Dumb iPhone Apps Are Making People Rich Again (Here’s how)

are crushing with iOS apps. There's a guys that we interviewed on the channel that have an app that forces you to do push-ups. They're doing 30K a month. Pat is here from Starter Story. Pat Hubshot just bought Starter Story.

That's amazing. Congrats. Congratulations.

Thank you. Is the news out? It is a technically not closed yet. So I'm going through a whirlwind. I'm going to try to put on a good face for you guys. Your seven days out right now from selling.

And when this goes live, it is presumably close. And yet, you are nervous. What's that about? Well, the deal is supposed to close tomorrow. But, you know, it's the psychology of it needs to be signed, closed, wired. Otherwise, I cannot take myself to that place yet.

That place to, you know, celebrate or tell people or anything like that. And it's kind of weird, you know, doing the production process. Because, you know, content needs to be recorded early to go out. So it's super weird to do an interview before it's done. How did you do with the negotiation?

Do you feel like walk us through? How do you approach that?

How do you think you did?

Give yourself a score there. I had a number in my head before any of this conversation happened. When it just came to my head, I started talking to chat. GPT about it, having a little conversation of like,

“what is before even the sale or anything conversations happened?”

So like, what would be my walk away number? And I just remember thinking back what that number is. And when I went back to the negotiation and then it sort of was that number, I was like, okay, well, I made up that. That would have been my number before any sale influence me or anything like that.

I negotiated to that number because I wanted to be like authentic in my negotiation of like that was like truly my number not to make up something for whatever. That was actually the number. Do you feel any bit of regret because you're like, oh, I got my number. I should have asked for more.

Yeah, 100%. You haven't made it. If that doesn't happen, that's the final stage of the maximum regret. And then it turns to maximum relief when it's done. Yeah.

All right, so let's explain what is starter story. People don't even know. starter story is a lot of things. But it started out as a side project while I was working in nine to five because I couldn't start any successful business.

“So I said, why not just start interviewing founders and sharing their stories online?”

And maybe I will find a co-founder through that or I'll find a good idea through that. Long story short, it took off. We found other mediums. We had the blog with the case studies. We had products.

We had community. We had a YouTube channel. It is all built around interviewing founders doing anywhere from 10k to 100k per month. Let me ask you, what do you get right? Because this idea of, hey, I'm going to interview founders about how they did it.

That's not like a new idea. And you did this only a couple of years ago. How many years have been three or four years? Well, how long has it been? Not been in the game longer than you might think.

Eight years is when I started the game. Even eight years ago, that wasn't a completely novel idea. But you did well with it. You separated yourself from the vacuum made it a success. What do you think you got right that others didn't?

“And I really hope it's not just like a, I worked hard, you know?”

Yeah, I think of one thing that, now I'm looking back. What did we get right is that we were, you had to share your revenue to get on the website. So a lot of founders at the time, they didn't want to share those things. Because they had investors. It was private or whatever.

We made it a requirement to share your revenue on the site. This is something that we got from indie hackers at the time, which was big on that too. Shoutout to Portland who built that. But once you could see, like, you don't want to read a story about a business. And you don't know how much revenue they're making.

You want to know how is this business doing? Okay, now I want to learn from this business. So having that revenue number at the top, that was really, really big. If you guys Google like starter story case studies, and you could find one. Or you could find this thing, it's called the full case studies database.

And so early on, you were really interesting because you would interview people.

And I always thought that I was like, within a very small niche of people who like this.

But I think it's actually a lot of people who like it. Where I love numbers, some obsessed with numbers. Yeah, and you would do these interviews with people. And they very clearly were not interviews of you speaking. It was as if you just sent people a Google doc the same Google doc over and over and over again.

And you asked questions and they typed out the replies. And then you created a graphic at the top. And it said, here's one. It says, "Brew mate." I think it's called "Brew mate."

Yeah, "Brew mate." I grew a drinkware brand to $1.1 million per month at 23 years old. And it said, "Jagap." And it said, "His revenue per month is $12 million." His, there's one founders.

There's 53 employees. Like the way he, you did such a good job of just outlining those numbers. And then what you did was, once you had like 100 of these, I could sort through like D to C, SaaS.

And frankly, if I was just trying to clone someone's company, yep, that's probably not the right word. But figure out what business model I wanted to do. Which I wanted to do. Well, if you wanted to clone someone's company,

somebody was going to do that. Yeah. But like, if you wanted to like research, that's the better word. You and Indie hackers were like the best. But like you had like a bunch of legends.

Like you had David Houser from Grasshopper and a bunch of people like that on early on. And it was really cool. Every single week, I talked to founders, as I mentioned, that are doing between 10K and 100K per month.

And people that have sort of their businesses had took off recently. So I like, I get to see. I get to have these conversations every single day and see like what's working like right now.

“We can go over some of that if you want to.”

Yeah, give us one. Yeah, sure. What you guys want to talk about. I have a couple options for you. We can talk about iOS.

We can talk about YouTube SEO. We could talk about APIs. We could talk about B2B video. What's exciting, dear? Let's do iPhone apps because to me, that sounds like 10 years ago.

