How to Become A Billion Dollar Creator with Nathan Barry, Founder of ConvertKit

Shaan Puri (@ShaanVP) and Sam Parr (@theSamParr) are joined by Nathan Barry (@NathanBarry) to discuss ConvertKit and how Nathan has grown it to over $200M, how to become a billion dollar creator, why he refuses to give Shaan a price discount, and much more. ----- * Do you love MFM and want to see Sam and Shaan's smiling faces? Subscribe to our Youtube channel. * Want more insights like MFM? Check out Shaan's newsletter. ----- Show Notes: (00:25) - Nathan's real estate investment making $15k a month (03:10) - His background (10:00) - Discussion on whether or not annual plans are worth it (15:50) - The billion dollar creator and the best ways to monetize (50:00) - Nathan discusses some of his failures and what he would do if he were starting over (01:01:30) - Shaan asking Nathan for a discount ----- Past guests on My First Million include Rob Dyrdek, Hasan Minhaj, Balaji Srinivasan, Jake Paul, Dr. Andrew Huberman, Gary Vee, Lance Armstrong, Sophia Amoruso, Ariel Helwani, Ramit Sethi, Stanley Druckenmiller, Peter Diamandis, Dharmesh Shah, Brian Halligan, Marc Lore, Jason Calacanis, Andrew Wilkinson, Julian Shapiro, Kat Cole, Codie Sanchez, Nader Al-Naji, Steph Smith, Trung Phan, Nick Huber, Anthony Pompliano, Ben Askren, Ramon Van Meer, Brianne Kimmel, Andrew Gazdecki, Scott Belsky, Moiz Ali, Dan Held, Elaine Zelby, Michael Saylor, Ryan Begelman, Jack Butcher, Reed Duchscher, Tai Lopez, Harley Finkelstein, Alexa von Tobel, Noah Kagan, Nick Bare, Greg Isenberg, James Altucher, Randy Hetrick and more. ----- Additional episodes you might enjoy: • #224 Rob Dyrdek - How Tracking Every Second of His Life Took Rob Drydek from 0 to $405M in Exits • #209 Gary Vaynerchuk - Why NFTS Are the Future • #178 Balaji Srinivasan - Balaji on How to Fix the Media, Cloud Cities & Crypto #169 - How One Man Started 5, Billion Dollar Companies, Dan Gilbert's Empire, & Talking With Warren Buffett • ​​​​#218 - Why You Should Take a Think Week Like Bill Gates • Dave Portnoy vs The World, Extreme Body Monitoring, The Future of Apparel Retail, "How Much is Anthony Pompliano Worth?", and More • How Mr Beast Got 100M Views in Less Than 4 Days, The $25M Chrome Extension, and More

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

  Like you gotta choose the business model that's right for you. But answer the question of like, okay, can this audience that I have make me a billionaire?

• 0:19Speaker 00

  I have one house that's gonna pull off like 15,000 a month and it's just a single house. So you'll beat it by quite a bit.

• 0:27Sam Parr?

  No way, really? What's, what's the house worth?

• 0:31Speaker 00

  I bought it for 900K.

• 0:34Sam Parr?

  That's ridiculous.

• 0:34Speaker 00

  And it's renting out now at 700 a night.

• 0:38Shaan Puri?

  Where, where is it located?

• 0:39Speaker 00

  Yeah. Uh, it's in, in Boise, uh, like right next to the Boise State University Stadium.

• 0:47Shaan Puri?

  So do you get like basically like football tourists or what do you, who, who's renting this thing for $700 a night in Boise?

• 0:53Sam Parr?

  We're live, by the way, Nathan, we're live.

• 0:56Speaker 00

  Great.

• 0:57Sam Parr?

  No, for real.

• 1:00Speaker 00

  Who's renting it? So you get like all graduation, everyone coming into, you know, tour the university or whatever else. And then, um, uh, just anyone coming into downtown. It's like a five bedroom, brand new construction. Sam, it actually looks like the kitchen looks somewhat similar to, uh, the place you just linked me to, so.

• 1:18Shaan Puri?

  So why haven't you bought like five more?

• 1:19Speaker 00

  Shelves and the tile backs wash and all that.

• 1:21Shaan Puri?

  Why haven't you bought like five more in the same area?

• 1:22Sam Parr?

  That's my question. Yeah, it's a million dollars. It's a million dollar or 900,000 or whatever you said, under a million dollar house that's making 20, 15 grand a month. Why don't you buy 50 of them?

• 1:33Speaker 00

  Well, I, I just bought this one and so it's not making that yet, but that's what we're like, the bookings for the summer. So it's at, uh, it just did 8,000 for January locked in. And then the summer bookings are coming in at like quite a bit higher. Like, so the January ones, you know, are last minute and Boise's slow there. But, uh, yeah, the summer ones are coming in at eight, nine, a thousand dollars a night, 800, 900 or a thousand a night. Which is wild and we haven't even put a hot tub on it yet. So I just bought a hot tub today and, uh, so we'll get that in there. I should be able to charge a little bit more and it's gonna be good.

• 2:13Shaan Puri?

  Wow. So we should start. We should intro, intro you.

• 2:17Sam Parr?

  Well, yeah. So you're, we're, we're live. That might go live. This is Nathan Barry. Nathan Barry. I've known Nathan since a Gumroad meetup, Sean. I went to a Gumroad meetup in like, for real. I'm not joking.

• 2:29Shaan Puri?

  2012.

• 2:30Sam Parr?

  Maybe 2013. 2012, 2013. Nathan was doing Gumroad. He had this book called Authority, right? Authority?

• 2:37Shaan Puri?

  Yep.

• 2:38Sam Parr?

  And I don't even remember what the book was about. Just making a living online. But then you also had graphic design stuff. And you had a really cool blog and you, you sold all types of stuff. But I've been homies with you for a while. And then you launched this thing called ConvertKit. And I was like, Nathan, like, the other thing's working. Just do that. And anyway, now it's a business that both Sean and I, I think are.

• 2:58Shaan Puri?

  I didn't end up, I didn't end up doing it. There's some mechanics problem with the way that.

• 3:03Speaker 00

  We can get into it. We're an LLC and it gets complicated as like pass through funds and stuff like that. But yeah. But Sam, you're.

• 3:12Sam Parr?

  I'm in the cool club and basically his business ConvertKit does like 26, I think, million dollars in recurring revenue. It's like a MailChimp competitor that's better and different. Their, their revenue is all completely live. So if you Google ConvertKit revenue, you can like see the revenue. 29.

• 3:28Shaan Puri?

  Do you regret now that your business is actually kicking ass? Do you feel like, I kind of wish this wasn't all super transparent? Or, you know, because it's good early on. Transparency is great early on. It gets you a bunch of people interested. Then when you start winning, you know, you're giving more value than you're getting back usually by that, by doing that.

• 3:45Speaker 00

  Yeah. So I think it's a great idea if it's for a mission reason and a terrible idea if it's for like a marketing reason. And I actually had two friends who sat me down at one point and they're like, Nathan, this is an intervention. Take down your like public metrics page and which they were right, like they had talked to competitors who were like, wow, this is so helpful. Like strolling through and they're like, you know, your competitors are doing this, right? I'm like, I know. But really it's like, it's a mission thing of the whole mission for the company is to help creators earn a living. And so if we can put this public blueprint out there, that's not just like the snapshot in time where, you know, you've done it with companies where you're going through and you're like, oh, they said here they're at 10 million. You know, you're like trying to piece together the trajectory. We all have the same spreadsheets.

• 4:31Speaker 00

  And so. Like actually doing it in real time means that someone can be like, okay, I'm at 50k MRR. Churn is absolutely brutal right now. I wonder what ConvertKit's churn was when they were at 50k. Right? And you can go back and you can find the date range and be like, oh, in this time, here's all of their metrics. Here's how fast they're growing and everything. And so it's like this, for anyone who wants it, it's this masterclass where you have to dig in and find the data, but you can find everything about our business. And my hope is that it's like breadcrumbs that every future entrepreneur who wants to recreate.

• 5:04Shaan Puri?

  How much, how much traffic does that?

• 5:05Speaker 00

  Hopefully in another industry.

• 5:07Shaan Puri?

  Do you know?

• 5:07Speaker 00

  What's that?

• 5:08Shaan Puri?

  How much traffic does that page get?

• 5:11Speaker 00

  I don't know. It's not actually even our page. It's convertkit.baremetrics.com.

• 5:16Shaan Puri?

  Right.

• 5:16Speaker 00

  And it's not even ours. So

• 5:19Shaan Puri?

  Wow.

• 5:20Speaker 00

  Presumably not that much.

• 5:21Shaan Puri?

  So you're for real not using it for marketing. If you don't even know how much traffic it gets. Okay. Now I believe you. But when you said the mission thing, I have a, I have a system of tuning out whenever anybody says values, mission, vision, things like that. I'm just like, ah, by default, I do not believe anything you're about to say for the next 30 seconds.

• 5:42Sam Parr?

  How many, how many people work there now?

• 5:45Speaker 00

  69.

• 5:47Sam Parr?

  Because when you, you wrote this blog post two years, I forget, I've been reading your blog for so long, I don't remember the years, but you wrote a blog post and you're like, oh, we are making, let's say $8 million a year, but we basically had $20,000 in the bank. Or that's, I don't remember the exact numbers, but it was almost as extreme as that. Right?

• 6:06Speaker 00

  Yeah. So the company's totally self-funded. There's no outside capital. And so when we hit like this period of rapid growth, we grew from 2,000 a month to 100,000 a month in 12 months. And, you know, and that was just on 50 grand that I'd put in. We spent all of that money. And so what happened is the company was growing and profitable, but we were doing like 3% profit margins. And so we've gotten down to the point where we had, I think like $10,000 to $12,000 in the bank and like that was growing, but we were like, expenses were increasing by so much more that like our days worth of expenses was getting shorter and shorter. And so that got super scary. You just want to know, okay, random story.

• 6:51Speaker 00

  So I think you all know Andrew Warner.

• 6:55Shaan Puri?

  MixerG.

• 6:56Speaker 00

  I was at a MixerG meetup in San Francisco, like he would do these Scotch nights and

• 7:03Speaker 00

  After one of those, like, I think we were walking out of the building and he's like, you know, that kind of pulls me aside. He's like, did you seem super stressed? And, and I was like, yeah, like, and I kind of told him the financial situation. And we were like, our bank balance was growing, but you know, you're like now paying all these people and you have no money. And so I told him about that and, and he said, okay, here's what we're gonna do. I'm gonna wire you $25,000 tomorrow. You're going, if you need the money, spend it. Do whatever you, whatever you want with it. Whenever you feel right, like, pay me back. Or if you don't need it, like, just put it in a savings account, like, just let it be in, you know, like, an insurance blanket for you. And then, you know, wire it back at some point.

• 7:47Shaan Puri?

  Did you know him well?

• 7:48Speaker 00

  The only thing, if you, uh, we'd hung out in person, I think, twice before. So I knew him a little bit and I'd been on the podcast.

