I'm paper. We kind of hated each other, not, kind of, I hated you. I feel like I could rule the world. I know I could be what I want to put my all in it, like a Days on the Road. Less Traveled never looking back. Alright, so we have Austin here, Austin Reef founder of morning. Brew, I know how big you guys are. I don't know what the public numbers are. So I'll let you kind of say like, how big is the company now? Yeah, 70, 75 million of Revenue. This year, double-digit profit.
Arjun.
250 people are so and it's kind of a kind
of a crazy story. You guys started this. You guys were at college, right? You're at as in Michigan. Where were you guys? What's cool. Yeah, so we're at the University of Michigan. I applied to Duke didn't get in though, unfortunately, and so went to Michigan. Wow. Yeah, I went to a small private high school condolences Michigan. Worked out well as a little cold little bit colder than Duke. But I mean, my goal was to go to the biggest school I could get into other than you an IV or Duke. So I got into Michigan had no.
What I wanted to do and everyone went to finance in Michigan. So I was like, oh I gotta I gotta follow their heard. I was a sheep following the herd straight into the world of corporate finance or
Investment Banking and then stumbled upon this guy, Alex Lieberman who was like I wouldn't call a newsletter. It was a PDF attached
to an email. He actually took a made a Word document even PDF it and put it to an email and that was the first newsletter. So he was he was already doing. It was it called morning Brew? No, it's called market corner. It was way more markets, based way more
Oriented what's he in college as well? Or is he did? He graduate, he was two years old and I was and that's a big part of our success. To be honest, if I was his age, we probably would've went out and raised Venture Capital. So you know, 20, 2015, BuzzFeed, raising money, Vice, raising money. And the only reason we didn't follow that path was because I was in college and no one's going to fund a sophomore in college. And so, Alice went to work at Morgan Stanley for 14 months. I spent the summer in Investment Banking and was like, holy shit. This
Is miserable get me out of here and steals? All right, I got this morning. Brew thing, I might as well do it for a couple years. And what's the worst thing that happens? I come back here and that was the, that was a starter going full-time. What did your nice Jewish parents? Think about you, not becoming a banker and instead working on a newsletter. So my parents were actually okay with it, except I told them after my junior year, I said I have one more year of college. What if I just don't go back. What if I don't finish? And the idea of them spending a hundred and fifty thousand dollars,
13 years of college, and not finishing my senior year, drove them nuts. So, the deal we made is, if I think if I graduate, and they were cool with me doing morning Brew for a year or two after I then fast forward. So, it was funny. So right, when we were selling in the process of selling, you announced that you had sold like months or two months in a before us. And so you guys sold a portion of the business. I think the majority of the business for at something like a seventy million dollar valuation in that. All right around there, I think we were actually we were doing
And at the same time, we're even talking to some similar Partners, I think we were. And the reason why like, Sean and I wanted to have you on because we want to talk about newsletters which every all three of us have a newsletter business, but you and I have an interesting background. We're like on paper. We kind of hated each other, not kind, and I hated you. So I didn't entirely hate you. I just, it was like, Just Sports opposed to a sports teams where I was like, I have a lot of respect for this person. I don't know anything about their character but I'm going to
Make up the story in my head till like motivate me. And the reason why I wanted to do that was because we so I launched, we technically launched the hustle on April April, 2016. Were you before us or after us? We were 2015 when we launched the first newsletter but it wasn't, it was just a very small thing then. So we were going like back and forth. It was like the skin was like the thing and then it was you and I morning Brew in the hustle and you guys were this like a New York kind of buttoned up crew. I was like a little bit of a crazier person. It was Tech San Francisco.
But it was like everyone kept comparing us and I remember like wanting to like Crush you guys and then after we built sold, Alex called me and you and I became buddies and I was like oh no, I actually love these guys. And now at this point you and I are great friends and I have a ton of respect but yeah. Like I wanted to crush you. I didn't I didn't really hate you. What did you feel? Yeah.
Look, I think it's always good for a business to have an enemy. I think in the early days are and he was the skim very quickly though. We were like, you know what, they're not our enemy. We realized. I think we both realized pretty quickly. That you can't raise 25 million for a newsletter, and have a good exit. And so I think was you and us? And so I turned you into the enemy and I was so immature at the time, right? I it was my first thing I don't College. I knew nothing. So, I was like, here's this guy. He's so abrasive. He's so aggressive. Like, what the fuck? And like I was. So, I wasn't principal, I didn't have real values.
At the time. And so I just saw you who are super valued, right? You have strong principles, very strong principles which some people love tons of people. I'm sure don't like and I was like this guy is just so abrasive and I've learned to love that about you but the time it just it rubbed me the wrong way and I was like, we're going to make this guy your enemy and we're going to crush this guy. All right, a quick message from our sponsor. You know, I was thinking about the shortest day of the year earlier and while we technically have the same amount of time as every other day of the year, the lack of daylight makes it feel so much shorter.
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Herb spot.com, dude. I used to get mad because everything that I was bad at you were good at and everything that I was good at I thought you guys were bad at and I'm like shit. They're just stealing all my ideas for my ads that I'm Runner. They're stealing all my content ideas and then I would see how you guys operate and I be like, no we gotta have all these sales people just like them. Like I remember I was at your office and you're talking about morning brew and you were like, I thought you would just hate them and be like they suck because I feel like that's how we used to just talk about most people.
Most startups is like, oh my God, they suck and especially one that's doing what you're doing. Then it's like, oh, I already want you to suck. So I'm going to say that and instead you were like, God, why is this email look better than ours? And you were just, like, show it to the whole team and you're like, look at this, why does this look so much better than our email? Look at what they do at the top? Like, God, there's something like you're just like, they're so much better at that the, you know, like the formatting, or the cleanliness or like the what the brand that they are doing at the I remember at the top of the email and I was like, wow.
He just respects the actual like craft so much, that he can't even hate them fully. He's like, God, they're doing good at these three things. Santa, I'll give you a story on the I never told you which is you know there was a time where I thought our copy was much better than yours our editorial. And then there was a time where I thought you guys passed us, right? And Alex in particular was maniacal about this. He would print out morning, Brew in the hustle every single morning and we would just go line by line first down line by line. And if you like
That lines better know our lines better know that we go line by line and to I mean some of the early morning Louise, they really hated you because when you wrote a story that we wrote and when yours was better and Alex thought yours was better, keeping people are pissed there. Like a Revolt in the morning, crew office one morning because of people like know, ours is better and I think ultimately wasn't better or worse, right. I was just cater towards different people but when we had we printed out your newsletter every day and read through it, through it for, I don't know. Six months, nine months. Like we were just so focused. Like I've never
Her been as hyper focused. As I was in 2018 on us. Writing the best newsletter growing, the best newsletter and selling it. Like I woke up every day, right? Grow cell, right? Grow set, like we wrote it in the wall and 11 a.m. every single day. We had the Great Wall of opens and we track our open rate and write down the wall and we had that for probably two years running every day. What was our open rate? And your strategy was to Art what our strategies were? They diverge? And they were different. So we were going to launch. We are going to stay in this space and vertical eyes and launch.
Option services and all this other stuff. You guys launched, multiple different newsletters, which met from my eyes. You grew your Revenue quicker. I personally hate that business because I don't like advertising that much, but you grew your Revenue way faster than us. I think you did. Like we, if we were one year behind you, I think we are tracking one year by. So, the year we sold, I think we could have done 18 to 20 million in Revenue which is around newer. I think the same year so we are like tracking perfectly which is really interesting but you went this horizontal route where you launched?
Multiple multiple newsletters. Which route do you like looking back? Look, I mean, it's tough to say, we took the round the wrong route, but I also think it's what we had to do, right? We didn't have the choice. You had because our content was more General business, right? You wrote with an edge with the tone you were targeting entrepreneurs, or maybe like account Executives, who want to become entrepreneurs. And so you had way more opportunity to launch a Trends or to launch a hustle con for us. We thought, you know, a general morning. Brew subscription, wasn't gonna
Work a general morning, Brew event wasn't going to work. The tone wasn't specific enough that the Target customer wasn't specific enough but we fell in love with his B2B business which I know both of you gotten a little bit of a Twitter shit. When you you spoke about the beat of the world and you know, industry dive but we I fell in love with that business and I'm like, wow. And you can get in front of retail professionals and HR professionals and we have them in our newsletter and it was a crazy as business where we launched a newsletter and then he break even before we even hired the writers, because we pre-sell
The Advertiser, let's call it like a B2B SAS company into one of these newsletters and so I know there's better or worse. I think you're our opportunity was easier to get to 100 million of Revenue. Yours was easier to get, so let's call it like a billion dollar company, right? Because you could have subscription multi Revenue stream, much easier. It just was gonna take another, you know, eight to ten years. That's great. I'm happy. I'm learning that now, after I sold that I'm happy, I got to see it because I just got to copy. Both your playbooks and do that. Do it for the milk Road?
All three of us were able to win but the same Playbook. Mine was the easiest path of all because I could just text you guys and be like, hey think about doing your thing but for crypto what do you think it was like yeah I think it's going to work, let's do it. It did the Playbook work perfectly Shawn. You think it has so far, right? We basically less than a year. We built the number one, like the biggest daily crypto email, its profitable. It's, you know, seven Figures. It's, I don't know, like, it worked as well as one could expect bootstrapped it, you know, in our
Spare time. Like that's like as good as I could have expected that to go, dude. That's why these businesses are awesome. As people don't realize, that's why I always hate. When people say, if you're going to start it over again, what would you do? I'm like, do the same thing, like it works. It consistently works. I know, Austin. You're way more like pessimistic. You got your like, I'm pretty paranoid, your way more paranoid. And I know you say, like only can't work again and I'm like, no, man. I think it. Well I think I think a cash you have like a framework around. You have like a lot of opinions around email, newsletters, give us. Yeah. And put it in the context of milk Road. Like when I
Just got to do that or you saw those going to do that. What do you think and did that fit your framework? For what you thought might work? Or was that may be an outlier? Yes, perfectly fits the framework it, so I'm pessimistic on relaunching, the next morning, brew a general business for million-person email, but basically I split up newsletters into three categories, one or the editorial newsletters, right? You have you set your sub stackers. You're packing McCormick's full newsletter. Maybe 2,000 words, maybe 10,000. If you're some of these writers and that's like category 1, right, Category 2
Is what we did aggregation, right? And Sam and I kind of went more General General business went for scale and then after that you kind of have like the, let's call it morning, Brew for X. Right? Where you you have still have that aggregation of summaries but you're more Niche, right? And maybe the Tama smaller, but you think because of your tone and because of the way you cover it you can have a larger percent of that time, reading your product which Shana, thanks what you're doing. And the third is more of, like, your classic. Hey, I'm gonna give you five, links your five bullet Friday or things.
Like that. I think the biggest opportunity is Sean, what you did, which is morning Brew for X. You find a growing industry. Use ride that tail way. If you just own that and build a brand, something, really distinct in one of these, you know, niches. And if x if x is financed or X's something, that's be more B2B or like, you know, a professional kept, you know, something that's a job title. Then X works better than if x is, you know, fly fishing or or you know basketball or something like that. Yes, I need you to go.
Zoomer out, right target consumers, it's got to be high dollar, it's got to be, you know, the newsletter for Ferrari owners or the newsletter for Rolex owners, write something where people spend you know, hundreds of thousands of dollars a year on this B2B is great as well. That's the other place I would go. And so, you were kind of like I call it. Maybe prosumer e, right? It was the best of both worlds. You can hit on both worlds, you got the consumer-oriented readers. And then also the people who work in the crypto industry. Did you agree with our? I know that or I'll say it myself I did sound like a douche bag when I was talking about industry.
I didn't mean it like phrase it that the way that I did, but when we were talking about Industry Drive, you know there are 600 million dollar company that mostly is a newsletter business and our criticism towards the B2B industry was like the contents. Pretty wack. Do you agree with that assessment? Like you still think there's a lot of a opportunity to build really big B2B media companies? Yeah, I just think it's the other way. Sean did it right? Which is go the complete opposite route, right? So they're they're pretty dry. They have a standardized process. They go in every single vertical. Look. I think their business models simple but it's
not easy. I don't think what they did was easy at all, but it's very simple. The Playbook is very well, defined, there's no crazy tap. They're not, you know, building some AI machine learning thing. It's they create great content, they resonate, they sell ads into it. But the way the compete I think is to treat be to be like consumer, right? To treat them like people like, you know, the milk row does. Why is it not? You're saying it's simple but not easy. Why is it not? What do you mean? It's not easy. I mean I think to scale across all those verticals. Right? To your point, add businesses are pretty tough.
Right? And so you take on a lot of costs and you can't you can't mess up, right? Because if you go wrong and verticals, you a bunch of writers and salespeople. And the thing about media businesses, even when they're profitable, the difference between 20% profit margins and losing 20% is way is way it. Like, it's easier to flip that because of all your fixed costs, it's not SAS, you don't have locked in, you know, you're a B2B SAS company. You've locked in 100 or 110 percent of your Revenue the next year because of renewals every day with a
That it's another grand. You got to go sell more ads and so it's not easy. They you know that this is an absolute grind. We found this guy, I'm going to give a shout out here is names, I don't know, I think it's date. You pronounce it voltar and he's from the Netherlands and he I think he's at school right now. I don't know what happened but I did a video I thought. Okay, maybe maybe we'll start doing YouTube content. I do this video when Luna collapse and I did this video like I lost a bunch of money on Luna and I did this video, I thought it was good.
Like funny as I got Michael viral, whatever we came out late. We came out like three weeks after the news so that was kind of stupid so it didn't go super viral. But one good thing came of it which is this get this kid on Twitter was like, hey your thumbnail sucks for you. YouTube thing, like it should be like this, or like this or like this. He did this thread. And I was like, you know, you're great. I don't know if I'm going to do any more YouTube videos but like you want to just come in our slack because I just well I like what you just did those like helpful and it was quick and like, you know, he's like sure. Yeah let me amazing. I love the milk.
