My First Million: Sam Reveals The Company He's Worked On For The Last 8 Month

I will predict and guarantee really that this is going to be a greater than hundred million

dollar a year revenue business.

Low end, 300, 400 million, high end, billion dollars.

I feel like I can rule the world, I know I could be what I want to, I put my all in

it like no days off on a road, let's travel never looking back.

All right.

We are live.

Sorry I missed last week.

I had to do a thing, but today's a big day for me.

I'm launching my thing.

I'm finally talking about the thing that I've been working on.

It's called Hampton, joinhampton.com.

This is your Steve Jobs moment dude.

Is it?

Every once in a while something comes along that changes everything.

Triangle hand pose.

Yeah, I'm just going to sit here like that.

This is the first time that I've been working on something that I haven't talked about it

like within 24 hours of having the idea and it's killed me, it's killed me and I have

hated it.

I've hated it.

I'm so nervous.

And so why now?

So I'll give it people background.

So my new company that I've been working on, I think I've been working on it since July,

but I've had the idea for a long time and I like even interviewed people in the space

on the pod.

So by the way, that's the funniest part of this whole thing.

You invited people onto the podcast, asked them, hey, how do you run your business?

How do you grow it?

What are the numbers?

How much money does it make?

How'd you start it?

Where'd you hire from?

And then you just launched a competitor like 90 days later.

It's not a competitor.

So we had chief on.

It's not a competitor to chief.

We had Tiger 21 on, not a competitor to them.

But yeah, so I wanted to prove, because you remember how I said, I hate the question when

people say, how would you start if you could do it over again?

Yada, yada, yada.

And I would tell them, well, it's easy for you.

You have an audience.

And so I was like, all right, well, I'll just do it in front of you.

And it just approved to myself and this little chip on my shoulder that I can create stuff

without an audience.

So Hampton is the URL is join Hampton.

I couldn't get Hampton.com.

It's like owned by the Holiday Inn or whatever the Marriott company or whatever it is.

But it's pretty simple.

It's a vetted network for founders and entrepreneurs.

So basically, if you're a founder, our sweet spot is like, if you're the CEO of a company,

our sweet spot is like 10 million a year in revenue, but you need at least a million

in revenue, at least three million in funding or these are all over.

Explain what it does before you.

Yeah.

These are the requirements.

I'm going to.

So what I'm saying is you need like, it's for a certain size of CEO, but basically you

sign up, we vet you and I'll interview and all this stuff.

And what you get is basically what you and I had.

So before Sean and I started this pod, before he started this pod, him and I would meet

once a month.

It would be me, you and like five or six other guys.

And we would like, it was basically like group therapy for business.

And we did it for a couple of years.

And then we did it informally for a long time.

And I've done it, I've done it informally with a bunch of people, but it kind of changed

my life.

And so we decided my partner Joe and I to create that, but for people who are all over

the country.

If you're in Idaho and you have this company that does like 20 million in revenue, you're

kind of like a freak.

You're like an outsider in your community.

And so what we did was we made this thing where you can sign up, get vetted and we put

you in a group of eight to 10 people with an executive coach.

We come facilitators who guide conversations that you have once a month.

And then there's a Hampton wide digital community that you can talk to other people at any time.

And then we host dinners.

So we have like dozens of dinners.

We have adventures.

So like a bunch of members are going to a rally car event next week.

And so we do all these things, but basically it's like, I hate using this, but it's almost

like a safe space.

Oh man.

Wow.

You went there.

I know I went there.

You must really care about this business.

I went there.

Would you say that you can feel seen?

You can bring your whole self.

You can bring your work self and your personal self, but it's like a place where like, let's

say you have to lay people off.

If you can, you could ask people publicly, no one's going to make fun of you.

Like I got, I have to lay people off.

How do I do this?

Or you could be like, I'm bummed.

I'm really sad.

I have to lay people off.

Or the opposite, you're like, I'm killing it.

Money is coming in.

How are you folks investing?

And so when I had my group, I used to do one with you and I did one with my now partner

Joe Spicer.

Like he knew my net worth.

He knew my relationship issues with friends and family.

He knew when I was selling the company, I was like, dude, how do I not look stupid when

I'm selling this company?

Like I feel very ashamed about X, Y and Z.

And so it's this place where you can, it's kind of like this pod, but more intimate.

That's kind of why we had the idea.

I didn't want to launch it publicly because A, I wanted the product to be perfect.

Like I wanted it to be great and B, communities like this, it's not like software where you

just throw bodies at it and it doesn't matter how many people are using it.

We had to like really be careful.

So we've added all these awesome people and we like, it was very hand curated and it

still will be, but like I wanted it to be like that early on.

A quick break to let you know that today's episode is brought to you by the Side Hustle

Pro podcast.

A podcast hosted by Nikela Matthews Okome, which is also on the HubSpot podcast network.

So the Side Hustle podcast is focused on people bringing their side hustles into making them,

their full time gigs, making them big businesses.

And so she's got a bunch of really interesting episodes.

Her most recent episode is about a woman who was popular on Instagram and created a bunch

of products and brought it into Target and got it into retail stores, which is really,

really hard.

She has a few other episodes on changing the relationship with money and building a healthy,

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challenging, mastering self-talk and then also how to have a plan for the year and put

it into action and much more.

So go check it out, Side Hustle Pro, wherever you get your podcasts.

All right, everyone, on the podcast about last year, one of the best guests we ever

had was this guy named Neil Patel.

It was kind of controversial because he said that he was spending $200,000 a month, which

is a ton of money.

And the truth is, even though it was controversial, everyone was asking about him and if we can

get him on again.

Well, I've got good news because he has a podcast and today's episode is brought to

you by his podcast.

It's called Marketing School and it's a daily marketing podcast brought to you by Neil Patel,

the guy we had, and his partner, Eric Sue.

So they share all types of stuff about marketing, business, investing, and your friends will

think you are a marketing genius.

So check it out.

You can just search Marketing School on your favorite podcast platforms or on YouTube.

So search Marketing School on YouTube and check it out.

And so I think you pitched it.

You almost didn't do yourself justice there.

You know when people come on the pod and you're like, let me just do that for you real quick.

That's my urge.

Dude, this is my urge, man.

Yeah.

I like the nerves or getting the best of you because here's how I would explain this.

I think you got one part right, which was the most important thing, which was you were

a customer of a product like this before you built this business.

You didn't just build this business because you're like, oh, this might be a great idea.

When we met, I don't know, 10 years ago almost, it was through something like this.

We created a group.

It was me.

It was you.

It was Smith who went on to sell his business for like, I don't know, $708 or $900 million.

But at the time, he wasn't in that spot.

A guy named Sieva, who was at the time doing this kind of class notes college business

that wasn't really going to end up being that big.

But his next thing, Enduring Ventures, has turned out to be pretty big.

It's a $100 million plus company now.

And there was a small group of us and we would meet twice a month and there was one really

important thing that it did, which was it gave you, like you said, the safe space.

Now what does it say from, well, for most CEOs, most of the time, I would say most people

think starting a business is hard or being a CEO is hard, but they think about the beginning.

Like, oh, it must be hard to get the idea or get it off the ground.

And as anybody who's actually done it knows, that's like 1% of the journey.

The hard part is actually the climb.

It's like once you've got your idea and you've got your, yeah, like now, seven years of day-to-day

with a bunch of unknowns and a bunch of like fires that are going to pop out of nowhere

and you have to, you have to put out those fires and just staying happy and healthy and

sane and being who you are during that seven year climb is actually the hard part.

And so who helps you during that climb is I think the important part.