• 7:54Sam Parr?

  And what were you gonna say? The only thing? Why?

• 7:57Speaker 00

  Oh, the thing he said is like, if you do decide to raise funding, like, convert that into, you know, like, I'll be the first person in for that. If not, wire it back.

• 8:05Shaan Puri?

  What a smart move!

• 8:07Speaker 00

  Okay, but the thing that he said-

• 8:08Shaan Puri?

  That's such a good move!

• 8:10Speaker 00

  The thing that he said is, the only thing that will piss me off on this is if you ever try to pay me interest on it. Like, don't try to make this a loan in any way. And so I held on to the money. It sat in the bank account for like, eight or nine months. We grew our bank account to the point that we had plenty of savings in the bank and all of that. And I wired the money back and like, Andrew is forever one of those people where I'm like, thank you. Just because he pulled me aside and was like, dude, you seem stressed. And he was like, let me loan you a security blanket.

• 8:40Shaan Puri?

  That's one of the coolest stories I've heard. That's, frankly, that's amazing. Shout out to Andrew. We gotta have, we gotta have Andrew on now just for that story. We've joked about it before, but we should have him on for sure.

• 8:53Sam Parr?

  Because if he's done it to you, he's probably done like some weird stuff like that to a bunch of people. So that's, he's probably had some interesting stories.

• 9:00Speaker 00

  Yeah, I mean, he knows everyone too. So he's

• 9:02Shaan Puri?

  I'm looking at your guys' revenue chart. There's a huge spike every November. What did you do is like a Black Friday deal? Or what? What causes this huge?

• 9:11Speaker 00

  Yeah, we can talk about whether that's a good idea or not. So early on, right? When you need cash, the thing that you do in SaaS is you push annual plans, right? Because you have this cash flow problem. And so we started pushing annual plans as part of our Black Friday sale, you know, to bring forward a bunch of that cash. And so we kind of just kept doing that. And then what it did is it aligned a whole bunch of

• 9:34Shaan Puri?

  renewals.

• 9:35Speaker 00

  You know, annual payments right around that same time. So it just keeps getting bigger and bigger, right? Until it gets to the point that you're pulling in like four and a half million dollars in a single month. You're also getting all the churn at the same time. So I don't know that, like, I like, we're not going to keep doing.

• 9:49Shaan Puri?

  By the way, there's so many things like that in business that I'm like, we're doing this? I can't really say if it's a good idea or a bad idea. I wish I could. But we're just, we're just gonna keep doing it for now. And then like, I just kind of feel like it's gonna work out. But I could totally see that, like, we didn't need to do any of this, or that this, like, long term is hurting us more than the short term gain.

• 10:11Speaker 00

  What's an example?

• 10:12Shaan Puri?

  Um, like in my D to C business, I was kind of thinking about this is we do this model that like drops new products all the time. Every single week, we drop new products. And it's great because it causes this sales spike, but it also puts you on this treadmill of new products that you have to release every week. And that means you gotta do photo shoots of those products every week. And then that means that you have to have inventory, whether you sold your previous inventory or not, you gotta buy new inventory. Like most brands, they don't do that. They only buy new inventory when they're out of the old stuff. So even though inventory sucks out cash, you know, it's like, well, I'm buying it because I there's I'm sold out. We're not even doing that. But on the other hand, it's creating like, when I look at his chart, it's creating this spike

• 10:54Shaan Puri?

  every single week. And I'm like, okay, so that's good. But these other three things are bad. And like, I don't know how to weigh these against each other because they're like in different categories that speak different languages and on different time scales. So it's just hard to, hard to know if this is like a dumb idea or a bad idea or a good idea.

• 11:11Speaker 00

  I think the thing to look for in that is something that served you before might not serve you now. So like that served us really well for a period of time because it brought in this cash, you know, and you could tell the team like, hey, like payroll is good. We're set for a long time and it gives that level of comfort. And also, like in the early days, churn is often high in a business just because you don't have very many mature accounts. And so locking that in is really good. But then if you get to this long, you know, much later in the business, you're like, look, we're on a cruel accounting it, we don't really care. We have plenty of cash in the bank. Like the spike at this time doesn't make a difference. Right. And so just I'd watch for those things where it's like this served the business well for a while and it doesn't anymore.

• 11:53Sam Parr?

  Who built the early version?

• 11:55Speaker 00

  So I did all the design and front end development and then I hired freelancers to, you know, write the rails backend. And then that went okay. And then it went much better when I hired a long time friend named David to come on and like, full time, build it. But that was two years in.

• 12:14Sam Parr?

  And you and it was making enough, it was making enough money to pay him?

• 12:18Speaker 00

  No, that was where I paid him out of the 50 grand that I put in, which was like our, our savings and everything.

• 12:27Sam Parr?

  Seems like a pretty good return. I mean, 50K and you're able to get that built and turns into what it is now. Or at least it got you to enough revenue to pay people.

• 12:36Speaker 00

  Yeah. Yeah. And I mean, it's wild what you can do when, when you're doing a lot of the design and code yourself, you know, so you gotta count that in the costs. But, but, but yeah, and then you just fund it with, that makes it sound easier than it is. But, you know, you fund it with growth.

• 12:53Sam Parr?

  Simple, not easy.

• 12:54Speaker 00

  Yeah. Simple, not easy. That's right.

• 12:56Sam Parr?

  So Sean, Nathan, he's got this blog post called like, how to, how to build wealth. I think it's called, we have another blog post, ladders of wealth. He's got this actually, this other great blog post called the billion dollar creator, I think it's called, or the billion dollar blog.

• 13:11Shaan Puri?

  Let's do the billion dollar, let's do the billion dollar one. All right. Sorry, Sam. I didn't know where you're going with that.

• 13:16Sam Parr?

  Well, well, I just want to say, so this whole thing about transparency. So Nathan, I don't think you publicize this, but I'm on this email list and every month or week, probably month, I think, he sends out, dude, it's the craziest shit I've seen. He sends out his entire net worth and you could see like how much cash he has, how much, like which stocks he owns of and of how much, like his angel investments, like you see his entire, all of his finances.

• 13:46Shaan Puri?

  I gotta get on this list. This sounds amazing.

• 13:51Shaan Puri?

  I might be on that.

• 13:52Speaker 00

  It's all the content that I wanted to, that I wanted like other people to publish. Like Sam, you talk about Fat Fire and like, that's a fantastic subreddit. And I just want like more of those conversations because I've written a ton about people who have, or like how to get from, say like zero to a hundred thousand dollars on the internet. You know, that's, you mentioned my book, Authority. That's what that was. But like, once you kind of get to the point where you're making a hundred thousand, two hundred thousand or more online, like people don't talk about what you do with their money. Because, you know, if you do that, someone's like, oh, you know, like there's Sam just bragging about how much money he has again, or, you know, something like that. And so I was like, okay, I'm gonna make a private newsletter and I just

• 14:33Speaker 00

  charge people a hundred bucks, like just to filter out the, the, anyone who's gonna complain about it, I guess, or say that I'm bragging. And then just say, I'm gonna write about all the stuff that I wish I knew when I made like my first 250 grand online. And so.

• 14:48Sam Parr?

  The way that I, I describe your blog or that email is, it's kind of like face tattoos and cornrows. I think it's super cool when other people have them, but I don't want it. Like, you know, not, not for me, but I, I, it's cool when others have them.

• 15:04Speaker 00

  There's only 200 people on that list. So it's, it's a small group right now. Dude, I don't know, man. But Sean, what was your question about?

• 15:11Shaan Puri?

  Well, I wanted to kind of walk through the framework here. So you have this blog post that's kind of like, I know you worked on that for a while, kind of shaping your thinking here. And then we also have Sam, who's somewhat bearish on the idea of the creator economy, thinks it's kind of overhyped, over buzzword. And you're Mr. Creator Economy in a way, Nathan. So I think this will be, this might be good. But let's walk.

• 15:34Speaker 00

  I don't think our opinions are opposites, by the way. I would, I would say probably our opinions are not opposite.

• 15:39Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, for the sake of an argument, let's just, let's just walk through. So you basically have these four rules of building a billion dollar audience. So I guess like first, why did you even want to do this? Like, kind of like, what got you interested in this? And then let's walk through the four.

• 15:54Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 15:56Speaker 00

  So the article asks a question, like the whole premise of it. And that is, what is the most profitable place to direct attention? Right? So everything we do, right? We're recording a podcast now, whatever you're doing on, on TikTok, or if you're a movie star, everything else, right? You have attention and brands want it. They're willing to sponsor, you know, all of this stuff. And so it's like, okay, you have the opportunity to point that attention somewhere. What's the most profitable way to do that long term? Because you look at people,

• 16:28Speaker 00

  you know, maybe who are taking sponsorships, right? Five grand to, you know, to sponsor the newsletter, or, you know, 500 bucks for a sponsored

• 16:37Speaker 00

  Instagram post or anything like that. And that's actually not that profitable. And then when you dive in, you learn that the most profitable thing to do is to create your own product and to drive that attention to something where you actually build equity long term. So it's like a longer article talking about that. But like the richest movie stars, you know, like take Jessica Alba, for example, right? She has made a lot of money from movies, but the bulk of her wealth is from starting a company using, you know, being the spokesperson for her own company. And then my other favorite example would be Ryan Reynolds, who You know, he's doing ads for other people and probably getting paid a million bucks here, $10 million there, you know, that kind of thing. And at some point, he goes like, forget

• 17:22Speaker 00

  that. I'm going to buy my own companies with Mint Mobile and Aviation Gin, and I'm going to be my own spokesperson. So I don't get cash, I get equity. And so, you know, you just watch this process of people doing it over and over again. And that's actually my hypothesis with ConvertKit, right? Of I have attention on the internet through running a blog, and a newsletter and all of that. How do I want to monetize it? Sponsorships, eBooks, membership, a bunch of things? I'm like, nope, I want to monetize it through ConvertKit, building a SaaS company. Like, that's my version of the billion dollar creator. So that's the whole premise of the article. And it's like,

• 18:03Shaan Puri?

  So you have a couple of examples. So, okay, so rule number one is you have to build more than a personal brand. So what does that mean? You give the example of Jessica Alba, of Mark from Primal Kitchen. So what is the nuance here? It's like, it's not just your face, your name, you need to actually create a brand around, around your lifestyle or your interests? Is that it?

• 18:24Sam Parr?

  By the way, Sean, Primal Kitchen is the sugar-free ketchup company that I like. So this guy named Mark, he's like, kind of looks like the 65-year-old version of me, but like even more jacked. And he like has a health blog, and he starts selling ketchup, and he sells that for like $300 million.

• 18:41Speaker 00

  Yeah. So I mean, what Mark did with, I mean, his blog was called Mark's Daily Apple. And it was like the leading, you know, like paleo kind of health blog in that space. And a blog like that, you know, when he was doing this, 2006, 2010, that kind of thing, you can make a million bucks a year off of that blog. And he was, right? But you play that forward. And that's, it's all about him, all about his name, all that, right? His name is in the name of the site. But you can build substantial wealth that way. What he did instead is he started Primal Kitchen, you know, Kickstartered this whole brand by saying like, I have the most popular site in the space.