Route. And so he joins our slack. First of all, like what do we do with this guy? Like what the fuck is this guy? Like I've actually like a two-person meeting and I just invite this third guy from the Netherlands to a meeting. You'd be like, like, it's gonna talk. What's, why is he here? And for two months, no one knew why he was there, but then something amazing happened. We were like, we need to sell ads, like, for the next month or whatever. It was like, nobody wanted to do it. It's just like when we have to like just give me a pain in the
It sucks. It just sucks to sell ads, like I wish higher sales guy. It's like, even hiring a sales guys. Kind of a shitty task. Okay, let's procrastinate a little bit and along the way, this guy had been wanting, this guy had been always messing us ideas like he's like, I don't know, he's like in the slack so he's like trying to be productive. So he would just non-stop message ideas of things we could do.
And I gotta vote for Ben was just sort of like dude this guy is like, you know, incessant like he won't stop messaging, is I get its first it's a good but like nobody can handle this volume of ideas like this is crazy and then he's like I use like you got to do something about this and I was like okay I'll do I'll talk to him or I'll kick him out of slack. It was like Hey what if we just point the machine gun like out words instead of like right now, the machine guns shooting us with ideas. What if we just made him like sell the ads and he just bothered
The hell out of everybody else. And so, that's what we did and this guy is the single-handedly crushing milk Road had sailed through the crypto bear market. Like we have fully sold out for months on end. Just one guy with with this one. Kid who's not even 20 years old, just absolutely pillaging the market and the advertisers will privately DME be like, yo, I shared this guy's name with our sales team because I was like, this is how you sell, like this guy is real.
List. And I was like that that is that was just like an incredible. I don't know. Like incredible thing. He is so impressive dude. Let's talk about that real quick. Ad sales, ad sales suck Austin. They suck and what I learned to getting into the hustle II. Did you sell? I sold our first ads, I think I got us. I sold like the first maybe a hundred thousand dollars worth of ads and then in order to scale, we had to hire a sales team and they would show me like the conversations that they are going to have. I'm like there's this conversation will never work like you're using all this jargon.
Ian and you're wearing like these like button up your shirt plaid shirts, and like these brown leather shoes. Like you guys look like do weeds. Like this is never gonna work and it worked perfectly. Nobody wants to go skateboarding with you right now. Yeah, we're not ready. I was like dude you look like your name is Todd or Kyle like this is not gonna work and sick. My name is dafuq, it works. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. What kind of a person I was not cut out for that the, the media buying?
Old, did you do it? Well no. So yeah. That really days, we bought right. But we, we Soul all direct response as right was Casper mattress. It was a way luggage. It was you know hey by your placement here you're going to get 300 clicks and 3% of converting you're going to make a thousand dollars will charge 800 as we've grown though, I think there's another difference between us we were in New York City and open up this whole world that I had no idea about which was the world of media buying and these big ad agencies and they have huge budgets.
That's right. We're not talking about 100 Grand from Casper. Ware talked about five million dollars. In the biggest brands in the entire world and it really is a black box that people who aren't it. And I think it's one of those things where it's a black box intentionally so people can't get in right finances. The same thing every year there's a new term within the ad industry or Finance just to keep people on the outside, do it? It's crazy. It's crazy. And it's like not based in logic or fact, it's based on relationships and like, it's so weird. It's like, oh wait, I have to realize that this
In this lady, I'm trying to get to buy ad. She just has to spend this 20 million dollars this quarter and she just wants to find somewhere to place it where she won't get fired. That was such a weird feeling. Yeah, I mean that the idea of like media budgets, right? Hey, they if they, uh, they don't use it, they lose it. And so you're incentivized to spend money. It's interesting and it's something that we learned Again by hiring people in New York, which I think was a big difference between us and you you had a lower cost more like inside sales team, a really efficient one, right? You took that route, we didn't take that route.
Whoever these Big Brand dollars and I think both routes work at the pens what you're you're looking to sell we just took the router say hey we're going to we're going to Dive Right In this black box and we're going to learn all about it. We're going to get a million dollar and we won. Our first advertisers discover gave us a million bucks. I was in college, I'm a senior in college living in my frat house, right? Like beer cans everywhere. I get an email from the CMO of discover like, here's an RFP. I'm like, what in the fuck is an RFP? What are the fucking on no clue? I open it up. It's like, hey, give us media plans.
For like half a million a million bucks, right? For a million dollars. She could own the company seven times over the company was not worth 100 Grand and here's this woman asked me for a million-dollar RFP and, you know, we just we learned it but it really is relationship driven game. How did you justify that? Like how do you like if AMX says, we're going to spend five million dollars this year? Be real, do you actually think that's going to help them? Like, sell more shit? Yes, what I do, right. We do a lot of brand lift studies and things like that, right? It's different, right? It's
Not, we're not no one's trying to say, you know, like Lexus for example or car company. Alexis doesn't expect him how many brand lift studies. Did you do? We used to do that? But I'd be like, what the fuck is this brand, lift, study, like this? I like, are you kidding me? Todd. What the hell is a brand live study? I don't know what the hell does this. Or we would do all this other stuff like an RFP. Like we have been doing it for like six months. And I was like, hey guys, I like at this point I'm a little bit too afraid to ask, but I don't know what this stuff means. I didn't know what any of this stuff. It's so
Challenging if you don't work in the industry, and then they like they talk about agencies and I'm like, wait, what the hell? It is an agency. Why don't we just go straight to the brand, like this stuff from an from a small business owners perspective. All of this stuff is crazy and efficient and stupid. Now, that I've been at a big company HubSpot, I understand, I'm like, okay, I get like these guys are having to like, give out a billion dollars of marketing like now, I understand a lot more, but when you're just a 10-person company, you're like, do you guys realize this Market study shit done work, like this brain study, that's bullshit.
Write a letter like you're gonna give me twenty thousand dollars to write this article. It took me like 20 minutes to do it like so it doesn't make sense when you're small. Yeah, but you know people are, people are buying the audience, they're buying the the relationship with with you. They're not buying, you know, purchasing things like that. And so, you know, I think at scale, when you get the 4 million subscribers, if you can, change the perception of half a million or a million people and have make them because of a marketing campaign, have a, you know, 10% of people have a higher perception of of credit card exes.
Programs, like that is really valuable when your Visa or Mastercard American Express and you spend a billion dollars, like that's so much money. How do you deploy a billion dollars in marketing? Spend you go through agencies and that's how it all happens, dude? So Sean and I are really good, I think at starting stuff, we've got pretty good Vision where we can spend things up and get them to like a million in Revenue pretty quickly. The thing that I was always envious of you because it's my, it's a fairly big shortcoming. I think I have is you are just so good at
That I don't know exactly how to explain it. You've got this, like almost private Equity, like ability to like look at numbers and be like, oh the margin here is shitty. And I'm like, I've never used that word margin in my life, but you'll like talk about, like the margin here. And like, well, if you just change that by like ten percent, probably by doing this, your outcome is going to be like this, this and this like, you just have this really good operational ability. You're also really good at saying, like, well, if you just improve this, this and this and only focus on that. Then in six months, I think your outcome will be this. You're really good at
And you are really good at that, at a very young age. How did you figure out how to do that? How did you learn how to do that, and have that insight? And have that ability? And also have that faith in like? Well, if you just do this, this and this the outcome might be this, this and this in eight months. Yeah, I mean, so I got an undergraduate business degree and I always used to shit on undergraduate Business Degree. So I'm like, what? A complete waste of time. Like those four years were so dumb, but as I look back, it really did, give me a pretty good overview of what it takes to run a business. Now, I actually the day-to-day of running
A business. But like what is accounting? I took like seven accounting classes or I don't know maybe five. Those were actually really valuable to be able to really dive deep into a p&l to real and my summer spent in Investment Banking to, to understand, what's a financial model. What drives a model, those things that within the context of Finance like yeah, yeah, they're okay. When the context of running a business was super helpful, to understand what levers you need to pull. But the other the flip side is I Look to You three years ago and I'm going for, we knew each other maybe even two years ago and I was
Both of you. I was like I hate these guys because they're so good at going 021, they're so good at coming up with ideas like on the opposite, right? I'm not an ideas guy can't come up with ideas, but I do think once the idea is, there is certainly cooler and sexier to do what we do. You know, listen to this. There's no doubt about that. Yeah, he's definitely. Yeah. But like it, dude. What would you Robbie? You know, we aren't really don't like partner because 0 to 1 is cool. But that like Wonder 100 million years is pretty fucking cool tool. You guys take things, you get them off the ground. You take them two three.
Employees and a million dollars of Revenue and I'll take it from 1 to 100. And we can just a sample power. Couple years I asked him about his margin and he thought I said margarine, he brought me some butter. And yeah, dude, like substance was either a billion-dollar company or worthless time stamp says, no idea. Yeah. Well, I like, I remember when we were negotiating to sell and like there's just all these things that people were giving me.
I thought and I'm like, man, I just didn't even think about that. Like it's just and I actually know a lot of people that are really successful like, we're talking billion-dollar successful and they know so little about operations and there's a lot of people like that, like, who are just they're good at hiring Like Richard Branson. I think he famously said he's like, dude, I didn't know what a PL was until we hit like hundreds of millions of Revenue. Like I don't know how to read it. I'm a three types of the same thing which is super cool. Also, what I like that you said on the operation side like I say I'm saying is
Is Right. Grow cell with your we wrote that on the wall, we woke up every day and said, right? Gross. L. We had the Great Wall of opens. Those are the things that we I used to do this. So such like similar, like, we literally had the wall but not with milk Road. Actually, this is like kind of my earlier startups and monkey afraid. I remember Sammy probably member this when people used to come in like we would always have like all this shit on the walls and like the sayings and these posters and like indoctrination that indoctrination. And and I will always felt like whenever I would meet founders,
One of the highest predictors of success was, do they even know what the main thing is? And it sounds like a stupid question, but for a lot of Founders, they didn't really understand what the main thing was for their business. They didn't know their businesses version of right grow sell. Okay and even if they understood like that, that's going to generic. You look at. What do you do with that? They didn't understand to translate that into the Great Wall of opens is the number. We're going to write down every day. We're going to look at it and if it's bad we're going to do something about it. And if it's good we're gonna like double down on that.
And that's what daily work is. Is around this one number and so it was like, I remember we have these Founders in the office and they would be like, I backyard. What's a, you know, how many new customers you guys get today are like, what's the revenue? And they have to like, oh yeah, let me check. And they would like, first didn't have a dashboard there, like going into the database. Like, bro, you haven't built an easy way to know this number and then the then, finally, they built that I didn't, they always have to check. And I was like, how do you not know why am I asking this question? Like, it's 3 p.m. one of y'all to should have asked this.
Question by 3:00 p.m. like every day. This is crazy and they just didn't do it. And I was like, these guys are going to fail because they don't have to keep the main thing. The main thing is that something that you see, or like did consciously, like, where'd you get that? Because that wasn't obvious to me right out of college. But sounds like you got it right? Right away? Yeah, that I mean for us and it's almost an insult, right? We were we people like why don't you do this? Why did you do that? Why you joined the video? We were too dumb to do that. Like we had nowhere like video. How the hell do you make a video? We
I'm barely get our newsletter out. I mean, there were days where we, we finished the newsletter, like, 2 a.m. we be coding, the thing ourselves and so I think it was partially, you know, a little bit of force, I fell. So partially a forcing function, you know, we just looked at me. Like, if we do these things, we will get here and we looked at the math and we're like, everyone's telling us, we're crazy. But if we grow Subs, fifty thousand dollars every or 50,000 subscribers every single month and our costs don't change. We're going to go from 50,000 monthly Revenue, to 75 to 100 to 125 and by ended.
This year we're gonna be at a million Subs, doing a million dollars of Revenue at month. And I tell that investors in people, they be like that doesn't make any sense. I'm like I don't know what to tell you like I'm just looking at the Excel and people couldn't even we spoke to investors and they were like what do you mean? Your business only has a hundred thousand dollars of cost. I'm like its people its growth marketing and it's in the SP that's it that's always spend money on and people are like what was that last line? I don't even know what that last line. We know email service provider we use sail through
ESP here, okay? I thought you said I was like, SP is what the hell's happening? It's one of things were like, it was just when you boil it down to numbers and run it in an Excel model. It's like so simple. And people these investors were like, well, like you're not accounting for this and that I'm like, it's all bullshit. Like, none of that means they think I'm just trying to make money, like, I'm just trying to hit you pussy. He also did some Scrappy stuff. I remember, like, didn't you get your first out of few thousand emails just by like standing in a classroom? We, we may have, we may have broken a couple laws to get our first couple thousand.
Schreiber. So people would walk out and you'd have a piece of paper and be like, hey no, write your email down, we wouldn't let him walk out. So we go in the beginning of lecture these econ, 101 lectures like a thousand people and I hated Public's, I still do, but I hated public speaking and I was like look if I'm going to this lecture hall and I'm a talking from a thousand people, I better get every damn email. And so what I would do is I'd speak in front of these people that I walk around, I go up each person teacher, would let you speak or you would just stand up and notice the teacher, let us because there's thing,
Michigan times, you actually attend minutes in between each class. So if the class started 10 actually started at 10:10 and so at 10:05, I get up there. I pitch on the pitch that one morning brew and then I basically print out an Excel document and I walk around, I'm just stand in front of people and just stare them in the eyes until they gave me their email and I sent the back of the class and type every email in. And I'd be like shit, Alex, that an A or a c, or a knee. He's like, who cares? Put them all in and we're checking for everything 6 permutations of
Every single email and that's how we got to like 10 or 15,000 at Michigan and then we're like you've a friend of Penn State. I'm afraid to Penn State. Let's do this at Penn State. Let's do it at my end. Let's do it at NYU. And next thing you know, we like 50,000 people across the country college students reading morning, Brew
Are your parents wealthy to do? Grew up wealthy. I'd say middle class upper middle class but what's interesting. So I grew up in the suburbs of Baltimore and like I didn't know, I thought I knew wealth and then I moved to I went to Michigan I and I met people from LA and New York, I moved to New York and I saw people from New York and I never saw that kind of wealth. And to me that was inspiring. That was exciting because I came from again, there's like a very well off. I had everything I needed but you know, I know people. I met people at school who are flying private planes. I know.
