From Blogger To $100 Million Business With Neil Patel

Sam Parr (@TheSamParr) and Shaan Puri (@ShaanVP) sit down with entrepreneur and online marketing guru Neil Patel to talk about his success starting as a blogger to making 9-figures in revenue. ----- Links: * Neil Patel * Photopea * 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: (03:00) - Neil's business history (07:00) - Minority certification (09:00) - Magic Johnson theory (24:45) - Monthly burn rate (38:35) - Neil's philanthropy (49:05) - 9-figure revenue (56:10) - Photopea ----- 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.

• 0:00Sam Parr?

  To say in your blog post that you go $15,000 a month is all I need. I'm happy. That was like 10 years ago, I think, but that's but you used to say 15,000.

• 0:09Speaker 01

  Single and no kids is easy. Right now, if I had to guess on my burn rate, 120 to 180 a month.

• 0:15Sam Parr?

  What?

• 0:16Shaan Puri?

  That's insane. So what is, how does that break down? So what's the like, what's the bulk of it? Whether so house probably is the biggest one?

• 0:24Speaker 01

  No, I have no mortgage.

• 0:25Shaan Puri?

  Okay, so you're spending 120 to 180 K without spending anything on your house?

• 0:37Sam Parr?

  So Neil, I was telling you a little bit about what you're getting into. We record everything, by the way. So like we just hop into it. But Sean kind of knows who you are. I've been a fan of yours for like 10 years. Can I tell Sean and the audience who I think you are? And you could tell me if I'm wrong and like what I'm missing?

• 0:55Speaker 01

  Sure, go for it.

• 0:57Sam Parr?

  All right. So you're Neil Patel. So I know you because you used to have this blog called Quick Sprout. I read it. Maybe 10 years ago, it's probably a 15 year old blog, if I remember correctly. At first, it was mostly about like SEO, but eventually it kind of like warped into being about SEO, about content, but just about business in general. And you would do like crazy stuff like you would build a business that made $100,000 a month in revenue by like you just picked like a random niche. And I think it ended up being supplements and you like blogged every month about how that was going. And you used to blog about all types of crazy stuff. But then eventually you also started a company called Crazy Egg, which I heard was doing many millions of dollars a year in revenue. And it was a bootstrap and you own the whole thing.

• 1:37Sam Parr?

  Then you and Heaton started Kiss Metrics and raised a bunch of money. It didn't end up working out wonderfully, but it was like, it could have been actually quite huge. Heaton wrote a great blog post about like where, you know, where a couple of errors were made. But now you've got like a seven or 800 person agency that is also bootstrap like the rest of your stuff. And you've just kind of been balling out like for like 15 years in the world of business, just killing it with agencies. Is that right? Did I, did I get everything mostly right?

• 2:05Speaker 01

  Mostly closed. So Crazy Egg came first. Heathen's the co-founder on that. He has it all or, you know, he owns Crazy Egg as well. So it's not just me anymore. And then there's another guy named John Butler, who was also part of Crazy Egg at the beginning. And then Quicksprout came later. I started blogging on about business and stuff like that. Kissmetrics then came. Kissmetrics didn't work out. Quicksprout started to have a big audience related to marketing. We tried to create an SEO software on there. I did that with my co-founder Heathen at the time. He's like, alright, how about we create a company out of this? I'll do the software. And that didn't work out. I didn't want to be part

• 2:48Speaker 01

  of it anymore. He took it over. And he ended up making it a business site, directory, you know, informational site, whatever you want to call it, has affiliate offers, which you already know about. And then the last one was the ad agency, which is correct. And then there's been a lot of stuff in between here and there. A lot didn't work out. But generally speaking, I tend to do one thing at once, focus. And currently, I spend all my time on my ad agency.

• 3:17Sam Parr?

  And that, you're at six, seven hundred. How big is that at the moment? And it's only like five or six years old, right?

• 3:24Speaker 01

  Yeah, so we're on our fifth year. And then this year will be end of year five. We're at roughly seven hundred people. I think maybe a little bit more, maybe by end of year nine hundred-ish, if I had to guess.

• 3:34Shaan Puri?