• 19:21Speaker 00

  Let me, you know, make these paleo-friendly ketchup, mayonnaise, that kind of thing. And then he goes, you know,

• 19:29Shaan Puri?

  Do you know how big his audience was? Do you know how much traffic he had at the time?

• 19:32Sam Parr?

  It wasn't huge, huge. Like it was no bigger than ours.

• 19:36Speaker 00

  Yeah, 100,000 subscribers on the email list, maybe?

• 19:39Shaan Puri?

  100,000 was kind of like trusted audience size to kick off this thing.

• 19:43Speaker 00

  Yeah, you gotta remember, audiences were a lot smaller, like even just 2015, 2012, like that kind of timeframe. But yeah, then he sells it to Kraft for 200 million dollars. You can't sell a blog to, like a blog doesn't sell for 200 million, you know? Like all of these things. And the crazy thing is he still owns the audience, right? The thing that Kickstartered this whole product, he still owns. He can sell off that whole brand, talking to him at a conference. You know, he's just on to the next thing, figuring out what he wants to do next. He didn't have to sell his name and whole identity with it. And Kraft is thrilled with their purchase.

• 20:21Shaan Puri?

  Kylie Cosmetics is probably the biggest one that people know about because you have tons of attention through Instagram, TikTok, whatever, the TV show, whatever. And instead of just saying, hey, you can pay me, because people used to say, wow, you have to pay $25,000 for a tweet from Kim Kardashian. Or then that was 25,000, then it went up to like 250,000, then 2 million dollars for an Instagram post from,

• 20:46Sam Parr?

  Is it 2 million dollars?

• 20:47Shaan Puri?

  It got up to that range where it was like either hundreds of thousands or low millions to get like an actual like endorsement post from one of them. And so then, you know, cool, you can make a lot of money doing that, right? You can stack up quarter million dollars at a time. But Kylie Cosmetics was a billion dollar brand. So it's like, well, who wants to pay me to promote their products? Well, it's mostly like skincare products, makeup products. Or for Kim Kardashian, it's her shapewear, like, you know, like Khloe Kardashian, it was like, you know, fashion or whatever. So Khloe launches True American Jeans. Kim Kardashian launches, I think it's called, what was it? Skims? Is it like the shapewear brand?

• 21:29Sam Parr?

  Dude, Sean, you are on top of it. Keep going.

• 21:31Shaan Puri?

  Kylie, Kylie Cosmetics.

• 21:34Shaan Puri?

  Kanye, Yeezy shoes, right, Larry's like, they all turned to say, whoever is the most willing advertiser, actually you become my competitor and I'm going to launch my own brand, my own equity and have my own equity in this thing. And there's a guy in the NBA who gets made fun of for this, which is this guy LeVar Ball. I don't know if you guys know this guy, but basically he has three sons, all three wanted to make it to the NBA. And this guy's this like loud mouthed guy. They got like a reality show around them because they're sort of like the like, you know, basketball version of the Kardashians. There's three brothers and like a, a kind of an overbearing parent who is like, architecting their business strategy. And when they were gonna, the guy was going to get picked second in the draft and Nike offered him a contract and Adidas.

• 22:16Shaan Puri?

  And instead he created big baller brand, you know, triple B. He created his own shoe line. And like the shoes kind of sucked and like, you know, he didn't have the full business plan. And people were making fun of him for like, oh, wow. You turned down a guaranteed $10 million from Nike to like launch this thing. $10 million a year or whatever. And it's like, actually that was the right move. Now, maybe his execution was slightly poor, but it was actually the right move and, and a lot of these NBA players would have been better served had they done that themselves.

• 22:45Sam Parr?

  Well, how's it going now? The shoe thing?

• 22:48Shaan Puri?

  So the shoe thing is not going good. Basically the guy they had running it like, was like kind of stealing from them. So they fired him. That was like a, a black mark on it. The second brother never made it to the NBA. So that was like a little bit of an issue. The first brother kind of underperformed his potential at that time. And actually now that it would have worked because the, the youngest brother, the one who was like the, the, the one who's kind of like, he was kind of like a, a fuck boy a little bit. He was, you know, was like, had a goal, you know, like a diamond grill, had like a Lambo at 15. And was like, you know, he was kind of off the reservation. He actually turned out to be the best one. He's actually a star player. And if they had kind of built it properly around him, it probably would have done a lot better.

• 23:27Sam Parr?

  So I, Nathan, you'll get a kick out of this. So like three or four weeks ago, we did this thing where we said, we're going to give five G's to one or two, three people who take our clips, download it, post it on Tik Tok and get views. There's this kid. Who did it? And I don't remember how many views he got, but like our hashtag, I think, got 30 million views in like two weeks. And this guy accounted for a lot of them. And multiple of his videos got a thousand, or sorry, a million views. One video got so big that we drove 35,000 new members to the subreddit Fat Fire.

• 23:59Speaker 00

  I heard about that.

• 24:00Sam Parr?

  And they complained. And I was like, reached out to this kid. I'm like, who are you? And he replies back with like, Michael at UMichigan.org, or something like that, or dot U, or whatever it is. And I'm like, wait, dude, are you in college? And he calls me and I FaceTime with him and he's in his dorm room. And he's young. He's still in college. He's in his university thing. And, and he's really cocky, not in a bad way, but he's like, he's got chutzpah. He goes, man, I knew I was gonna do this. I wanted to prove to you guys that I could do it. I want you to pay me money to do this now. And I'm gonna do this for other people. And we're gonna change the media game. And I'm gonna raise money. And I was like, okay, hold on, dude. Hear me out. And he goes, I'm gonna, I'm gonna go raise money for this thing. Do you wanna invest?

• 24:41Sam Parr?

  I go, bro, listen, you do not wanna raise money for this. Here's what you should do. You are so talented at this, that don't raise money for this, but get it big and start launching other stuff on top of it. And if you wanna raise money, raise money for that stuff. And own all, he owns this thing called like, um, I forget what it's called, Future, but he's got like eight handles now that have like, a million something followers. I'm like, no, no, no, don't raise money for this thing, man. Own that forever. And that's your piggy bank and your audience. Raise money for like this other thing that you wanna do and funnel it through there. But don't sell that thing, because I raised a little bit of money for my thing, which was like that. And I, I don't regret it, because I got the outcome that I wanted. But I do regret it, because it definitely, you're massively handicapped because of it.

• 25:26Speaker 00

  Yeah, well, and that's, I think such a good point, because you can have that platform to launch whatever you want. In the same way that, you know, Mark Sisson can use his platform to then go launch the next thing, right? He probably has contracts that say he can't compete in the exact same space. But he could do a fitness thing, or he could do something else, right? You have the ability.

• 25:49Shaan Puri?

  I was gonna give an example Conor McGregor is doing this pretty brilliantly in the UFC so like UFC gets knocked a lot because of they have like low fighter pay right like the the percentage of revenue that they give to their fighters is way lower than other sports NBA is 50% NFL is like 50% UFC is like I don't know 15 or 20% so the fighters are you know they go out there they get their you know face beaten in and they're they'll make $20,000 off that fight or $40,000 or $80,000 and then they only get to do that two or three times a year so it's like a pretty brutal sport for low pay what Conor McGregor did was instead of selling the attention try to try to make money as his kind of like service fee he created a brand around literally every part of his lifestyle so he's like alright this thing's gonna get me famous

• 26:33Shaan Puri?

  but then okay what am I famous for people like my suits at the press conferences cool I'm launching a suit brand okay I'm Irish I'm gonna launch an Irish whiskey Irish whiskey I think just sold for I don't know if you know

• 26:46Sam Parr?

  yeah like he walked away with a hundred

• 26:47Shaan Puri?

  exactly then he's like cool I'm super fit cuz I'm a UFC fighter my body's amazing here's my P90X program it's called McGregor fast you can you can buy my program and subscribe to that and you can get fit with me oh you're getting fit and guess what else do I do I recover okay here's a recovery spray that I spray on my leg that's like you know like makes my leg recover faster after workouts and the guy is literally just selling like every piece of his lifestyle as a independent brand like you know I think at one point he was thinking about launching a sports betting exchange it's like what is the best business like who's wants to pay me oh DraftKings wants to pay me hmm maybe instead of DraftKings is McGregor Kings now and I will I'll launch a competitor

• 27:29Sam Parr?

  he just he just opened up a bar called the Black Ford

• 27:32Shaan Puri?

  exactly oh you know I had good success whiskey what else do we do Irish stouts okay I'm gonna so he bought a bar not that the bar is that good it's like a bar in his hometown your bar's not gonna make a ton of money but then he used that bar as the like basically the backdrop to film him creating a stout and now he's gonna sell a stout as a new like alcoholic beverage brand and it's kind of amazing the guy's gonna become a billionaire and fighting is gonna be the lowest part of his income stream is my guess which is insane

• 28:01Sam Parr?

  I bet you I bet you Conor McGregor I bet you he goes broke

• 28:06Shaan Puri?

  well he might make a billion he might lose a billion

• 28:10Sam Parr?

  I think you could. Nathan, you're you're worth like, did you reveal the valuation of your company?

• 28:17Speaker 00

  We we raised it 200 billion.

• 28:19Sam Parr?

  Okay, so let's just I let's just I don't know what the facts are, but let's just say you own 90%. So you're worth 180 million dollars. Do you think that you can ever spend through that?

• 28:30Speaker 00

  I would have to radically change my lifestyle.

• 28:33Sam Parr?

  But do you think? Is that enough?

• 28:37Speaker 00

  Yeah, that's so much more than enough. I think I spend like 200 grand a year. So if that gives you an idea. If you take like, if you set aside the things like when I'm not buying assets.

• 28:47Shaan Puri?

  That's your burn. That's your actual burn.

• 28:49Speaker 00

  It's like 200 grand a year. So yeah, it would take a lot to. Yeah, to spend through through that.

• 28:56Sam Parr?

  So do what we let's go. Let's go to this wealth ladder thing. Well, I I saw that.

• 29:01Speaker 00

  There's a point.

• 29:03Sam Parr?

  I'll go.

• 29:03Speaker 00

  So what what Sean was saying about

• 29:07Speaker 00

  like the trend between all of these people is that that's what's in the rule number two of selling products, not attention. And that's the flip, right? So Conor McGregor is a perfect example of this because everyone's expecting people to sell attention. Right? That's the the NASCAR logos plastered all over the car equivalent of that. And you're like, great. Conor is doing that every celebrity. And so, you know, you expect that

• 29:32Speaker 00

  everyone like every influencer is going to do that. And the wealthiest people are the ones who are like, great, I'm going to not do that. I'm going to promote my own product. Conor is the extreme example of like, I'm going to do 10 of these or something. Most people are like, let me do one or two. But that's where you're going to build this real wealth.