A plane. Once you got rich pretty good because I like, but what? Like when you guys tell you're pretty young right now? I think you guys sold it. What 26 or something. Yeah, I need 25.
Well the reason but hold on real quick, the reason I asked was because like you've got this like this immigrant hustle and before I knew you, I stereotyped you as this like everything's been given to this rich kid like a and and hearing this story. I'm like, oh no. These guys were like just as pretty as I was for sure. Sometimes more. The Alex has his own story about, you know, his family, and his dad passed away. And so he was, I mean, I learned so much from Alex about Hunger. Like Alex again, he broke things down the same way. I did, Alex would be like, hey, you know what?
Like Alex, we need 100 advertisers this year. I'd like, I don't know how we're gonna do it. We have zero because I know exactly how we'll do it. I'm going LinkedIn and I'm not going to sleep until a message, 1000 companies and we'll get a 10% reply rate of like, you're gonna message 1000 companies, he's like, well, isn't that what you need to do to get to 100 advertisers? I'd like yeah, but that sounds crazy. He goes well let's start working and we just like to have sit there, drink beer and we work. It just you know, crank out, pulled the M's, the head of everything, I must know, the head of growth and everything York City direct to
A company because Alex incessantly emailed them and we would like we would laugh at the response. We would get excited when someone respond to be like, hey Alex, this is your ninth email like you gotta stop following up like number 8 was good, but 9uu past it. So yeah, I think we both have that hustle. What did it feel? Like back to Sean was saying, you're 25 and you don't know how much money you made, but let's just say eight figures. What's that feel like when you're 25 fucking dope? I me. So, first off, it was just
I got the wire. Just what it does. The sum of money I was doing covid. So I get this, the like listen to this job is to position on one hand. I just made a boatload of money, more money than, you know, I thought I'd ever make right on the other hand, I'm living in my childhood bedroom sitting next to my parents, as the wire, hits my account, and never like, what are you gonna do now? I was like, I don't know. My mom's cooking like meatloaf like
It's ugly. Yeah you like tell your mom mom, make me breakfast. Yeah, it was most handsome guy. Well mastic thing ever. You should have just moved into the master bedroom. This shit's mine I think look I think getting a quick win early in Laura Wynn early in life is so important right? Just having that Swagger that confidence that brand allows me to do so much that I wouldn't have been able to do otherwise like what get into any
A room. I can get in touch with anyone. Right? I will get ya meet girls. No, no. I'm engaged. So I'm not I'm not looking to be girls now. But people are always like, damn, like you were single and that field happen like you would have been set for life. Well, so yeah, what one of the opportunities do you think you get? I mean again like get into any room, right? So meetings investing what are some? What are some cool rooms you got into? I mean, I can't like it's the same things that I think you guys are. You guys also have a winter? I don't think anything is
Is that well I don't like to leave my house and then Sam's only interested in like people that are like this guy's the best acts thrower and you know, the country and he's like super pumped about it. I'm like, I don't think you needed to like, you know, pull your, you know, rich guy card to get in touch with him, but I feel like you don't know, like, like, have you met Leo DiCaprio? I feel like he might have just bumped into Leo DiCaprio somewhere. That's like, that's more your time in New York. So I bumped into Justin Bieber in the Bahamas, which is pretty cool. But no, I mean, like the weekend
we have with, with what's-his-name mr. Beast, and I spent a weekend with Kid Rock on his Ranch. That was pretty sad. Tell me about that. What was that button? And he's a unique unique character. Again, this is all according to him. So I haven't even fact, check this but I'll assume he's telling the truth, he told me he's the only person to play at both President Obama and President Trump's inaugurations, he played at both and he knows both super well, he's close to most and he has this this, he lives in this huge Ranch outside of Nashville, right?
And there to it was, my friend's name is Shane, he works in Tech, he's good. Friends with Kid, Rock Kid Rock, obviously use a guy and Shane put together 10 people in Tech, Kid, Rock 10 people, music we go to his Ranch and I mean you got there and it's like out of a movie, right? You walk in and Kid, Rock's bats is to me, he's got a cigar sticking out of his mouth. He's got a shotgun. He's just shooting clay pigeons and the whole weekend was out of a movie, right? His Studio. Unbelievable. We pull know.
Later together just telling stories about Eminem. I mean he's is really really cool he's a lot of people don't realize this but Kid Rock got famous right before CDs went down and he's one of the best-selling artists of all time and I it would surprise me if he's probably worth two or three hundred million dollars because he was famous when CDs were eighteen and twenty one dollars and so like this is so now though I think he's a new source of wealth so he owns again this what I've been told he owns the most popular bar and all of Nashville and
Whereas most of the other ones like Luke Bryan has one and a bunch of other country singer. They just license their name to the bar, right? And they make a couple percent. I think Kid Rock's like a 50/50 owner and I've heard this probably makes two million bucks a month. You know, I've heard more I've heard like it's a project really, I've heard got enough. It's true. I've heard it's big, big money, you know, hi. Hi tens of millions, which is crazy, you know? Dude, the one of the best things about our companies and like the culture that us three have
Kind of built with our friends because we kind of like got into this media game a little bit early, and I don't know about you Austin, but when the hostel was starting, there wasn't that many people who we could look at and be like, well, let's just do what they do but different. They're like I remember I told this one media guy who I'll tell you afterwards, he's the founder of a multibillion-dollar media company. I was like here's what I'm doing because bro. This will never make more than two million dollars a year in revenue and this other person who I'm now, good friends with was like, dude, when you talk about this, I'm like, it doesn't matter just a small screen, who cares? Like if you're in
Email or on a website. It doesn't matter. The math shows, XY and z. And so we had a higher like, 24 year old to like, we're promising. But like, and then we had to learn about it as we grew and be, but because of that both morning, Brew the hustle and the in the crew that now Shaman, Sean's great at this, as well. We, we've done a really cool job of like, finding smart and experienced people who now have gone on to do a lot of really cool stuff. And that makes me really really proud to like see like this crew that we've all built. And so there's like the hustle crude the morning Brew Crew.
Ooh, and then Sean was like the hostiles thing. Now, he's got his own thing. Have you noticed that? Like, we all have this little like, Army of people who have like been through like this, like self-created like training camp. It's kind of neat 100%. I mean, it's we, in the early days, we could not get people to work with us who didn't want to be entrepreneurs. And the pitch was simply like, Hey, we're starting a business you'll be in on the ground floor, right? You'll see what it's like and that's all you get. Like, you know, we didn't have a human for the first year and a half, I was so cheap.
For the first year and a half and morning. Brew, you didn't get a company computer. You had to bring your own computer to work. Do I was famous because I'm Tracy coward. Put, hey, I'm buying, I'm buying laptops. Does anyone have a Mac for sale for five hundred dollars? No, do we were not dropping any money on company theater? We didn't have health care in the early age. You got nothing, you got me and we should, we couldn't afford it because I was so against taking venture capital. I was like, we're going to make every penny count One More Story Fridays at 3:00, we'd all go pencils down.
I work with stop because we'd a referral program, we'd send out stickers and t-shirts and that whole thing that you know I'm sure we've all seen but we had no be no packing and so we'd sit down we'd like wheel in that we were keg into our office and we convey earlier we do like assembly line. The first person would would like open the envelope. The next person with stick the sticker in there. The next person with lick'em the next person would put the label on and for like three or four hours like 3 p.m. until 7 p.m. on Fridays, that's all we did was just
Envelopes of shit. Well you're one of your early Guys. Tyler dank has gone on to start beehive which is a really cool company. He's in like a really good entrepreneur, he's iterating really quickly and then I've got a couple people have done that. It's just cool to see like these people who were young and not dumb but like just young and like inexperienced gone to like build cool shit. And then like your ex people are now other newsletter companies and then Sean has hired a couple of my ex people or and probably it seems like couple of your ex people and it's like this, incestuous
One thing which at first I would be jealous. I'm like, well, what the hell were they working with this person? But now, I'm like, this is awesome, man. Like, we've created this like tiny little industry of newsletter, nerds, and it's actually quite cool. Yeah, I love it. Yeah, I think it's really cool. I think there's me so much more value create. I think Tyler's doing, beehive is amazing. I think what I've been so impressed with him, it's like that the maturation from the morning Brew days of, you know, it's like six of us and he's a little bit of everything to the way he's able to scale himself and scale that team is amazing. And so it's
The entrant rungs the same way. Like what's wrongs done is incredible. And there's any, there's a ton of examples. It's really cool to see if you regret selling. No. No. That's, that's you answered that. Not even though. Like so you sold part of the business? What do you think? The mean Tire business is going to sell for in the future and I think many multiples of what we sold the first half for, but we structured the deal in a way that I thought was great, right? I mean, the ability to have life-changing money. If anyone has the option, like
I always think it's good to take half your chips off the table, right? And maybe I'm biased, but I did that and it's worked out those really important but I still have enough upside where I'm excited, right? It's not like a tiny earn out that people sign where it's like, 10% of the deal. It can, it can be really, really meaningful and that drives me, that keeps me excited. It keeps me on the hunt, I love the company, I love the people, we work with, I love the executive team, but I would, I mean, during covid ordering, I wouldn't have slept that night. I just, I sleep very well at night knowing that like I have my
Nest egg. And so what you do with money, do you think or with it or do you touch it right away? What that money hits the bakery at your parents house? Yeah. What happened to that money over the next? I don't know how long it's been like a year or two. Yes, I hadn't I'd say like terms ever. Like I'd be like make a Splurge purchase. There was nothing out there. That was that excited about buying. So I end up buying a car and which expensive item by like a Mercedes. I bought an Acura right. Nothing crazy. I doubled or ice? Yeah.
Yeah, pre-owned Acura brand new 2022, Sports boat, sports edition, a tech, a tech conditioning, big lies. You really do have that immigrant mentality, but I think we didn't get you like a 23andMe test. I feel like there's something going on here. You got too much immigrant energy. I love it. No, but I me I increase my rent four to five times, right? Live in a great apartment. I went on a amazing vacation last summer, you know, I
You love, I know you guys know, ramit stay to yourself, the I'm aperture up announced last name, but like that idea of like you're rich life and just spending. Oh yeah, I mean lifestyle creep is real, right? That is real totally. And so, like, look, I spend money on the things that I find interesting and that I like and I love traveling and staying, it really nice hotels and spending a ton of money on business class flights and things like that. I like living a nice apartment but like I live in New York City what am I gonna do? Drop another 50k on a car. That's it's not a parking lot.
81 days a year. It's a complete waste of money. It's just stupid. And I know I Morgan housel actually tweeted this and I read this to. It Will Smith's book, he has a great quote, he was talking about Fame and becoming famous and the quote, was something, like becoming famous is awesome. Being famous, is cool. And losing any famous horrible. And I feel the same exact way about money, right? I feel the same way and so I have known
I really spend money on things. I don't actually care about I don't want to I don't want to lose my money because I can, you know, change the a to a hammer and everyone a Mercedes. So I spend money that eye on things actually care about so I can make sure I maintain my wealth. What do you invested or do you just, are you conservative or you aggressive? Like what's the pie chart of like of the hundred percent? Where did where did the money go? Yes, I probably took like 85 90 percent of it and put it into very, very boring stuff, right? S&P 500 or, or
Or Vanguard like Target date funds like night 2065 or something like that, right? So this yourself or you hired like a, well no, I hired a team and it's a good thing I did. Cause if not, I would have went off the rails, right? And then I put you know, five maybe seven percent in crypto, right and I put another 5% in Venture investing, right? But the vast vast majority is in really boring real estate. S&P 500 and
Like bonds, right? But like really boring. Shit. Let's talk about some non newsletter stuff. So you got a bunch of ideas when we were hanging out at Camp. MFM you were telling me about, like, this thing you're doing in this thing. You're doing. I was like, oh, this guy's like way more Dynamic and interesting, a whole bunch of different things. What are some ideas that you think would be cool to share? Yeah, so I'll throw out a bunch of ideas I have. But one General framework, I think people should think about is when you're in shitty Economic Times
We're going into now. I think the the framework you should use, as you should look to save companies money or earn individuals side income, right before company's money didn't matter, right? Capital was abundant. So companies, they were all about just grow grow grow, right? How can you help me grow? It's a 180 now, you know, people were trading their money for others. People other people's time right now. They're trading time for money and so all, you know, if you can help companies Preserve
Money you can I think build really, really great side. Hustles. So a few ideas where I think it's like what's old is new and then there's a bunch of agencies. I think it'd be really interested to start right now. One is outsourced talent. I knew nothing about the outsourced Talent game. I recently became a co owner in a business. It's a really cheap business called oceans. They found talent in Sri Lanka right? Really cool Talent Sri Lanka where they've u.s. graduates, come to Tech startups work. They're really interesting, and I think there are ways, right? They have a unique Advantage going to Sri Lanka.
Go, which we don't have to talk about, but I think there are companies who were hiring a full-time copywriter. Let's call it or a full-time, you know, marketer, and they probably need them for 25, 30 hours, a week, 20:21. Screw it. Right will need them at some point. I think now companies are really questioning ftes, right? Do you need a full-time hire and so you can create these niche market places. I'm getting investment opportunity to them all the time and they're just not Venture scale, but you bootstrap a Marketplace. Let's call it like a Content marketing agency.
Eeyore, content, marketing Marketplace for B2B companies. Write these stocks are down, 90 95 %, they're trying to drop ftes but they still want content, right? We all know how valuable only audience and content is and billing that Marketplace helping them find people. I think simple services like that are going to come back into Vogue and be very very profitable. What's that company, where the founder got in trouble for not converting the convertible notes but it was a Marketplace for developers and it like bootstrap it tell you how practically if we don't top tell so topped out they got in trouble.