And you know, the hard thing if you're a CEO is you talk to investors, you got to tell

them everything's great.

Everything is up and up and up, you're crushing it.

You talk to your customers, you need to tell them how great everything is.

You talk to your employees or your teammates in the office every day.

You can't be telling them about all your problems.

You have to, again, tell them how great everything is.

So this was, for us, this was the one group where you could just say how things actually

are.

This is what's going good.

This is what's going bad.

I don't even really know about this other thing.

I got to figure that out.

I've been procrastinating that just because it's like looming and I don't, I don't really

know what to do.

And it is this founder group therapy thing where you sit down with, you know, six or seven

other people.

And I would say it's like 70%, the conversation is like 70% tactics, 30% dude, I've been there.

You know, don't worry about this, like the therapy, but the value is almost on the other

side.

It's like the connections that you make, you know, the ideas that you get, the relationships

like, you know, Sieve ended up being one of my groomsmen, I think, in my wedding.

You know, we invested in a bunch of companies from the mastermind and that made a bunch

of money.

Had I not been in a mastermind with you, I wouldn't have seen how you built the hustle

and I wouldn't have known how to build the milk road of business.

I didn't know I was planning to create five years later, but that blueprint was etched

in my brain from those meetings.

And so you get all these like kind of crazy outsized benefits.

And basically, I think most people massively overwrite the idea of a mentor because I think

it sounds like the easy button.

It's like, man, I wish that there was just some, some genius who knew everything and

had done everything who could just tell me what to do and solve all my problems.

And of course that doesn't really exist.

But like some mentors are pretty overrated, but peers I think are massively underrated.

And what you've done is basically curate a bunch of people who are like you.

So if you're in that kind of like, I've got a successful business, I'm on my seven-year

climb.

I want to make this as big and as generational as I can.

You want other people who have already done that or also in that journey with you doing

that at the same time.

So that's my, my sales pitch for you.

You've done it better than me.

You've absolutely, thank you.

You've done it way better than I did.

Well, the other thing is I'm not doing this really for you.

I remember the first piece of viral content I had was me writing how I set, how I set

up our mastermind, how we ran it and how you should, like if you want to do that too, here's

how you should do it.

And this was like, I had some crappy PDF somewhere, but it's been downloaded like, I don't know,

10,000 times now.

Wow.

I don't even know where those emails are.

I should go find them.

But like that thing has had like 10,000, 10,000 downloads now in a couple of years because,

and I don't promote this thing.

It's just, I said it once on a podcast a long time ago at the very beginning of this.

And consistently people, it resonates.

People are like, I want that.

How do I, how do I set mine up so I can have my own version of what you have?

Now, what you did, you made it easy.

You made it a product.

You were like, don't worry about figuring out how to find the right people, how to organize

this, how to make sure the discussion is not a huge waste of everyone's time.

And it's super productive.

You just turned that into push a button.

And if you're accepted in, you get all that out of the box, which is smart.

And I used your thing.

I used that, the down the list that you're talking about.

I used just my experience with our thing.

And then I went and studied it.

You know, I was talking to a lot of other, these groups and trying to figure out, I've

been calling it speed of vulnerability.

How do we like get people to be vulnerable quickly?

And it sounds weird, but we have like people like crying at some of these things.

And I'm like, yes, yes, got them.

Tears fuel me.

Yeah.

What's better than revenue?

The tears of my customers.

Well, particularly men, like men are like, well, have like some people afterwards are

like, this was amazing.

Why haven't other people done this?

I'm like, yeah, dude, it's called therapy.

Like people haven't done this for years and just a lot of men in particular don't do this

type of stuff.

That's why I haven't joined.

I don't want to cry.

Last time I cried, somebody gave me a titty twister and I just decided after that day it's

not happening again.

So yeah, I've been avoiding your emotional trap here for a little bit.

By the way, this is not just something you studied like, oh, there's these three companies

that started in the last 10 years that do this.

This is like on some Benjamin Franklin shit, right?

Like this is, I think Junto or Hunto.

I don't know what he called.

I don't know how you pronounce it, but like back in the day, this was like a Ben Franklin

thing even every Friday.

He would go to this like one bar.

You might know the story better than I do.

I'll kind of butcher it, but he went to this bar every Friday and he invited a community

of like-minded people and he called it, I think, a club of mutual benefit, like benefit

or something like that, which has basically meant it's a club of people who we are going

to make each other better.

I want sparring partners when it comes to business.

It's kind of the way that you think about it or I think about it, but he was doing the

same thing.

His was a little less business oriented, so a little more like topics of society and

law and whatever, like they would just debate random things, but he like attributed a lot

of his success to doing this regularly, to having this regular recurring meeting with

peers who played the game at a high level and that makes, you know, iron sharpens iron

type of thing.

And so, yeah, this is not like a new idea that's been around for a little while.

How do you think about how this compares?

So people have heard of, oh, YPO, they've heard of whatever.

These other ones, Tiger 21, Vistage, all these things.

How does it compare?

I know, I have my opinion, you might have to be politically correct around how you say

all this.

No, no, we're all different in our own special way, but like, I see you as the sexier, modern,

more fun version that I would want to be a part of.

Is that not like it or is it actually much different?

My whole career, my like 15 year internet career, it's been based on like taking old

ideas and just putting new spins on it.

And so, like, that's what we did with newsletters.

Newsletters have been around before the internet and we just put a different spin on it and

people are like, oh, you created this amazing, interesting new thing.

And I'm like, no, not really.

It's not that new.

It's just, we just like, you know, put a different logo on it and we had our texture.

We added our texture to it.

And we do the same thing with this one.

But like, if I make fun of these other companies, I'm only joking because they serve a need.

But like, there's YPO.

So YPO has been around since the 50s.

It's a really big business, but YPO, it's like 50 and 60 year old men and we make a

joke at Hampton where we're like, not a lot of people in our group, their businesses aren't

inheriting 15 apartment buildings in South Florida.

YPO exists for that.

And YPO does have like a lot of like tech people and internet people, but it is a little,

the age range is much older.

It is a little bit more boy's club.

It's like YPO without Cialis.

Yeah.

Or it's the war shopping, some of the marketing, some of the, I can say these things because

it's not my business.

And they're cool and all, but they're just, they're just older.

And so, Hampton, it's digital first.

So like, we have D2C companies who aren't tech companies and we're like, should we call

it tech companies?

And like, they're technically not tech companies, but they're tech companies if you call, if

you tell your mom what you do.

So they're like tech companies, internet companies, that's where they are.

A lot of people who you recognize on Twitter are members of that type of shtick.

A lot of like just consumer software companies, a lot of B2B software companies, but almost

everyone's software or internet based.

And it's significantly younger than a lot of, of these older companies.

And then compare it to like a mastermind, which I don't even use that word.

Those are typically like 50, a lot of them can be like 50 grand and it's a little bit

more internet marketing.

So this is very much like a startup.

So let's do this.

Because I think the best sales pitch, like with any community is who else, who else is

here?

Am I doing bad?

No, no, no.

You're doing good.

I just want to make sure I get you to the good bits, right?

I'm your wingman here.

I'm trying to get you laid here.

So let me help you out.

It says on your website, your website's nice, by the way, I want to talk about one thing

in a second here, which is that you did this differently than your other stuff.

You like hired a fancy design agency and you like picked a good name.

You like built it in stealth.

You like violated a bunch of your own rules, which I think is kind of all of them.

I want to hear about those in a second.

But first it says the average Hampton member has 23 million in annual revenue.

And then there's some minimum.

And like any community, the most valuable thing is who else is here because that's what

I would care about, right?

