figured out a way
0:33:24 to get them
0:33:25 on your email list
0:33:26 now you’ve already built
0:33:27 a good rapport with them
0:33:28 so now when you launch
0:33:29 you know
0:33:30 some kind of a Side Hustle course
0:33:30 or a membership
0:33:31 or some other
0:33:33 bigger digital products
0:33:33 like they’re already
0:33:34 like oh you know
0:33:35 this guy already delivered
0:33:36 so much value for me
0:33:37 with this little $5 printable
0:33:38 that he sold me
0:33:39 and so yeah
0:33:39 it’s like it’s like
0:33:40 a great entry point
0:33:41 into your business
0:33:42 with these printables
0:33:43 and Etsy is a great
0:33:43 search engine
0:33:44 to get people
0:33:45 into your ecosystem
0:33:46 who might have not
0:33:47 gotten there before.
0:33:48 Yeah the Side Hustle
0:33:49 business planning template
0:33:50 we came across
0:33:50 some people
0:33:51 who are doing
0:33:52 who are like doing this
0:33:52 for like kids
0:33:53 summer businesses
0:33:54 like here’s the
0:33:54 you know
0:33:55 we want to teach
0:33:56 our kids entrepreneurship
0:33:57 here’s the lemonade stand
0:33:58 you know business plan
0:33:59 template that they would buy
0:34:00 and like make their kids
0:34:01 fill out
0:34:01 it’s like
0:34:01 I love it
0:34:03 there’s probably a ton of these
0:34:04 we’ll plug these into
0:34:04 e-rank
0:34:05 and see what we can get
0:34:06 now at the time
0:34:08 that this episode
0:34:09 is airing
0:34:09 Gold City Ventures
0:34:10 is in the middle
0:34:12 of their semi-annual
0:34:14 e-printables course launch
0:34:15 so we can link up
0:34:16 your reference
0:34:17 to that
0:34:18 in the show notes
0:34:19 for this episode
0:34:21 at SideHustleNation.com
0:34:22 slash Cody
0:34:23 C-O-D-Y
0:34:24 and we’ll be
0:34:25 right back
0:34:26 with more with Cody
0:34:27 in just a minute
0:34:27 including
0:34:29 his business idea
0:34:30 donation
0:34:30 for Side Hustle
0:34:31 show listeners
0:34:32 right after this.
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0:36:45 All right, we’re back
0:36:46 with Cody Berman
0:36:47 from The Five Show
0:36:48 and Gold City Ventures
0:36:50 for round two
0:36:52 in this episode
0:36:53 Round two is
0:36:54 your business idea donation
0:36:55 This is something
0:36:56 you think listeners
0:36:57 could run with
0:36:57 This is something
0:36:58 that you might start
0:36:59 yourself
0:37:01 if you had more hours
0:37:01 in the day
0:37:02 What have you got
0:37:03 for us here?
0:37:04 I even have a name
0:37:05 for this business
0:37:06 for your listeners
0:37:06 Nick
0:37:07 I’m hoping
0:37:08 I’m trying to
0:37:08 scratch my own edge
0:37:09 here
0:37:09 I’m hoping
0:37:10 that someone
0:37:10 creates this
0:37:11 I don’t have
0:37:11 the time
0:37:12 I don’t have
0:37:12 the resources
0:37:13 I don’t have
0:37:13 the connection
0:37:14 It’s called
0:37:15 The Hub
0:37:16 and it is an
0:37:17 all-in-one
0:37:18 business service
0:37:19 for entrepreneurs
0:37:20 so this is
0:37:20 legal
0:37:21 accounting
0:37:22 a development team
0:37:23 marketing
0:37:24 HR
0:37:24 everything you could
0:37:25 possibly want
0:37:26 as an entrepreneur
0:37:27 all packaged into one
0:37:28 and I’m sure
0:37:29 you have felt
0:37:29 these pains
0:37:29 Nick
0:37:30 where you’re
0:37:30 looking for
0:37:31 say a new
0:37:31 accountant
0:37:32 or you’re
0:37:32 looking for
0:37:33 a legal team
0:37:33 it’s like
0:37:34 pulling teeth
0:37:34 I’m asking
0:37:35 all my
0:37:35 mastermind groups
0:37:36 I’m posting
0:37:36 in Facebook
0:37:37 groups
0:37:37 everyone’s giving
0:37:37 you different
0:37:38 recommendations
0:37:38 you don’t
0:37:39 know who’s
0:37:39 good
0:37:40 it’s so much
0:37:41 and as we’ve
0:37:41 scaled up
0:37:42 Gold City Ventures
0:37:42 in our company