Because they only raised like eight hundred thousand or a million dollars, but they didn't convert the the found the the note or whatever, so it's controversial but they basically have bootstrapped it to this point to like north of 100 million in net revenue. And so these marketplaces are like can be they can be pretty freaking powerful and seem. They seem too hard to get off the ground but they don't seem that hard if you already working in the in the industry and it's a super Niche a niche topic because people ask me all the time to go hey I want to hire writers who should I hire and I'm like I don't know man. It's
Hard. I don't know who you should hire. Yeah, I mean the one I don't want I'm now a co-owner and has gone from zero to seven figures of are are in like eight months, right? You pick a very specific Target? Customer you have access to unique, talents, and gross, gross. Gross margins? Are your take no well. Now both right. Both are seven figures of error. Wow, yeah. It's nuts. That's crazy. And then what's his name? Marshall from Marshall Hoss. He did Shepherd. What's the use of? This is just the same business and I it seems like he's scale that to Heist.
Diggers in like, less than a year. It seems from the outside. Yeah, I think they're a bit different, right? Ours is I think there's just more like strictly EA's. The one we have is more you, you've people in finance people and operations. What's interesting about Sri Lanka? Is they have big four accounting firms, right? And you can poach, people not just from local businesses, but from people have been trained by Ernst & Young and Deloitte. And so it's an interesting, an interesting demographic to go into. Yeah, I love that one. I think that's a great one. Use the other one. You said was help individuals earn side money. What's a
What's an example of that? Yeah. So here's what I think, interesting? Right. So you built morning Brew for crypto, right? I know a lot of people spoken about this but I don't think anyone's really built the brand yet. I think morning. Brew or the hustle for AI is going to be huge. Right? And I think dude how's that feel? By the way the thing you're just like called Sean the morning Brew blank. It's okay. It's okay. We did kick your ass if they're up to, I mean, it's okay. It's okay that happened. We can test Let It Go. Though, we could tell we can take a
The deep breath. And just let it go. If you if that would help. No, no. You get you guys did a really great job. I thought that was awesome and I think someone's do the same thing in AI right into the bootstrap version of this, is to do what you did, right? The AI newsletter right down, the Fairway, have a unique tone, integrate yourself into the audience the way I think to take it to the next level is the last three months. Thousands of entrepreneurs have all started tinkering on little AI side projects, right and they all have 50.
Krr and I've been reaching out to all these Founders like, you know, different little tools. Right? These are not real big businesses. They're all side hustles, right. I went home for Thanksgiving. I asked all my friends from home, my family hailing. Have you guys been playing around with a chat GPT? Have you been player on know? Like what in the hell are you talking about? Right? And so, clearly it's the same customer for all of these different things, right? And so, I think there's an opportunity for the AI for morning. Brew to start a little tiny capital, or a little holding company, where you can start to invest in.
These businesses, right? Give a an off-ramp, these Founders who built these 50 or 100, or 150 Kar our businesses and start cross. Promoting them bundling marketing, them you write reviews for your, a little AI tool and then you promote it. And instead of having advertising which Again, Sam has spoken about how it's difficult. You're promoting all your products, you have this portfolio of 10, 20, 30 little AI tools, and maybe each one is half a million or a million of ARR, but altogether, you can get you get pretty big.
Pretty quickly. That one seems harder to be. I feel like like I like the idea but Mike. Okay. Realistically if I did that I like ideas where the idea is so good. My execution can be like a 7 out of 10 and I still win. Yeah. But this is his thing, man. This is his thing, he executes some of these things really well. Yeah, that hard I'm telling you, I've been talking to a bunch of these like these Founders, these little AI side projects. And I've been, I'm like, what are you doing with it? They're like, I have no idea what I just heard.
I think that's hard is not because you can't roll them up, you can't buy them. I think it's hard because it's like the Linde effect, right? So when something has been around for three months is that 50 km are our and it seems great. Like you don't know if that's easy to be around three months from now. Because the next model will come out or the next chat like for example, you know you're stable, diffusion comes out, then then you know, chat GPT comes out. Well, people were, you know, I've invested a couple of these that you know, the AI writing tools.
They're getting better and they're pouring Millions into marketing to get to get customers for their, you know, AIA right into. But everybody's building on the same foundations, the same models and they're trying to say how they're going to be differentiated and the reality is that could differentiate on a customer acquisition. And so I think that like it is, you know, I think about when I buy something like you know the tiny Capital model works because he buys stuff that's like kind of been like around and forgotten and it
Word for like a long period of time but he buys like a dribble. But you know, it's like, oh, it's been around for years and I could buy it and I can, it's going to be around for years and I can improve it over that time versus buying the things that are really new and quick. I think you have a challenge with the durability of those businesses because what happens as, you know, the AI just keeps improving either, these things become obsolete or it starts to consolidate into, like, one app that can do four of these things. And so, you don't need one for posting on social media and one,
Or writing emails. It's like a it's the same Chrome extension. That's just going to do both. And so I think there's a good chance you can kind of get like, you know, just sort of Blown Away by by the rate of change that's going on in the industry. So that's the thing. I'd be worried about with that similar to, I remember telling Andrew Bogut said about Frazee, oh, I was like, oh, this is super smart. Like these FBA stores are super cheap. And as you know, like each one of them a small, but you could go and just like, scoop up all these. Look at this, they're buying them on this like crazy little multiple egos.
What I wanted to do and everyone went to finance in Michigan. So I was like, oh I gotta I gotta follow their heard. I was a sheep following the herd straight into the world of corporate finance or Investment Banking and then stumbled upon this guy, Alex Lieberman who was like I wouldn't call a newsletter. It was a PDF attached to an email. He actually took a made a Word document even PDF it and put it to an email and that was the first newsletter. So he was he was already doing. It was it called morning Brew? No, it's called market corner. It was way more markets, based way more
Oriented what's he in college as well? Or is he did? He graduate, he was two years old and I was and that's a big part of our success. To be honest, if I was his age, we probably would've went out and raised Venture Capital. So you know, 20, 2015, BuzzFeed, raising money, Vice, raising money. And the only reason we didn't follow that path was because I was in college and no one's going to fund a sophomore in college. And so, Alice went to work at Morgan Stanley for 14 months. I spent the summer in Investment Banking and was like, holy shit. This
Is miserable get me out of here and steals? All right, I got this morning. Brew thing, I might as well do it for a couple years. And what's the worst thing that happens? I come back here and that was the, that was a starter going
full-time. What did your nice Jewish parents? Think about you, not becoming a banker and instead working on a newsletter.
So my parents were actually okay with it, except I told them after my junior year, I said I have one more year of college. What if I just don't go back. What if I don't finish? And the idea of them spending a hundred and fifty thousand dollars,
13 years of college, and not finishing my senior year, drove them nuts. So, the deal we made is, if I think if I graduate, and they were cool with me doing morning Brew for a year or two after
I then fast forward. So, it was funny. So right, when we were selling in the process of selling, you announced that you had sold like months or two months in a before us. And so you guys sold a portion of the business. I think the majority of the business for at something like a seventy million dollar valuation in
that. All right around there, I think we were actually we were doing
And at the same time, we're even talking to some similar
Partners, I think we were. And the reason why like, Sean and I wanted to have you on because we want to talk about newsletters which every all three of us have a newsletter business, but you and I have an interesting background. We're like on paper. We kind of hated each
other, not kind, and I hated you. So I didn't entirely hate you. I just, it was like, Just Sports
opposed to a sports teams where I was like, I have a lot of respect for this person. I don't know anything about their character but I'm going to
Make up the story in my head till like motivate me. And the reason why I wanted to do that was because we so I launched, we technically launched the hustle on April April, 2016. Were you before us or after
us? We were 2015 when we launched the first newsletter but it wasn't, it was just a very small thing then.
So we were going like back and forth. It was like the skin was like the thing and then it was you and I morning Brew in the hustle and you guys were this like a New York kind of buttoned up crew. I was like a little bit of a crazier person. It was Tech San Francisco.
But it was like everyone kept comparing us and I remember like wanting to like Crush you guys and then after we built sold, Alex called me and you and I became buddies and I was like oh no, I actually love these guys. And now at this point you and I are great friends and I have a ton of respect but yeah. Like I wanted to crush you. I didn't I didn't really hate you. What did you feel? Yeah.
Look, I think it's always good for a business to have an enemy. I think in the early days are and he was the skim very quickly though. We were like, you know what, they're not our enemy. We realized. I think we both realized pretty quickly. That you can't raise 25 million for a newsletter, and have a good exit. And so I think was you and us? And so I turned you into the enemy and I was so immature at the time, right? I it was my first thing I don't College. I knew nothing. So, I was like, here's this guy. He's so abrasive. He's so aggressive. Like, what the fuck? And like I was. So, I wasn't principal, I didn't have real values.
At the time. And so I just saw you who are super valued, right? You have strong principles, very strong principles which some people love tons of people. I'm sure don't like and I was like this guy is just so abrasive and I've learned to love that about you but the time it just it rubbed me the wrong way and I was like, we're going to make this guy your enemy and we're going to crush this guy. All right, a quick message from our sponsor. You know, I was thinking about the shortest day of the year earlier and while we technically have the same amount of time as every other day of the year, the lack of daylight makes it feel so much shorter.
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dude. I used to get mad because everything that I was bad at you were good at and everything that I was good at I thought you guys were bad at and I'm like shit. They're just stealing all my ideas for my ads that I'm Runner. They're stealing all my content ideas and then I would see how you guys operate and I be like, no we gotta have all these sales people just like them. Like I remember I was
at your office and you're talking about morning brew and you were like, I thought you would just hate them and be like they suck because I feel like that's how we used to just talk about most people.
Most
startups is like, oh my God, they suck and especially one that's doing what you're doing. Then it's like, oh, I already want you to suck. So I'm going to say that and instead you were like, God, why is this email look better than ours? And you were just, like, show it to the whole team and you're like, look at this, why does this look so much better than our email? Look at what they do at the top? Like, God, there's something like you're just like, they're so much better at that the, you know, like the formatting, or the cleanliness or like the what the brand that they are doing at the I remember at the top of the email and I was like, wow.
He just respects the actual like craft so much, that he can't even hate them fully. He's like, God, they're doing good at these three things. Santa, I'll give you a story on the I never told you which is you know there was a time where I thought our copy was much better than yours our editorial. And then there was a time where I thought you guys passed us, right? And Alex in particular was maniacal about this. He would print out morning, Brew in the hustle every single morning and we would just go line by line first down line by line. And if you like
That lines better know our lines better know that we go line by line and to I mean some of the early morning Louise, they really hated you because when you wrote a story that we wrote and when yours was better and Alex thought yours was better, keeping people are pissed there. Like a Revolt in the morning, crew office one morning because of people like know, ours is better and I think ultimately wasn't better or worse, right. I was just cater towards different people but when we had we printed out your newsletter every day and read through it, through it for, I don't know. Six months, nine months. Like we were just so focused. Like I've never
Her been as hyper focused. As I was in 2018 on us. Writing the best newsletter growing, the best newsletter and selling it. Like I woke up every day, right? Grow cell, right? Grow set, like we wrote it in the wall and 11 a.m. every single day. We had the Great Wall of opens and we track our open rate and write down the wall and we had that for probably two years running every day. What was our open
rate? And your strategy was to Art what our strategies were? They diverge? And they were different. So we were going to launch. We are going to stay in this space and vertical eyes and launch.
Option services and all this other stuff. You guys launched, multiple different newsletters, which met from my eyes. You grew your Revenue quicker. I personally hate that business because I don't like advertising that much, but you grew your Revenue way faster than us. I think you did. Like we, if we were one year behind you, I think we are tracking one year by. So, the year we sold, I think we could have done 18 to 20 million in Revenue which is around newer. I think the same year so we are like tracking perfectly which is really interesting but you went this horizontal route where you launched?
Multiple multiple newsletters. Which route do you like looking back?
Look, I mean, it's tough to say, we took the round the wrong route, but I also think it's what we had to do, right? We didn't have the choice. You had because our content was more General business, right? You wrote with an edge with the tone you were targeting entrepreneurs, or maybe like account Executives, who want to become entrepreneurs. And so you had way more opportunity to launch a Trends or to launch a hustle con for us. We thought, you know, a general morning. Brew subscription, wasn't gonna
Work a general morning, Brew event wasn't going to work. The tone wasn't specific enough that the Target customer wasn't specific enough but we fell in love with his B2B business which I know both of you gotten a little bit of a Twitter shit. When you you spoke about the beat of the world and you know, industry dive but we I fell in love with that business and I'm like, wow. And you can get in front of retail professionals and HR professionals and we have them in our newsletter and it was a crazy as business where we launched a newsletter and then he break even before we even hired the writers, because we pre-sell
The Advertiser, let's call it like a B2B SAS company into one of these newsletters and so I know there's better or worse. I think you're our opportunity was easier to get to 100 million of Revenue. Yours was easier to get, so let's call it like a billion dollar company, right? Because you could have subscription multi Revenue stream, much easier. It just was gonna take another, you know, eight to ten years.
That's great. I'm happy. I'm learning that now, after I sold that
I'm happy, I got to see it because I just got to copy. Both your playbooks and do that. Do it for the milk Road?
All three of us were able to win but the same Playbook. Mine was the easiest path of all because I could just text you guys and be like, hey think about doing your thing but for crypto what do you think it was like yeah I think it's going to work, let's do it.