Like, okay, you, I like the idea.

I always liked the idea.

I like the idea of a party, but who's coming?

And so who are, give me like, I don't know, three, four, five, however many you want.

Like, give me some stories of interesting members you've met that have made this like

fun for even you to be a part of.

I'm going to give you two categories.

One, the people who you know, and then two, the people you don't know.

The people you do know, POP.

That covers 100% of the pie chart.

Dude, so like POP Anthony Popliano, who was on the pod a few weeks ago, he's a member.

So POP has a media company and an investment company.

And you guys have, if you listen to the pot, you know, he is Patrick Campbell, bootstrapped

his company, Profit Well to like a $200 million exit.

Your friends, Bump Health, you know, Bump Health, they make a, yeah, they, well, you

know, what's the husband's name, Leland, his wife, Christine's a member, they, they bootstrapped

their company to tens of millions in revenue and they create, it's a service for pregnant

women.

Clipscription box for pregnant women.

Yeah.

Yeah.

CB Insights, Anand from CB Insights, one of the most impressive people I've ever gotten

to hang out with, very level-headed and, but like just quietly building.

You know, CB Insights, I, have you heard that Lil Wayne quote where he's like, real G's

moving silence, like lasagna.

That's a non.

Austin Reef, he's in my group.

So my former enemy, now one of my closest friends, Austin Reef from Morning Brew, is

a member, Nick Huber, Sahil, Sieva, all these types of people.

But let me tell you about the people who you probably don't know.

Have I ever told you about Brett Adcock?

You've mentioned this guy because he took some flying car company public or something

like that.

But tell the story.

All right.

Listen to this.

So this guy named Brett Adcock, he started this thing called Vetterie, which was a marketplace

for talent.

But it was very much like hired.

So if you're an engineer, you go through all these tests, they kind of like algorithmically

and kind of manually match you with cool interviews.

They eventually bought hired, he sold it for a hundred million dollars.

He took a bunch of his earnings from that and he started Archer, which he took public

at the time for like two billion.

What I kept now is like six or seven hundred million, but it was a flying car company.

Basically they kind of look like helicopters, but they're like unmanned flying things that

United Airlines bought a bunch of.

And he took time off between Vetterie and Archer to study how it worked.

He literally went to like University of Florida to like learn how this works.

Now his latest company, which I'm a personal investor of, is called a figure.

And I went to his factory and he's like, and they basically are these robots that look

like Robocop.

But instead of killing you though, they just, you know, load t-shirts into packages for

Walmart.

Walmart's a hypothetical one and they ship it off.

So you know, there's like millions of people who are doing this, who are getting paid.

Pick and pack.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Pick and pack.

There's 20,000 of these three PLs in America.

Did you know that?

I didn't know there's 20,000.

Yeah.

For our incomes where we ran one, right?

So I hired a bunch of people to do this.

I've done a lot of pick and pack myself because people call it sick to work.

It's crazy.

So these robots that could basically run, they call them humanoids and these like,

they can run for 20 hours a day.

They charge for four hours a day and they're just packing stuff and it's all using robots.

But he took like 20 or 30 million dollars of his own money and he was like, I basically

own two stocks or one stock, Archer, my public, my public company, and then all the cash that

I have, I bought a house and then I put invested all of it into figure, my new company.

This guy is like all in on it.

It's pretty wild.

Another interesting person, we talked about Anya of Rooted.

She's the one person meditation app.

It's a panic attack app that does over a million in revenue.

So it goes all the way from folks like Brett, who are on their ways to be billionaires all

the way down to Anya, who's got a million dollar thing that she's slow growing slowly,

but she owns 100% of it.

Another interesting one, AJ Patel, another guy who's pretty under the radar.

Is that the Zesty Paws guy?

Yeah.

He bootstrapped Zesty Paws to a $600 million exit.

Now he has a new thing called High Key.

We talked about him a lot.

He's pretty baller.

And so how does it work?

These people, you get put in a group of peers, so you get, you apply, you get accepted, you

get matched into a group, and then you meet once a month with a facilitator who guides

that discussion, right?

Yeah.

And the meetings have these like, we review each meeting afterwards and we like study what's

the good, what's the bad, and then we've just shaped the format.

So what makes it great meeting versus just okay meeting?

So what I learned from the podcast is basically, these meetings are basically content.

So I try to find juicy, good content.

So a really good meeting.

We do this thing called the business breakdown.

Well, someone will like do a SWOT analysis, strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, what's

the other T threats on their, on their business, and they'll explain how it works, what their

cat is, where they're getting customers, and they just reveal everything.

And they're like, here's where we suck.

Here's where we rock.

What do you think I should do?

And here's the issue that I'm facing.

And so that's a really good meeting when they do that.

So Triple Whale, you, one of your best investments of all time, he's, he's a member and they'll

just explain how the companies work.

No threats for Triple Whale.

Yeah.

This, what I'm about to say is not for Max, this is for everyone.

What they'll say is like, it's going well, but like, we're sucking here, here, and here,

or about to lay people off, or we just got an acquisition offer and it's way below our

valuation, whatever.

And so they like, well, and so people will have all types of contacts on their companies

in order to give advice.

So that's a good meeting.

And then we've hired, how many do we have?

We probably have 30 or 40 facilitators on staff, right, dude.

And that's hard.

It's hard to bring these people up as hard and like training them.

So it's been like a, that's been the biggest challenge.

And that's our biggest cost is, is trying to figure out how to get these people to do

stuff well.

Now, let's talk about how you decided to start this.

So again, I think if I had said, what is the Sampar startup method, I would have said

the first bit I think was, was kind of correct, which was sniff around for the opportunity.

I think you are a world-class, you know, hound.

Sniffer.

Top five sniffer, I know.

Easily.

So you're good at finding opportunity in that, what that means is you talk to a bunch of

people and you bluntly ask them, be like, is that a good business?

And then they're like, well, yeah, I mean, we did this much of revenue and you're like,

oh, I was just asking, but thanks for telling me.

You do a good job of basically finding interesting models or, you know, that are businesses that

you think are good businesses.

So that part I think was straight out of a, straight out of your normal playbook.

And so you did a good job with that.

Then you were like, okay, I could see this business and I think you even like talk to

somebody who had bought a company like this, like private equity and you were like, yeah,

why'd you buy it?

I call them.

How did they grow?

Well, year by year.

What's your plan with them?

Would you buy another?

Was this like a one-off outlier or are there other businesses like this and you basically

got confidence.

So there was some of your method to getting confidence.

Dude, I called the guy and I was like, look, hey, I just got, I found your number on the

internet.

I don't want to sound like a douchebag here, but here's who I am.

So I'm kind of like legit and I'm going to create something that I have a feeling you're

going to want to buy.

I don't know if I'm ever going to sell it, but I have a feeling you're going to want

to.

So it's, it makes sense for you to have it talk with me right now.

And I have a particular set of skills I've honed over you.

Well, thankfully it worked like taking speech.

Very humbly.

It was going to be very humble, but yeah, and you like told me a little bit about the

business.

He didn't reveal anything that I, I mean, I could have found a lot of it online, but

he didn't, it's not like he like broke any like confidentiality stuff.

But yeah, I did that.

And then I just created a type form and I created a Google doc.

I just wrote out in one page what my new idea is, who should join, who shouldn't join.

And at the bottom was a type form.

And I sent that Google doc to like 50 friends and like 20 of them signed up and I interviewed

all of them.

So I actually took a screenshot.

Look at my calendar.

You see my calendar down here?

My calendar.

It's like a zebra.

There's like stripes.

Basically, I did like.

Weird flex.

All right.