• 29:50Shaan Puri?

  And then let's just hit the other rules real quick. So rule number three, drive higher customer value through recurring or repeat purchases. So you'd rather have a product that you can that has repeat purchase rate versus a one off. That's the big idea there.

• 30:03Speaker 00

  Yep. Yeah. And that's the thing of if you just look at the most valuable brands, you see that a lot of them are selling a product that someone buys many times.

• 30:13Shaan Puri?

  Right. Yeah. So, you know, if my first million created a idea journal, it's probably not going to have super high repeat purchase rate because you're, you know, one journal will last you a long time versus if we made, you know, the pure money deodorant and pure money deodorant is something that you would go through every two months. Then that consumable is going to be worth more than, you know, so product selection is important here.

• 30:35Speaker 00

  Yep. And so even just going back to the ketchup example, right? You know, you're going through ketchup every month, every couple of months, you know, that's way better than something that lasts forever.

• 30:45Shaan Puri?

  Right. Billionaires ketchup. Great. Okay. So then last one, choose a better business model. So what do you, what are you, what are you pointing out here with choose a better business model?

• 30:55Speaker 00

  Yeah. So there's a couple of things in this. One is, well, I'm using the example of Vani Hari, who has the food babe. So she had information products business. She's selling cookbooks, meal plans, all of that. And then she teamed up with a friend of mine, Derek Halpern, who was also in kind of that online business space. And they went and made like a health supplements company. And so it's completely different. They've made the switch from, you know, that business model into selling this product that people are buying on a recurring basis that, you know, the brand can be acquired. But then I think that the other example that's interesting, I love listening to Andrew Wilkinson on the show and, you know, he did his whole thing.

• 31:37Speaker 00

  His whole thing is using a very cash flow positive business, right? In MetaLab of they're doing agency work. Honestly, it's a very profitable business, but it's not valued that high in the market. And so he's like, okay, I'm going to take low to medium quality revenue and use it to go buy really high quality revenue. You know, because agencies, they're not as recurring, they're not a high multiple. If you want to sell the business. So it's like, great, I'm going to go buy software companies or start software companies, you know, and so I'm going to trade in, you know, one set of revenue for another. And then you see this a lot in software where someone will launch to like, you'll have two versions of the same tool. One's like the WordPress plugin version where it gets it done and all of that.

• 32:22Speaker 00

  But none of those really turn into like substantial companies. And so the ones that made it. Or like OptinMonster, where they built a WordPress plugin, it was okay, made millions of dollars, but like it's not valued like a software company. Whereas when they go and rebuild, like Side Balki rebuilt OptinMonster as a SaaS platform, added more features, you know, they can charge a different pricing model, all of that. And, and then it's really valuable, right? You have to raise money at Silicon Valley valuations, you get to sell the company at those multiples, even though it's like fundamentally accomplishing the same.

• 33:01Shaan Puri?

  Let's talk about three people who I think left money on the table. You named two of them. I have a third. Actually, you might have named all three. Okay. So you talked about Ramit Sethi, who you think, you know, maybe he's making 10 million a year in revenue, selling kind of high-end courses, his audience is all around personal finance. And you pointed out, like, at the time where he had a bunch of audience and trust in personal finance and was advocating for a philosophy of like, hey, you know, low fee index fund style investing, set it and forget it, you know, saving a certain portion of your revenue. He could have built Wealthfront, which just got acquired for 1.4 billion, you know, yesterday or something like that, which was like a robo advisor doing just that. So instead of selling courses,

• 33:44Shaan Puri?

  could have built a software product. So left, left some value potentially on the table. Another one is Tim Ferriss, right? Tim Ferriss has, makes a ton of money on sponsorships and ended up making a ton of money through investing in the right startups because of his brand name. But, you know, could he have done what Joe Rogan did with like Onnit supplements, right? Like, I think Tim Ferriss has a huge trusted audience. He said, look, I tried every supplement and here's my issues with them. So I'm launching the Paleo Ketchup, I'm launching the nootropic supplement, I'm launching the, the protein powder, whatever, whatever he could have picked, you know, I think is, is a $500 million business, given the size and trust of his audience. But it seems like he didn't go that path. So what do you think of, of that?

• 34:29Shaan Puri?

  Oh, the third was Marie Forleo.

• 34:30Sam Parr?

  What was the third?

• 34:31Shaan Puri?

  I think you had her in here and I think you pointed out, and yeah, you pointed out two things. One is she builds everything in her name instead of building like brands that can be dissociated from like her person. The product is her telling you content, her selling you time and consulting or whatever else. Her selling you a course versus her creating a product based on her belief system and you trust her. So you think this product is going to work for you. So.

• 34:59Sam Parr?

  But listen to this, Sean, you're not exactly, but you're criticizing these people. You're doing the exact same thing. So you've got this big audience of people who like and trust you, that shockingly trust you and do what you say. But you're building this other thing that people are begging to know what it is like. Do you think that like you're, you should follow your own advice here?

• 35:23Shaan Puri?

  Oh, totally. You know, that's why I like this article. I think it's an eye opener for, it pieces together a bunch of like anecdotes and philosophies. And by the time you read it all the way through, you're like, yeah, of course, of course I agree with this. So I did it in a way with the fund. So for example, podcast, podcast ad revenue, I think our first year I made like 70,000 or something like that in podcast ads. It wasn't much. It was like a very, the, the value of the audience I felt was bigger than the, the value of the trust in the audience was bigger than the ad revenue. And so I bet on that. I was like, okay, well, what if I raised a fund from these people who have been listening and I'm not going

• 36:05Shaan Puri?

  to take any, I'm not going to do any pitch meetings. I'm not going to make a presentation. I'm just going to say, hey, if you trust me from this podcast and you want to invest alongside me in startups, you can. And so now that fund is like an $8 million a year investment vehicle. So if you just take the math on that, right? You get 2% of that in management fee. Okay, that's not that much, but then you get 20% of carry. So 20% carry means you're basically getting 1.6 million of startup equity that you're investing per year for free. So 70,000 in ads versus 1.6 million in startup equity. Of which I get to pick the startups and I think those startups can, you know, what if that's 5X in the next, you know, seven to 10 years?

• 36:45Shaan Puri?

  So that means each year I'm getting something like $5 million a year of value out of a product created from the podcast. So that's an example of doing it. Example of not doing it is I do a course. And the reality is I do the course just because I, A, I like teaching and B, I like the instant cash flow from that because I can go buy stupid shit with it. So for example, I, like, I wasn't, I stopped teaching my course because I just got busy doing other shit. And then I really wanted to go like do some random NFT speculation. And I was like, ah, I feel stupid doing this with my money. What if I just like did a course for, you know, two weeks? And then that let me go buy a Bored Ape and a Crypto Punk and whatever else. Okay, that sounds more fun. And so I'm like, yeah, I'm down to, you know, teach six sessions to do that. That seems like a good trade in my head mentally.

• 37:29Shaan Puri?

  But I would say that's not actually a good use of time. And then the new thing we're building, the new product is kind of in that boat, right? The Milk Road isn't called Sean's Crypto Newsletter. It specifically has a new brand name and it has like staff around it. And it's a product that if it works, can be big and it'll be supercharged or kind of initially, initially distributed by people who already follow me and like my content.

• 37:55Sam Parr?

  And then the second criticism which Nathan can address, which is like, and maybe Remit would say this, he's like, well, but I like blogging. And I don't know anything about starting like a, a fintech company. And what's, what's your reply to that, Nathan?

• 38:09Speaker 00

  Yeah, I mean, I think that's a great answer. And like all these people who I like lightly pick on in my article, they're all friends. And, and so that's one where like, you gotta choose the business model that's right for you. But answer the question of like, okay, can this audience that I have make me a billionaire? Trying to have as many examples of like, if that's the outcome that you want, you know, or maybe it's not a billionaire, right? Because you raised money or something else, but getting on that hundreds of millions of dollars type scale, then it's like, okay, well, here's the framework that it has to happen. And if you're saying like, look, you know, these, we list the people who have amazing businesses, right? They're can complete control of their time, making millions of dollars a year, you know, like absolutely no complaints there. So this is all on the case study of like, how would you do it?

• 38:54Speaker 00

  Actually, one of my favorite examples, I used Michael Hyatt as an example in this article. And he replied, like, he sent me an email right after it and said like, hey, We actually discovered the exact same thing. Personal brand entirely. We're selling digital products. We're very tied to our email list. We're doing like sponsors and stuff like that. And we realized like, oh, this business is gonna, you know, reach some limits. And so he then built out all these sub businesses. They built out a journal product, you know, other physical products. And realized, okay, how can we build? Well, take what we have now and use it to leverage. You know, other independent brands and like Kickstarter and launch them. And so it's fascinating to like, use someone as an example and then have them come back and be like,

• 39:38Speaker 00

  you're spot on in describing our business, but you're actually two years. Like you were spot on two years ago. We realized the same thing. We're fixing it. And now like everyone will see the result a little while from now. And so, uh, yeah, if, if people want this path, you know, that's, that's the way to go about it.

• 39:56Sam Parr?

  How big is this? How many notebooks does this guy sell?

• 39:59Speaker 00

  Uh, I don't know that I have the numbers. I'm trying to think what he, what he put in the article, but it's, uh, his other products are now bigger than all the things that we know him for. So in the tens of millions of dollars.

• 40:12Sam Parr?

  That's crazy. All right, what were we saying, Sean?

• 40:16Shaan Puri?

  I was gonna jump to the ladders of wealth. Cause I think this is the other kind of nice framework that you have. So, um, and this is kind of like, I think some people have heard of kind of stuff like this, but I just wanna like lay out the fast version and then we can go into whatever's, whatever's interesting from this. So you have this image of, uh, of a series of ladders. And it's not like one ladder that you just go up, up and up. It's basically like, if you use, if you choose this method of wealth creation, your ladder can be this high. But if you choose this method of wealth creation, it can go one rung higher, or it can go two rungs higher or four rungs higher, depending on which one you choose. So here's, here's how it works. So it's basically the lowest ladder, the smallest ladder is you're selling time for money. So that's having a job or being a, yeah, having a job, basically.

• 41:00Shaan Puri?

  Then there's your own service business. So this might be like an agency, you're charging by the project. You have some clients, you charge some hourly rate. Whether you're, you know, it doesn't matter if you're like making logos for some company or you're a lawyer, you're actually in the same boat. You have a service business with clients and you charge an hourly rate. Then there's product side productized services, which is

• 41:23Shaan Puri?

  it's given a given example of a product of productized.

• 41:25Speaker 00

  Yeah. So the example would be, let's say I charge a hundred dollars an hour to redo the copywriting on your website, you know, and so I'm I'm doing that. Or I say for a thousand dollars, one time you can buy it with a credit card. You know, I will go and rewrite your site, you know, or write you one whole landing page. And so there's a couple of really important things there. One, the purchase is being made without me talking to you. Like if I'm charging a hundred bucks an hour, probably have a conversation. You're like, we're planning that.