  Who are these people? These, like, seven hundred anonymous Indians in India? What's going on? Who are these people?

• 3:41Speaker 01

  We do have some people in India. But what's funny is-

• 3:45Shaan Puri?

  How many people do you employ in New York? That's what I want to know. That's my agency test.

• 3:49Sam Parr?

  You're in Brazil too, though, right?

• 3:51Speaker 01

  Yeah, we're in Brazil. Majority of our people are in the United States. If I look at region-wise, the United States has the biggest headcount. We also have offices in Australia, Canada, UK, Brazil, India. I think we're opening up Germany soon. We're looking at Italy. We're looking at France and a few other regions as well. But our model is, is like, our ad agency in India markets companies in India. It's not really used to outsource American work into India.

• 4:22Sam Parr?

  And what work are people doing? Like, what's the service that you're providing?

• 4:26Speaker 01

  All digital. So like SEO, pay per click, email marketing, conversion rate optimization, organic social, paid social, the list goes on and on.

• 4:34Sam Parr?

  And do all the customers come from neilpatel.com?

• 4:39Speaker 01

  It used to be that way. Then we started getting a lot through word of mouth. I would have never really guessed that word of mouth drives business.

• 4:48Shaan Puri?

  How, how many, can you say how many, uh, so most people I would say like our audience would be like, oh yeah, it's cool to have like a personal brand, but me and Sam have figured out, oh wow, this shit really does open up more doors than you would have expected. Uh, you've been doing this for a long time. So Neil Patel, which is kind of like a personal blog where you're talking about like, you know, hacks and experiments and strategies that you've, you know, figured out. How many, can you say how many millions that brought in in client bookings, what for the agency, like what, uh, how big did just the referrals from Neil Patel get you before other stuff kicked in like word of mouth and being recognized in the industry and other things like that?

• 5:25Speaker 01

  I think the Neil Patel brand got us to around like 30, 40 million in revenue and then word of mouth started kicking in and then other things started kicking in and employees started bringing in their own deals because they've worked in the space for so long. And then we saw more and more growth, got awards that brought us deals. Being a minority owned business, that helps. Believe it or not, there's, if you're Indian and you live in the United States, you're considered a minority and uh,

• 5:53Shaan Puri?

  I was about to say, are we a minority? I feel like I never get minority credits.

• 5:57Sam Parr?

  You're the majority of CEOs out there. So I mean,

• 6:01Speaker 01

  Funny because we go through RFPs and some of them ask if you're, um, what is it like MBE certification or something like that? I forgot what it's called. Or minority business enterprise. And I was like, well, I'm not a minority. There's like one plus billion of me in this world, right? And they're like, oh, you're a minority. I'm like, what are you talking about? There's like a billion plus Indians in this world. How are we a minority? And they're like, oh, in America, you're a minority. And in some of these RFPs, they're looking, it says in there, we're looking for, um, LGBTQ? I don't know what the, all four of the letters are.

• 6:38Shaan Puri?

  You have the tattoo on your arm.

• 6:40Sam Parr?

  Yeah, the Q's there.

• 6:42Speaker 01

  And then women owned businesses, veteran owned businesses, and the other one was minority. And I was just like, wait, there's actually a quota that these big Fortune 500 companies have to hit. And they're like, yeah. And I was like, well, I'm a minority. They're like, well, you need the certification. And I was like, I gotta have a certification to tell you that I'm a minority. And at first I didn't realize I was a minority. They were telling me, oh, you're a minority. We reached out to you. We're hoping that you'd be a good fit. And I'm like, I'm a minority. And they're like, yeah, you're a minority in the United States. You'd help us meet our quota. Do you have the certification? I'm like, what are you talking about? And then we went through the process and got the certification.

• 7:19Sam Parr?

  You gotta get your papers, bro. You gotta get your papers right.

• 7:22Shaan Puri?

  I would have been offended. And then as soon as I realized, wait, this is to my advantage. Oh, hold on. I also got solar panels on my house. Does that help? You know, like I'm a dog owner.

• 7:33Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, exactly. I have I have a vision impairment called far sightedness.

• 7:39Shaan Puri?

  What else works in my favor here? You know, like, was the certificate just turn the webcam on and it looked at you and it was like, yep.