It did the Playbook work perfectly Shawn. You think
it has so far, right? We basically less than a year. We built the number one, like the biggest daily crypto email, its profitable. It's, you know, seven Figures. It's, I don't know, like, it worked as well as one could expect bootstrapped it, you know, in our
Spare time. Like that's like as good as I could have expected that to go,
dude. That's why these businesses are awesome. As people don't realize, that's why I always hate. When people say, if you're going to start it over again, what would you do? I'm like, do the same thing, like it works. It consistently works. I know, Austin. You're way more like pessimistic. You got your like, I'm pretty paranoid, your way more paranoid. And I know you say, like only can't work again and I'm like, no, man. I think it. Well I think I think a cash you have like a framework
around. You have like a lot of opinions around email, newsletters, give us. Yeah. And put it in the context of milk Road. Like when I
Just got to do that or you saw those going to do that. What do you think and did that fit your framework? For what you thought might work? Or was that may be an outlier? Yes, perfectly fits the framework it, so I'm pessimistic on relaunching, the next morning, brew a general business for million-person email, but basically I split up newsletters into three categories, one or the editorial newsletters, right? You have you set your sub stackers. You're packing McCormick's full newsletter. Maybe 2,000 words, maybe 10,000. If you're some of these writers and that's like category 1, right, Category 2
Is what we did aggregation, right? And Sam and I kind of went more General General business went for scale and then after that you kind of have like the, let's call it morning, Brew for X. Right? Where you you have still have that aggregation of summaries but you're more Niche, right? And maybe the Tama smaller, but you think because of your tone and because of the way you cover it you can have a larger percent of that time, reading your product which Shana, thanks what you're doing. And the third is more of, like, your classic. Hey, I'm gonna give you five, links your five bullet Friday or things.
Like that. I think the biggest opportunity is Sean, what you did, which is morning Brew for X. You find a growing industry. Use ride that tail way. If you just own that and build a brand, something, really distinct in one of these, you know, niches. And if x if x is financed or X's something, that's be more B2B or like, you know, a professional kept, you know, something that's a job title. Then X works better than if x is, you know, fly
fishing or or
you know basketball or something like that. Yes, I need you to go.
Zoomer out, right target consumers, it's got to be high dollar, it's got to be, you know, the newsletter for Ferrari owners or the newsletter for Rolex owners, write something where people spend you know, hundreds of thousands of dollars a year on this B2B is great as well. That's the other place I would go. And so, you were kind of like I call it. Maybe prosumer e, right? It was the best of both worlds. You can hit on both worlds, you got the consumer-oriented readers. And then also the people who work in the crypto industry.
Did you agree with our? I know that or I'll say it myself I did sound like a douche bag when I was talking about industry.
I didn't mean it like phrase it that the way that I did, but when we were talking about Industry Drive, you know there are 600 million dollar company that mostly is a newsletter business and our criticism towards the B2B industry was like the contents. Pretty wack. Do you agree with that assessment? Like you still think there's a lot of a opportunity to build really big B2B media
companies? Yeah, I just think it's the other way. Sean did it right? Which is go the complete opposite route, right? So they're they're pretty dry. They have a standardized process. They go in every single vertical. Look. I think their business models simple but it's
not easy. I don't think what they did was easy at all, but it's very simple. The Playbook is very well, defined, there's no crazy tap. They're not, you know, building some AI machine learning thing. It's they create great content, they resonate, they sell ads into it. But the way the compete I think is to treat be to be like consumer, right? To treat them like people like, you know, the milk row
does. Why is it not? You're saying it's simple but not easy. Why is it not? What do you mean? It's not easy.
I mean I think to scale across all those verticals. Right? To your point, add businesses are pretty tough.
Right? And so you take on a lot of costs and you can't you can't mess up, right? Because if you go wrong and verticals, you a bunch of writers and salespeople. And the thing about media businesses, even when they're profitable, the difference between 20% profit margins and losing 20% is way is way it. Like, it's easier to flip that because of all your fixed costs, it's not SAS, you don't have locked in, you know, you're a B2B SAS company. You've locked in 100 or 110 percent of your Revenue the next year because of renewals every day with a
That it's another grand. You got to go sell more ads and so it's not easy. They you know that this is an absolute grind. We found this guy, I'm going to give a shout out here is names, I don't know, I think it's date. You pronounce it voltar and he's from the Netherlands and he I think he's at school right now. I don't know what happened but I did a video I thought. Okay, maybe maybe we'll start doing YouTube content. I do this video when Luna collapse and I did this video like I lost a bunch of money on Luna and I did this video, I thought it was good.
Like funny as I got Michael viral, whatever we came out late. We came out like three
weeks after the news so that was kind of stupid so it didn't go
super viral. But one good thing came of it which is this get this kid on Twitter was like, hey your thumbnail sucks for you. YouTube thing, like it should be like this, or like this or like this. He did this thread. And I was like, you know, you're great. I don't know if I'm going to do any more YouTube videos but like you want to just come in our slack because I just well I like what you just did those like helpful and it was quick and like, you know, he's like sure. Yeah let me amazing. I love the milk.
Route. And so he joins our slack. First of all, like what do we do with this guy? Like what the fuck is this guy? Like I've actually like a two-person meeting and I just invite this third guy from the Netherlands to a meeting. You'd be like, like, it's gonna talk. What's, why is he here? And for two months, no one knew why he was there, but then something amazing happened. We were like, we need to sell ads, like, for the next month or whatever. It was like, nobody wanted to do it. It's just like when we have to like just give me a pain in the
It sucks. It just sucks to sell ads, like I wish higher sales guy. It's like, even hiring a sales guys. Kind of a shitty task. Okay, let's procrastinate a little bit and along the way, this guy had been wanting, this guy had been always messing us ideas like he's like, I don't know, he's like in the slack so he's like trying to be productive. So he would just non-stop message ideas of things we could do.
And I gotta vote for Ben was just sort of like dude this guy is like, you know, incessant like he won't stop messaging, is I get its first it's a good but like nobody can handle this volume of ideas like this is crazy and then he's like I use like you got to do something about this and I was like okay I'll do I'll talk to him or I'll kick him out of slack. It was like Hey what if we just point the machine gun like out words instead of like right now, the machine guns shooting us with ideas. What if we just made him like sell the ads and he just bothered
The hell out of everybody else. And so, that's what we did and this guy is the single-handedly crushing milk Road had sailed through the crypto bear market. Like we have fully sold out for months on end. Just one guy with with this one. Kid who's not even 20 years old, just absolutely pillaging the market and the advertisers will privately DME be like, yo, I shared this guy's name with our sales team because I was like, this is how you sell, like this guy is real.
List. And I was like that that is that was just like an incredible. I don't know. Like incredible thing. He is so impressive
dude. Let's talk about that real quick. Ad sales, ad sales suck Austin. They suck and what I learned to getting into the hustle II. Did you sell? I sold our first ads, I think I got us. I sold like the first maybe a hundred thousand dollars worth of ads and then in order to scale, we had to hire a sales team and they would show me like the conversations that they are going to have. I'm like there's this conversation will never work like you're using all this jargon.
Ian and you're wearing like these like button up your shirt plaid shirts, and like these brown leather shoes. Like you guys look like do weeds. Like this is never gonna work and it
worked perfectly. Nobody wants to go skateboarding with you right now. Yeah, we're not ready. I was like dude you look like your name
is Todd or Kyle like this is not gonna work and
sick. My name is dafuq, it works. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. What kind of a person I was not cut out for that the, the media buying?
Old, did you do it? Well no. So yeah. That really days, we bought right. But we, we Soul all direct response as right was Casper mattress. It was a way luggage. It was you know hey by your placement here you're going to get 300 clicks and 3% of converting you're going to make a thousand dollars will charge 800 as we've grown though, I think there's another difference between us we were in New York City and open up this whole world that I had no idea about which was the world of media buying and these big ad agencies and they have huge budgets.
That's right. We're not talking about 100 Grand from Casper. Ware talked about five million dollars. In the biggest brands in the entire world and it really is a black box that people who aren't it. And I think it's one of those things where it's a black box intentionally so people can't get in right finances. The same thing every year there's a new term within the ad industry or Finance just to keep people on the outside,
do it? It's crazy. It's crazy. And it's like not based in logic or fact, it's based on relationships and like, it's so weird. It's like, oh wait, I have to realize that this
In this lady, I'm trying to get to buy ad. She just has to spend this 20 million dollars this quarter and she just wants to find somewhere to place it where she won't get fired. That was such a weird
feeling. Yeah, I mean that the idea of like media budgets, right? Hey, they if they, uh, they don't use it, they lose it. And so you're incentivized to spend money. It's interesting and it's something that we learned Again by hiring people in New York, which I think was a big difference between us and you you had a lower cost more like inside sales team, a really efficient one, right? You took that route, we didn't take that route.
Whoever these Big Brand dollars and I think both routes work at the pens what you're you're looking to sell we just took the router say hey we're going to we're going to Dive Right In this black box and we're going to learn all about it. We're going to get a million dollar and we won. Our first advertisers discover gave us a million bucks. I was in college, I'm a senior in college living in my frat house, right? Like beer cans everywhere. I get an email from the CMO of discover like, here's an RFP. I'm like, what in the fuck is an RFP? What are the fucking on no clue? I open it up. It's like, hey, give us media plans.
For like half a million a million bucks, right? For a million dollars. She could own the company seven times over the company was not worth 100 Grand and here's this woman asked me for a million-dollar RFP and, you know, we just we learned it but it really is relationship driven game.
How did you justify that? Like how do you like if AMX says, we're going to spend five million dollars this year? Be real, do you actually think that's going to help them? Like, sell more shit?
Yes, what I do, right. We do a lot of brand lift studies and things like that, right? It's different, right? It's
Not, we're not no one's trying to say, you know, like Lexus for example or car company. Alexis doesn't expect him how many brand lift studies. Did you do? We used to do that? But I'd be like, what the fuck is this brand, lift, study, like this? I like, are you kidding me? Todd. What the hell is a brand live study? I don't know what the hell does this. Or we would do all this other
stuff like an RFP. Like we have been doing it for like six months. And I was like, hey guys, I like at this point I'm a little bit too afraid to ask, but
I don't know what this stuff means. I didn't know what any of this stuff. It's so
Challenging if you don't work in the industry, and then they like they talk about agencies and I'm like, wait, what the hell? It is an agency. Why don't we just go straight to the brand, like this stuff from an from a small business owners perspective. All of this stuff is crazy and efficient and stupid. Now, that I've been at a big company HubSpot, I understand, I'm like, okay, I get like these guys are having to like, give out a billion dollars of marketing like now, I understand a lot more, but when you're just a 10-person company, you're like, do you guys realize this Market study shit done work, like this brain study, that's bullshit.
Write a letter like you're gonna give me twenty thousand dollars to write this article. It took me like 20 minutes to do it like so it doesn't make sense when you're
small. Yeah, but you know people are, people are buying the audience, they're buying the the relationship with with you. They're not buying, you know, purchasing things like that. And so, you know, I think at scale, when you get the 4 million subscribers, if you can, change the perception of half a million or a million people and have make them because of a marketing campaign, have a, you know, 10% of people have a higher perception of of credit card exes.
Programs, like that is really valuable when your Visa or Mastercard American Express and you spend a billion dollars, like that's so much money. How do you deploy a billion dollars in marketing? Spend you go through agencies and that's how it all happens,
dude? So Sean and I are really good, I think at starting stuff, we've got pretty good Vision where we can spend things up and get them to like a million in Revenue pretty quickly. The thing that I was always envious of you because it's my, it's a fairly big shortcoming. I think I have is you are just so good at
That I don't know exactly how to explain it. You've got this, like almost private Equity, like ability to like look at numbers and be like, oh the margin here is shitty. And I'm like, I've never used that word margin in my life, but you'll like talk about, like the margin here. And like, well, if you just change that by like ten percent, probably by doing this, your outcome is going to be like this, this and this like, you just have this really good operational ability. You're also really good at saying, like, well, if you just improve this, this and this and only focus on that. Then in six months, I think your outcome will be this. You're really good at
And you are really good at that, at a very young age. How did you figure out how to do that? How did you learn how to do that, and have that insight? And have that ability? And also have that faith in like? Well, if you just do this, this and this the outcome might be this, this and this in eight months.
Yeah, I mean, so I got an undergraduate business degree and I always used to shit on undergraduate Business Degree. So I'm like, what? A complete waste of time. Like those four years were so dumb, but as I look back, it really did, give me a pretty good overview of what it takes to run a business. Now, I actually the day-to-day of running
A business. But like what is accounting? I took like seven accounting classes or I don't know maybe five. Those were actually really valuable to be able to really dive deep into a p&l to real and my summer spent in Investment Banking to, to understand, what's a financial model. What drives a model, those things that within the context of Finance like yeah, yeah, they're okay. When the context of running a business was super helpful, to understand what levers you need to pull. But the other the flip side is I Look to You three years ago and I'm going for, we knew each other maybe even two years ago and I was
Both of you. I was like I hate these guys because they're so good at going 021, they're so good at coming up with ideas like on the opposite, right? I'm not an ideas guy can't come up with ideas, but I do think once the idea is, there is certainly cooler and sexier to do what we do. You know, listen to this. There's no doubt about that. Yeah, he's
definitely. Yeah. But like it, dude. What would you Robbie? You know, we aren't really don't like partner because 0 to
1 is cool. But that like Wonder 100 million years is pretty fucking cool tool. You guys take things, you get them off the ground. You take them two three.
Employees and a million dollars of Revenue and I'll take it from 1 to 100. And we can just a sample power. Couple years I asked him about his margin and he thought I said margarine, he brought me some butter. And yeah, dude, like substance was either a billion-dollar company or worthless time stamp says, no idea.
Yeah. Well, I like, I remember when we were negotiating to sell and like there's just all these things that people were giving me.
I thought and I'm like, man, I just didn't even think about that. Like it's just and I actually know a lot of people that are really successful like, we're talking billion-dollar successful and they know so little about operations and there's a lot of people like that, like, who are just they're good at hiring Like Richard Branson. I think he famously said he's like, dude, I didn't know what a PL was until we hit like hundreds of millions of Revenue. Like I don't know how to read it. I'm a three types of the same thing which is super cool.