Yeah, that was probably the most surprising one on the list, right? It's like, wait, that's the, that's the now opportunity. I feel like that was the 2010 opportunity. Right, right. So yeah, it might, it might feel like it's an old opportunity

or it's too broad. But again, this is all, this is not something I read on Twitter. This is not something that I just came up with through ChadGBT. This is what, when I talked to 12 founders a week, I'm seeing six of them are crushing with iOS apps.

This is where this is coming from. So a couple of examples. There's a guy's that we interviewed on the channel that have an app that forces you to do push-ups before you can go in social media.

Like, you scroll, it blocks you.

“And then you have to put your phone out there”

and prove that you've done push-ups. They're doing a call 30K, they're doing 30K a month. And actually, they're doing a lot more. Can't disclose it exactly. But after we interviewed them, they told me some crazy numbers.

And there's another one that does basically the same thing,

but it makes you pray, makes you do a prayer to God before you can go on on that TikTok. Yeah, yeah. Just like, and not intended. Yeah, yeah, to enter heaven.

Yeah, there's like a feature in the iOS API or something like that. That allows you to screen block apps. So there's tons of apps like this. Or just basic blocking apps. There's a bunch of productivity-related apps that are popular.

Like that that have some sort of almost gimmick element to them. But you see it on TikTok, you see it on social media, and you're like, oh, let me try it. Okay, I want to do some. I want to get a little healthier or whatever.

And are these? Okay, so I see it push-up, push-up time blocker, right? Push-up app blocker, push scroll, push scroll. That's the one. Push scroll, okay, gotcha.

So you go, push scroll. Okay, push scroll is really good. So you replace Doom's rolling with a healthy habit. It literally has a picture of a guy doing push-ups like with AI, watching him.

And then it says it can limit your apps you're addicted to,

and basically you earn, you earn it as you make progress.

Now, here's my question. Are these doing the same kind of like, you make a fun kind of novelty app, and then you do like massive TikTok content by giving a paying influencers or affiliates,

or basically getting like 100 or 1,000 pieces of content posted every week, they'll come up with their own hooks. Like, oh my gosh, y'all, check this out.

“I haven't used Instagram at all this week because of whatever, right?”

Or here's where these gains came from. Instagram, what? And then it's like, hey, is it that? Is that the playbook that they're all doing? Sure, just become a TikTok affiliate, that's pretty good.

That's kind of natural. What was really cool about this app? And it is a cool story worth telling. Is that they didn't actually build the app first? They created the viral video first.

And this is a really cool story that we told is basically, they created a video about them having to do push-ups before scrolling. They pretended that the app exists and they showed them having to do push-ups or whatever. They created a bunch of other videos about other app ideas.

This is the one that went viral. And then when it did, it got some hundreds of thousands of views. They went and scrambled to create the app. And then it took off. So they were able to validate the idea through TikTok

and through their marketing show, they're going to use. And then build it, which I thought was super cool. Were they technical? One guy, there was two guys. One guy was the technical guy, the other guy was the kind of the market.

The push-up guy. Yeah. One guy's just great to push-ups. So this is the opposite of field of dreams, right? Instead of, you know, if we build it, they will come.

It's like, if they come, then we'll build it, I guess. I just got to build it then. And they just went viral first. Exactly, they reversed the whole process. Which I think is the right way to do things now,

because imagine creating 10 apps and having none of them work. That would take you a year, or creating one video in one day, and having a work in that takes one day. All right, so Pat is giving you guys something straight out of his playbook,

which is his method to finding a $1 million business idea.

It's a template that guides you through seven proven methods

It gives you real-founder case studies so you can build and validate your ideas fast. If you want the template and case studies straight from Pat, you can download it right now, just click the link in the description and up back to the episode.

Are there other apps that you're seeing

“and other genre of apps that you're seeing that are working?”

Apps are the new info products, I think. So anything in health, wealth, relationships, productivity, self-improvement, these are all great spaces. And the reason why I wanted to share the dumb apps, because they're the most funniest when you think about them,

I'm not saying go build a dumb app, but build anything in these sorts of spaces right now, health, so fitness, gym apps, these sorts of things, wealth, money, productivity, these sorts of things. That is a great space to be building right now.

What are you seeing in wealth? Well, there's not any kind of the silly apps, but anything that's in like crypto trading, these sorts of things, those are really, really popular. What's the stop vaping app?

Yep, so that would be another one of the health. I think the health one is a good space. There's a guy that just built an app that helps you track. It was called puff count, and I think you just track how many puffs you took, and then once you get to a certain low amount,

it sort of gamifies the process of quitting nicotine. That was a cool one, he sold it for a lot of money, and that was a really cool example. Did a lot of two.

You bought it, like Philip Morris, and he shut that second one.

Get that out of here. And these kids, I assume I watched your channel, and it's almost like 20 times. Are a lot of them actually technical, or they just think, "Yeah, I had to make this stuff."

That's the thing, is they're using AI coding. And this is why it's big now, and you're thinking it was big 10 years ago. It's big now, because in order to build an iPhone app, you needed to have a team of four.

To build a good iPhone app, you needed to designar, you needed a product person, you needed an engineer, probably a back-end, and a front-end engineer. But with AI coding tools, you can just have an idea. That's not perfect, but it's like 95% of the way there.