• 7:45Speaker 01

  That's not enough. And what's funny is our COO or VP operations, one of the titles, I forgot what Tracy's title is. She asked me for this like six months before we did it. She's like, hey, I need your birth certificate. I'm like, yeah, why do you need my birth certificate? She's like, oh, we need it for this certification. I'm like, whatever. And the moment someone ended up telling me how Magic Johnson generates a lot of his revenue because he's a minority and gets a lot of contracts, partners with other businesses, white labels it. And uses his name, becomes a quote unquote owner of that business and then outsourced.

• 8:17Shaan Puri?

  Oh, wait, tell me about that. Give me an example. What's what's what's an example of the Magic Johnson formula?

• 8:22Speaker 01

  Sure. So I don't know if this is true. This is just what someone in the minority space ended up telling me. So that's the caveat. I don't know if this is true or real. And they're saying, let's say if someone has a food company and they have the contracts with a lot of the hospitals that are run by the government, like the VA. They're looking for minorities to provide it, but there's already a lot of big corporations that provide the food. So Magic Johnson may go create a business that's in that space. Partner with the big supplier who already provides the food to these hospitals. He'll go get the contracts and then work with them to actually fulfill.

• 8:53Sam Parr?

  Yeah, wait, Sean, you never heard, you, you never heard of this. My, my, my in-laws, my in-laws own a, a moving company and they're minorities. They're, uh, black, they're Haitian immigrants and they win deals partially because of that reason. Cause like Morgan Stanley or something like that, if they want to move, they wanna, they have some type of policy in their company. It says, we, we wanna get RFPs for, or we wanna get bids from these types of companies.

• 9:19Shaan Puri?

  I had no idea how, I didn't, obviously I knew this exists. I just didn't realize how significant it was. I definitely didn't know the Magic Johnson formula, which is frankly genius on his part. If that's, if that's actually what he does.

• 9:31Speaker 01

  We don't know that part, but it's true. But think of it this way, right? It's a quota. So if I go and I get a RFP, let's say from Boeing, which funny enough, we lost the RFP because we're overbikes for what they wanted. Um, and let's say my price is very similar to the competition. I have awards showing that we were the agency of the year. So like, all right, these guys are good at what they do. We have the case studies and if we're similar pricing, like, oh, this minority helps us hit our quota. Let's give the business year.

• 9:59Shaan Puri?

  Right. Yeah, yeah, of course. You, you have some merit, uh, to go with it.

• 10:03Sam Parr?

  For the first $30 million of business, you got that and you must've gotten that by year two or so, if you're growing this fast. What was the main, year three, sorry.

• 10:13Speaker 01

  Year three.

• 10:14Sam Parr?

  What was the main service like? When I think of like, cause I went to your website and I actually submitted a lead to figure it out. There was the maximum, you, you ask what your website is and what your budget is. And it's like zero to 10,000, 10,000 to 20,000, and then just 50,000 plus. So were you serving like mostly small businesses? And what, like, what were you, were you doing as simple stuff as like making their Yelp page good? Like, what were you doing?

• 10:41Speaker 01

  Yeah, so it's not that small. We do have some SMBs like that, but we actually first started off in, uh, mid-market. Our clients would pay us like a minimum of 10 grand a month.

• 10:51Sam Parr?

  And what would you do for 10,000 a month?

• 10:54Speaker 01

  So nothing was cookie cutter. It was all custom. So like, maybe they need SEO, maybe they need a help on paid management, maybe they need some CRO or email marketing or a little bit of everything, right? But the plans would start at 120 a year, right? 10 a month and scale up from there to 20 a month, 30 a month, whatever it may be.

• 11:13Shaan Puri?

  What was most in vogue as the service when you started, like the trend everybody wanted? And then what's the in vogue thing today?

• 11:20Speaker 01

  When we first started, it was mainly SEO.

• 11:22Sam Parr?

  And what does that mean, though? What does that mean? You use HA reps or something? And your employees like, look which terms they should rank for? And then you write an article for them?

• 11:30Speaker 01

  So it was optimizing their on-page code, helping build links, creating content, promoting the content, and making sure that traffic converted into leads or sales, assuming if they weren't services. And it was a positive ROI for the customer.