I got that zebra calendar.

I got that zebra calendar basically.

And like, there's no meetings on the day that you'll see.

There's no meetings on the day we record the, the pod.

But besides that, there's like 10 to 15 meetings every single non-MFM day.

Yeah.

I would just call you one of those Bluetooth headsets.

Like you're a telemarketer because I was like, I think Sam is just doing these like

20 minute calls all day.

Like for a while you were doing that, right?

You were doing basically 20, 30 minute sales call or discovery call every day, all day.

Because we used to be completely unscheduled, right?

Like we had that elephant schedule is just clear gray, nothing there.

And I could call you anytime we could have a little chit chat.

It was fine.

And then all of a sudden you started this business and you became the machine.

Was it hard?

I became the machine.

Was it hard to flip that switch?

In a way, I, here's my suspicion.

In a way, you kind of missed that and it felt fun to go like super, like hardcore about

it.

It was awesome, but it was hard.

It was like lifting weights, like during it, like I was proud to do it and I was happy

to do it, but it was very challenging.

And so I was like doing all these calls and I would interview people, figure out who is

interesting, who's not interesting, who we should turn away, who we should accept.

And then we just sent us StripeLink and we accepted payment.

And then we said, all right, you have a 30 day delay.

We went out and found the executive coaches, the facilitators.

We trained them.

And then the first meeting started.

And we did that for about a hundred people without any website.

And we didn't create a website until around December.

And when we created a website, I actually months in, correct?

Months in.

Well, yeah.

Many seven figures in revenue.

The way you talk about money is so funny.

Many, many seven figures in revenue.

What does that mean?

Humans don't talk like this.

Millions in run rate.

It was like, we were doing good.

I was doing good.

It was just me and Joe.

So basically he would go out and find the facilitators and I would go out and like find the users.

By the way, there's a great story here because if you actually go to the website, ceomastermind.com,

this same business idea that you're doing right now was a business I started at the very

beginning of the podcast very loosely.

I was like, hey, this mastermind thing is really great.

It's helped me a lot in my life.

Anybody want to join one or create one here?

Put your thing in and I think I did $250 or $300 per month per person.

So it was like three to four.

I thought that was club LTV, which was like the greatest name ever.

Separate.

That was separate.

First was CEO mastermind.

I think I still have the website.

CEO mastermind.

It just has index.

Yeah.

Maybe I didn't renew or something like that.

But basically I had created this website.

This is how I met Ben, by the way.

Ben was one of the six people that signed up for this in the first batch.

I said, oh, I'm only having one group and I made this thing on ClickFunnels and they

joined the group and I was the facilitator, which was, you know, a bad move because why

did I quit?

Because I was like, I don't really want to be facilitating this anymore.

So I'm not going to do this business.

And the obvious is the same mistake I actually made in my sushi restaurant, which was the

restaurant was actually quite profitable from month one, but I hated going every day at

five in the morning to the fish market and picking up tuna and then making the spicy

tuna mix that hated all the stuff.

And any smart person would have just been like, you need to hire somebody to do that.

And in my head, it was just like, if we hate doing this, everyone's going to hate doing

this.

This is terrible.

I don't want to do this anymore.

Get me out of here.

And similarly for the CEO mastermind thing, I was the facilitator, which was a bad move

because really what ended up happening was I couldn't resist solving everyone's problems

and everybody who joined was a fan of the pod.

So they really just wanted to talk to me.

They didn't really care about their peers.

And so that was just a mistake on my part.

But I'll tell you something.

Ben came out of that.

So I got my win out of that, which was I met Ben.

He became my business partner.

The second thing was it is a great lesson in turning the intensity knob up.

It's like for anyone out there who's like, Oh, I had that idea.

No, no, no.

I literally had this idea.

I was in the same position as Sam had this idea before Sam created the website, created

the prototype, did the first round of it for a few months and then decided, I don't really

care about this six grand a month right now.

I don't really want to, I don't know if I want to grow this.

I don't know how I don't know.

And I just sort of let it die on the vine.

Just forward three years, Sam tells me, he sends me that Google doc if I want to start

this business.

And I'm like, Oh, that sounds super familiar.

I know that idea.

That's that's interesting.

I actually, you know what, I always didn't think that was a good idea.

And so then I got to see, I got to watch, it's like watching your buddy, date your ex.

It's like, I got to watch Sam send me a chart every day of the ARR going up, like just exploding.

Like, dude, we're going to need bigger paper eight by 11 is not cutting it.

The bar charts going off the page.

And I was like, this is a great example of when you turn the intensity now up to 12.

Because you were willing to do the sales calls every single day, every 30 minutes all day.

You were immediately going out and hiring people so that this could scale and you wouldn't

have to get bogged down in the operations.

You could stay focused on growing it.

You did all the things that anybody would, anybody smart would advise somebody to do.

You were doing all those things and it was great to see.

And I say this not to say that you, that you Winklevast me or anything like that.

That's not what it, that's my takeaway, but I say it as a joke because I really that is

my takeaway, which is the difference between success and failure is often just turning

the intensity now up.

Now at that time, I had just sold my company, I'm still working at Twitch.

I don't think I really would have gone and done that.

I don't think I really even wanted to do that.

But man, is it a powerful way to see like a, an AB test.

Here's somebody who does it as a one of the 10 things that they're doing and a light intensity

is really fully committed and versus somebody who's fully committed, who turns the intensity

up up to 12, same idea, using the same, you know, fundamental platform of this podcast

as like, you know, your, your launchpad for that where I don't know, maybe not the launchpad

because you'd have promoted on here, but you know, the credibility you had when you hit

up those people, like a lot of those people you mentioned were former guests.

Dude, I think this business would not be good for you.

In fact, I don't think this business is good for me to run.

So I've hired, I, we got it to a certain size and then once we could, we hired a CEO.

And that's within less than a year, right?

Which is unusual, but I think probably that you had a reason you wanted to do that or

you, you actually probably planned to do that from the beginning.

Why is that?

No, we didn't plan to do, we, we, or we didn't plan to hire this person.

No, no.

But did you, did you think you would be the CEO or did you plan to hire a CEO?

No, like once it, once it started working, I was like, oh man, this is going to be significantly

bigger than I think it can be.

And also I don't have the skill set.

It's a very operational, heavy thing and you have to be very calm and patient and talk

to people like really politely constantly and it's a very people heavy business.

So you know, we have dozens of these facilitators and like wrangling them up and like figuring

all that out.

It's quite hard and I don't have that ability and I don't have the ability to run a really

big company, which I think this is going to be.

So no, we, I don't think you could have done this.

I, I know for a fact I could not have done this or you would have had to hire someone

as well.

Hiring a CEO this early is hard, it's hard to hand over your baby.

So I think people, I know when Andrew comes on, people always ask, oh, ask him about hiring

a CEO.

I don't know why.

I think it's another one of these easy buttons people want to push of like, again, it's like

the mentor thing.

Oh, this person will solve all my problems.

Oh, if only I found a great operator, then I could have all of the ownership and none

of the work.

This sounds fantastic.

And of course that does happen.

It's not that it doesn't happen, but I think a disproportionate number of people are interested

in that.

Uh, do you have anything interesting you could say about finding and hiring the CEO and how

you know that they're the right person for, for this business and taking that big leap

of faith of handing a working but early business to somebody else?

So when I write like three months before I was selling the hustle about like literally

three weeks before I got the email from HubSpot, I started talking to this guy named Jordan,

who is the chief growth officer at Motley Fool, which is, you know, like at the time

like a $500 million a year thing.