You can just build it with zero. This is a team of zero. Apps that couldn't have existed before, because it wouldn't have been cost effective. You couldn't have built a stop vaping app with a team of four people

getting paid $100,000 a year, or $200,000 a year. It just wouldn't have been feasible. But now there's this opportunity for all these little, kind of weird, fun apps that blow up on social media, because you don't need anybody to build them anymore.

You know what's interesting is you said that um, apps the new info products that didn't hit with me until just a second ago. Do you guys remember the police scanner app?

“I think it was called 5-radio, or 5-0 radio.”

Do you remember that, Sean? Sort of. Not really. I've heard of these, like, citizens as a one I know about. This is before that.

So I'm part of this forum where this guy is a poster, and I knew he was kind of a celebrity to me a little bit. And his name's Alan Wong, and he started this thing called 5-0 scanner. So if you guys Google him, he kind of get was famous because he created this iPhone app. And I think his story was that he was an immigrant from another country.

He came here with nothing, his family. I think they worked in a restaurant, something like that. He created this thing called the 5-0 scanner. Right when the iPhone got started, and he made eight figures. I think he was making like $5 million a year repeatedly for a very long time.

And he wrote the story about how he was able to retire his mom and dad. Then he bought a Lamborghini and he took a photo of himself and the Lamborghini when he was 24. And he kind of went viral for that.

But he never actually taught how to make apps.

He was kind of like true to like just making apps. And I remember this guy, and he was like one in a million. There was like not other people doing like these iPhone apps that were making five or eight million dollars a year with one employees. He was one in a million, and it was so cool.

And he's like a celebrity a little bit to me, because I kind of grew up. He was kind of like my Thai Lopez, and it is kind of interesting to say that. These, they are the new info products because info products when I was growing up. And I was in 19 and 25, trying to urge 19 and 21 try to get into the internet. It was always info product people that like I didn't exactly look up to.

Because I thought they were so lazy a little bit. But I was like, I want that life. I aspire to have that like I can make money anywhere at any time be on a beach type of lifestyle. And it is funny that you're saying that the in apps weren't even on my radar. Because I didn't know how to make them.

I couldn't, I physically couldn't do that. But now I probably could. And that is kind of an interesting way to look at it.

“And then we saw, we had this one, what was the kids who we had on here?”

Sean Calarytrecker, Cal Cal. Cal AI. Cal AI. He was seen how big that business is now. So he talked to it. This guy's act talked to us. Literally, he was new not a Tuesday. But what do you do here? He was a team home. He was a team home. He was a team home. He was a team home.

I came home for lunch during high school to do this interview.

And I have to go back to school. And at the time, I think it was a $30 million year business.

How big is it now? I saw on X. So it's not verified or anything like that. But they said they did $6 million in January alone. So 70, what is that put it at? 70 something million?

which is like a course on how to make apps.

And I don't think it landed. I think people kind of mocked it. But anyway, it was cool to like see that this is the new info product.

“Well, it's cool because it sounds like there's two trends coming together, right?”

It's apps are getting easier and easier to make with AI and vibe coding. And then on the other hand, you have a new discovery platform. TikTok that you can get your app downloaded from. Yeah. And both happening at the same time, like Charlie Munger calls these like Lola Paluso effects,

where multiple factors kind of conspire in your favor. And then suddenly you get this crazy sort of Lola Paluso effect out of it. And so you get one, two, three, four variables all pushing in the same direction unintentionally. And it creates like a new opportunity. So we were joking like, dude, iPhone apps is like 2010.

Like, well, what do you mean that's the opportunity?

Well, there's something that changed. Apps got way easier to build. And Apps got way easier to be discovered. There's a new way to get discovered as an app. So the playing field reopened in a way that the window was sort of closed,

you know, over the last, let's say, five years ago. It was less juicy than it is currently. Yep. That's right. Okay. You want to do another idea? What else you got?

Listed this B to B, B to B video. I'm curious what you have there. Yeah. I don't have, like, crazy business ideas here. But I have just some intel on how big this opportunity is. And there's so many business ideas you can do off of this.

So I know this and you guys know this is that video content is hard. Doing anything on video is hard. Doesn't matter if it's long form, short form, paid ads, organic, getting authentic, non-AI gen. No, I don't talk about AI generation stuff.

Like, video to work for your business that gets views and converts customers. There, it's really, really hard. At companies, there's lots of functions, right? Design, that's pretty much solved. You get good designers to do good stuff product.

It's a little tough, but kind of generally solved. Engineering, kind of solved, especially with AI sales. There's lots of playbooks for all these, right? But there's no playbook right now for video. I will stop there.

Let me know what you guys think immediately about that. I think you're spot on. I've said before, videos now, the native tongue of the internet, it's the language that the internet speaks. And so if you can't make good video, you essentially is like moving to America and not being able to speak English.

You might be able to get by, but it's not going to be easy for you. And so you're right, that the way you just put it is really great, which is that companies don't even have really the job function yet at the majority of companies to be able to produce video. Who in the company should be able to produce video, right?

Now it's like, I can have a youngest employee, maybe he's going to do it. You know, the guy who happens to have a camera and to, you know, understands, TikTok a little bit, I guess you can sort of do it. The social media person's supposed to expect it to do this. But it's probably going to elevate up to the level of product, design, project management.