0:37:43 there’s just
0:37:43 all these
0:37:44 different pieces
0:37:45 and all these
0:37:45 different places
0:37:46 if someone
0:37:46 were to
0:37:47 develop
0:37:48 the hub
0:37:49 we’d pay
0:37:50 I’m not even
0:37:50 joking
0:37:50 we’d pay
0:37:51 like $5,000
0:37:51 a month
0:37:51 for that
0:37:52 to get rid
0:37:52 of all
0:37:53 the other
0:37:53 individual
0:37:54 people
0:37:55 that are
0:37:56 tangentially
0:37:57 attached to
0:37:57 our business
0:37:58 just to have
0:37:58 this one
0:37:59 awesome
0:37:59 rockstar
0:38:00 team
0:38:00 in place
0:38:01 and obviously
0:38:01 there’d be
0:38:02 different tiers
0:38:02 maybe a new
0:38:03 entrepreneur
0:38:03 is paying
0:38:04 $100 a month
0:38:04 the more
0:38:05 developed
0:38:05 businesses
0:38:06 are paying
0:38:06 $10,000
0:38:07 plus a month
0:38:08 I don’t know
0:38:08 but I would
0:38:09 love for someone
0:38:09 to do this
0:38:10 because it
0:38:10 has been
0:38:11 so difficult
0:38:12 and so much
0:38:13 work for us
0:38:13 to find
0:38:14 those key
0:38:15 players
0:38:15 that again
0:38:16 we don’t
0:38:16 have the
0:38:16 expertise
0:38:17 like we’re
0:38:17 not developers
0:38:17 we’re not
0:38:18 legal
0:38:18 we’re not
0:38:18 accounting
0:38:19 we’re not
0:38:19 HR
0:38:20 but they’re
0:38:20 important people
0:38:21 they’re important
0:38:21 people that you
0:38:22 need to make
0:38:23 your business
0:38:24 succeed and to
0:38:24 be compliant
0:38:25 so I would
0:38:26 love if someone
0:38:27 took this idea
0:38:27 and ran with it
0:38:28 okay talk me
0:38:28 through this
0:38:29 so are we
0:38:30 thinking like
0:38:30 a directory
0:38:31 of sorts
0:38:32 of like here
0:38:32 are the top
0:38:33 legal professionals
0:38:34 that deal with
0:38:35 online business
0:38:35 e-commerce
0:38:36 here’s the top
0:38:37 accounting
0:38:38 professionals that
0:38:38 know this type
0:38:39 of business
0:38:39 like you know
0:38:40 Sam Parr
0:38:40 from
0:38:41 Sam’s List
0:38:41 right
0:38:42 My First Million
0:38:43 and Hustle
0:38:43 yes
0:38:44 yeah yeah
0:38:44 so he was
0:38:45 he was doing
0:38:45 something like
0:38:45 this for
0:38:46 accountants
0:38:46 right
0:38:47 yes
0:38:48 so not that
0:38:48 not that
0:38:49 what I want
0:38:49 is and this
0:38:50 is why it’s so
0:38:50 difficult
0:38:51 you need some
0:38:52 kind of attractive
0:38:53 reason for these
0:38:54 people to want
0:38:54 to work directly
0:38:54 with you
0:38:55 like if I’m
0:38:56 paying the
0:38:57 hundred dollars
0:38:57 a month
0:38:57 five thousand
0:38:58 dollars a month
0:38:58 whatever it is
0:38:59 whatever your
0:39:00 scale of business
0:39:00 is I would
0:39:01 want them to
0:39:02 just assign me
0:39:03 like here’s you
0:39:03 know here’s your
0:39:04 lawyer here’s your
0:39:04 accountant here’s
0:39:05 your dev person
0:39:06 and they’re just
0:39:07 kind of at your
0:39:07 beck and call
0:39:08 like if you need
0:39:09 a funnel completed
0:39:10 or you need like a
0:39:11 website thing
0:39:11 done you just
0:39:12 hit up the dev
0:39:13 guy that’s already
0:39:13 part of your
0:39:14 package and he
0:39:14 does it for you
0:39:15 or if you need a
0:39:16 legal contract you
0:39:16 have like a new
0:39:17 joint venture that
0:39:18 you’re doing you
0:39:18 hit up the legal
0:39:19 team of the the
0:39:20 hub subscription that
0:39:21 you’re already a
0:39:21 part of and they
0:39:22 take care of it so
0:39:23 not a directory
0:39:24 because I think
0:39:25 directories still
0:39:26 kind of you have
0:39:26 to go through the
0:39:27 hard work you have
0:39:28 to interview a
0:39:28 bunch of people you
0:39:30 have to pick one
0:39:30 get recommendations
0:39:31 that’s not what I
0:39:32 want I’ve been
0:39:33 there done that I
0:39:34 want them to just