And I was like, Jordan, I want to hire a CEO for the hustle and I started recruiting him,

went to his house, wind and dined him and he was like, I'm in.

And then I got this call from HubSpot and I signed an NDA and they're publicly traded.

So I couldn't tell him.

And then about a week before the deal closed, I was like, Jordan, I've got to back out of

our deal.

You like, I have to take this offer and he was like, I understand.

But you know, I told them HubSpot still needs someone to run the organization within.

Do you want it?

And so he said, yeah.

And so he ran it.

And so now I think HubSpot media, which is what the hustles called it has like a hundred

people and he's done a good job.

Then a year and a half later, two years later, he quit.

And he was like, Hey, do you want to, I heard you're working on this new thing.

Can I consult with you?

And I was like, yeah, yeah, yeah.

That'd be great.

And I was like talking to him and he was like, do you need a CEO?

And immediately I said, yeah, but I had this weird conflict with HubSpot.

And so I just hollered at HubSpot and I explained the situation.

I go, man, he bailed already.

He wants to work with me.

Are you guys okay with it?

And so they said, yes.

And so we immediately got in a room and we just hashed out a deal where he's highly

incentivized to grow the company.

And he is perfect for this because I think I've known like what he's about.

But it was like a, I guess technically a two and a half year process and the takeaway

from this is I've been recruiting this guy for two and a half years now to like come

and work with me.

And so it took a long ass time.

And so when we sold the company, which, which is common, honestly, that sounds sounds like,

oh, that's unusual.

No, it's not unusual.

Often the best people are people that you kind of have this like almost, oh, maybe the

timing's not right yet.

And it eventually in a weird way, things do fall together later, much later, but those

relationships get built over time and they see, you get to see them operate over time.

They get to see you operate over time and it builds a lot of trust.

So it's pretty common.

I think it's a good reminder not to burn bridges and not to close doors.

Well, that's what I was going to say.

You have to keep people, you got to treat people right.

So when we sold the hustle, I gave him like a thank you check.

It was like, you didn't work here, but I feel really bad.

I just want to give you this as a token of my appreciation.

I'm like, he's like, this is literally a check that just says thank you, just because it's

what am I supposed to do with this?

When I say big check, I mean, it was physically a large check that I handed over to him, but

I shook his head in front of it.

And but dude, you got to treat people right.

Like, you know, Steph Smith, another person who I've worked with for years.

She went and worked at Andreessen Horowitz.

And when I was starting this, I was like, just so you know, this thing's available.

But anyway, this is a long game.

And you know, you talked to James Currier.

James Currier's partner is someone who he met.

James Currier is like, I don't know, close to billionaire guy who has an incubator and

a bunch of other companies.

He is partners with someone I believe who he's known for like 20 or 30 years.

But you have to like, it's a really long game to recruit these people.

Yeah.

And by the way, they've been, they did businesses together for like 15, 20 years, stands currently

not at NFX, which is where James is the thing that they, I think, I think they co-founded

together, maybe they didn't co-founded together, but they were, you know, they've been doing

business together for 20 years, naturally he would have been doing that.

But he got recruited by Mark Zuckerberg.

And Zuck had been recruiting him for 10 plus years and finally got Stan to agree to go

to Facebook after 10 years of recruitment.

And I think now he's left, but he worked there for, you know, three, four years during green.

And I think James was like, yeah, that's cool.

Like, go for it, go for it.

Go on tour.

That's great.

Like, you know, our partnership is still intact even if you go do that, which I think

is like a pretty awesome thing.

You know, I had a moment like this recently.

So I'm starting a new thing.

I'm not talking about it yet either.

So let's talk about that in a minute about why neither of us talk about stuff.

Exactly.

So I, the plan was me and Ben are going to do this.

Great.

We've, we just built and sold the Bill Crowd.

That was a big win in a short amount of time.

We raised our fund together in like one month, raised a, raised our own rolling fund that

can deploy, I don't know, between seven to $10 million per year.

We built a course business, that's a seven-figure course business.

We, you know, we've done like four or five things together now.

Me and Ben, and I'm like, oh, we have our team.

We don't need anything else.

But as we talked about this new thing, I was like, you know, there's one person that

I would recruit to join this, that I would give equity in this too, because I probably

wouldn't give equity to anybody in this, because I'm like, I'm sure this is going to work.

I think this is going to be big.

So I value the equity.

So why would I give money to anybody?

I don't need anything from anybody.

I don't need capital.

I don't need experience.

I don't need anything.

There was one person, and so I hit up this one person, and I said, listen, I'm doing

this thing.

I think you're a perfect fit for it.

And for that person, honestly, this is a perfect fit.

It wasn't even like a sales pitch where I'm trying to convince you.

It's like, literally, there's a perfect match.

Like, you know the thing you really love to do?

You know that real, that problem with your current thing where you don't own any path

to wealth?

I'm offering you a path to wealth.

You know, you always wanted to feel special.

Literally I'm not recruiting anybody else.

This is either your job or there's no job.

And I was like, you don't have to interview this.

I know you.

You've known me.

This is something that can work.

And the person was like, wow, this really does sound perfect, but you know, I'm hesitant

because of this one visa thing, this logistical thing.

And this person called me a few weeks after they spoke to you.

And I was like, oh, well, all those things are solvable.

So anyway, long story short, the person was like, you know what, I'm just too nervous

about that.

You know, I'm not sure I'm not sure I'm ready to leave, blah, blah, blah.

And in my head, my reply was like, dear idiot, dear idiot, thanks for notifying me about

your dumb decision.

Yeah, it's like, it's like, it's like what a cute girl, you know, like, rejects you.

It's like, well, I didn't even want you anyway.

Right, right.

You have ugly angles.

Yeah.

And so that's how I felt.

So anyways, I like have this like 30 second reaction where I'm like, oh my God, I can't

believe this person didn't make the offer, doesn't make any sense to me.

And then I was like, you know what, life's complicated, I'm shunned on, like, you know,

it's not as easy as a decision.

These are big leaps of faith that somebody would have to take.

And you know what, I thought they were great before this.

I still think they're great.

I think that, you know, this decision, I think is probably the wrong decision for them.

But who knows that, you know, I bet you, I bet we'll end up working together in the

future anyway.

They are awesome, and I think we're going to keep doing awesome things.

Eventually those things will intersect.

And so I was like, okay, that was my like reaction, brought up two things for me.

One is, reminder to myself, don't let the in the moment reaction be the response.

For example, when we sold the milk road, same thing, we rejected the people who we eventually

sold to first at the last minute.

And then they didn't get pissed instead, they just followed up like, you know, 45 days later

or whatever.

And we're like, Hey, what's up?

I didn't hear any news.

Did you guys not end up selling?

Like, we're still open if you would like to.

And we went back and ended up doing a deal.

And so I've learned over time that the real ballers, they don't react, they respond.

And so don't let the in the moment reaction take away your future opportunities.

The second thing is, it highlighted to me that courage is actually massively underrated.

And I was like, this is, I was like, this person is more talented than me.

And in fact, often when I work with people, I'm like, this person is much smarter and

more talented than me.

Why do I get the job?

Why do I get the CEO job?

Or why do I have the most equity?

It's like, because I think I just have one thing that a lot of these people don't have,

which is I have a lot more courage and guts to go for things that I want that more talented

people end up over analyzing and not going for.

And it just highlighted to me the importance of having courage and having guts to chase

after something that's good, even though there's some unknowns or some risks involved in it.

And not talking about this person's specific situation, but just as a common trait of like,

what's the difference between an entrepreneur and a non-entrepreneur?

It's not intelligence, charisma, it's not any of those things.