“Like, there's going to be one of these functions at companies where you need to be able to produce”

good video because that's how we communicate with the world now. Yeah. Or it's going to be the person who's least embarrassed. What's funny is like, so I started to December. I started doing, I try to, I wanted to learn Instagram, so I was like, I'm not a video a day.

I was so ashamed to be doing this and like that I like started learning how to do this. And I was like, this is so like, maniputable. Like, I know how to do this now. It took me about 30 videos to master, but what was holding me back was the shame. Just the shame, like it's just so embarrassing to like be walking down the street

and talking and be like, hey, so here, I'll put it. Wait, hold on, got to redo it again. Hey, so here, I was like, well, if I would hold it a certain way, I could just pretend that I'm on face time, but people can't be repeating the same thing over and over again, like, this is stupid, like, I'm acting here, it was horrible. Well, that's actually why it's a huge opportunity.

And I have this in one of my other ideas, which is around YouTube SEO, but that's also related to video, but I talked to a lot of founders or people that want to be founders. People are afraid to put themselves on camera. That's actually why there's one of the biggest opportunities. Because 99% of people would rather write an article or, you know, do something with like Google

SEO or just do something that doesn't have to put themselves out there and put their face out there.

“And that's actually why YouTube, I think, will be a huge opportunity because most people are too”

scared to actually put a camera in front of their face and start yapping. It's also hard, right? Like it takes a lot of work to do YouTube. Compared to a podcast, a podcast is so much easier than doing planned scripted, edited, packaged, YouTube content. And then you get the big view number in your face and you get a media-like slap or, you know, that quick high that you're doing in a chase, right?

And that's a very tough cycle on YouTube. I think, you know, short form is sort of similar. There's like the phrase, like 200-view jail where a lot of people will create TikToks and they

just sort of never get past the 200-view number. You just stay stuck in that state, right?

But there's a huge amount of self-consciousness as well as actual work that goes into doing this.

20% of their data? That's like reading a book but then tearing out four-fifths of the pages. Point is, you miss a lot. And unless you're using HubSpot, the customer platform that gives you

“access to the data you need to grow your business, the insights that are trapped in emails,”

call logs, transcripts, all that unstructured data makes all the difference because when you know more, you grow more. And so, if you want to read the whole book instead of just reading part of it, visit HubSpot.com. So what's the solve here? How do you actually solve this? What are different angles you could take? Sam, how would you, let's say you believe this was the problem? I think Pat is accurately described. The problem and the value that's there. But you

mean, you still need a key to unlock the door. What would be the key? What would be an idea that you would create in space? I could show you a couple people. A one guy that I think is cool. He does, so big companies they want to get into video. HubSpot obviously wants to get into video. Big Fortune 50, Fortune 100, Fortune 500 companies, they need to figure out YouTube and they need to figure it out fast. And I know a guy who has an agency that he goes for the big boys, he goes

for like the Microsoft's the Figma's. And he basically just sends them, he helps them build YouTube

teams and he sends them package ideas. Do this title, do this thumbnail, do this title, do this thumbnail because you are Microsoft or some massive company he charges like it's different probably per client. But he's told me some crazy numbers like 50 to a hundred thousand dollars per month, just for YouTube strategy. And that shows you how much B to B, this is a B to B specific play here, how much they're willing to pay to have this problem solved. And I still don't like that's like

one example. I don't even know a lot of people that are solving this problem. I don't know what you guys think. Well, there's other people who are doing like done for you, right? So we've talked

“about the guy, I think his name's Josh, who does the street interviews for companies? So it's like,”

oh, Josh, you know what, you know what's the most shameful and awkward and difficult version of videos like man on the street interviews. So he's like just niche down into like, I'll give you that format. You give me money. I will walk around New York and I will stop people on the road and I will ask them, you know, three goofy questions to try to get, you know, try to get you some clips. Okay. So that's like one guy who's doing the done for you service. I know these other guys that

do, they fly to companies and they, they podcast interview them. They're like, look, forget even getting booked on an actual podcast. I'll just interview you. Chop it up like you were on a podcast. Nobody even needs to know that there's no long-form podcast actually underneath this. And I'll just interview the clips. Like, and for you, that's a lot easier. The user, the CEO, the founder, is pretty comfortable just sitting down and being interviewed about their company

in a podcast format. And they just do it. The whole thing turned key and it's like, well, let's just cut out the part of helping you get booked on actual podcast and cutting it. We'll just fake the podcast. It's great. Yeah. And so that's like another, like, we will deliver this format to you for a, you know, tens of thousands of dollars a month, uh, type of type of type of thing. Now you only need 10 customers and you're, you know, now you're cooking at over 100

grand a month. Yeah. I like the idea of taking one popular format and then turning that into a business. Like you said the street interviews, do that one format for one business. And I actually met that guy who started that business and he told me some pretty wild numbers about his revenue.

“We talked about it. Yeah. It was doing, uh, I think the shirt is going to be 10 million in revenue.”