• 11:44Sam Parr?

  That sounds like a ton of work for $10,000 a month.

• 11:47Speaker 01

  It would start at 10. It depended on the keywords, how hard they were to rank for, and it would go up from there.

• 11:54Sam Parr?

  And what about now?

• 11:55Shaan Puri?

  Sam, I love when you describe people's businesses because you're just like, so what does that mean? You just Google their name and then it doesn't show up? And then you go write an article with their name? And it's like, what's the hustle, dude? You just read the New York Times and then you just cut out half the words and then you hit send in an email? Like, is that what? Is that what the hustle is?

• 12:11Sam Parr?

  Yeah.

• 12:15Shaan Puri?

  Nailed it.

• 12:16Sam Parr?

  I mean, it can be like, like, like, you know, there's, there's always more nuance and complication in reality. But like, if you can explain things in a fairly simple way where it's like, what's HubSpot? Oh, they just make software. So when you people sign up for your website, you can email them and call them. You know what I mean? Like, you could, I'm just trying to dumb it down a little bit.

• 12:36Speaker 01

  But when you look at the business, when I first started, massive churn, how to add tons of features, how to figure out onboarding, how to figure out trading. There was a lot of stuff that went to make HubSpot a multi-billion dollar company, right? A lot of people look at it as email, but they do more than email. They do more than a CRM. They've added, actually, if anyone in this space has a ton of traction, they have a history of adding a lot of those features for free, which is a smart model, and then gobble up market share, get them into the ecosystem, and hopefully they stick around.

• 13:06Sam Parr?

  And so what's, what's the popular?

• 13:08Shaan Puri?

  You should do the ad reads for us. That was amazing.

• 13:13Shaan Puri?

  By the way, Sam, I think you should make suburban dictionary, which is just you explaining businesses without like any, any of the complicated stuff like, yeah, what is it? If you get customers. Call them and email them.

• 13:27Ben?

  The three syllable dictionary, like I explained complicated things, but no word is above three syllables. That's what we're gonna call it.

• 13:36Shaan Puri?

  What? By the way, I was just gonna say Ben brought up one point on that minority thing. Ben, you want to say that? That sounds pretty interesting. You slacked us something.

• 13:43Ben?

  Neil kind of mentioned this too, but like, this is really, really popular in government work because the government is like very hardcore about hitting their quotas for racial minorities. And so around here, like I actually know a couple of guys and basically what they do is the people I know are all African American. They get the contract, they put their name on the contract, they then outsource the entire thing to like Deloitte or KPMG or whatever, and they take like, you know, 15% of the revenue or whatever.

• 14:15Shaan Puri?

  They create a consulting firm. That's like the minority, minority Inc. And then minority Inc. goes and gets the contracts and farms it out to, to like Deloitte or whoever.

• 14:23Ben?

  That's great.

• 14:26Speaker 01

  I can't find this client info.

• 14:28Speaker 04

  Have you heard of HubSpot? HubSpot is a CRM platform, so it shares its data across every application. Every team can stay aligned. No out of sync spreadsheets or dueling databases. HubSpot, grow better.

• 14:42Shaan Puri?

  I lived in, in Indonesia for a while and they had such a bad traffic problem. Jakarta is like, I think the worst traffic in the world. Like you're just going two miles, you might be there for two hours. And so they were like, okay, we need to create like a carpool incentive. So how do we create an incentive where if you have three or more people in your car, then you can go in the fast lane? And so this, so it worked for like, you know, a month. It was like, oh, wow, this is great. If we carpool, we get to go faster. And then this like little industry sprouted up where people would just stand at the edge of the carpool lane, like a hitchhiker. And they'd be like, I'll get in your car. If you want a third rider, I'll just hop in and we could ride in the fast lane. And then they would get off on the other side and ride back with somebody else. And so they would be professional, like, you know, HOV lane participants.

• 15:25Shaan Puri?

  So they would just spend all day riding with you in your car. So you'd be sitting there and someone would just get in the backseat with you. It's just like a random Indonesian person and you would pay them 10, 10 like rupees or whatever, and then 10 bot, and then they would, you know, get out on the other side a mile later. It was amazing.