It's often simply having the guts to go and choose to go do the thing.

And so it just highlighted that for me, I'm like, man, this is a person with double the

talent I have, but they're going to get half as far because they're lacking that one thing.

I hope they over time develop more of that confidence to go for it.

And wow, it maybe go reprice how important that is.

So I used to do this thing called hustle con, which was like, you know, we did it five or

six or seven times and we would get founders of interesting startups to come and explain

their story.

We would have 500 up to 2,500 people there.

You spoke at a couple of them and I used to tell these people, all right, you're speaking

slots at three, you have to come at noon for the mic check and we'll be backstage and whatever.

And little did they know, there was no mic check.

The mics work perfectly.

There is no mic check.

Like you don't do a mic check at a conference, there's also the mic check could take one

second.

And so you, you getting them there three hours early was, yeah, the mic check, there ain't

a mic check.

You put this little lapel mic on, you're good.

But I would tell them that because I was like, sick, I'm going to get to spend time with

all these like billionaire type people backstage.

And the best part was I would get like six of them backstage at a time.

And there was like a time where it was like this woman who started class pass.

It was the guy who started Grammarly, the founders of away, you know, the travel company,

the Casper founders, the founder of WeWork.

And I remember having them all back there and I would do what I do, which is I would

just like throw a question out there.

I wouldn't insert my opinion, but throw out a question out there and I would hear them

talk.

And people were complaining about like, there's this one person who was like, I have to fire

my VP of finance.

They're horrible.

And they've been working with me, working with me for two years and I'm known they've

been horrible, but I'm too afraid to fire them because I don't want the confrontation.

And there's this other person saying like, dude, I've been raising money this whole time.

I got to keep raising.

And I don't know if I'm ever going to make anything from this yada, yada, yada.

And then there was a couple of people like Max of Grammarly who is just like killing

it.

But I get to like hear what he has to say.

And I remember thinking at that moment, I remember thinking, a lot of these people

are 20 or 50 times more successful than I am, but they are not 20 or 50 times smarter

than me.

I think that might be the case with a couple of them, like the Grammarly guy Max, but

most of the people, they're like, they're not, you know, we had the Tom from Quest Nutrition

who sold this company for a billion dollars.

I remember hearing him say like, whatever he was saying, I was like, I have those same

thoughts.

The only difference is, is that you are more courageous than me and you started your journey

a little bit earlier and you're getting after it.

And I remember like being around that group and then being around our group that we had,

it did a few things.

One, it normalized success.

And like another example of this is like sports, like I don't think that Brazil is necessarily

or Argentina has genetically superior people that makes them good at soccer.

It's just that they just grow up playing and they expect to be good and they work together

and it normalizes that type of excellence.

Another thing is it made me realize that the people who I admire, they're fearful.

They are exactly like I am, you know, I heard this guy complain about not wanting to fire

someone because he just hated the confrontation.

The difference is that they do it anyway.

And so meeting my heroes that way, it really made me realize that they shouldn't be on

a pedestal other than the reason of like, they're just, they just did the damn thing.

They're not necessarily smarter.

And so you and I have had people on this pod who are significantly more successful than

both of us and a lot of them, not all of them, they're not much better or sometimes they're

even worse.

Sometimes we've had some amazing guests on.

They're like, it's just kind of an idiot.

Like there's been times where I'm like, but they've killed it.

They've pulled it off.

Andrew Wilkins is another guy who I've talked about.

I'm like, I feel like we're almost in the same ballpark of like patients of IQ, maybe

one person is better or worse, but his success level is huge because he's just been doing

it for longer and he actually like tried something that was against the grain.

So anyway, that's one of the big things that I learned being part of Hampton and also being

part of our group.

And that's one of the reasons why we wanted to launch it was to like make, like normalize

this type of success.

So if you're in Idaho, so we have this woman named Janessa who has a company called Simply

Eloped.

You know, all they do is they sell like wedding packages basically, it's a little bit more

complicated than that, but simply eloped, you can check it out.

She's in Idaho, has like a $10 million a year business, $8 million a year business.

And she's like, in my neck of the woods, like no one's doing what I do.

So I think that like I'm at the peak right now.

And so it's nice to be around other people who are killing it a little bit harder than

me.

And now I know I have like, I know what the next level is in the next peak.

That's one of the big learnings I have being around some of these successful people and

I'm pumped.

This is out.

Another thing that we're doing, by the way, my partner wanted to try PR and TBD if it's

going to work or not, but it's miserable to talk into these journalists.

It's horrible.

I hate it.

I told him, I go, I'm never doing this again.

Man, being around these people, you never know like what they're going to take out of

context or like if they're going to come like angry, it sucks, man.

I hate doing PR.

I've never done it and I'm never going to do it again.

Doing PR, I feel like is like, you know those scenes where it's like, you take out a knife

and they have a knife and it's like, we're sort of approaching each other's knife.

We're going to have to get really close if we're going to, either of us wants to do

this.

I hope you're not trying to do that.

But I have to have my knife in case you do.

It's a Mexican standoff, baby.

It's an old, in fact, we should, we should drop the hard J of journalists and just call

a pernalist because, you know, this Mexican standoff is tough.

It's tough to do.

But I think there's, I think there's a lot of value, especially for something like what

you're doing, because you're going to have this seed community of people who are like

founder type people who probably listen to the pod.

They know you or they know about the hustle and they trust you to build something awesome.

Then you're just going to have a bunch of people who've got good businesses that are

like, I don't listen to podcasts and I don't know what the hustle is.

No, I don't do that.

But I do read the Wall Street Journal and if the Wall Street Journal tells me about this

thing or if, uh, whatever tech crunch tells me about this thing, in my mind, it's like

credible.

And, uh, and so I think, or, you know, you, you reach out to somebody to join and they're

going to Google you, what are they going to find when they Google you?

I think is, uh, is an important like question.

When you had done this, you did a really good rant a second ago and there was like three

or four things that I thought were awesome.

Um, one of them reminded me of something I watched last night.

So I was watching, I was going down YouTube rabbit hole.

I watched this video that was a compilation of Martin Shkreli's greatest advice, which

is probably pretty good.

Other than the like, the whole like, you know, like breaking the law, you know, besides that,

besides that, you know, he probably has not even good things to say.

I am buying a lot of Shkreli stock because everybody abandoned, he became a penny stock.

Everybody's abandoned.

Everybody just sort of wrote this guy off.

Um, I'm not saying that I would give this guy my money, but this is a very smart person

who has very interesting things to say.

He is very entertaining, first of all, um, and secondly, he's got interesting things

to say and he's, he's very, very intelligent.

Did he do, uh, something wrong?

Did he commit a crime?

It sounds like it.

I don't know.

I didn't go look into all of it, but he went to jail, um, would I, you know, trust him

with everything in my life?

Would I give him, you know, the password to my bank account and hell no, but I do think

that in general, people just write off people way too quickly.

What did he say?

Um, and there's a whole bunch of interesting things.

So in this compilation, it's like a 30 minute compilation and halfway through, he goes,

he does this one thing.

Somebody's like, uh, yeah, you know, something about being successful.

And Martin's like, he's like, you know, he said, first of all, you don't have to want

to be successful.

Right.

Like you, you get to choose what you want, what's success for you.

Uh, I play this capitalist game.

I like success, success in this way.

And it's what matters to me.

And he's like, so, so if you want to do that, he's like, you know, IQ, nah, like IQ is not

the thing.

He's like, there's like a minimum amount of IQ you probably need.

Not as high as you think.

If you're watching this video, you probably got it.

And he's like, uh, also bad news, your IQ is not going to change.