Yeah. One format. It's great. Well, here. Do this, Pat. Let's show. Okay. So do me a favor. You sent me a thing where you have your Google sheet or sorry, your Google Doc that you have for every single video that you made. I want you to show it to Sean. And the idea here is like, what you, your pre-work for your, your YouTube video was really good. And it outlined the whole story. You did a really good job of when you showed me how to make YouTube video. And what Sean's

describing is basically just doing that, but for companies. Let's do it. So for the audience,

Sean and I have done 750, almost 800 podcasts. Sometimes they're super well researched. Other times were like, let's just riff. What do you want to talk about? Tell me about your weekend. Let's just talk. And it requires like no work. And occasionally, those will get seen by hundreds of thousands of people. Okay. Usually they'll be an interview that has little research and we're just friends with the person. And that could potentially get a million views. Yeah. But then I saw yours. And it was so much

more work. But worth it. Yeah. I'm very anal-retentive. And I want everything to be planned out. And I don't like off the cuff. I don't like spontaneous. I want everything to be there in the doc before that gets filmed. I'm not saying that's better or worse. That's more of my style. But I can pull up. Let me just find the right one to show you. Okay. So this is what we call a prep

doc. I mean, my first million has something like this, too. But this one is a little different.

This is our prep doc for all of our videos that we do at Starter Story. And we will do a couple things in here. First, we start with the package. So this is before anything gets filmed. It's not postfilm. It's pre-production. And we do the title and thumbnail. So this is this guy here. It's a different guest. But we're saying, hey, this is the thumbnail we're going to do. And this is the video.

it. It's like a good example. And I learned this when I read this production book. There's a Hollywood production book. But when you sell a script in Hollywood, they have what's called a treatment. And it's basically a pitch of a video of why someone will want to watch this video.

“If you want to sell your script in Hollywood and convince some director to pick it up or whatever”

happens in Hollywood, you have to sell this, you don't give them the 120 page script. You sell them

the sales page of the script. So we always have title thumbnail, obviously. And then we have what's

called a treatment. I'll stop there. And let me, you guys, let me know what you think about this. So let's read the treatment. So you go, this is Mike founder from Australia. Now, are you thinking about this like, what it needs to be nailed in the treatment? What do you have to, what's an important part to find when you write this pitch? Yeah. I always try to think about how and this might have been written by my producer. But what I like to think about in the treatment

is like the vibes and the feeling that the viewer will get when they watch it. Why should this video exist? Why will this, why will they leave this video and think about it for the next two weeks or tell their send it to their friend? I like to think about the feeling that you have when you watch it. Maybe this isn't the best example of that. But what is the viewer going to walk away? This isn't really like an intro. This is more like I'm telling my producer right now,

sell me on this idea. So that when we go to record it, we know exactly what we're trying to get out of this and that it ends up being how we planned. So in this case, is the kind of the, the main thing I would be feeling or wanting is, oh man, I really want the sort of exact playbook. Yep. Um, you know, in this case, the ten-step playbook, validated by Reddit post with 151 comments of how he's built these, you know, he builds SaaS apps to 200 KM or something like that.

That, that's the premise of this video is that, hey, I have this very specific 10-step playbook. And this is something that we found because he had written this awesome Reddit post about it. It was really like a simple 10-step playbook. If I do this, I do this, I do this, I do this, something that our audience really likes. So we build the whole video around that checklist. And that checklist almost becomes like a character in the video that we can further dive deeper

on. And this, the whole video, and this is another thing to kind of have it down here a little bit,

“is that every video has like a big idea. Like, why should this video exist?”

I don't want to tell the entire story of how, you know, he was born and how we grew up in all these things. I want to do it around one idea. And for this video specifically, it's the 10-step playbook. And then everything is built around that video because when the, yeah, that's something that our audience likes and is really valuable because he used it to actually build a great business off of. Gotcha. That's very cool. And then when you go to interview them, you're trying to extract,

you're trying to basically now fill in the blanks of this skeleton you already think is a winning video. Yep. Yep. Exactly. And I like to look at, I mean, one thing that I like to look at is successful social media post, successful Reddit post, successful seminars or like talks that they gave out of conference. Those are all good bones for, and this is the checklist right here that he did. Are the 10-step process? Those are all great bones for any video. It's like how I like to

think about videos if they've done this sort of talk or, or they've written this before. It's always

always a great outline, I guess. So how many of these videos are you doing a week? We're aiming for it's two to three right now. So we're making two or three of these a week. That's a lot. Yeah. Yeah, it seems like you kind of undersold yourself at the beginning when you're like, you know,

“I stuck with it. I think obviously consistency and sticking with it mattered. But it sounds like”

also what really mattered was building a system. Yep. To be able to do this at scale, right, a team and a system, you had to do that. I would say most creators don't know how to build a system. Right. And it sounds like you found the growth, the growth hypothesis, which was, if I put these types of stories on YouTube, there's always a YouTube will keep feeding me more and more audience for this type of content. And I can grow that way versus SEO versus anything else. Right.