• 41:56Speaker 00

  Second thing is it's prepackaged. So you know exactly what you're buying. And then the the third thing is that the time and money are totally disconnected. So if I get better and better, if I hire people, any of that, right? Like, I'm not having to sit there for 10 hours and do it. And so there's a bunch of these skills that they have to learn to do the productized service.

• 42:19Shaan Puri?

  An example, a simple example, we, I think Ryan Beagleman came on the pod a long time ago, and he talked about drop servicing, which was a version of this. So like, the the example he was given is like, there's these products that are like, you pay thirty dollars and I'll draw a picture of you, you and you give me a picture of you, and I'll draw you as a Simpsons character. Or like, you can send this as a gift. So if somebody loves The Simpsons, you can give me a photo of them. I'll draw it as Simpsons character, you get it. So it has all the elements you talked about. Self-serve, you come in, has a predefined price, you just click a button and you pay. You get a defined product, end product out of it. So we're kind of both clear on the bargain. And then third, you don't know how long it takes me. You don't know how much it costs me. I don't have to do the work myself.

• 43:02Shaan Puri?

  So with a lot of these character services, it's like, it just gets piped to a, you know, person in the Philippines who's an artist. They take the gig, they submit it, they get seven dollars. The the service keeps, you know, whatever, twenty three dollars and and it's all done. So that's like an example of a productized service.

• 43:21Shaan Puri?

  And by the way, isn't there like a Facebook group called Productized?

• 43:23Sam Parr?

  Oh, yes.

• 43:24Shaan Puri?

  There's a guy running that's pretty interesting.

• 43:26Sam Parr?

  Yeah, we talked about him.

• 43:29Shaan Puri?

  Yeah.

• 43:29Sam Parr?

  Green.

• 43:30Shaan Puri?

  Green.

• 43:30Sam Parr?

  Do you know the guy's name?

• 43:33Sam Parr?

  Greenfelt, maybe, or something like that?

• 43:36Shaan Puri?

  So, so what he does is he's got this Facebook group and the reason like it's so niche, but it's actually pretty valuable for if you're in that niche. So he has this Facebook group called Productized Services or something like that, Productized Businesses. And, um, and what he was doing was he would just show an example. So he'd say, oh, look, this is a real estate agent. And before, here's how it used to work. You know, here's their page, here's their face, call them up, become a client, blah, blah, blah. And he's like, or sorry, that's not a good example. It's, I make, I design websites, I can code anything, you can hire me as a freelancer. And then he changed it to a product I service, which is you're a real estate agent, you need a website for your company, I make real estate agent websites.

• 44:18Shaan Puri?

  Come here, pick one of the, the six templates, push, go, I'll give you a website. And I'll charge you a fixed fee of $250 or $500 to give you that website. And so it's basically a way of productizing a, um, a service.

• 44:32Sam Parr?

  You know what the best name that I've ever heard for that is Jack Butcher, who's our friend? And he has this course. It's got, it's beautiful. It's called Build Once, Sell Twice.

• 44:41Speaker 00

  So good.

• 44:43Sam Parr?

  It's such a good name.

• 44:44Shaan Puri?

  I, I took the course, yeah.

• 44:46Sam Parr?

  Well, did you love it?

• 44:46Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, I loved it just because everything Jack does is done so well. So, you know, uh, he could, you know, write me a birthday card and I would be like, wow, I love birthday cards now. It's like, do I really love birthday cards or do I just love Jack Butcher? I think I just love Jack Butcher, actually.

• 45:01Speaker 00

  Yeah, his ability to take something and like distill it down to the absolute essence. And like build one, sell twice is that like it's selling products. You know, where you're saying, okay, I can make this thing a single time and, and then sell it as many times as I want, which everyone talks about the upside of that. Of like, oh, this is going to be amazing, right? I can build this and sell it a whole bunch of times. No one talks about the downside. That like it's so freaking hard to do the first like to make the first one, you know, whereas if I'm building a one off thing like using websites, for example, like, okay, I'm supposed to build a website for Sam. He's paying me 2000 bucks. Like I build this out. It's not that hard. I can use my skills to do it. The product version is like building a website builder, you know, that's incredibly hard. And so you have this like trough for

• 45:46Speaker 00

  a long time where you're not going to make money in the short term, but the the like leverage is incredible.

• 45:52Sam Parr?

  How old are you now?

• 45:53Speaker 00

  Thirty one.

• 45:55Sam Parr?

  So you're thirty one. As long as I've known you, we've known each other since we're both like twenty three, twenty four. You've always pretty much been the same where you were pretty calm, very patient. I would say patient would probably be the best word to describe you. And there's been a lot of times, I remember in two thousand and fourteen or something like that, I didn't have much money, but I hollered at my really rich friend. And I was like, man, Nathan is doing like a hundred grand a month, like in revenue, this thing's gonna be big. You should try to invest and maybe I could broker a deal. And if I did that, then I met you, you probably had a ton. You've also probably had a ton of people who were trying to buy the company for a life changing amount of money. And you've

• 46:35Sam Parr?

  probably had loads of other opportunities. So my question is, how have you stayed pretty calm and also incredibly patient throughout all this? Patience is something I struggle with your Sean was telling you about how he launches like a new does a new drop every week and like, and I think that that's rooted in like, oh, but we need the numbers to go up this week. And like you got caught and I've done this. I do the same thing where I'm like, but it's not growing now. And I need to. So how have you done so patient and long term focused?

• 47:07Speaker 00

  Well, I think part of his personality and you're right that like, patient and relentless are probably two things you can use to describe me back then and now. But I think a lot of the ideas that are in some of these articles or that I try to write about is really in building this one thing. So I think about, uh, what analogy I like is strip malls versus skyscrapers. Let's say we're getting into real estate development and we've got a piece of land and you're trying to decide, okay, what, what should we build on it? And so you want to make money quickly. And so you build like, uh, you know, first little office building or something. You got like a Radio Shack there. Now you're make, you got a little bit of cash flow coming in, you know, you want to expand. So you build another, you know, add on to that. Now we've got a subway and we're, we've built it out and we've got a little strip mall or a shopping center.

• 47:53Speaker 00

  And that's like, we're going to use up our land, uh, each time we're expanding horizontally. And so we're, you know, launching a new product. The, the version of this is the, like the blogger, podcaster, or someone who's like, I've got my ebook, my membership site, my whatever other thing that I'm doing. You know, I keep adding and each one makes a little bit of money. My approach on everything is the skyscraper model of like, I'm going to do one thing and I'm going to keep pouring everything into that and just keep going taller and taller and taller. And makes it, and so like, ConvertKit is my attempt at a skyscraper. And like in the Billion Dollar Creator article, it's all about people I think who are building those skyscrapers.

• 48:32Sam Parr?

  You've not, you've not always done that, actually. I think, and I think that that's a good strategy, but I would, I would actually say it's pretty cool that you've not always done that. And I'll give you an example, but the reason why it's cool is because like you're flawed and you do, you, you definitely have your, your, even though you're incredibly patient and long-term thinking, like maybe it's not rooted in this probably, but like there are some examples. For example, like you've done a bunch of book launches. You've launched like eight or nine things that's, that have sucked. You did this great Twitter thread where you, well, no, he did this Twitter thread. Yeah. He goes, here's the nine things that I've created that were horrible. No, he had a, I don't know if he used the word suck, maybe he said fail.

• 49:11Speaker 00

  Yeah, flopped or something like that. So in that, uh, this is something else, right? Like, we all want to jump in and build the most perfect product. And you can't do that because there's all of these skills you have to learn. Like, that's the point of this Ladders of Wealth Creation article, is that, like, business and building wealth is the combination of like a thousand little skills. And if you try to do it all at once, you know, like, you're going to fail. And so that's like, in these ladders, the one point that I'm trying to make is that the, like, you know, I put marketplaces and social networks, you know, and at the top of the hardest ladder. And then just below that is SaaS. Because if you think about the number of skills that you have to know in order to do that.

• 49:55Speaker 00

  Like, Sam, what was, uh, the first product you sold online?

• 50:00Sam Parr?

  Um, I, uh, well, there was two. It was liquor. So I sold alcohol on the internet and then I also created a guide on how to, how to find a roommate in San Francisco.

• 50:11Speaker 00

  Okay, so that guide, like, do you remember, as you were trying to figure out how to collect payments for that? Or like, how to put together a page that would sell it? That's why he was at the Gumroad meetup.

• 50:21Sam Parr?

  Yeah. I ended up using Gumroad because it was so stressful. I couldn't figure out, I was like, well, I was like, I remember going to Shopify. I'm like, well, does Shopify let you sell PDFs? How does that work?

• 50:32Speaker 00

  So all of those things, right? You're trying to figure out how to do, like, okay, how to collect money on the internet is something that you have to learn. And now we're just like, we get, we could rattle off a whole bunch of ways, right? But someone starting out saying, hey, I want to get into this, they don't know how to collect money on the internet. They don't know how to write headlines. They don't know how to collect email subscribers, why that even matters, right? All of these things. And so I think the best way to do it is to learn through a bunch of these other little products, right? And so that was, like, basically what you're seeing all the way along with the eBooks and everything else, is me learning all of the skills that ended up culminating in being able to build a conversion.

• 51:11Sam Parr?

  Yeah, that's fair.

• 51:12Speaker 00

  And then the other thing is, like, if I say I only focus on ConvertKit, like, that's not fully true, because I like to have contrast in my life. I think that's something that helps. And so, like, we started off, you know, riffing on some real estate stuff. And the reason that I like it is because you spend all your time sitting in front of a computer. And so, doing something tangible, like Airbnb or something in the real world, like, to me, is the opposite. Because I get to actually go see a real property, I get to, you know, visit it in person. It's a totally different experience. My friend, Sean Blanc, says, if you work with your mind, you should rest with your hands. And that's,

• 51:53Speaker 00

  I like that idea of, like, just doing something that's the opposite. And so, I think if you give yourself these little indulgences of, like, buying a house in Airbnb, or starting, like, a one-off paid newsletter that you run on autopilot, or Sean, what you're doing, where you're like, run out and make a course, and then you're like, okay, that was fun. I think that can be a creative outlet that then helps you focus on the main thing, rather than saying, like, oh, I'm gonna go create 10 main things.

• 52:22Sam Parr?

  When you've been creating ConvertKit, let's say that either you've sold the company, and you still want to, like, do interesting things, or you're 21 or 25 years old, and you want to start something, what interesting opportunities or problems that need to be solved have you've discovered where you're like, I can't do that now, but it'd be pretty cool if someone, like, someone could totally get into the blank and do blank?