• 15:41Sam Parr?

  You, uh, Neil, was, was Quicksprout, uh, Ben, there you go, uh, was Quicksprout? I mean, so that was your main business, Quicksprout and Crazy Egg were your main business for a while.

• 15:53Speaker 01

  Quicksprout was just a blog and then my co-founder Heath then ended up taking it over and now it's his blog.

• 16:00Sam Parr?

  So, but what was your main source of, of revenue and income? Because I'm, like I said, I've listened to you forever. Like you've been crushing it, it seems like financially for like 10 plus years.

• 16:10Speaker 01

  I don't know if I'm crushing it, but, uh, the main source of income was Crazy Egg for most of my life. And then it ended up becoming the ad agency.

• 16:20Shaan Puri?

  And Sam, you said something at the very beginning that if I was listening to this, I'd be like, wait, hold on, I want to hear that story. You said something like, just for kicks, he would like spin up a business that like did a hundred K a month in revenue. What's an example of that? Tell that story, because that sounds awesome.

• 16:34Speaker 01

  Yeah. So everyone thinks like, it's really hard to make money online. And then you got these shysters who are like, buy this for a thousand dollars and you become rich, which never really happens. Maybe every once in a while, but for most people it doesn't. So I was like, I could have business on anything. People are like, go create a nutrition business. My audience picked, I gave them like a lot of different options. They picked a nutrition business. And I was like, all right, let's create a blog, get a ranking, get some traffic and then funnel people in through quizzes, through, uh, emails. And let's bundle them into, uh, supplements, rank higher on Amazon, get traction and see what happens. And it did well.

• 17:10Shaan Puri?

  And that took you like, uh, months, years?

• 17:13Speaker 01

  It wasn't months, it was much more than that. I think it was like,

• 17:16Sam Parr?

  A year, right?

• 17:17Speaker 01

  A little bit less than a year. I think it was like nine or 10 months. So it wasn't like one or two months sadly, but a little bit less than a year. So it was pretty good.

• 17:27Sam Parr?

  It was an awesome, it was an awesome blog post series, Sean. You gotta Google it. Google like Quicksprout or Neil Patel, then like a hundred thousand dollars a month. And it was like a monthly update. It was pretty amazing.

• 17:36Speaker 01

  I, I don't think, we may have deleted it now. I don't know if it's still online, but, and then, so I took the money I made from Crazy Egg and I would park it into other things. So it's like stock market, for a long time, the stock markets had a really crazy run, right? Then you also have things like investments, a lot of venture funds, uh, angel investments. And then sometimes you just get lucky. Sometimes you don't know this is a numbers game.

• 18:00Shaan Puri?

  We had talked about doing a content series like this to grow the podcast. I was like, you know, I think one of the best ways to grow the podcast could be if we do a challenge like what you had described and one of the ideas is like, what if Sam created his own, Sam Sticky Yicky, his own condiment brand and we basically show how we build a D to C brand, like from, from the idea to like branding to marketing to, and we just do it all transparently to like, like get people hooked on, okay, let me see how you guys actually build this thing. Now, it's a lot of work, which is why I think ultimately we didn't do it. But how well did that work for you? Was that like just kind of like a good content thing? Or was it like, no, that was like, drove a lot of growth for the brand and the blog. I'm curious how well that worked for you.

• 18:41Speaker 01

  It didn't drive as much growth for the brand, but it did help out every little bit. Like I did crazy experiments. So I spent like a hundred and something or 200 and something thousand on clothes and wanted to see what that did in business meetings, spent money flying first class everywhere. See, wanted to see what that would do. But yeah, I tried a lot of different experiments and it was just for shits and giggles. And it was also a reason to justify some of my expenses. And I'm like, I want to fly first class because I remember my first time flying first class, someone else paid for it. I'm like, wow, this is, I've been missing out. This is a lot better than being crammed up and flying all the way to Europe from Los Angeles, you know, and

• 19:24Speaker 01

  economy. And then I was like, man, let's do some experiments and let's see if I can justify this expense. But yeah.

• 19:32Sam Parr?