0:39:35 like have really
0:39:37 high quality vetted
0:39:38 people that I can
0:39:39 trust that I can
0:39:40 just give them
0:39:41 these tasks that I
0:39:42 don’t want to do or
0:39:43 don’t know how to
0:39:44 do okay so I’m now
0:39:45 understanding it better
0:39:47 as a have like a
0:39:49 on-demand fractional
0:39:51 agency fractional
0:39:52 support for basically
0:39:53 fractional everything
0:39:55 fractional everything
0:39:56 okay it’s like it’s
0:39:57 not worth having
0:39:59 somebody on staff
0:39:59 full-time or even
0:40:00 part-time but like
0:40:01 there are needs that
0:40:03 come up exactly for
0:40:05 legal for technical
0:40:06 stuff and say just I
0:40:07 will you know I want
0:40:08 a resource in my
0:40:09 back pocket to to
0:40:10 go to do that and
0:40:11 not have to somebody
0:40:12 else does all the
0:40:13 vetting and I don’t
0:40:14 have to go out and
0:40:14 and ask friends for
0:40:16 recommendations on here
0:40:16 I just like have a
0:40:17 membership to this
0:40:18 thing and people are
0:40:19 standing by ready to
0:40:20 help me out that’s it
0:40:21 if someone did this
0:40:23 well I would pay and
0:40:23 I’m sure a lot of
0:40:24 other people would
0:40:25 pay I talked to a lot
0:40:25 of other entrepreneurs
0:40:26 who have the same
0:40:27 pain points people
0:40:28 would pay a lot of
0:40:29 money for this if it
0:40:29 was done well yeah
0:40:30 when I had the the
0:40:31 virtual assistant site
0:40:32 there were especially
0:40:33 in the overseas
0:40:35 companies in in India
0:40:36 and the Philippines
0:40:36 they would kind of
0:40:37 promise this like oh
0:40:38 you need web
0:40:38 development done you
0:40:40 need a funnel building
0:40:40 done you need
0:40:41 copywriting done like
0:40:42 hey look we’ve got it
0:40:43 all in-house we got the
0:40:43 experts to do this
0:40:44 design whatever you
0:40:45 need the question mark
0:40:46 is always the quality
0:40:48 component and so that’s
0:40:49 kind of the where the
0:40:50 vetting comes in like
0:40:53 well how you know
0:40:54 and the level of trust
0:40:55 you have to build to get
0:40:55 somebody to sign up
0:40:56 how tight is this legal
0:40:57 contract again
0:41:01 all right that’s the
0:41:02 hub the all-in-one
0:41:03 business hub for
0:41:04 entrepreneurs now you’ve
0:41:05 got that business idea
0:41:06 that’s your next side
0:41:07 hustle you can run with
0:41:08 that let’s go to round
0:41:10 three the triple threat
0:41:12 the first component of
0:41:13 this is a marketing
0:41:15 tactic it’s working
0:41:15 right now it’s not
0:41:17 have to be Etsy
0:41:18 related this could be
0:41:18 related to any of your
0:41:20 other businesses we
0:41:20 kind of touched on it
0:41:21 before but one that’s
0:41:22 working and it’s worked
0:41:24 for years is printables
0:41:25 or digital downloads as
0:41:26 lead magnets or low
0:41:28 ticket offers and we
0:41:29 discussed a little bit
0:41:30 using the side hustle
0:41:31 Etsy shop as an example
0:41:33 but it’s just such a
0:41:34 great way to get people
0:41:35 into your ecosystem it’s
0:41:37 almost like a trip wire
0:41:37 products I don’t really
0:41:38 like that term too much
0:41:39 because it sounds like
0:41:39 you’re tricking people
0:41:40 into buying something but
0:41:42 it’s just a great way to
0:41:43 get people exposure to
0:41:44 what you’ve got like what
0:41:45 you’ve got to offer and
0:41:46 if you can wow people out
0:41:47 the gate with something
0:41:48 either free like a lead
0:41:49 magnet or cheap like a
0:41:50 low ticket offer maybe
0:41:51 it’s literally seven bucks
0:41:53 or 17 bucks they’re
0:41:54 going to be so much more
0:41:56 prone to purchase whatever
0:41:57 other things you have to
0:41:58 sell whether it’s a course