• 52:46Speaker 00

  Yeah, okay, this is honest, but a terrible answer to your question, because I also did it, right? Is, as we were doing email marketing, you know, and running the newsletters for, like, James Clear and Tim Ferriss and everyone else, the thing that I wanted to do was then get into commerce of, like, okay, we have this whole side of it, right, where we're sending all the emails, have the connection to the fans. Now I want to build the, like, the credit card processing, and I want to get a cut of everything that they sell. And so, then I realized, like, oh, And that was always the answer. Actually, if someone was like, if you weren't doing ConvertKit, what would you do? Now, I always said, I'd go start a Gumroad competitor. And then the nice thing is there's that synergy there. So it's like, okay, I went and started

• 53:28Speaker 00

  a Gumroad competitor called ConvertKit Commerce. It's in the same product. So it's like, both a realistic answer and probably not very satisfying for you because it's not like totally different.

• 53:41Sam Parr?

  Gumroad has been around for a long time now. Up until recently, they pretty much had never done anything to change it. And no one is competing with them. But there's a downside. It doesn't make that much money. Like, I actually don't know what it makes anymore. But as of a couple or a few years past, like, he would tweet out his revenue. And like, it was really hard to build a business where he was making like 4% of someone's like $10 PDF. You know what I mean?

• 54:06Speaker 00

  Well, and so that's why you have to build a, build a better business model, right? And so if you look at something and say, how could we improve that business model? The thing that I saw in that is like, okay, what if we had another product alongside it that we sold? And right, so for ConvertKit, we make money off of your email subscription. And so I now have these two things that go hand in hand. And so the commerce side is really good because now, like, we're able to, for every one of our customers, right, who's selling products, we're able to make a little cut of that. And they don't feel like they're paying us anything extra because it's just a bit of the credit card processing fee. And then it also reduces our churn. Because anyone who's selling through ConvertKit Commerce,

• 54:50Speaker 00

  right, they're now, like, ConvertKit is paying them rather than the other way around. And so we saw radically lower churn. So I'd argue that like Gumroad by itself, or, you know, the Gumroad competitor that I wanted to start by itself, you're right, it's not that good of a business model. But when you pair it with ConvertKit and make the creative marketing platform, this is turning into a sales pitch. But you get the idea that I'm trying to make. It's the, like, the combination of those two things that then makes it a fantastic business model. And so you have to look at, okay, this is working, I want to go after this in whatever space it is. And then take a step back and say, okay, what are the flaws in the business model? What other products do I pair it with? What other audience do I target it against? You know, any of those things that actually makes it a compelling

• 55:35Speaker 00

  business instead of like, an average business.

• 55:40Sam Parr?

  And do you, actually, are you still hands-on with ConvertKit? Or are you, I know you're the CEO, but do you have someone helping you run it? Or are you still the guy in charge?

• 55:53Speaker 00

  No, I'm way too hands-on. The thing that people don't tell you in startups is that like, the growth that you see is a whole bunch of stacked S-curves. You know, of like, you figure out things that work and it takes off and then it levels out and you gotta figure out the next or like, the next stage of growth. And so I'm very hands-on. Like, we've had a few executives leave over the last year, just a lot of change. And so I'm like, completely in it, recruiting new executives, working with the team to design the next version of the product. And so, yeah, I'm not the, like, case study of what you should do for the perfect execution on.

• 56:34Sam Parr?

  You're not the four-hour work week.

• 56:36Speaker 00

  I am not the four-hour work week.

• 56:39Sam Parr?

  Do you grind? I mean, I know you got like 18 kids.

• 56:45Speaker 00

  Three.

• 56:46Sam Parr?

  I know, I just, because as long as I, as long as I remember you, I think your oldest are like, you had your oldest when you were young. And so I always would tease of like, what do you have, like 40 kids now?

• 56:56Speaker 00

  Yeah, I'm 31 and I have a 10-year-old.

• 57:00Sam Parr?

  And, but you, are you grinding right now? Or do you have, is it a 40-hour work week?

• 57:07Speaker 00

  It's, right now, it's a lot more than a 40-hour work week. But it's interesting of trying to structure that around like kids, you know, of, it's a lot of like, waking up early, you know? Or like this weekend, we were headed out for our team retreat, like meeting everyone up in person. So I'm leaving Saturday morning. So like this morning, when my kids woke up early, I like, we went out of the house and like, spent two or three hours together, you know, before, because I know I'm gonna work all day and, and then be gone all next week. So, yeah, I don't work a crazy amount, but at least like 50.

• 57:42Speaker 00

  55 hours a week is probably what I aim for. So I don't know if that counts as grinding, but it's definitely not not relaxing.

• 57:50Sam Parr?

  It's in the middle.

• 57:51Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 57:52Sam Parr?

  The middle, I think of grinding and not grinding. What do you think, Sean?

• 57:56Shaan Puri?

  I think it's great. You know, I think convert, I'm a user, so I, and I complained to Nathan all the time. I'm like, I'm paying too much for convert kit. And he's like,

• 58:05Speaker 00

  You do complain about that.

• 58:06Shaan Puri?

  And he was good.

• 58:07Speaker 00

  And I just point out how much money you make.

• 58:08Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, he was like, but you know, emails like making you all this money. And I'm like, yeah, but I just feel like emails free and like this should be free. And I was like, I was like, can I just get this for free? And he's like, well, you know, like, let me know what you think is, you know, he was very, very patient with me. And I was sort of like, you know, because I was like, I was like, I don't know. I told Ben, I was like, Ben, go find like what we should use instead of convert kit. And Ben kind of like searched for a couple of products. And then he was like, well, you know, like, they're all kind of worse, but there are some cheaper options. You want worse, but cheaper. And I was like, oh, fuck, I gotta choose worse, but cheaper.

• 58:41Sam Parr?

  Wait, what's your, what's your, what's your bill every month?

• 58:44Shaan Puri?

  I think I pay like $400 a month, maybe more. I don't even know.

• 58:48Sam Parr?

  That's what you're, and how much money do you make a month?

• 58:50Shaan Puri?

  Well, see, it's not about that, right? Like it's more, I, those are two separate things, I feel like, because, because the email directly doesn't make me that much money. It's like,

• 58:59Sam Parr?

  Got it.

• 58:59Shaan Puri?

  Through the email, I build the audience and then through the audience, if I launch a product or a course or whatever, yeah, that makes a bunch of money. But that's separate work I gotta go do with a separate set of costs that go into that. And so we actually did, we were like, oh, should we switch? And then I kind of respected that Nathan wasn't just like, oh, whatever it takes to stay, you know, here you go free. I was like, I was like, oh, okay. The fact that he didn't do that tells me like, he knows the value of his thing. And as much as I hate that I'm, you know, not getting this like free discount or whatever, I respect that. And so I stuck with it.

• 59:34Sam Parr?

  Nathan, are you Mormon?

• 59:35Speaker 00

  No, I'm not.

• 59:36Sam Parr?

  Dude, you got that Mormon energy, man. How often do you hear that?

• 59:42Speaker 00

  I mostly just hear it from you, Sam.

• 59:44Speaker 03

  You've never heard that from anybody. What else? I mean, you live in Idaho. You, you, you had kids at 21. Like you're, you work hard, you're honest. It seems like you don't party. You got hardcore Mormon energy. What do you drink Mountain Dew all the time?

• 59:58Speaker 00

  Yeah. You got hardcore Mormon energy.

• 1:00:02Speaker 00

  No, Sean, what I was gonna say is that what, what's funny is so like Tim McGraw and Arm Swartznager both have converted newsletters and they pay full price and they don't ever give me shit about it. But then it's the, it's like the internet influencers where they're like, I should get this for free, you know? And I'm like, no. So it's fascinating because we've had that a lot over the years, right? Of people saying like, hey, what discount can you give me? Do you know how famous I am? And kind of what's fun is getting into, I separate them from internet famous and actual famous. And the more we've gotten into the actual famous space, the more it's been easy to say like, no, man, here's the value that we provide. And I think I was giving you a hard time because you had just done a thread like two weeks earlier

• 1:00:46Speaker 00

  about your paid newsletter that was making like 50 or a hundred grand a month. I can't remember if I like linked you to the same thread, but that's what I wanted to do in the Twitter DMs. So.

• 1:00:55Speaker 03

  How big is, how, how big is Arnold's list?

• 1:00:59Speaker 00

  Oh, we can't say those numbers, but he's still relatively small.

• 1:01:03Shaan Puri?

  Who's, whose list is bigger? His, his list or my list? My list is not very big, but I think it could be the same size as Arnold.

• 1:01:10Speaker 03

  No way.

• 1:01:11Speaker 00

  That bitch? You don't have favorite little like business model synergy?

• 1:01:19Speaker 03

  That weekly?

• 1:01:25Speaker 00

  So he was on, like, it's fun, like, as he goes around and promotes his newsletter, right? Cause he goes on like Jimmy Kimmel and is talking about his email newsletter, which is, is always fun.

• 1:01:34Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, I go on Indie Hackers, dude.

• 1:01:39Speaker 00

  But when like a business model thing that's funny is when one convert a customer links to another to grow their list. So like when Tim Ferriss links to Arnold's list and said, like, hey, you know, go sign up for Arnold's list, it added forty thousand subscribers. And it's just like, our cut just goes up. You know, just one customer just referred to the other. But now, anyway, it's a

• 1:02:03Sam Parr?

  Dude, you gotta write a blog post like, the best way to grow your list, partnerships. Here's like a list of like, interesting people to partner with.

• 1:02:13Speaker 00

  I have a VP of Growth opening. Do you want to come?

• 1:02:18Shaan Puri?

  He works for Morning Brew, actually, as we discussed last episode.

• 1:02:21Sam Parr?

  Yeah, last episode, Morning Brew offered me a job, too.

• 1:02:25Shaan Puri?

  It's actually like a great power move is to just offer staff writer jobs or staff jobs to CEOs of other companies, just to like flex on them. Hey, you know, I heard things are tough. Just so you know, we're always, there's always a home for you here.

• 1:02:42Sam Parr?

  So listen to this.

• 1:02:43Shaan Puri?

  CEO of MailChimp.

• 1:02:45Sam Parr?

  Like the, like, a month into starting The Hustle, I, like, we wrote blog posts, whatever, and we were, I was trying to hire writers, and I saw this awesome article, and I, and I don't remember where it was, but the author was Nellie Bowles, I think her name is, B-O-W-L, B-O-W-L-E-S. And now, she's like a really famous New York Times person. And I think, like, even when I found her, she was actually at the New York Times, but like, had just done a one-off piece for this small magazine. And I emailed her, I'm like, you are so good. Would you love to interview for a position at my company? Like, we're looking for bloggers. And she was like, that's cute. But no, thanks. And I will never forget that. She told me, that's cute. I have, I have, I have held this grudge

• 1:03:30Sam Parr?

  against her for years, because she said it's cute. For years.

• 1:03:37Speaker 00

  You can just imagine, like, the little pat on the head and the hair tassel that went with, like, that's cute, you know, like,

• 1:03:43Sam Parr?

  It kept me up at night, like, so many, I was like, I'm gonna, how am I gonna get revenge? And I don't have a good way. But that was like, eight years ago.

• 1:03:51Shaan Puri?