  That's amazing. And you just, you, did you say early on that you just gave Heaton? So did you invest in Heaton Shaw's other company, Sean, Nira?

• 19:41Shaan Puri?

  Yeah.

• 19:42Sam Parr?

  Yeah. So we're both, Neil, we're both investors in Nira, which is, Heaton's your cousin, right?

• 19:47Speaker 01

  No.

• 19:48Sam Parr?

  Or brother-in-law, brother-in-law. Yeah, sorry. And Heaton's amazing. He's another, he's a great blogger as well. And Sean and I both invested in his company called Nira, which is either gonna be a dud or it's gonna be like the biggest company ever. I know. The, like, it's like a company that's close, like they're gonna close like multimillion dollar contracts, I would guess. That's, it's like a big old business, potentially a big old business. But did you say that you gave him Crazy Egg?

• 20:15Speaker 01

  So with crazy, what ended up happening is, is what I wanted to do is we were doing business forever together. And then eventually I just said, hey, you can have the monthly distributions and I'm gonna go create another business.

• 20:32Sam Parr?

  Why would you give that? Why?

• 20:36Speaker 01

  He didn't ask for it, nor did he care for it, nor did he want it. You know, he's never been about money, neither him or I have. And we're not rich. I can't actually speak for him. I'm not rich. I've just done well enough and I don't spend as much. So it's like, don't really need the money. Does that make sense? Like if you just don't spend money, you don't really need much cash.

• 20:57Shaan Puri?

  Dude, you just said you dropped $200,000 on clothes. What do you mean you don't need money?

• 21:00Speaker 01

  Well, that was like, right? But that's not my daily life. Like I'm wearing a white t-shirt with stains that my kids spit up on.

• 21:09Speaker 01

  They're probably like 10, 20 bucks. I don't know what the white t-shirts cost, but they're not really white anymore. So I try not to do video recordings in front of white walls anymore, uh, cause you can just tell the discoloration from it. Nonetheless.

• 21:23Shaan Puri?

  So did Sam say you live in Brazil? Is that what?

• 21:26Speaker 01

  No, no, I have a, a division in Brazil. Like we do marketing in Brazil for Brazilian companies.

• 21:32Shaan Puri?

  And you live in Texas? Where do you, where do you live?

• 21:35Speaker 01

  Vegas.

• 21:36Shaan Puri?

  Vegas. Okay. Amazing. And, uh, so have you, um, is it easy for you to keep your burn rate down? Because like, uh, I was telling Sam this, I spend like, I don't know, $25,000 a month now, just like, and I'm not, I don't even feel like I'm.

• 21:50Sam Parr?

  Dude, I think Sean, you might, I think you might spend more than that now. If, I bet you add it up because I know what, how you spend. I bet you it's more than 25.

• 21:57Shaan Puri?

  It might be, it might be a little more. Uh, but it's not more than 30, I would say. I don't think it's more than 30. So I, but like. Yeah, I got two little kids, but I got two little kids, but they're like babies, right? Like, you know, like they don't, they don't eat food. Yeah. So, so, you know, there's diapers, sure, but like, it's not them, it's me.

• 22:15Shaan Puri?

  So.

• 22:16Speaker 01

  Burn rate, I would take thirty.

• 22:18Shaan Puri?

  You said it's a steep burn rate or it's a.

• 22:21Speaker 01

  Good burn rate. I would take it. I would trade with you.

• 22:24Shaan Puri?

  Okay, gotcha. So when you say you don't spend much, what do you say is your monthly burn rate? Because I think for most people listening, right? They're like, most people don't talk about how much they make or how much they spend. All right. How much you make? Sometimes that's sensitive. How much you spend?

• 22:35Speaker 01

  How much I burn.

• 22:35Sam Parr?

  Well, but but Neil, you actually wrote this in a blog post. You said, you said, I spend, this was, I don't know if you're, I have no idea if you're single or if you have a family and you can.

• 22:46Speaker 01

  My my burn rate right now.

• 22:48Sam Parr?

  But you used to say in your blog post that you go fifteen thousand dollars a month is all I need. I'm happy. That was like ten years ago, I think. But that's, but you used to say fifteen thousand.