So worrying about IQ, isn't going to help.

I think he's a high IQ type of guy though.

He's a high IQ type of guy, but he's, he's, he's like, I've met a lot of people and he

goes, actually the higher the IQ tends to run into one problem, which is they just overthink

everything.

They overcomplicate everything.

And he's like, he basically described my favorite, my meme of the year, the mid-wit meme, which

is basically like, you know, the idiot, the, the, the sort of numbskull on one side and

the Jedi on the other and is the, uh, the sort of the mid-wit, which is the, the, the

person who's got the high IQ, but the lack of courage and the lack of wisdom to know

how to zoom out.

Um, and they overanalyze and over assess everything.

He was basically describing how this happens for most people.

And I thought, um, man, it's so true what he's saying that like, often the higher IQ,

he's like, he goes, they just get in their own way.

And I gotta tell you, that shit hit different when he said that.

I was like, it's so true.

I know the times in my life where I get in, I get in my own way.

Like what's an example.

And like, I'll give you an example because I have somebody who's like a mentor of mine

that I text all the time about my business stuff and usually just the act of typing it

to this person.

I'm like, I know what they're going to say.

Cause they're the, they're, they're on the Jedi side about, um, I've given this example

before my econ biz where I was like, I was like, okay, we got the Facebook ads up and

running.

Um, it's working.

Um, you know, I'm thinking we should do influencers.

I think influencers could be huge for us.

And I'm thinking, um, we don't have Google, but people are, you know, obviously there's

a lot of search traffic.

Look, I attached this PDF of report of search traffic.

And what do you think about SEO?

I feel like SEO could be good cause it's cheap.

And then what do you think about, and I was just like saying all this shit.

And then my, my Jedi friend was like, um, don't talk about, don't say the word influencers

until you're making 400,000 a month on, uh, on Facebook ads.

And I was like, Oh, okay.

He's like, cause remember, like we said at the beginning, Facebook's probably going

to be the biggest driver.

So if you can't get Facebook ads to work, none of this other stuff's probably going

to work.

And the best way to get Facebook ads to work would be to, I was like, focus on it.

And so just having somebody who could just Jedi zoom out and be like, don't say, don't

say all these words.

Like don't say the word influencer until you get to this amount of money.

Then you're allowed to talk to him about influencer.

Peter teal has the same thing he used to do at running PayPal famously is like, was Peter

teal a good manager?

And people are like, no, like managerial skills or like soft skills are not what Peter teal

is known for, but he did one really effective tactic, which was everybody in the company

would have their one key thing that they're working on, the one mission that they have.

And if you ever tried to talk to him about not your mission, he would simply get up and

leave the room.

Like he would be like, Oh, you're talking to me about not the mission.

Bye.

Yeah.

Just blows up the hot air balloon, just turns on the fire floats away by as he turns into

a speck in the distance, and I've taken that like philosophy.

I'm not as hardcore about it as I want to be, but like, that's how I feel when I talk

to people like, Oh, remember that thing we wrote down that we said was the most important

critical thing, the main thing.

Oh, you're not keeping the main thing, the main thing.

And you see this all the time, like the example I gave of the smart person who turned down

the job.

That was perfect.

They needed the Jedi to be like, you want all these things and you just got offered all

those things, like take it, figure out the rest after that.

You know, that's, that's the Jedi zoom out.

And so similarly, I think that being in these types of groups helps you with the Jedi zoom

out because you will, you will get out of your own way about some part of your, your

brain that's tangled up in a knot where you are overthinking, overanalyzing, over complicating

something.

It'll happen with like, you know, yeah, I heard this guy and it's just not working out.

But I feel like maybe I haven't put in the right position and blah, blah, blah.

And then the peer group would be like, so you're saying that they're lazy, they misrepresented

what they did before and you've tried to give them the freedom to do something and they're

just not doing, you know, sounds like it's not working out.

Maybe you should let them go.

Yeah, you get out.

And then they become obvious.

Obviously they're going to do the six month plan.

They're like, do you think that in the six months it's going to improve?

No, I guess there's no way.

So then do you think you should do the six month plan?

It's like, it's just obvious, it's the common sense, but common sense is fairly uncommon.

And this is the first time I've launched something significant with an audience.

And I remember talking to you with the Milk Road, I think you launched it January, a year

ago, a year and a couple months ago.

Yeah, the first edition was like in end of December, January.

And the first edition came out then.

You like, were so excited and with this pod, we don't hold back.

And so you were just like telling me how excited you were, but it was live.

And then it was working and everything.

But I remember you like forwarding emails or just talking to me, you're like, well,

here's the Milk Road for Brazil.

It's live already.

They're just like, they send it 10 minutes later, but they just copy and paste it.

And I actually met one of these guys the other day, he was like, yeah, I was one of the guys

copying Milk Road.

And he said like, he said the most beautiful thing ever, at least to our ears, he was like,

but then I only did it for like a month or two months.

And I realized it was too hard and I can't, I can't actually pull it off.

And I was like, awesome.

That's exactly what we like to hear.

But I remember you like, I remember you were like, yeah, this sucks, like all these people

ripping us off and I don't think it made any impact on the actual business, but it does

like distract you and it gets your like cortisol levels going.

And it was the same thing with us, with this audience.

And so there was a few times where I would throw like little Easter eggs out there.

Like I would throw like a domain name.

Like one time I just mentioned Marathon Ranch, which was like the URL of my Airbnb.

And I didn't expect anyone to actually book it, or I would mention like these other things

that I had access to.

And I'd go and look at the analytics and I would see like, oh wow, 10 or 20,000 people

came to the website.

And so I'm going to not mention this because I've learned from Sean's stuff of like, let's

not mention something until it gets to a certain size.

And there's a bunch of other reasons, which is like, you don't want the community to get

too big too fast and all that.

But just the pressure of like people talk about like they build in public.

A lot of people who build in public, they do it as a marketing scheme.

They do it to get traffic or to get awareness.

You know, Buffer did this.

Buffer was one of the first people I've ever seen where they revealed all their revenue

and they also revealed all their salaries.

And that was like their shtick.

That's how we know about them other than their products, great and everything.

But that's how they got out there.

But once you and I were in the very fortunate position of having an audience, the name of

the game for all for us a lot of times is just shut the hell up.

Don't talk about shtick.

And I remember like being in like seeing what you're going through.

And I'm like, I'm not mentioning a thing anymore about certain stuff.

I think, I think you're right, but you're focusing a lot on the like competitive aspect

of it, which I think is overblown.

That's overblown.

But it's pressure.

Yeah.

It's overblown.

I think it's the pressure and the lack of flexibility, which is in the early days of

something you don't have a lot going for you.

It's like, do I have a big brand name?

No.

Do I have a good track record of success and a bunch of customers?

No.

Do I have a well-established product?

No.

I just built it last week, right?

So it's like, you don't have, where are the attributes?

You don't have any of those attributes, but the one attribute you have is basically like

speed and agility.

The ability to change, be flexible, adapt, and turn on a dime.

As you see, oh, the market actually wants this.

And so the reason for me to not talk about something early on is typically that, well,

two things.

One is with the podcast, you're inviting a bunch of guests over to the house.

I want to clean up the house a little bit, right?

Because I'm going to get a lot of traffic from day one.

Whereas before I had an audience, I wasn't going to get a lot of traffic from day one.

Cool.

I don't want to get out.

Only 10 people are going to come to the site anyway.

It doesn't matter how crappy it looks.

With something like this, a bunch of people come.

So you kind of don't want to put your worst foot forward there.

But the most important thing is, you don't want to go tell the world, I'm doing X.