Also, what I like that you said on the operation side like I say I'm saying is
Is Right. Grow cell with your we wrote that on the wall, we woke up every day and said, right? Gross. L. We had the Great Wall of opens. Those are the things that we I used to do this. So such like similar, like, we literally had the wall but not with milk Road. Actually, this is like kind of my earlier startups and monkey afraid. I remember Sammy probably member this when people used to come in like we would always have like all this shit on the walls and like the sayings and these posters and like indoctrination that indoctrination. And and I will always felt like whenever I would meet founders,
One of the
highest predictors of success was, do they even know what the main thing is? And it sounds like a stupid question, but for a lot of Founders, they didn't really understand what the main thing was for their business. They didn't know their businesses version of right grow sell. Okay and even if they understood like that, that's going to generic. You look at. What do you do with that? They didn't understand to translate that into the Great Wall of opens is the number. We're going to write down every day. We're going to look at it and if it's bad we're going to do something about it. And if it's good we're gonna like double down on that.
And that's what daily work is. Is around this one number and so it was like, I remember we have these Founders in the office and they would be like, I backyard. What's a, you know, how many new customers you guys get today are like, what's the revenue? And they have to like, oh yeah, let me check. And they would like, first didn't have a dashboard there, like going into the database. Like, bro, you haven't built an easy way to know this number and then the then, finally, they built that I didn't, they always have to check. And I was like, how do you not know why am I asking this question? Like, it's 3 p.m. one of y'all to should have asked this.
Question by 3:00 p.m. like every day. This is crazy and they just didn't do it. And I was like, these guys are going to fail because they don't have to keep the main thing. The main thing is that something that you see, or like did consciously, like, where'd you get that? Because that wasn't obvious to me right out of college. But sounds like you got it right? Right away? Yeah, that I mean for us and it's almost an insult, right? We were we people like why don't you do this? Why did you do that? Why you joined the video? We were too dumb to do that. Like we had nowhere like video. How the hell do you make a video? We
I'm barely get our newsletter out. I mean, there were days where we, we finished the newsletter, like, 2 a.m. we be coding, the thing ourselves and so I think it was partially, you know, a little bit of force, I fell. So partially a forcing function, you know, we just looked at me. Like, if we do these things, we will get here and we looked at the math and we're like, everyone's telling us, we're crazy. But if we grow Subs, fifty thousand dollars every or 50,000 subscribers every single month and our costs don't change. We're going to go from 50,000 monthly Revenue, to 75 to 100 to 125 and by ended.
This year we're gonna be at a million Subs, doing a million dollars of Revenue at month. And I tell that investors in people, they be like that doesn't make any sense. I'm like I don't know what to tell you like I'm just looking at the Excel and people couldn't even we spoke to investors and they were like what do you mean? Your business only has a hundred thousand dollars of cost. I'm like its people its growth marketing and it's in the SP that's it that's always spend money on and people are like
what was that last line? I don't even know what that last line. We
know email service provider we use sail through
ESP here, okay? I thought you said I was like, SP is what
the hell's happening? It's one of things were like, it was just when you boil it down to numbers and run it in an Excel model. It's like so simple. And people these investors were like, well, like you're not accounting for this and that I'm like, it's all bullshit. Like, none of that means they think I'm just trying to make money, like, I'm just trying to hit you pussy. He also did some Scrappy stuff. I remember, like, didn't you get your first out of few thousand emails just by like standing in a classroom? We, we may have, we may have broken a couple laws to get our first couple thousand.
Schreiber. So people would walk out and you'd have a piece of paper and be like, hey no, write your email down, we wouldn't let him walk out. So we go in the beginning of lecture these econ, 101 lectures like a thousand people and I hated Public's, I still do, but I hated public speaking and I was like look if I'm going to this lecture hall and I'm a talking from a thousand people, I better get every damn email. And so what I would do is I'd speak in front of these people that I walk around, I go up each person teacher, would let you speak or you would just stand up and notice the teacher, let us because there's thing,
Michigan times, you actually attend minutes in between each class. So if the class started 10 actually started at 10:10 and so at 10:05, I get up there. I pitch on the pitch that one morning brew and then I basically print out an Excel document and I walk around, I'm just stand in front of people and just stare them in the eyes until they gave me their email and I sent the back of the class and type every email in. And I'd be like shit, Alex, that an A or a c, or a knee. He's like, who cares? Put them all in and we're checking for everything 6 permutations of
Every single email and that's how we got to like 10 or 15,000 at Michigan and then we're like you've a friend of Penn State. I'm afraid to Penn State. Let's do this at Penn State. Let's do it at my end. Let's do it at NYU. And next thing you know, we like 50,000 people across the country college students reading morning, Brew
Are your parents wealthy to do? Grew up
wealthy. I'd say middle class upper middle class but what's interesting. So I grew up in the suburbs of Baltimore and like I didn't know, I thought I knew wealth and then I moved to I went to Michigan I and I met people from LA and New York, I moved to New York and I saw people from New York and I never saw that kind of wealth. And to me that was inspiring. That was exciting because I came from again, there's like a very well off. I had everything I needed but you know, I know people. I met people at school who are flying private planes. I know.
A plane. Once you got rich pretty good because I like, but what? Like when you guys tell you're pretty young right now? I think you guys sold it. What 26 or something.
Yeah, I need 25.
Well the reason but hold on real quick, the reason I asked was because like you've got this like this immigrant hustle and before I knew you, I stereotyped you as this like everything's been given to this rich kid like a and and hearing this story. I'm like, oh no. These guys were like just as pretty as I was for sure. Sometimes
more. The Alex has his own story about, you know, his family, and his dad passed away. And so he was, I mean, I learned so much from Alex about Hunger. Like Alex again, he broke things down the same way. I did, Alex would be like, hey, you know what?
Like Alex, we need 100 advertisers this year. I'd like, I don't know how we're gonna do it. We have zero because I know exactly how we'll do it. I'm going LinkedIn and I'm not going to sleep until a message, 1000 companies and we'll get a 10% reply rate of like, you're gonna message 1000 companies, he's like, well, isn't that what you need to do to get to 100 advertisers? I'd like yeah, but that sounds crazy. He goes well let's start working and we just like to have sit there, drink beer and we work. It just you know, crank out, pulled the M's, the head of everything, I must know, the head of growth and everything York City direct to
A company because Alex incessantly emailed them and we would like we would laugh at the response. We would get excited when someone respond to be like, hey Alex, this is your ninth email like you gotta stop following up like number 8 was good, but 9uu past it. So yeah, I think we both have that
hustle. What did it feel? Like back to Sean was saying, you're 25 and you don't know how much money you made, but let's just say eight figures. What's that feel like when you're 25 fucking
dope? I me. So, first off, it was just
I got the wire. Just what it does. The sum of money I was doing covid. So I get this, the like listen to this job is to position on one hand. I just made a boatload of money, more money than, you know, I thought I'd ever make right on the other hand, I'm living in my childhood bedroom sitting next to my parents, as the wire, hits my account, and never like, what are you gonna do now? I was like, I don't know. My mom's cooking like meatloaf like
It's ugly.
Yeah you like tell your mom mom, make me
breakfast. Yeah, it was most handsome guy. Well mastic thing ever. You should have just moved into the master bedroom. This shit's mine I think look I think getting a quick win early in Laura Wynn early in life is so important right? Just having that Swagger that confidence that brand allows me to do so much that I wouldn't have been able to do otherwise like what get into any
A room. I can get in touch with anyone. Right? I will get ya meet girls. No, no. I'm engaged. So I'm not I'm not looking to be girls now. But people are always like, damn, like you were single and that field happen like you would have been set for
life. Well, so yeah, what one of the opportunities do you think you get?
I mean again like get into any room, right? So meetings investing what are some? What are some cool rooms you got into? I mean, I can't like it's the same things that I think you guys are. You guys also have a winter? I don't think anything is
Is that well I don't like to leave my house and then Sam's only interested in like people that are like this guy's the best acts thrower and you know, the country and he's like super pumped about it. I'm like, I don't think you needed to like, you know,
pull your, you know, rich guy card to get in touch with him,
but I feel like you don't know, like, like, have you met Leo DiCaprio? I feel like he might have just bumped into Leo DiCaprio somewhere. That's like, that's more your time in New York. So I bumped into Justin Bieber in the Bahamas, which is pretty cool. But no, I mean, like the weekend
we have with, with what's-his-name mr. Beast, and I spent a weekend with Kid Rock on his Ranch. That was pretty sad.
Tell me about that. What was that button? And
he's a unique unique character. Again, this is all according to him. So I haven't even fact, check this but I'll assume he's telling the truth, he told me he's the only person to play at both President Obama and President Trump's inaugurations, he played at both and he knows both super well, he's close to most and he has this this, he lives in this huge Ranch outside of Nashville, right?
And there to it was, my friend's name is Shane, he works in Tech, he's good. Friends with Kid, Rock Kid Rock, obviously use a guy and Shane put together 10 people in Tech, Kid, Rock 10 people, music we go to his Ranch and I mean you got there and it's like out of a movie, right? You walk in and Kid, Rock's bats is to me, he's got a cigar sticking out of his mouth. He's got a shotgun. He's just shooting clay pigeons and the whole weekend was out of a movie, right? His Studio. Unbelievable. We pull know.
Later together just telling stories about Eminem. I mean he's is really really cool
he's a lot of people don't realize this but Kid Rock got famous right before CDs went down and he's one of the best-selling artists of all time and I it would surprise me if he's probably worth two or three hundred million dollars because he was famous when CDs were eighteen and twenty one dollars and so like
this is so now though I think he's a new source of wealth so he owns again this what I've been told he owns the most popular bar and all of Nashville and
Whereas most of the other ones like Luke Bryan has one and a bunch of other country singer. They just license their name to the bar, right? And they make a couple percent. I think Kid Rock's like a 50/50 owner and I've heard this
probably makes two million bucks a
month. You know, I've heard more I've heard like it's a project really, I've heard got enough. It's true. I've heard it's big, big money, you know, hi. Hi tens of millions, which is crazy, you know?
Dude, the one of the best things about our companies and like the culture that us three have
Kind of built with our friends because we kind of like got into this media game a little bit early, and I don't know about you Austin, but when the hostel was starting, there wasn't that many people who we could look at and be like, well, let's just do what they do but different. They're like I remember I told this one media guy who I'll tell you afterwards, he's the founder of a multibillion-dollar media company. I was like here's what I'm doing because bro. This will never make more than two million dollars a year in revenue and this other person who I'm now, good friends with was like, dude, when you talk about this, I'm like, it doesn't matter just a small screen, who cares? Like if you're in
Email or on a website. It doesn't matter. The math shows, XY and z. And so we had a higher like, 24 year old to like, we're promising. But like, and then we had to learn about it as we grew and be, but because of that both morning, Brew the hustle and the in the crew that now Shaman, Sean's great at this, as well. We, we've done a really cool job of like, finding smart and experienced people who now have gone on to do a lot of really cool stuff. And that makes me really really proud to like see like this crew that we've all built. And so there's like the hustle crude the morning Brew Crew.
Ooh, and then Sean was like the hostiles thing. Now, he's got his own thing. Have you noticed that? Like, we all have this little like, Army of people who have like been through like this, like self-created like training camp. It's kind of neat
100%. I mean, it's we, in the early days, we could not get people to work with us who didn't want to be entrepreneurs. And the pitch was simply like, Hey, we're starting a business you'll be in on the ground floor, right? You'll see what it's like and that's all you get. Like, you know, we didn't have a human for the first year and a half, I was so cheap.
For the first year and a half and morning. Brew, you didn't get a company computer. You had to bring your own computer to work.
Do I was famous because I'm Tracy coward. Put, hey, I'm buying, I'm buying laptops. Does anyone have a Mac for sale for five hundred dollars?
No, do we were not dropping any money on company theater? We didn't have health care in the early age. You got nothing, you got me and we should, we couldn't afford it because I was so against taking venture capital. I was like, we're going to make every penny count One More Story Fridays at 3:00, we'd all go pencils down.
I work with stop because we'd a referral program, we'd send out stickers and t-shirts and that whole thing that you know I'm sure we've all seen but we had no be no packing and so we'd sit down we'd like wheel in that we were keg into our office and we convey earlier we do like assembly line. The first person would would like open the envelope. The next person with stick the sticker in there. The next person with lick'em the next person would put the label on and for like three or four hours like 3 p.m. until 7 p.m. on Fridays, that's all we did was just
Envelopes of
shit. Well you're one of your early Guys. Tyler dank has gone on to start beehive which is a really cool company. He's in like a really good entrepreneur, he's iterating really quickly and then I've got a couple people have done that. It's just cool to see like these people who were young and not dumb but like just young and like inexperienced gone to like build cool shit. And then like your ex people are now other newsletter companies and then Sean has hired a couple of my ex people or and probably it seems like couple of your ex people and it's like this, incestuous
One thing which at first I would be jealous. I'm like, well, what the hell were they working with this person? But now, I'm like, this is awesome, man. Like, we've created this like tiny little industry of newsletter, nerds, and it's actually quite cool. Yeah, I
love it. Yeah, I think it's really cool. I think there's me so much more value create. I think Tyler's doing, beehive is amazing. I think what I've been so impressed with him, it's like that the maturation from the morning Brew days of, you know, it's like six of us and he's a little bit of everything to the way he's able to scale himself and scale that team is amazing. And so it's
The entrant rungs the same way. Like what's wrongs done is incredible. And there's any, there's a ton of examples. It's really cool to see
if you regret selling. No.
No.
That's, that's you answered that. Not even though. Like so you sold part of the business? What do you think? The mean Tire business is going to sell for in the future and
I think many multiples of what we sold the first half for, but we structured the deal in a way that I thought was great, right? I mean, the ability to have life-changing money. If anyone has the option, like
I always think it's good to take half your chips off the table, right? And maybe I'm biased, but I did that and it's worked out those really important but I still have enough upside where I'm excited, right? It's not like a tiny earn out that people sign where it's like, 10% of the deal. It can, it can be really, really meaningful and that drives me, that keeps me excited. It keeps me on the hunt, I love the company, I love the people, we work with, I love the executive team, but I would, I mean, during covid ordering, I wouldn't have slept that night. I just, I sleep very well at night knowing that like I have my
Nest egg. And so what you do with money, do you think or with it or do you touch it right away? What that money hits the bakery at your parents house? Yeah. What happened to that money over the next? I don't know how long it's been like a year or two. Yes, I hadn't I'd say like terms ever. Like I'd be like make a Splurge purchase. There was nothing out there. That was that excited about buying. So I end up buying a car and which expensive item by like a Mercedes. I bought an Acura right. Nothing crazy. I doubled or ice? Yeah.