• 22:58Speaker 01

  Single and no kids is easy. Right now, if I had a guess on my burn rate, one twenty to one eighty a month.

• 23:04Shaan Puri?

  What? That's insane. So what is, how does that break down? So what's the like, what's the bulk of it? Whether, so house probably is the biggest one.

• 23:13Speaker 01

  No, I have no mortgage.

• 23:14Shaan Puri?

  Okay, so you're spending one hundred twenty to one hundred eighty K without spending anything on your home?

• 23:20Speaker 01

  Of property tax, property tax for both my homes and HOA dues is probably close to two hundred a year.

• 23:29Shaan Puri?

  Okay, great.

• 23:31Speaker 01

  So.

• 23:33Shaan Puri?

  We've got twelve thousand of the way there.

• 23:35Sam Parr?

  All right, yeah. So there's.

• 23:40Sam Parr?

  Okay.

• 23:40Speaker 01

  Life insurance is twenty five grand a month.

• 23:43Sam Parr?

  What?

• 23:44Speaker 01

  My whole life policy has twenty five to three hundred a year.

• 23:48Shaan Puri?

  No, no, wait, what?

• 23:49Sam Parr?

  Wait, what? What the hell is a twenty five thousand dollar a month life insurance policy? What? Can you explain that?

• 23:55Speaker 01

  Is it just a benefit? Like if I die, my wife and kids get money, like a life insurance policy.

• 24:02Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, well, I get that. But is that normal? I've never heard, like, either I'm dumb or you're dumb. What? Who's dumb here? Am I dumb? Because I've never heard of anybody spending that much on their life insurance.

• 24:12Speaker 01

  It's like an investment account. It builds over time. So it's not like it goes away, right? Most life insurance policies are for, call it ten years, and then you buy another one. Mine just keep going and you can borrow against it. Just think of it as like an investment vehicle. So that's twenty five a month.

• 24:27Shaan Puri?

  Okay, I see. Now I understand.

• 24:30Speaker 01

  Staff, cleaners, nannies, driver, we have a full time driver. I think that ends up being around fifty seven a month.

• 24:39Sam Parr?

  Fifty seven hundred, fifty seven thousand.

• 24:42Speaker 01

  Thousand.

• 24:43Sam Parr?

  Uh, you know, a driver Uber? What, why?

• 24:49Speaker 01

  More affordable. I optimized for convenience in Vegas. I go through this company, they charge a hefty premium. I go through this company and I have decals on my car. So if I do a meeting in front of a casino, the car can just stay in front of the casino and doesn't have to move. If I'm going to the airport, you can straight up pull up into the plane or whatever you want to do. And you don't have to go through terminals or anything like that. So that makes life.

• 25:15Shaan Puri?

  So part of your strategy, as I'm picking this up, is that you live the best lifestyle you want. And it's all expensable, the way you do it.

• 25:27Speaker 01

  Uh, I don't know if it's all expensive.

• 25:29Shaan Puri?

  Is that what you meant with a decal? Like it's a company, it's like marketing, it's like a, like a marketing vehicle for you.

• 25:35Speaker 01

  So there, there's a limo company. If I have their. And just pay them. I can end up parking wherever I want in theory, not literally wherever I want. But in most cases I can park wherever I want and the car can just sit there and wait for me.

• 25:48Sam Parr?

  So, all right, so what else? Anything else? You fly private?

• 25:50Shaan Puri?

  He's like, I, I buy a daily Disneyland fast pass just in case I decide to go that day.

• 25:57Sam Parr?

  Yeah.

• 25:59Speaker 01

  For convenience of time.

• 26:01Shaan Puri?

  What's been, what's been the number one, uh, like, kind of like where you feel like most people don't? Most people think this is too expensive and not worth it. But for me, I get way more value. I'll give you an example of my life, right? So I, I thought I had burned right until we started talking. So this is great. I'm feeling so much better about myself. But the one thing I did was I, I hired a private chef. So I was like, all right, that I think, I, I always thought that's the lifestyle of the rich and famous. And I, I thought, wow, that's cool because you eat healthy and it tastes great. You don't have to fuss with time and, you know, cooking and dishes and groceries and all that stuff. And so to me, it's like a no brainer. I'm like, dude, anybody with any kind of money, you should be like, that should be one of the first, like fancy car later. Private chef now, like, cause I'm like, to me, the value, the reward way outweighed the cost. I think most people don't typically make that trade.