0:41:59 or membership or services
0:42:00 or whatever one-on-one
0:42:01 coaching they’re going to
0:42:03 be so much more prone to
0:42:04 sign up if they already
0:42:05 know that you’re someone
0:42:06 who delivers value and
0:42:07 you’re able to sell these
0:42:09 on Etsy is that the
0:42:10 primary strategy or is
0:42:11 it just through your
0:42:13 website like where were
0:42:14 you finding eyeballs and
0:42:15 buyers for gold city
0:42:16 ventures it’s a whole
0:42:17 bunch of things so not so
0:42:19 much Etsy anymore but
0:42:21 especially I shouldn’t
0:42:22 say that we do have a lot
0:42:22 of people who come from
0:42:24 Etsy but like most people
0:42:24 who join our email list
0:42:26 are not from Etsy but so
0:42:27 we have like you know
0:42:28 affiliates who promote our
0:42:30 stuff we use SEO like we
0:42:31 have a huge blog and
0:42:33 YouTube channel and we’re
0:42:34 doing paid ads so like
0:42:35 there’s a whole bunch of
0:42:36 different ways that we’re
0:42:37 getting people to download
0:42:38 these lead magnets or buy
0:42:39 these low ticket products
0:42:41 but again it’s it’s
0:42:42 building that trust now
0:42:44 we did a really fun
0:42:46 episode with Pete Boyle
0:42:48 who has his one dollar
0:42:50 product challenge and his
0:42:51 argument was like yeah you
0:42:52 could build your email
0:42:54 list with you know a
0:42:55 bunch of free lead
0:42:56 magnets but the question
0:42:57 is are you are you
0:42:58 building a list of
0:42:59 subscribers you build in a
0:43:00 list of buyers and he’s
0:43:02 like that one dollar
0:43:04 barrier was enough to
0:43:06 really accelerate sales
0:43:07 of everything else that he
0:43:08 had to offer it’s like
0:43:08 obviously I’m not going to
0:43:10 make a living off of this
0:43:11 one dollar product but it
0:43:12 led to you know in his
0:43:14 case led to hire ticket
0:43:15 consulting business and
0:43:16 how it to hire ticket
0:43:17 digital product sales too
0:43:19 but just that little hurdle
0:43:20 that little bit of
0:43:21 commitment and we talked
0:43:22 about people who pay
0:43:23 pay attention and if you
0:43:24 can wow people you
0:43:26 deliver you know 10x or
0:43:27 100x the value for that
0:43:29 one dollar thing then all
0:43:30 of a sudden that level of
0:43:31 trust really skyrockets
0:43:33 absolutely all right that
0:43:35 is our marketing tactic
0:43:36 digital downloads as lead
0:43:38 magnets low ticket offers
0:43:39 figure out what you might
0:43:41 be able to create and
0:43:41 probably what Pete
0:43:42 recommended was working
0:43:43 backwards from your core
0:43:45 offer or you know peeling
0:43:47 out a piece of that that
0:43:49 solves some initial pain
0:43:50 point and like okay
0:43:50 what’s the natural
0:43:52 progression of somebody
0:43:53 going through this if
0:43:54 they ultimately are going
0:43:56 to need your your full
0:43:57 service what’s a logical
0:43:58 first step there the
0:43:59 next question here of the
0:44:01 triple threat is a new or
0:44:03 new to you tool that
0:44:03 you’re loving right now
0:44:05 we mentioned e-rank we
0:44:06 mentioned ever be we
0:44:07 mentioned canva we’ve
0:44:08 had a few different tools
0:44:09 here but what else have
0:44:10 you got for us something
0:44:12 I started using way too
0:44:13 late so I’ve been using
0:44:14 chat GPT for a while but
0:44:15 I hadn’t really
0:44:16 experimented with custom
0:44:18 GPTs I think I actually
0:44:19 heard you talk about this
0:44:20 on a podcast correct me
0:44:22 if I’m wrong Nick but now
0:44:24 I have custom GPTs for a
0:44:25 couple different use cases
0:44:26 where like I have a
0:44:28 custom GPT that can write
0:44:29 something in my voice if I
0:44:30 need like a blog post or
0:44:32 an email that just kind of