  Sam's like, Arya Stark, before bed every night, he says a list of the names of the people he needs to, like, get revenge on. It's like Nellie Bowles.

• 1:03:58Sam Parr?

  I definitely have, you know, like what they say, like I got like a bunch of champagne bottles with people's names on it. And whenever I get back at them, I'm like, crack that champagne bottle open and drink it. Like, yeah, I want some people's heads on my desk. That's for sure.

• 1:04:11Shaan Puri?

  We have a buddy.

• 1:04:11Speaker 00

  What are we gonna do to get on that list?

• 1:04:14Shaan Puri?

  Not much, turns out.

• 1:04:15Sam Parr?

  Not much. Yeah, just don't call me cute.

• 1:04:21Shaan Puri?

  Just be like, you know, comment on one of his Instagram, you know, videos and just be like,

• 1:04:27Sam Parr?

  Awesome for a beginner.

• 1:04:29Shaan Puri?

  Just like move on.

• 1:04:32Sam Parr?

  Or like, you're still at it. Awesome.

• 1:04:40Shaan Puri?

  We, we have a buddy who is like the nicest guy in the world. Like, you know, will give you the shirt off his back and nice to everybody, kind of strangers, kind of animals, kind of everybody. And you go into his house and on his fridge, he's got this like clip art picture of a, of a brand name of another company's logo with a target and like, kind of like a red target, like a sniper. And he's got three of them on his fridge. And I remember going over like, what's this about? And he's like, oh yeah, he's kind of like, you know, those are my, those are my competitors. I just, every day when I come to the kitchen, I just want to think about, you know, just sort of killing them, basically. I was like, whoa, there's a dark side to the, to Mr. Nice Guy here.

• 1:05:24Sam Parr?

  Do you have one of those, Nathan?

• 1:05:25Shaan Puri?

  I would bet anything Nathan does not have anything like what we're talking about. He's got.

• 1:05:30Sam Parr?

  You are so wrong. I bet you that he, he will, I don't know if he'll admit it. I bet you he hates MailChimp.

• 1:05:39Speaker 00

  Oh, see, I have weird feelings about MailChimp because I have so much respect for them. And like.

• 1:05:47Sam Parr?

  Dude, you have respect to them? Like the guy who killed John Lennon has respect for him. It's called a love knife. You love him so much, you want to kill him. That's like what it is. It's like, the guy who like killed the Pope, that's what you're gonna do.

• 1:06:00Speaker 00

  So you have to separate the businesses, like the business from the people. So I think that's true. Like one time I was at a conference and Ben Chestnut was speaking. And so I emailed him and was like, Hey, man, will you? I don't know even know why he said yes, but it's just like, like big fan of what you've done. Like in all fairness, we're a competitor trying to take as much business from you as you can. But would you be up for sitting down and talking? And he said, like, yeah, I have a flight at this time. So I'm checking out the hotels, like, meet me in the hotel lobby. You know, and we'll chat for 30 minutes.

• 1:06:28Shaan Puri?

  Gave you the wrong hotel. Love it. Great power move, Ben Chestnut.

• 1:06:33Speaker 00

  Set me on this wild goose chase.

• 1:06:34Sam Parr?

  Yeah, he's like, that's cute.

• 1:06:36Shaan Puri?

  You never had a flight?

• 1:06:40Speaker 00

  But no, like he sat down with me and told me all about how they launched their free plan and all this stuff. And then the, they were Inc. Magazine's company of the year. This is the Inc. Magazine, like Inc. 5000 event. And so the editor in chief from Inc. Magazine comes up while we're talking. He's like, Hey, Ben, great talk, all of that. And he, Ben goes, Hey, do you know Nathan? He's trying to kill my company. And like, as he introduces me to the editor in chief of Inc. Magazine. And anyway, so I have tons of.

• 1:07:10Sam Parr?

  What would it look like if you just like assaulted him right there?

• 1:07:14Shaan Puri?

  Sam's got off.

• 1:07:15Speaker 00

  Well, it'd be jail time.

• 1:07:16Shaan Puri?

  He's still thinking like, like killing Nellie Bowles with a love knife or whatever.

• 1:07:22Sam Parr?

  For the record, Nellie, I'm not gonna, I'm not gonna do anything.

• 1:07:25Shaan Puri?

  Is this, Sam, is this the same person that you had the interview, the famous interview with at the New York Times or the New Yorker? Or whatever it was? And like, the interview did not go well?

• 1:07:35Sam Parr?

  It did not go well.

• 1:07:36Shaan Puri?

  Was this with her or was somebody else?

• 1:07:37Sam Parr?

  No, that was Erin Griffin. And she like came to interview me and I don't even know why, but she was fishing for stuff. And she's like, so like, what do you do in the weekends? Like, listen to Joe Rogan? That's what she said to me. I'm like, what?

• 1:07:52Sam Parr?

  Like, no, like, he doesn't even like, that's Monday to Friday. He doesn't even have a podcast.

• 1:07:58Sam Parr?

  Talking about. Yeah. And she was like, well, like, because you're like a tech bro. And I'm like, first of all, most of New York Times revenue is digital. You're a tech company. So you tell me, what are your tech friends do? And so anyway, yeah, that didn't go well.

• 1:08:11Shaan Puri?

  Did you storm out? Or how did that end?

• 1:08:13Sam Parr?

  Yeah, I was just like, I don't know what to say. I'm out of here. Yeah, I it didn't. It didn't end well.

• 1:08:18Shaan Puri?

  That's so good.

• 1:08:21Speaker 00

  Uh, those interviews, I've only ever had one of those. Um, I don't remember who it was with, but where you're like, okay, I think we're done. Where you can just tell that they're like, looking for some angle and all the questions are weird.

• 1:08:32Sam Parr?

  But why would anyone hate you? Because you're kind of perfect.

• 1:08:37Speaker 00

  It's good that you bring that up.

• 1:08:38Sam Parr?

  Like, whoa.

• 1:08:40Shaan Puri?

  It's like, well, I got a lot of flaws. It's true. So I'm not sure what the problem is.

• 1:08:45Sam Parr?

  Yeah, it's like, I like this. I've got, there's a lot of bad things. I like this in the shower.

• 1:08:49Shaan Puri?

  Clip of Biden, uh, the other day, when he called the journalist was like, on the way out. Did you see this clip?

• 1:08:54Sam Parr?

  A stupid son of a bitch.

• 1:08:55Shaan Puri?

  Guys like, you know, what do you think about inflation? And Biden, just like, in that moment, was just like, lost it. He was just like, yeah, great. Stupid son of a bitch.

• 1:09:06Shaan Puri?

  That's how I imagine Nathan, like, breaking character in like, one of these interviews.

• 1:09:13Speaker 00

  So, okay, Sam, I have a question on this then. Like, do you think that being so nice and all of this? And like, everyone likes me, holds back my, uh, growth as an entrepreneur and, you know, uh, internet, so I want to be internet celebrity?

• 1:09:26Sam Parr?

  No, because, um, A, like, you're happy and it's working. So I think that's like the goal. And B, you actually have dropped it a couple of times. So, uh, you don't have to talk about this if you don't want to. But basically, you didn't like what Sahil at Gumroad did. And you called them out. And it was pretty, uh, it was pretty vicious. And I knew that, do you know this, Sean?

• 1:09:46Speaker 00

  No. What did he call him out for?

• 1:09:48Sam Parr?

  Dude, he just like publicly kind of bitch slapped Sahil. And like, it was crazy.

• 1:09:56Speaker 00

  So, so I was around, as Sam was talking about, I was around Gumroad from the very beginning. I think I was the first independent, or at one point, they told me I was the first independent seller to cross $10,000 in sales on Gumroad. So like, from the very, very beginning. And anyway, so friends with tons of people there and like, spent a lot of time at their office and all of that. And a huge friend of Sahil's. But at one point, he like, got burnt out on the company. They had an offer to buy the company. He didn't take it. He laid everyone off instead. Like, it wound down and, and like, ultimately failed. But the thing is with a platform like that, they don't like fail and disappear. They just like fail and coast and still, like the software still works and all that.

• 1:10:40Speaker 00

  And then he came back and told this totally different story of like, here's how I, you know, like VC is evil and I'm running the company like in this totally new way. Here's how I run it in five hours a week with like, two contractors. And that was frustrating, but I didn't say anything. But then when they went and raised new money and didn't give any, they, they got all the VCs to write off their equity. They got all of the team members to be like, hey, it's a failed company, like, give up your equity and all that as part of it. And they went and raised a bunch of new money and didn't go back and give the original team members. Like, that pissed me off because it was like, I know exactly who built the software, you know,

• 1:11:24Speaker 00

  like, because I sat next to them as we were talking about it, you know, at their office in San Francisco. And like, I know that they don't have any equity and I know that you didn't take care of them. And now you're like, telling this new story and everything. So, yeah, I guess, Sam, I do make some enemies on the internet.

• 1:11:36Sam Parr?

  You do. And when you said that, I was like, well, I was, I don't know Sahil. He seems like a nice enough guy from my limited interactions with him. But I was like, well, if Nathan's saying that, it's probably true.

• 1:11:48Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, you know, you could separate the person from like, the decision. I've made a bunch of bad decisions, but I don't think I'm a bad guy. And

• 1:11:56Speaker 00

  Oh, me too. I've made a lot. Yeah.

• 1:11:58Shaan Puri?

  And so, you know, I would separate the two, like, because he, you know, probably a nice guy. I don't know him super well either. But, but you're right, like, you know, the, the way he kind of got Twitter famous in a way was to come out and tell this story of like, The kind of like, it was like a fail story that worked. It was like, we were the hot thing. We raised money. We had all these expectations. People bet on us. It didn't work. And so now we're in this new mode and I've seen the light. It was sort of like, you know, I got baptized and now I believe that this business should be done this other way. Okay, fair enough. And some people really liked that. They thought it was very transparent and all that good stuff.

• 1:12:40Shaan Puri?

  But it was weird that like, you know, a year or two later, it's like, I'm raising new money at a hundred million dollar valuation. It's like, wait, you're back on the, that train. Like, weren't you kind of saying like, you know, all the things that were wrong with that model and

• 1:12:52Speaker 00

  Like freedom.

• 1:12:54Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, championing the, the freedom that you were getting and the choose your own destiny and getting off the rat race. Like, maybe I read it wrong. Maybe I was just skimming and I missed the point, but like, that did seem strange to me. And then like you're saying, Nathan, like, it's kind of weird to kind of, to do that whole thing in public when a whole bunch of people bet on you, lost money on you and, and are not participating in the like, you know, future. And so that would leave a bad taste in people's mouth, I think. So, you know, I think it's fair points. You know, and I'm sure, I'm sure he's got his side of the story about why it's not bad and why it's not that and all those things. So, you know, fair enough, but he's not here. So I'm just going to say my side and it seems like that'll be the final word.