Like one of the frameworks I always liked. But I think it's kind of gone out of style. It was Eric

Rhys when you did the Lean Startup. And he said basically a company, you really have two main hypotheses. There's the value hypotheses. So if I do this, this will be valuable to this type of person. Right. It will help this type of person with this problem. And then he goes, you have the growth hypotheses, which is totally separate from the value one, which is, if I do XYZ, that will create sustainable compounding growth. And that growth hypothesis can be, if I run Facebook

ads, I can spend this much money acquire users for this much and generate this much to reinvest to buy the next user. Yeah. It can be SEO. It can be YouTube. It can be anything. Right. Where you're going to basically have some hypothesis as to how you grow. And he's basically like,

but the growth one wrong, you've built a very, very small business. If you get both of those right,

you just have to be an idiot to not get the money part right at the end. And I always liked that

framing. And so whenever I do a project, I sort of try to think about what's our value hypothesis.

“And I'd call it a hypothesis because we don't know until we go test it. And what's our growth hypothesis?”

We don't know until we go test it. What do you do with the money once you've already made it? This is a question, Sean and I asked our successful guests all the time. And the reason we ask it is because if you are successful, if you do have a little bit of money information on how to spend or invest your money, it's actually really hard to come by. And I know this because instead of Hampton, which is my community of founders, people ask this question all the time. People have made

$10 or $50 million. How do you spend it? How do you invest it? And so to help solve this problem and

answer this question, I actually interviewed 80 plus founders. Guys, like Scott Galaway, Alex Ramosi,

Brian Johnson, people who are worth $50, $100, even billions of dollars. And we got them to reveal everything. So their networks, how much they pay themselves, their monthly expenses, their portfolio, things like that. And we turn these 80 interviews into one document. And I don't think you can find

“this type of information literally anywhere on the internet. And it's completely free. So if you”

want to see behind the networks of people who are worth billions of dollars and their portfolios or expenses, everything, you go to joinhampton.com/reveal. Again, joinhampton.com/reveal. Check it out. I have a feeling you have a bunch of other like system-related stuff up in that chrome window with all those tasks. Yes. And yes, I personally am very interested in seeing you click around. Can you do that? Yeah, let's do it. So yeah, as Sean said, I'm a big fan of systems and processes.

It may be that's just like my more like logical brain, former software engineer, spreadsheet, kind of guy. So I try to build my company around a lot of systems. And I had a note in here that I wanted to talk about, which was busy people are the biggest losers. I used to be in corporate nine to five. And I hated when I hated urgency culture. I hated getting emails in one-off Slack messages. I worked at Deloitte and you'd get an email. And then all of a sudden,

you're working at Deal the whole weekend. I hated that. So I knew that when I started a company, I didn't want to build my business like that at all. I wanted to build it around systems. A synchronous systems, so that I could play tennis every day at noon. And also my people that work for me enjoy that, too. It's not for everyone, but this is how we operate. So everything exists on a notion. So right here, we have our all tasks that need to get done in the company,

are simply assigned out to people. And there's no like real like deadline or meetings about them. There are just things to get done when you can manage that Deep Work session that you meant to do that day. You go and do those. And we're good. As long as you get the stuff done that we plan to, and we hit our KPIs and all these things, you can work whenever you'd like. And everything is here in this notion. Additionally, we have all of our production for our company, including YouTube,

Instagram, Twitter, everything, everything we post on any sort of social media. We track it all inside notion here. And we have freelancers helping edit the content and create the content. Who manages this board? I would say, well, I have a producer like producer light. I call him who sort of started to manage this more. But I built this over. I wanted to get more serious about repurposing. So I built this over like course of like two, three months.

Built it. It's more just like created the spreadsheet and created the processes. And then I sort of handed it over in the last two months to someone else. So I have a light producer who manages this right now. Light as in part time or the light as in half a person. A little guy. Both. A little guy. A little guy who works a little amount. Yeah. All right. I love the busy people are the biggest losers because I think busy is a badge of honor

in a lot of different circles. And what a what a terrible badge to to be proud of. Yes, in my opinion. I remember my buddy came and worked for me. And he used to work in in investment banking. And he would he kept saying this phrase that we were like, dude, Sam, what is this thing you keep saying? And he would say, he's like, yeah, he's like, can he get that to me, ASAP or sooner? And I was just like, dude, what is ASAP means as soon as possible? What does ASAP

or sooner mean? And he's like, I don't know. We just always say that in investment banking. And I was like,

what a, what a like fighter flight. What a cortisol phrase. He didn't just call me. He's injecting in your company. Yeah. You know, everyone has that friend when you hang out with them. And they're always on their phone. They're always on work emails. They're dropping out to take calls. I remember when I was a

“kid. I was on a hike with my buddy and his dad was on the hike. I'll never forget”

this. I was probably like nine years old or something like that. And his dad was just on the phone for the entire hike. Really, and there's like really nice hike. And I was like, man, I just never

a bad business or a flaw systems flaw or an overextension of yourself. It's usually not like you're just handed that. What's that US thing up there? Yeah, US is cool. Entrepreneur operating

system is, you guys are probably familiar with that, right? Yeah, I've never actually done it. Do

do you do it same at Hampton? Do you pay for US? Well, you don't have the pay for it. You could read a book and just make your own shit. No, but like, people pay for the implementer and all that stuff. Yeah, I paid an implementer for a one day seminar with our leadership team. And he was like 20 grand or something? No, no. It was like $3,000 for one day. Oh, you got like the clearance integrator or what would you do? No, like I, like someone who was like a certified like

implementer or something, I was going to hire him and then I showed him my pre-work and he's like, well, you guys are actually almost there. Let's just meet with your whole team for six hours and I'll teach everyone how to do it and then we'll go over your current rocks and I'll show you the

“right format and then you're good to go. It looks like, is this the first company you did it at?”