0:44:33 will take an information
0:44:35 that I give it kind of
0:44:35 spit it out and honestly
0:44:36 like reason with itself a
0:44:38 little bit and then spit
0:44:40 out final products and it
0:44:41 honestly doesn’t need too
0:44:42 much tweaking sometimes I
0:44:44 have another custom GPT for
0:44:45 generating and researching
0:44:47 Etsy product ideas I have
0:44:49 another custom GPT for
0:44:50 basically researching a
0:44:52 guest for my podcast the
0:44:52 financial independence show
0:44:54 and like kind of unearthing
0:44:55 some interesting questions
0:44:56 or things that they’ve
0:44:58 mentioned before and for
0:44:59 those wondering a custom
0:45:00 GPT is like if you’re on
0:45:01 chat GPT you know you just
0:45:03 type in like hey I’m
0:45:03 interviewing Nick Loper
0:45:04 today tell me some
0:45:05 interesting things about
0:45:07 him a custom GPT is
0:45:08 basically just a string of
0:45:09 queries that you have
0:45:10 saved so it’s like hey
0:45:11 you know search up Nick
0:45:13 Loper what are his like top
0:45:14 episodes what are some
0:45:16 interesting things that he
0:45:16 doesn’t talk about too
0:45:17 often and it will you can
0:45:19 add as many queries as you
0:45:20 want as many kind of
0:45:21 actions onto this string of
0:45:22 instructions that’s
0:45:24 basically a custom GPT and I
0:45:25 was way too late to this
0:45:26 game and they’re awesome
0:45:28 okay this is something you
0:45:30 like would save in the in
0:45:31 the sidebar of chat GPT
0:45:33 rather than having to punch
0:45:34 in those kind of priming
0:45:36 prompts each time yes you do
0:45:37 need the paid version the
0:45:39 $20 per month pro version of
0:45:40 chat GPT and then like in
0:45:41 your profile at the top right
0:45:43 it’ll unlock and you’ll see
0:45:44 like there’s I mean there’s a
0:45:44 bunch of options that
0:45:46 unlock with that tier but
0:45:47 custom GPT is one that was
0:45:48 one of them I don’t think
0:45:50 there’s any maximum number I
0:45:51 think you can create an
0:45:52 unlimited number of custom
0:45:54 GPTs for all different use
0:45:55 cases interesting I haven’t
0:45:57 played around with that I’ve
0:45:58 just gone through the you
0:45:59 know one specific use case
0:46:00 maybe I heard a guest
0:46:02 mention it then yeah the one
0:46:04 that I would probably need to
0:46:05 create is like take this
0:46:08 article and turn it into a
0:46:09 compelling YouTube script
0:46:10 that’s like kind of the
0:46:11 bottleneck in creating more
0:46:12 video content like we’ve
0:46:13 got this huge body of
0:46:15 library of content on the
0:46:16 site but it’s like how do we
0:46:17 translate some of that over
0:46:18 to video and do it in a way
0:46:20 that is native and natural to
0:46:21 YouTube and not just reading
0:46:22 reading a blog post I don’t
0:46:23 think that would necessarily
0:46:25 play very well yeah and so
0:46:26 you know a series of prompts
0:46:28 like you are Nick Loper from
0:46:29 side hustle nation and this
0:46:30 is your task do you
0:46:32 understand yes yes and like
0:46:34 okay here’s here’s the copy can
0:46:36 you turn this in you know don’t
0:46:37 include blah blah blah you know
0:46:38 it’s okay to use some of the
0:46:39 same phrasing but it’d have
0:46:40 to be word for word you
0:46:42 understand yes okay and go
0:46:43 there but like to have that
0:46:44 saved I could see how that
0:46:45 would be a time saver oh
0:46:47 yeah huge time saver all
0:46:50 right and last but not least
0:46:51 your favorite book from the
0:46:53 last 12 months one that I
0:46:55 didn’t think was gonna have
0:46:56 such a profound impact on
0:46:56 me because it was really
0:46:57 dense when I started reading
0:46:58 I was like oh my gosh this
0:47:00 is so boring it’s called