Yeah, pre-owned Acura brand new 2022, Sports boat, sports edition, a tech, a tech conditioning, big lies. You really do have that immigrant mentality, but I think we didn't get you like a 23andMe test. I feel like there's something going on here. You got too much immigrant energy. I love it. No, but I me I increase my rent four to five times, right? Live in a great apartment. I went on a amazing vacation last summer, you know, I
You love, I know you guys know, ramit stay to yourself, the I'm aperture up announced last name, but like that idea of like you're rich life and just spending. Oh yeah, I mean lifestyle creep is real, right? That is real totally. And so, like, look, I spend money on the things that I find interesting and that I like and I love traveling and staying, it really nice hotels and spending a ton of money on business class flights and things like that. I like living a nice apartment but like I live in New York City what am I gonna do? Drop another 50k on a car. That's it's not a parking lot.
81 days a year. It's a complete waste of money. It's just stupid. And I know I Morgan housel actually tweeted this and I read this to. It Will Smith's book, he has a great quote, he was talking about Fame and becoming famous and the quote, was something, like becoming famous is awesome. Being famous, is cool. And losing any famous horrible. And I feel the same exact way about money, right? I feel the same way and so I have known
I really spend money on things. I don't actually care about I don't want to I don't want to lose my money because I can, you know, change the a to a hammer and everyone a Mercedes. So I spend money that eye on things actually care about so I can make sure I maintain my wealth. What do you invested or do you just, are you conservative or you aggressive? Like what's the pie chart of like of the hundred percent? Where did where did the money go? Yes, I probably took like 85 90 percent of it and put it into very, very boring stuff, right? S&P 500 or, or
Or Vanguard like Target date funds like night 2065 or something like that, right? So this yourself or you hired like a, well no, I hired a team and it's a good thing I did. Cause if not, I would have went off the rails, right? And then I put you know, five maybe seven percent in crypto, right and I put another 5% in Venture investing, right? But the vast vast majority is in really boring real estate. S&P 500 and
Like bonds, right? But like really boring. Shit. Let's talk about some non newsletter stuff. So you got a bunch of ideas when we were hanging out at Camp. MFM you were telling me about, like, this thing you're doing in this thing. You're doing. I was like, oh, this guy's like way more Dynamic and interesting, a whole bunch of different things. What are some ideas that you think would be cool to share? Yeah, so I'll throw out a bunch of ideas I have. But one General framework, I think people should think about is when you're in shitty Economic Times
We're going into now. I think the the framework you should use, as you should look to save companies money or earn individuals side income, right before company's money didn't matter, right? Capital was abundant. So companies, they were all about just grow grow grow, right? How can you help me grow? It's a 180 now, you know, people were trading their money for others. People other people's time right now. They're trading time for money and so all, you know, if you can help companies Preserve
Money you can I think build really, really great side. Hustles. So a few ideas where I think it's like what's old is new and then there's a bunch of agencies. I think it'd be really interested to start right now. One is outsourced talent. I knew nothing about the outsourced Talent game. I recently became a co owner in a business. It's a really cheap business called oceans. They found talent in Sri Lanka right? Really cool Talent Sri Lanka where they've u.s. graduates, come to Tech startups work. They're really interesting, and I think there are ways, right? They have a unique Advantage going to Sri Lanka.
Go, which we don't have to talk about, but I think there are companies who were hiring a full-time copywriter. Let's call it or a full-time, you know, marketer, and they probably need them for 25, 30 hours, a week, 20:21. Screw it. Right will need them at some point. I think now companies are really questioning ftes, right? Do you need a full-time hire and so you can create these niche market places. I'm getting investment opportunity to them all the time and they're just not Venture scale, but you bootstrap a Marketplace. Let's call it like a Content marketing agency.
Eeyore, content, marketing Marketplace for B2B companies. Write these stocks are down, 90 95 %, they're trying to drop ftes but they still want content, right? We all know how valuable only audience and content is and billing that Marketplace helping them find people. I think simple services like that are going to come back into Vogue and be very very
profitable. What's that company, where the founder got in trouble for not converting the convertible notes but it was a Marketplace for developers and it like bootstrap it tell you how practically if we don't top tell so topped out they got in trouble.
Because they only raised like eight hundred thousand or a million dollars, but they didn't convert the the found the the note or whatever, so it's controversial but they basically have bootstrapped it to this point to like north of 100 million in net revenue. And so these marketplaces are like can be they can be pretty freaking powerful and seem. They seem too hard to get off the ground but they don't seem that hard if you already working in the in the industry and it's a super Niche a niche topic because people ask me all the time to go hey I want to hire writers who should I hire and I'm like I don't know man. It's
Hard. I don't know who you should hire.
Yeah, I mean the one I don't want I'm now a co-owner and has gone from zero to seven figures of are are in like eight months, right? You pick a very specific Target? Customer you have access to unique,
talents, and gross, gross. Gross margins? Are your take
no well. Now both right. Both are seven figures of error. Wow, yeah. It's nuts.
That's crazy. And then what's his name? Marshall from Marshall Hoss. He did Shepherd.
What's the use of? This is just the same business
and I it seems like he's scale that to Heist.
Diggers in like, less than a year. It seems from the outside.
Yeah, I think they're a bit different, right? Ours is I think there's just more like strictly EA's. The one we have is more you, you've people in finance people and operations. What's interesting about Sri Lanka? Is they have big four accounting firms, right? And you can poach, people not just from local businesses, but from people have been trained by Ernst & Young and Deloitte. And so it's an interesting, an interesting demographic to go into. Yeah, I love that one. I think that's a great one. Use the other one. You said was help individuals earn side money. What's a
What's an example of that? Yeah. So here's what I think, interesting? Right. So you built morning Brew for crypto, right? I know a lot of people spoken about this but I don't think anyone's really built the brand yet. I think morning. Brew or the hustle for AI is going to be huge. Right? And I
think dude how's that feel? By the way the thing you're just like called Sean the morning Brew blank.
It's okay. It's okay. We did kick your ass if they're up to, I mean, it's okay. It's okay that happened. We can test Let It Go. Though, we could tell we can take a
The deep breath. And just let it go. If you if that would help. No, no. You get you guys did a really great job. I thought that was awesome and I think someone's do the same thing in AI right into the bootstrap version of this, is to do what you did, right? The AI newsletter right down, the Fairway, have a unique tone, integrate yourself into the audience the way I think to take it to the next level is the last three months. Thousands of entrepreneurs have all started tinkering on little AI side projects, right and they all have 50.
Krr and I've been reaching out to all these Founders like, you know, different little tools. Right? These are not real big businesses. They're all side hustles, right. I went home for Thanksgiving. I asked all my friends from home, my family hailing. Have you guys been playing around with a chat GPT? Have you been player on know? Like what in the hell are you talking about? Right? And so, clearly it's the same customer for all of these different things, right? And so, I think there's an opportunity for the AI for morning. Brew to start a little tiny capital, or a little holding company, where you can start to invest in.
These businesses, right? Give a an off-ramp, these Founders who built these 50 or 100, or 150 Kar our businesses and start cross. Promoting them bundling marketing, them you write reviews for your, a little AI tool and then you promote it. And instead of having advertising which Again, Sam has spoken about how it's difficult. You're promoting all your products, you have this portfolio of 10, 20, 30 little AI tools, and maybe each one is half a million or a million of ARR, but altogether, you can get you get pretty big.
Pretty quickly. That one seems harder to be. I feel like like I like the idea but Mike. Okay. Realistically if I did that I like ideas where the idea is so good. My execution can be like a 7 out of 10 and I still win. Yeah. But this is his thing, man. This is his thing,
he executes some of these things really
well. Yeah, that hard I'm telling you, I've been talking to a bunch of these like these Founders, these little AI side projects. And I've been, I'm like, what are you doing with it? They're like, I have no idea what I just heard.
I think that's hard is not because you can't roll them up, you can't buy them. I think it's hard because it's like the Linde effect, right? So when something has been around for three months is that 50 km are our and it seems great. Like you don't know if that's easy to be around three months from now. Because the next model will come out or the next chat like for example, you know you're stable, diffusion comes out, then then you know, chat GPT comes out. Well, people were, you know, I've invested a couple of these that you know, the AI writing tools.
They're getting better and they're pouring Millions into marketing to get to get customers for their, you know, AIA right into. But everybody's building on the same foundations, the same models and they're trying to say how they're going to be differentiated and the reality is that could differentiate on a customer acquisition. And so I think that like it is, you know, I think about when I buy something like you know the tiny Capital model works because he buys stuff that's like kind of been like around and forgotten and it
Word for like a long period of time but he buys like a dribble. But you know, it's like, oh, it's been around for years and I could buy it and I can, it's going to be around for years and I can improve it over that time versus buying the things that are really new and quick. I think you have a challenge with the durability of those businesses because what happens as, you know, the AI just keeps improving either, these things become obsolete or it starts to consolidate into, like, one app that can do four of these things. And so, you don't need one for posting on social media and one,
Or writing emails. It's like a it's the same Chrome extension. That's just going to do both. And so I think there's a good chance you can kind of get like, you know, just sort of Blown Away by by the rate of change that's going on in the industry. So that's the thing. I'd be worried about with that similar to, I remember telling Andrew Bogut said about Frazee, oh, I was like, oh, this is super smart. Like these FBA stores are super cheap. And as you know, like each one of them a small, but you could go and just like, scoop up all these. Look at this, they're buying them on this like crazy little multiple egos.
Yeah. It's like picking pennies up in front of a steamroller and is his first reaction and I was like yeah, I can see what you mean but like if the platform changes he goes if anything happens he's like you know, these aren't real durable Brands. I haven't been around for a while, maybe it's that Amazon changes the algorithm. Maybe it's that there's you know more competition maybe a set, the multiples go up there. So there's four or five different ways where you just get steamrolled and as actually what how it played out pretty much in the in the Amazon aggregator space was for a while. The
It was good. And then those companies went all in on it and then they kind of got steamrolled in our they're getting steamrolled as we speak. Yeah, I think you bring up a great point about aii, right? And that's why, well, I think the technology is great. I've been very skeptical investing in these companies. That's really build on top of, you know, open my eye because it's like, if you have a nice wrapper, right? It's nice marketing. It's great. But, what do you have long-term? What are you actually going to? What are you going to do that? Who doesn't do that? Nobody's doing their own AI? Everybody's everybody's building off open it.
Disabled. And that's why I'm skeptical investing in that, right. I think there's so many popping up, right? So next crypto wave right, there's gonna be a huge, huge bubble and you know and they're raising not a crypto prices but I'm seeing hey two guys left some you know injuries and back company or raising 5125. Like what do you have? They're like, oh well, we have a deck but since we created the deck, we've already changed our mind. It was this. And now it's this. It's like, guys, come on, you can't forgive me sir, but we've seen this play off of her and they're like while you say that they're like we just got another offer for 35 prices go.
Shut up. You know, like I always, I always felt
this way about you, and as I've got to know you, I feel this way even more the way that, you know, someone's an interesting founder is when you talk to them and you're like a little fearful of them where you're like, I don't want to have to go against this person because they're going to be very, very challenging to kill and you totally have that Vibe, you've got this like weird mixture of neuroticism where you're like, no. I have to go like, I have to win. We're gonna lose like everything's over.
I don't win this thing, but then you also have this like really good work ethic. I remember I asked you the other day. I'm like, hey, at what point at morning, Brew? Did you quit grinding? And you're like, what never, I'm still grinding. And I think that's just a really, that's really fascinating. Are you
weirdly? Good at like some random thing? Did you like channel that Obsession towards some other things? Yeah, like, growing up.
We like, we tennis or some
bullshit. Yeah, I mean, I was obsessed with video games, right? Sports video games, nothing, nothing specific, right. Was it like Travis Callen act like number two,
We tennis in the world now it was that and now I'm like is that for cooking, right? I'm I've thought about what I'd go to culinary school and take night classes because now obsessed with cocaine. I love to cook. Wow did not see that coming. You gotta come over for a meal. Yeah comes in the I know you don't leave San Francisco but when you do something to your ship
so what do you what's you said something about ramit and like you're rich life. What do you think you're rich life? How old are you now 20 818? What's your rich life going to be at 35 and 40 like what are you working towards?
Yeah, I think for me it's all about time, right? Like to me, wealth is all about having time and spending that time how you want to right now? I want to spend that time building this company because I constantly see more growth and more opportunity and not just like 2x but 10x, But ultimately what I would be able to 35 is spend my time how I want to spend it on any given day, right? And that means a lot of travel. I love traveling like II want to go at some point in the not-too-distant future. Hopefully, go on a six-month trip. Three months a year
Capri months of Southeast. Asia. I never got to do that. A lot of my friends in college when they graduate, they went to Thailand and, wherever else I drove from Michigan to New York and started working the next day. And so for me, it's a lot of traveling, nothing crazy. Spend time with family doing fun stuff, right? Like being able just to say, hey, like today, I'm gonna you know drop 500 bucks and go, you know, do something, you know, that thousand dollars. Go do some fun activity, right adventurous activities, but it all comes back, just waking up and say, hey, here's how I wanna spend my day and then doing that
thing. Are you able to do that?
Now, I can write, but I choose to spend that time on morning, Brew, like I am maniacally focused on growing morning. Brew a, there's a ton of opportunity, but as soon as I don't think that like I'll change I'll say, Hey, you know, today I want to do something else.
Do you like having two hundred plus employees? It sounds like fucking hell particularly New York Manhattan. Like woke employees that like in the New York media seem like everyone's talking about unionizing. Like, when I think about that I'm like, this sounds miserable.
Yes, I got this blank if it's miserable because I know you can't say.