No, I do that. The hustle as well. EOS, specifically? Yeah, I'm a fan of it. I think that I'm, are you like a, I swear by it kind of guy or where are you at with it? I swear by a trend. We use like a transformer version. So for example, EOS for those listening, it's an operating system run your company. The book is called Traction by his guy named Gino. Gino, by the way, Shona's

has to come on a whole bunch. If we want, we can invite him on. But basically, the crux of the whole thing

is your L10 meeting, which happens every for us every Monday at three o'clock. It's two or one half or two hour meeting and each team has some number or metric or goal that they are assigned to, and then task below to reach that goal and we go over each week. What's going well? What's not going well and how to improve. Typically EOS is divided quarterly. We actually at Hampton do ours every six weeks. So we do rock planning every six weeks as opposed to quarterly. I think quarterly is too long

for startup. But so you can kind of like manipulate it to like fit your needs. But over the course of many, many years, we've kind of made our own. I like the six weeks. That we do it quarterly, but it takes too long. It takes too long. It's like with a startup, but with a startup, like you get, you can get new information relative to click and so what we do is we actually each team actually only, we try to limit it to two rocks. So each team just gets two important rocks and that's six weeks,

and then we change them or keep them, but whatever we want to do every six weeks. And then you have a scorecard. And what we're looking at is your scorecard where you go over every single week. What's going on? So this looks like a scorecard that you go over at your L10 meeting. Yep. It gives you nice, for someone like me with no management experience and I have an MBA, don't know how to manage people. It was nice. We've been doing it for like two over two years. It's nice to just have a basic,

I don't think it's the perfect system. But I think it's a system for someone who's a creator. Like we talked about earlier, who wants to start building more of a business or someone who's going from solo-preneur like me that didn't intend to build a business, it's a good rails or system for KPIs planning and it's not perfect by any means, but it is A system. And most people just need A system. Can I say a quick disclaimer? Because I used to be the kind of guy who

somebody I'd be watching something or I'd hear a talk and somebody who'd be like, "Oh, I use this system." They gave me some acronym and then they're like, "Yeah, this is what I do. This is so good

“for me." And I'd be like, "Ah, that's what I've been missing." That's the tool. I was one tool”

away. I was one framework away, one acronym away from success. And turns out, spoiler, I was never

one acronym away from success. And there's a specific type of person and a specific moment in time when you need a system tool. And that is when you have growth, but you have a growing headache. So the business is growing, healthily, but your headache is growing, you know, maybe even more than that or proportionately to that. And I think what most people have is a business that is not really growing enough and then they try to add systems and processes and it actually slows them down

and they don't even grow faster because growth often is like a matter of like striking a vase like drilling for oil. You don't need to be super efficient. You just need to find the oil. And sometimes that's brute force. Sometimes it's a little bit of gut instinct. Sometimes it's a little bit of cowboyness to trying different little experiments. But I think, you know, I just want to say that a lot because I wasted a lot of time when I actually needed growth and then I adopted systems

of people who had growth. And I've conflated the two. I thought the system creates the growth.

“No, no. The system manages your headache as you grow. That's how it's been for me at least my”

person's experience. I'll take the other side of that, which is I think that there are times where the system does create growth because I think typically what happens when you have companies,

of either luck or you knew how to do one thing well or for a variety of reasons. But what I have

found is whenever I hit those that like three, whenever I get to like three million in revenue,

I then like think like, okay, I need to now go do this new marketing channel or do this new thing.

“And oftentimes the actual answer is, no, you should actually do less things and just do this”

one marketing thing over and over and over again. You're saying at three million. I'm saying, most people are not even at the three million. Most people don't get the three million. Most people who watch this or are going to watch any type of content on YouTube are pre-getting one, two, three million in revenue. And for those people, I think that's the sucker like spot where you think you might be a tool away. So I totally agree with you. If you've already got the thing,

that's again, you have healthy growth. If you've gotten to one, two, three million in revenue. And from there, you need systems to scale, right? But you don't need systems to scale if you don't have a working thing. Or even when your team size gets kind of above four people, you kind of like have to have something. But yeah, I hear what you're saying. You want to show something else? I want to ask you a question about this blog post. In December 2020, and maybe

you could take us back to like how the business was doing back then. You wrote a blog post that says 2020, I am my own greatest obstacle. Yeah. I already, I haven't even read the post. I already