0:47:01 thinking fast and slow by
0:47:03 Daniel Kahneman and it’s all
0:47:06 about human psychology and why
0:47:08 people tend to make certain
0:47:09 decisions it’s like really
0:47:10 interesting if you’re a
0:47:12 marketer and just like kind of
0:47:13 like the gambling lottery
0:47:15 mentality like loss aversion
0:47:16 there’s a whole bunch of
0:47:17 really really good stuff in
0:47:18 there and stuff that we as
0:47:19 marketers can use to our
0:47:21 advantage interesting I have
0:47:22 heard of this book for a long
0:47:23 time it’s been out for a while
0:47:24 but have never cracked it
0:47:26 open so thinking fast and
0:47:28 slow it is dense it is dense
0:47:30 it’s not like a fun read but
0:47:31 there’s just like a lot of
0:47:32 info in there it’s it’s there’s
0:47:34 a lot of really good stuff yeah
0:47:35 you would layer this on with a
0:47:37 an influence by Robert
0:47:38 Cialdini type of thing how do
0:47:39 how do we tap into these
0:47:42 psychological benefits or
0:47:43 psychological triggers to
0:47:44 improve our business exactly
0:47:47 okay well very cool we’ll link
0:47:48 that up in the show notes as
0:47:50 well side hustle nation dot com
0:47:52 slash Cody you’ve got a million
0:47:53 different side hustles like
0:47:54 what’s what’s next for you what
0:47:55 are you focused on what what
0:47:57 kind of projects you got going
0:47:58 on more real estate builds
0:47:59 what’s new real estate been
0:48:01 slowing down on honestly our
0:48:03 core focus has been gold city
0:48:04 ventures and building that
0:48:06 out we have some exciting
0:48:07 stuff that I can’t announce
0:48:08 yet but just know that we
0:48:10 have some exciting projects in
0:48:12 the works constantly improving
0:48:13 building our community making
0:48:15 the content better and easier
0:48:16 to follow so yeah most of the
0:48:17 most of the new stuff for me
0:48:18 Nick is gold city ventures
0:48:20 which honestly if you were to
0:48:21 ask me this question years ago
0:48:23 when we first became friends I
0:48:25 probably would have named 10
0:48:26 news hot hustles I was going
0:48:27 to try I was doing way too
0:48:29 much yeah and honestly I think I
0:48:31 spread myself too thin so now I’ve
0:48:33 kind of re-narrowed my focus
0:48:35 into a couple core things that
0:48:36 I’m really good at and just
0:48:37 focusing all my time energy into
0:48:38 those so yeah doing more on
0:48:40 gold city ventures continuing the
0:48:41 podcast the financial
0:48:43 independent show and that’s the
0:48:44 main focus is for me right now
0:48:47 very good well we’ll link up all
0:48:48 of those resources included the
0:48:50 e-printables course at
0:48:52 side hustle nation dot com slash
0:48:54 Cody thank you for sharing your
0:48:56 insight this is again very
0:48:58 inspiring maybe hopefully get off
0:48:59 the sidelines and into the Etsy
0:49:01 game up a little bit myself big
0:49:03 thanks to our sponsors for
0:49:04 helping make this content free
0:49:05 for everyone you can hit up
0:49:07 side hustle nation dot com slash
0:49:09 deals for all the latest offers
0:49:10 from our sponsors in one place
0:49:12 thank you for supporting the
0:49:13 advertisers that support the show
0:49:15 that’s it for me thank you so
0:49:17 much for tuning in if you’re
0:49:18 finding value in the show the
0:49:19 greatest compliment is to share
0:49:21 it with a friend so help spread
0:49:22 the word fire off that text
0:49:24 message to somebody excited about
0:49:25 planting those little digital
0:49:27 money seeds building extra
0:49:29 income streams until next time
0:49:30 let’s go out there and make
0:49:31 something happen and I’ll catch
0:49:33 you in the next edition of the
0:49:34 side hustle show hustle on