It's going to be the best thing ever.

And here's exactly how it works, because you lose a little bit of that flexibility and

adaptability.

That's really your only attribute when you're young, right?

So it's like a kid or a baby.

They're hyper flexible.

And they can fall down.

A kid can't sprain an ankle, because everything is just too malleable.

They can learn seven languages, because their brain is so malleable.

A startup is kind of the same way when it's young, which is that the only advantage it

has is that it's really malleable.

So don't harden that too quickly by going and publicly announcing it when you may not

have tested it enough to understand exactly what you want it to be and how you want it

to work.

That's my take.

Let me give the audience two business ideas that I've discovered while working on Hampton.

The first, have you heard of Harrow?

It stands for help a reporter out, Harrow, H-A-R-O.

So Harrow was launched, I think in like 2005, it was pretty early.

And if you're a new startup, or even just like a smallish startup and you want backlinks,

it's based in, so you're a user, you sign up and you're a PR, or you're a startup person

and you're, or you're a PR person and you get an email once a day, sometimes like three

times a day.

And on the other side, it's a journalist.

So someone at Bloomberg says, I'm writing an article about the surge of interest in

homemade bread.

I need, I have a deadline tomorrow, so I need to get on the phone immediately.

And so the recipient will receive an email of like 10 of these types of requests and

they reply and they go, oh yeah, I actually am a bread maker or I'm a bakery and we just

switched entirely to selling home kits, get me on the phone.

And they do that because they want the link or they want the little bit of press.

That company was acquired by decision and it's kind of like just kind of floating around.

It doesn't seem like it's being innovated or anything like that, but I'm pretty sure

they have like one and a half million subscribers and people pay money to access it.

I think that someone can redo Harrow because we've had like reporters come to us and be

like, hey, can you introduce me to like a founder who's doing this, this and this?

I have a story.

Sure, we have hundreds of them.

I think someone can build that out in a little bit better, more interesting way and could

have a pretty nice size company really quickly.

So Harrow, but redo it.

Another one, I still, in our community, the number one most common thing that people talk

about is, does anyone know of a good blank that can do blank?

So does anyone know like, has anyone used triple whale or a competitor?

What do you think?

Does anyone, does anyone know of a good lawyer?

Does anyone know of a good freelancer who could do blank?

I think you can look at just all the categories and I would create niche websites for each

or niche newsletter.

So long form copywriters, here's the 50 people that we've vetted and we like, you can pay

access to view the list or here's a bunch of graphic designers who turn around quicker

than normal, they're cheap and they're reliable.

This is this list or lawyers or payroll software, whatever.

And I think that you can build a pretty big business doing that because this is the most

common problem that a lot of people are posting about in our community is vendors.

It's wild.

I'm shocked that it's consistently that.

I have a buddy who's doing Julian Shapiro and so I don't know if this is up right now.

I thought about making just like, people are always like, I need writers and I'm like,

I should just create Sam's list and it costs like $500 a month and I'll just update it

with interesting people that we're vetting who are good writers and we approve of.

But I think you could do that.

So Sam, but it's called the pineapple list.

So basically Julian was like, all right, he's in the growth world and he's been doing

growth for a long time with demand curve and a bunch of things like that.

And so he's like, basically, I've interviewed thousands of founders to figure out which

agencies they use.

So which growth agencies, design agencies, content agencies are good.

And he's like, so all you got to do is you come tell me what type of agency you need,

what your budget is, and then we will just give you, here's the top, you know, and we

charge you no money for that recommendation.

We'll even, you know, kind of hop on a call and review some of these agencies for you

and the agencies pay them for that lead.

This is a genius idea.

I think this is going to work really, really well.

And yeah, I think this is a great idea and I think it solves an important problem.

You know, in our founder group chats, what question gets asked all the time, hey, anybody

got a blank and blank that they love or hey, anybody tried this, I'm looking at it right

now and then you get the like the real inside scoop of is it legit?

Is it not?

Is it just okay?

Is it great?

So man, I think these can be big and they're not, they're hard, but they're really simple.

And if you have three months of free time, just go pick a niche and go interview all

the vendors in the space as well as all the customers in the space as many as you can

and get the truth about what they hate and what they love and create like a really vetted,

highly vetted list.

I think you could make a lot of money doing something like this and it's just a very crystal

clear product, market fit type of, type of solution.

Yeah, that's a good one.

I think we should wrap.

Thank you for putting my company describing it better than I even could.

I'm nervous, man.

I've never been this nervous or at least I haven't been this nervous in like four or

five years.

Dude, you haven't, the business is, the business is already kicking butt.

You already have a great community.

This business is going to work.

There's nothing to be nervous about at this point.

Also I think, you know, I hope we did a good job of explaining what it is, but like hopefully

some of the interesting things around it so that this isn't just like a one hour long

sales pitch about Hampton.

Like, you know, some of the thought process that went into how did you launch it?

What did you do differently this time?

You know, I hope there were some good nuggets in there.

You can let us know in Twitter if we went too far or if it was good.

And the last thing I think is, you know, you've been working on this now for how many months?

Since July.

So it's March.

So nine months or something like that.

You know, that's a long time, a long build up.

And so I think you deserve to have this episode to kind of talk through the whole, the genesis

of it, how you went about it, how it's going, interesting stuff that's happened along the

way, you know, that that is well, well-earned, well-deserved.

And I guarantee you, I will predict and guarantee really that this is going to be a greater

than $100 million a year revenue business, which means it's going to be worth something

like low end, $300, $400 million, high end, billion dollars.

I think that that is like extremely high probability in my head.

Well, thank you.

That's awesome.

That makes me feel good.

You know, you know, it's true, dude, it ebbs and flows.

And so I just want everyone to know that, like, I've built a successful ish company

before with the house.

So, you know, we had tens of millions of revenue and it exited and all that.

Every single day I wake up and I'm both one, I'm like, this is going to conquer the world.

And then the next hour, I think this is impossible.

How are we going to get this done?

So, like, I want everyone to know that the emotion doesn't go away.

You know, it doesn't matter how fit you are.

Running a race is painful.

It's a different type of pain, but it is always painful and hopefully it's also rewarding.

But it doesn't matter if you're lifting 100 pounds or 500 pounds, going to 99 max, 99

percent of your max, it's challenging.

Yeah.

It's good news, bad news.

It's good news.

Hey, that feeling is normal.

Bad news.

It doesn't go away.

When are we going to, when are we going to, when are you going to launch yours or announce

your thing?

Do you know?

I don't know.

A little bit of time.

A little bit of time.

All right.

Well, thanks for listening.

I'll bring it up every once in a while in the pod, but yeah, just check it out.

We're not going to, we're not selling it too hard or I'm not selling it too hard.

The point, it's like a Harvard, it's like Harvard baby.

So we want to, our, our, our metric of success is how many people we turn down.

Yeah, exactly.

So go ahead and apply.

Just so you can get that big fat rejection and then we get that acceptance rate under

1 percent.

Yeah.

Yeah.

We need a lot of people apply.

So we have more people to turn down.

I'm kidding.

Thank you for your service.

Check it out.

Joinhampton.com.

Thank you, everyone.

That's it.

All right, everyone, that's the end of my first million.

However, I've got good news.

You see, if you liked this episode, we actually have another podcast, the hustle is another

podcast.

It's called the hustle daily show.

It's a daily podcast that has everything you need to know about business and tech in

only a few minutes.

It's awesome.

Our best writers like Zach Crockett are behind it.

It's incredibly fascinating.

I listen to it daily.

So check it out.

It's called the hustle daily show.

Machine-generated transcript that may contain inaccuracies.