“nodded my head because I think every entrepreneur gets there to this realization. Can you explain”

where you were at this blog post and what this blog post means? Yep. This all, this blog post all revolves around a single week in my life where I is post-COVID. I was about three years in a building the business. And what most people don't know, they think, oh, you just built Star Destroyer and you grew that. Well, no, I was the guy with like 10 side projects. And I had two businesses that were like, I was splitting my time on and then other side projects and other

personal brand and doing all these things. Star Destroyer was making $8,000. These are sort of high level numbers. But it was making $8,000 a month. And then this other business I was building was like a software plug and type app was doing $2,000 a month. I thought this was going to be a bigger than Star Destroyer because I didn't think Star Destroyer is going to be big. And I was so burnt out that I said, I heard about this thing week by Bill Gates where you go off to a cabin and you

just think about stuff. So I couldn't afford a cabin in the woods or anything at that point. And I decided, okay, I'm just going to go get in my car. I'm going to get a drive across the country and I'm going to think through that process, through that week of not being on the phone, you know, this is no social media and nothing. I couldn't even check my email. I realized that Star Destroyer was the business I should be going all in on. This is the business that I

was meant to be build. I'm throwing basically no time into this business that's doing $8,000 a

month. And I'm throwing all my time into this business that I'm supposed to be building. This is how I get into YC and I do all these things. I should, I'm putting 20% of my effort into 80% of the revenue. Let's just drop everything else. And in that moment, after that week, after I realized all this, I basically sold that business, stopped working on anything else. And I went all in on Star Destroyer. And this is three years after starting it. Best decision I ever made, obviously. And I don't know

if I would have made that decision if I didn't take that week off. And essentially, I doubled the businesses revenue in a single month after that. And then everything went up after that. And this probably why I'm here today. So I'm my company and talking to you guys is that I realized that I was the biggest obstacle, right? If I, I was limiting my own success by thinking I could do everything. I love that. That's, that's very powerful. What sounds right on paper and what's actually right

“for me might be two different things. Because a lot of people would tell you, you should do the”

SaaS business. We're occurring revenue. It's amazing. You know, you could do this plug-in and you, it's software and all these great things. But you kind of realize like the thing I'm good at, the thing I enjoy, the thing that has momentum is this other thing. And if I keep splitting

focus, yeah, I'll never know. There's something that I like to cause, you have your ego business.

This is, this is the business you're supposed to build, the business that you look up to other people who they built those. Or that's the business that you're supposed to start, whatever. But actually follow the money. What's making money? What are you truly good at making? What are you meant to build? Think it's like a lot of people watching this. Maybe think about that. What's the ego business and what's the actual business?

So for this thing, you just drove 3,000 miles. Just like, yeah, I'm looking at the map. It looks like you started, where did you start Salt Lake City? Yeah, I was living with my mom at the time. So the shadow of my mom for housing me in this time when I was trying to figure things out. But yeah, I went from Salt Lake or up through the down to the West Coast and then up and around back to Salt Lake.

land around up to Jackson Hole, but in a circle format. Being 29 and living at home, and I think

“in this ball, you say you met a girl later on. So I assume you're single 29, living at home,”

trying to like do this thing. That's definitely not the most glamorous place to be in. Yeah. I was more just, I would do anything. I worked in corporate for five years. I worked at Deloitte. I worked at some startups. I worked at some big companies. And my motivation, I was so sick and tired of that. I think a lot of entrepreneurs just start early. They started 17. They started 18. I actually went through college in the corporate life.

So starting this business was more about freedom. And I knew I would do anything. I moved to Asia because it could be like $1,000 a month. I lived with my mom because I would, I could not go back to a regular job. That was my main motivation. And then I would say the

“business started working out. And that's why I live with my mom. So check this out. This is your”

monthly revenue at the time. So it looks like for the year preceding your think week. You were

basically plateaued from August 2019 to mid 2020, August 2020, June 2020. And you're

basically at a K-month, for a year flat. If you do the thing week, you make the decision six months later. You're now over 25,000 a month. And the trajectory, you changed the trajectory of the business with that. Yep. I think that's a great story. Also in this blog, I like, you know, you were talking about like, you know, how you felt, you're like, I know, I had so many projects and tasks I know I should do. But at the same time, I felt unmotivated to start any of them.

I mean, this really weird spot right now. I don't feel motivated about work. Nothing feels

“super important to work on. I don't feel like tweeting or writing. I don't want to read any books,”

you know, kind of burnout essentially. Yeah. And, you know, the solution to burnout wasn't like, I need to take six months off. It was like, I needed to do something that's just more in a alignment with what I'm trying to do and simplify rather than keep adding. Yep. Exactly. That's cool. I will congrats. Congrats on all the success. Congrats on, you know, things for us that this thing closes. We have to air this episode anyways. Yeah. And it will be a cautionary

tale of a county who took us for the hat. Yeah. But thank you guys. Yeah. You guys are huge

inspirations to me. Didn't listen to my first million. Obviously, got a lot of inspiration to do

what we do through everything that you've done both in my first million and out of it. So you guys are awesome. Keep doing what you're doing. You're the shit. Thanks for doing this, man. Thank you guys for having me. I feel lucky. I feel lucky. Oh, check out Pat. Check out starter story on YouTube. And yeah, all the things. That's it. That's the pod. Alright, my friends. I have a new podcast for you guys to check out. It's called Content

is Profit. And it's hosted by Luis and Fanzi, Kameo. After years of building content teams and frameworks for companies like Red Bull and Orange Theory Fitness, Luis and Fanzi are on a mission to bridge the gap between content and revenue. In each episode, you're going to hear from top entrepreneurs and creators. And you're going to hear them share their secrets and strategies to turn their content into profit. So you can check out content is profit wherever you get

your podcast.