Anything. Yeah, you know, I mean, look, I know things one with a lot of remote employee. So we do have a really good distribution of employees across the country, which I think does help, right? I think having employees everywhere. Gives different perspectives, right our engineering team lives. You know, in the midwest then and we have people all across the country, which I think is cool, but to be honest, as a CEO of a 250 person company, I'm not interacting with that many people and daily basis, but what I love is like the one, the reason I Stay is gonna be big
This team of people who are reporting to me who are just a plus all stars, like absolute rock stars. And that's what makes me so. Happy is when I can just come to work and say, Hey, you know, Chief content officer? Hey, you know, person acts like more, do you do it? Like, tell me more about how can I help you? But also, I'm like a vacuum, right? I'll hire someone new a chief content officer at Cielo. I'll be like, I'm gonna learn as much as humanly possible. And my goal is to catch up to you and knowledge as fast as possible.
And so if you're 38, you're 40, you're you're ten years older than me. I want to just vacuum up. Those 10 years of knowledge, you've gained working these four or five places in the next, like two months. And I'm going to pester you and sit with you and just learn as much as humanly possible. So I can be better than you and know more than you. And it's like this competitive
nature. That's exactly what I'm saying about being. Like someone did that. Your be a you'd be really hard to compete with, you were hard to compete with? That's a really fascinating mindset. It's very interesting.
Yeah, I saw Sean smirk. That's always a good sign.
You're like, yeah, I wouldn't want to be with you. It's like oh, you did. I'm here straight, I did. Yeah. And
like, I mean, it was fun. I think that, I think maybe I'm the same way where someone's, like, I don't know if I want to compete against you, but but like, you know, I think your intriguing, your interesting. I think you have got a really good mindset. I think you got that good inner game, I think I
can't refresh this before, but I think the thing that really I've changed my thinking about you so much. Is, I used to think you were like rude and
Now yeah, we've been working together on like a few side projects. And what I've learned is that your style is not for everyone but you are what I would call like admirably abrasive, right? And we run a call. I don't know if I'm supposed to tell their story, but we're on a call, I won't say any. It can run a calm and this guy gives like a three minute pitch, and I just see the look on saying this face. I go, oh, no, this guy's real is not good. And the guy goes Sam, what do you think? And Sam? No, smile straight face goes. I go.
Know why I'm even on this call? What are you talking about? And I'll just start dying but he's, I mean Sam, I'm not trying to be rude. I'm not trying to be rude lie and it's not for everyone, right? That style is not for everyone, but I can see how you so quickly grow things with the right people because that type of radical Candor that like hey I'm sure tell you what I think and we're not going to have an ego and we shall work together to solve problems is so much better than
In the corporate media being like, Oh yeah. No that was that was great. And then sending an email later you should look this guy straight in the eyes and you're like I don't know why I'm here.
Yeah I mean and the person who were speaking with I think they're great and I was just like you're you're a great this is stupid though you know be different and be better than you are right now and achieve your potential. I think you're I think you're great. That's typically the way that I work with people and I don't like hearing when people say that I'm rude that kind of hurts my feelings because I'm like, ah, shit. I don't want to be like, I don't want to be
Known as a jerk. I'm a pretty kind guy. I thought so I hate hearing that but it is the truth
Shawn. You were a saint but what cells have been like, will let you do it on her own. Yeah, I think Sam's intimidating to work with, you know, I think that I've seen a bunch of people on the podcast that are intimidating, but it's a good thing. It's a standard like the people who have really high standards for how they want things to go there. Intimidating to work with. Like, for me, we come on here. Something's messed up.
Camera the audio. Whatever I'm hey, don't worry, it's gonna be a great show. I'm trying to put that person at ease. I'm like, they probably feel like shit. I know they didn't want this to happen, you know. Like and a lot of these things are. That's not you intentionally messing something up. That's like something is going wrong. Somebody's late. So something out of your control is happening or as self gets frustrated. I could see that first and start to sweat and I don't think that's rude. I just think that's like I think you're focused and I think you, you know, you just like you
Like a blunt object is like what are going to say like this? Hammer is not very soft. That's a fucking Hammer. We that was why we like it, that's why it has. That's why you get the best spot in the tool set because it's this like, really like heavy blunt object and that's what you need and like for the podcast, a podcast would not be successful without Sam. Like that's just he brings that to the Pod and so I love that now with that comes you know, sometimes it's not going to be not ever get you treated with. So
Off gloves and that's okay. Like, you know, if you know the guys intent is good, then you don't really worry about it so I don't know. That's, that's my, my feedback. Yeah, I know that, that's all Grant and then Sean, let me I know I'm here for you guys to ask me questions, but I want to ask you a question which is, you know, like you obviously are great Storyteller. You're very good on camera. How much of that do you think is natural like yours? Born with it? And how much of
it do you? Let me answer this. Okay, go ahead, Sam. Keep going.
Going keep going. Let me, let me answer. The first part took a hammer,
and I can say, I was you, how much would you think you're born with and how much are you? Have you studied, like, how are you? And what are you doing, to get better at it? Because I've listened to the podcast for three years, and you just increasingly up their game and gotten better. And, I mean, it's pretty. It's pretty
incredible. Let me give my perspective and then he should answer. But, so from the time, I knew Sean, he was always pretty good. He would, we would, we would do these like, the, the podcast stemmed because me him and see Avenue.
We're the guys with meet weekly or monthly and like Dube kind of what we're doing now and some was always good at like I would explain something and be like well so what you're really saying is this so here's how you should look at it and he would like storytelling such a way where I'm like, oh wow, you've got this like inspirational like thing about you that's really good and then so we always had that I think that was like a I think it was born with that. And then we started the Pod and he was a little rough where I actually think early on, I was better than him at
Capturing attention. And then he started learning about copywriting. I think I was like, he should learn about this copywriting thing, and then he got really good at copywriting and then he got really good at storytelling like on a more refined basis. And basically what happened was because he was born with his, I think this innate ability as well as he wanted to learn about it and then he actually studied it his trajectory in his growth was quicker than mine and I think he actually surpassed it in terms of like storytelling and ability to capture attention. And if you won't listen to like the
First couple of episodes, you could clearly see like because of his tone of voice and everything like, alright, this person is intriguing but then it was like, he's studied it over a year and you could see that there was a huge change and I think it was in part of him studying copywriting and I do think he like, actually went and studied, like Hudson and like, all these are the comedian's. He like, figured out. We both like comedians, but I think he studies it and we'll like Twitter message each other. Like, hey, let's look at how the I told this joke. It was really interesting. And so he actually studied that and truly learned it. And so, I think it was a combination
Should have being born and studying over like two years. That is that
accurate. I think some things you said there were accurate for sure. My nobody knows. Right? Like is impossible question to answer but like I'll give it my best shot. My, there's my honest opinion. My honest opinion is I don't actually think I'm that good at it in an absolute terms. I just think is relative to Tech business and like podcasts are generally quite bad. No, dude, when I've seen you with
like professionals and they like Comedians and I saw that they
They were like, coming to you for advice.
Yeah, see that happens, but I think the I don't know, I grew up in Houston and he's just got like a very high swag factor and like, they're like how you play basketball in the locker room. There were dudes that like should have been on stage at the Apollo or something like that. Like just the natural Charisma of people that I grew up with were was just really, really high. So, I think that actually has a lot to do with it, would you hang out with people who naturally have a lot of Swag and Charisma until funny.
Folks, our stories are able to just quickly jump in and have quick wit, that's just becomes your normal. So I think part of it was that some environment stuff. My sister, for example, is way funnier way better Storyteller, the me and growing up. It was always Sean's, the smart nice one. He's quiet, he's shy. She's the funny one, career charismatic. If something happened to me, they'd be like Misha. Tell the story about like Sean like let initial tell the story, everyone will love it. So at every family party it was her doing and you know,
So, imagine that like the person you admire your older sibling is really great at this thing and you just constantly see your family and friends are like, everybody loves that about them. So to me, it became like an important thing in my life. I was like not in a negative way, not like a jealousy, but I was like, it was a thing. I valued. I was like, oh, that's a really cool skill. I value that I had no idea how to do it. And when I was younger, I was just super, super quiet. So I didn't talk that much in my friends group, I was just, the lie was the laugh track. I wasn't the
Guy making the jokes. I was the crowd noise and I got a couple lucky breaks. My cousin was in town and was like, Hey, you know, there's a movie audition going on like you want to come with me and I just like, I guess I don't know. And so I went with him and I ended up getting cast in the movie and that like showed me that exposed me to a different thing and the guy, the movie who is my brother was Kal Penn, who's the guy from Harold and Kumar and stuff like that. So I got to hang out with him for like weeks at a time. So now I'm around somebody else who's very charismatic, very good storyteller.
Eller. He's like a professional actor, right? So he was somebody. I admired that I was hanging out with four weeks. He's the only guy I talked to on set because I was intimidated by everybody else and he was super nice to me. And so we just hung out every day for like, you know, six weeks since a kind of a boot camp in like just being around. Somebody who's got that Charisma. Okay, then fast forward. I moved to San Francisco and I'm like, okay, I want to be like, you know, I don't know, in my mind. I was like, a CEO should be the leader. The leader should be inspiring charismatic.
Clear. I'm none of those things. So how am I going to do all that? And so I like tried to do things. I took, you know, I went to the SF improv, I took classes there all the time, right? As I was like, I don't know, it's fun, I might meet some people but also I think this I think your problems just like a crazy skill set to have like to be able to on your feet. Be able to think of something and you know make a crowd laughs that that to me is a actual superpower and it's a super. I wanted to have same thing with comedians. Like I like that content but I don't just want
Watch it and let just like drool come out of my mouth at all. Wow, these people are funny. I'm like I want to be funny. I love how funny they are and like what do they do when they tell stories to, you know, that makes it work and I'll go re-watch it and I'll sort of break it down. Sometimes I'll try I'll try it myself. Like for example when I did that Luna video I did it in the style of like there's John Oliver or Hasan minhaj like skits. And mine is like you know, 10 times worse and I texted it to us and he was like cool change these 95 things and I
Like dude, that's a lot to change. I'm just going to ship it like you know, I don't have time to do all that but like now that you've told me this, I now know what I should have done, but it's just those reps. Like it's Talent helps, but then there's reps and people don't really see the Reps and I would say like that combination of the three things, I mentioned, like being around people who are, who are better at it than you and you admire them that plants a little seed inside you right? Like also you were talking about that with money. Like you when you met people with more money, it was inspiring and you're like, oh wow, my World opened up
I now have, like, people I can sort of, like, I could try to embody a blueprint that they maybe they have to something I want. That's how it was with storytelling and sort of like I don't know, Charisma or something like that for me. And so that, you know, being around people do admire putting yourself in unusual situations that are like kind of intensives, like improv or acting in movies, stuff like that. Most people in business, don't have that experience, so they shouldn't be as good at it, right? Like if you've never gone through these intense experiences and then, you know, how would
You have developed those skills, it doesn't make
sense. Why are you asking that Austin? Are you trying to like get better at talking or
well, you better public speaking? So 2023 goal, I guess I'm going to New York improve your improv.
Dude, I I think some people are born better but I think everyone can get at least good but I do think Shaun has this like something that will make him great and it is let me just put it over here.
Awesome. Have you ever watched back a video of you speaking publicly in order to
take notes on yourself of how you did no super uncomfortable feeling, but an obvious thing to do if you wanted to get better at it, right? Like yeah, I just had that moment where I was like, oh, I'm saying, I want to get better at this. I've never done any of the obvious things you would do, right? I never liked went. Watch myself and said, what the hell am I doing with my hands? And why am I fidgeting so much? And I'm an, I keep saying with the start of these sentences, I should just say the sentence, but like I had to go review the game film, okay. Then the second thing was like, I had to take it seriously.
Did I just walk up there? I'm prepared and not. Warm, or do I warm up or do I prepare? Okay, that that added to the game and then the third one is like, who's the best at this? And I went to a Tony Robbins event. I was like this guy is like the best public speaker I've ever seen and even if I don't listen to any of his content, if I just literally listen to the rhythm of his words and the gestures and then the the hooks and how he's getting everyone's attention. That's a master class right there. Like okay, I'll take that and so that's how I started stacking up some of these things. I don't
There myself with good public speaker because I don't do a lot of speeches or anything like that anymore, but it's definitely something. I'm at a time I try to build up and it accommodated in an epic wedding speech, I got to say the best speech I ever gave was at my wedding unrehearsed off the Dome and just like it was. I don't know the perfect, the perfect speech. I just retired from the game right there at your own wedding and my own wedding. Yeah, well
you should come on More. By the way we should talk about newsletter shit because you're like the only person or us three are some of the very few people that I like
Actually want to ask newsletter, advice
from trying to get out of it. The newsletter guy branding to keep on bringing me on to be the newsletter guy. I'm
not dude, but it's, it is so fun. It's a love-hate relationship. It's really for the really fun to do but also their painful and whatever.
Yeah what do you think are going to be doing? Like 10 years from now? You're going to think you're be running businesses. You're going to be just investing or an NBA team or something. What do you do
or big businesses are small ones or
what? To me, it's barbell, right? I either
Anna. You know, have some passive income and you know work 20, 25 hours a week, more casual, or I want to go all in but if I go all-in it's got to be huge, right? The potential has to be multiple billions, I don't think I'm going to want to run a business where it's like, it's nice and it's like a double, right? If I win, it's a double. I don't want doubles, right? Either one home run or I went to, you know, sit in the Dugout and just, you know, be be part of the peanut gallery. I don't want to play in that. If I had
a it, I'm gonna look in the future.
And I'm going to tell you, it's probably not going to be you sitting in the duck. It's not going to be this is, I think maybe you will for a couple years, but it if I have to make a bet and I would put my money when I'm out this. It's not going to be that one. That's not what you're going to do.
All right, let's hope it works
out. Well, thanks for coming on here. Yeah, this is awesome. Great.
Thanks for having me soon. Again, soon, I feel like I can rule the world. I know I could be what I want to.