• 1:13:39Speaker 00

  I mean, tons of credit to Sahil afterwards because he, like he owned up to parts of it and we had a good conversation about it. And he actually, then when he launched his book, he actually included ConvertKit in the story in it, which I was really surprised. So as far as people who don't hold a grudge, I think Sahil's one of them.

• 1:13:59Shaan Puri?

  Not Sam. He's not Sam.

• 1:14:00Speaker 00

  I think.

• 1:14:01Shaan Puri?

  He's not Sam. And in fact, I actually manufacture grudges. So like, there's this one guy I always call my rival. And I'm sure from his perspective, he's either like, who is this? Or he's like, wait, why are we rivals? We got along, we got along just fine. And in my head, this is like somebody I met when I was in college and. The guy's got like a super ultra rich dad, like billionaire dad. And I always used to joke, like if I ever played basketball, there usually wasn't like another Indian guy like playing basketball. So if there ever was like the running joke in my group of friends in college was, well, Sean, we know who you're guarding. Like you have to guard him and you need to win your matchup here. Like your honor is on the line, basically like, we need to know who's the better Indian basketball player on the court right now.

• 1:14:46Shaan Puri?

  It was just like this running joke. And so that got extended. Once we, I started a business with my college friends, they were like, well, seems like this guy is like, you know, your rival. And I played into it and we kind of made it a thing where the guy would be like, you know, hanging out with Richard Branson on his island. And we were like, just trying to create a chip on our shoulder, underdog story is like, you know, I'd be sleeping on my air mattress that I was planning to return to Target to like save money because our business wasn't doing any good. And if you saw this other guy, like, you know, sipping pina coladas with Richard Branson, it just felt like, oh, those are the haves and we're the have nots. And so I was like manufacturing these little feuds or like, I remember we did a, we, when we bought Bebo back,

• 1:15:28Shaan Puri?

  we were going to relaunch it and I gave the scoop to this girl who was like really nice journalist to me. She was somebody I'd met. She seemed really nice. And I was like, hey, do you want the story? Like, I'll give you the story about like what we're going to do and how it all played out. She's like, yeah, great. So we, she comes over, I do the interview. It's like literally, you know, we're playing patty cake. It's all good. Article comes out the next day and the headline is like just some vicious, it's like, remember Bebo? Huh? Yeah, that, you know, that flop is back again. I was just like, it was like,

• 1:15:59Speaker 03

  Oh my,

• 1:16:02Speaker 03

  Disgusting.

• 1:16:04Shaan Puri?

  As he told me that, he told me the plan with his bad breath. And I was like, what? Like in my head, that's what it said. Like it was like as,

• 1:16:13Sam Parr?

  Yeah, if you like spinach, go eat some of the stuff that came out of Sean's teeth. It's still probably there.

• 1:16:17Shaan Puri?

  So I felt so backstabbed, you know, not, no love knife, just straight knife. And I remember just being like, so I never had the interview where I walked away. I had the opposite where I felt completely, and I text her, I was like, yo, what the fuck? Cause actually the article was fine, just the headline was completely brutal. It was just making fun of us and saying like, get a load of this fucking schmuck. And, um, and she's like, sorry, like the editor writes the headlines and he just thought that that's what would get more clicks. Like, I don't have any say in that. And I was like, oh, so fuck you and your profession was like, you know, where I landed on that. I think that was my only feud. Actually, my other one where I called, uh, what's her name? The Jake Paul of journalism was probably the other one.

• 1:17:01Sam Parr?

  Taylor Lorenz. Yeah, like I think that I actually think it's great fuel. I mean, like I joked to my wife, I'm like, I'm fueled on like carbonated water and like grudges. Like I think grudges, I think are like the greatest fuel ever. Like, isn't that like the whole thing about being like a chip on your shoulder? Like protein, healthy fats and grudges is like my macro, my macro diet. Yeah, I'm just like, yeah, like I gotta make sure I get my rage in that day. Otherwise I just don't feel like myself. It's like Ari Gold, I just love firing people. So anyway, I think it's good. I think rage is great.

• 1:17:36Speaker 00

  That's the key takeaway from this episode, people listen to.

• 1:17:38Shaan Puri?

  Sam, you do need like a lloyd.

• 1:17:39Speaker 00

  Let me go manufacture some grudges.

• 1:17:41Shaan Puri?

  Somebody yell out some rage.

• 1:17:45Sam Parr?

  I do like, well, it's Sean, when, when we first met Ben Levy, or I met him for the first time, you were like, well, you know, Sam's a little challenging.

• 1:17:53Shaan Puri?

  I just had to give him the heads up. Don't take it personal if he kind of fires off. Ari Gold is actually a great, great analogy, because there's no, there's no, um, uh, what's it called? Like, there's no hate behind the words, right? Like I'm yelling, but I love you. Like it says nothing to do with how I, how much I like you or how good I think you are. I'm just yelling because I'm yelling. And, uh, so I tried to give him the heads up, but you were so zen. This was post, post-exit Sam is a completely different guy. He's a, you know, you're not Ari Gold anymore.

• 1:18:24Sam Parr?

  It'll come back in due time. Dude, Nathan, thanks for coming on. Happy, uh, happy you're able to make it. I bailed on you last week. Sorry. And I'm happy that we made it work this time.

• 1:18:36Speaker 00

  Yeah. Thanks for having me. It's always fun.

• 1:18:38Sam Parr?

  What you want to promote your like, what? Yeah.

• 1:18:42Speaker 00

  Yeah. Okay. So if people want to follow me online, I'm currently trying to grow my Twitter audience. So you should go follow me there. I'm trying to see if I can go from I'm at 50,000.

• 1:18:52Shaan Puri?

  What is it?

• 1:18:53Speaker 00

  Hundred thousand. So at Nathan Barry and Barry's B A R O Y.

• 1:18:59Shaan Puri?

  Usually when you try to grow your audience, you should tell them the name of the thing.

• 1:19:05Speaker 00

  You know, I only want the most dedicated fans who like really, no, I'm just kidding. Thanks for the advice, Sean.

• 1:19:12Shaan Puri?

  Add that to your ladder. Shove that in your ladder.

• 1:19:16Sam Parr?

  You know what? We didn't discuss and I don't, we don't have time now, but one time Sean, Nathan renamed the company ConvertKit to something else and he didn't realize it, but it meant like something like it was disrespectful to Hindus, Hindus, Hindi, what's the plural?

• 1:19:32Sam Parr?

  And it was disrespectful to them and he made this huge name change and they changed the company back to ConvertKit after like 24 hours.

• 1:19:39Shaan Puri?

  Wait, what was it? What was, what was the name?

• 1:19:44Shaan Puri?

  Okay. What I speak Hindi, but what is that?

• 1:19:46Speaker 00

  It means service, but in Sikh culture, it means like selfless service and like the highest form of worship.

• 1:19:52Shaan Puri?

  Yeah.

• 1:19:54Speaker 00

  And so it's the whole thing.

• 1:19:55Shaan Puri?

  It's like, I'm doing it. I'm doing a service for you. I don't, I don't find that offensive. That's not offensive.

• 1:19:59Speaker 00

  Yeah, there were a lot of people who did find it offensive. And so if we talk about mistakes.

• 1:20:06Shaan Puri?

  Turns out I'm not as easily offended.

• 1:20:08Speaker 00

  Owning up to mistakes.

• 1:20:08Shaan Puri?

  I got in trouble.

• 1:20:09Speaker 00

  So Hindus didn't find it offensive. And I actually had a lot of people who were like, that's like, thought that it was awesome or something like that. But everyone who was from the Sikh culture, they were like, sorry, it had a much different meaning there. So anyway, that was a $500,000 mistake, but I owned up to it. So.

• 1:20:34Speaker 00

  That's a whole thing for another time.

• 1:20:35Sam Parr?

  By the way, that the convert kit, good name. The other thing like seven or whatever you said, not a good name. Like, so I think.

• 1:20:44Shaan Puri?

  Maybe. Hindu worship.

• 1:20:47Shaan Puri?

  That doesn't seem like the right name for an email.

• 1:20:49Sam Parr?

  Yeah. Great name. That's such a good name.

• 1:20:53Speaker 00

  Well, maybe it was a $500,000 mistake that will turn out to be a multimillion dollar win.

• 1:20:58Shaan Puri?

  Do you still, do you still have the domain? Cause we should just launch like a prayer service or like, you know, like a philanthropy thing for India under that. I have some Indian startups that might want that name.

• 1:21:09Speaker 00

  I do have the domain. There's actually two startups, one that went through Y Combinator and one other that have asked for it at one point, but I paid $340,000 for the domain. So I'm kind of hanging on to it.

• 1:21:23Shaan Puri?

  This is a four letter domain?

• 1:21:24Speaker 00

  Four letters.

• 1:21:24Sam Parr?

  I didn't even know how to spell that word. How do you spell that word?

• 1:21:27Shaan Puri?

  S E V A, right?

• 1:21:29Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:21:30Shaan Puri?

  But.

• 1:21:30Sam Parr?

  It sounds like a bottled water company, not like a, something that you're gonna like send emails from. So I think it's a smart move.

• 1:21:38Shaan Puri?

  My, I got in trouble this morning because I wrote, in the milk road edition that went out this morning, one of the things we covered was like, oh, the Fed, the Fed had this meeting about interest rates and how that's affecting like the markets. And, and I was like, basically I put a picture up of the committee that meets the Fed Open Market Committee, and it's basically like a bunch of old white people. And I was like, you know, today, you know, I had a bunch of different openers that I scrapped. One was like, here's a picture from a nursing home I visited recently. Oh, wait, no, that's not right. That's the Fed Open Market Committee. And I scrapped that and I said something else. And then I was like, you know, at today's elderly white people committee, and I like, I had a strike through and then I was like, no, at the Fed Open Market Committee.

• 1:22:21Sam Parr?

  It's like a rural McDonald's at like 7 a.m.

• 1:22:26Sam Parr?

  People got mad at you for that?

• 1:22:27Shaan Puri?

  It's like a seize candy. Yeah, people were like, you know, the skin color has nothing to do with it. I was like, yeah, of course. It's a joke and it has everything to do with my joke. And like, just the picture's funny. And like, wait, I thought we could make fun of the Fed with no repercussions. Like that, like the, there's like certain things that are really safe to punch at. And the Fed seems like one of the safest, you know, the Fed, you know, the Senate, like, who's defending their honor? I don't understand. Who are you? Is your mom on this? Is your grandma on this panel?

• 1:22:57Sam Parr?

  Too soon.

• 1:22:58Shaan Puri?

  Some people got mad at me. I was like, you should go ahead and unsubscribe because my filter is a lot looser than that.

• 1:23:06Sam Parr?

  Dude, Nathan, thank you. This is awesome.

• 1:23:09Speaker 00

  Yeah, thanks for having me. We'll have to do it again sometime and we'll have to hang out in Austin. When you get this new property, we'll come and do a workout on the, you know, on the ranch.

• 1:23:20Sam Parr?

  Come on, let's go.

• 1:23:22Shaan Puri?

  Good challenge accepted. Grudge initiated. All right.