• 26:45Shaan Puri?

  Sounds like you've experimented with many ways of spending money. What has been a good reward for, for cost, uh, trade that you're like, this one is, is great that most people don't do.

• 26:59Speaker 01

  I don't know. I'm in, I'm in a bubble because I have a lot of friends who are like me sadly. Uh, in which we spend a lot and we don't know what's reality. I know that sounds bad to say, but it's true, right? Uh, cook is not bad. Uh, housekeeper isn't bad. So you don't have to do your own dishes and stuff. Although funny enough, I enjoy doing that and ironing because it's uh, it's kind of like meditative for me. It's relaxing. I don't know why, watching TV and ironing. Um, nanny's help. So you get the freedom and you can watch your kids when you want to, but you can also do meetings and stuff like that. Um, the, the, probably the, the best expense I ever spend on is private planes. Not because I like it. It's uh, I don't mind playing commercial.

• 27:43Speaker 01

  Not really any difference for me, but it helps me optimize for times that way I can see my kids more. That does sometimes do a lot of meetings for work and just going and then coming back the same day. Just really in and out really quickly. Like sometimes I'll be home quick enough, like go from Vegas to Utah for a conference, speak, come back and I'll be home quick enough to pick up my kid from school. I like to meet, we will value it. That's worth the money.

• 28:06Sam Parr?

  Are you saving any money then? Or are, I mean, are you just taking a fat draw from the agency in order to, of uh, uh, pay for this? Or are you able to expense a lot of it to the agency? How's that work?

• 28:16Speaker 01

  I don't expense any of it to my company. I just personally pay.

• 28:20Sam Parr?

  So you're just, the agency is just that profitable of a business. It's doing that well.

• 28:26Speaker 01

  Or investments or savings. I've been well enough in life where I'm okay.

• 28:30Shaan Puri?

  Why did you do an agency? So me and Sam, I was talking about like, uh, we have many mottos on this podcast. Um, for example, we don't do public math. For example, you don't say you're rich. You say you're post economic. Uh, these are things we've picked up from, from guests along the way. And one of the, one of the model, one of the mottos that we say is uh, you know, agencies suck. And uh, it's like, and, and the reason we say it's not because they uh, like they do well. There's not that they suck. It's like they suck as a business choice. Like if I could, I have always thought if I could choose between software or an agency, I'd choose software because it's like, oh, it's not a services business. It's going to work while I sleep and it could scale up and I don't have to open up offices in Poland and Brazil and all these other places.

• 29:16Shaan Puri?

  But you chose that you did software and you chose agency now. Um, why'd you make that choice? And what's great about agencies that I'm kind of like not giving enough credit for?

• 29:28Speaker 01

  You're looking at business as in software is more scalable, it's more desirable by public markets, EX HubSpot versus Accenture. Accenture has way worse multiples than HubSpot. Accenture is a bigger company from a revenue EBITDA standpoint. But now, take a different approach. Okay, HubSpot's a publicly traded company. You guys are both HubSpot employees, I'm assuming still, is that correct?

• 29:52Sam Parr?

  Kinda.

• 29:54Speaker 01

  Sure, whatever your guys' deal is, right? But you guys are pretty much at HubSpot. Now, imagine creating a business and you don't plan on going public. You don't care for the limelight, you don't care for any of that. In business, what's a successful business? Good revenue growth and good revenue and profitability, right? All that really matters at the end of the day, whether you grow or not grow, is how profitable are you? Would you guys agree with that statement? Assuming you're doing something that's ethical and you're not selling drugs.

• 30:21Sam Parr?

  No, I wouldn't agree with that. I would say there's a third thing, which is like, is this enjoyable? And like, do I like my day to day? And with the more people you have, most people would say that's just a little bit more headache than...

• 30:36Speaker 01

  But that's not software or consulting. Anytime you build a big company, you tend to have a large amount of people. Whether it's HubSpot or whether it's Accenture, everyone has a lot of...

• 30:46Sam Parr?

  Yeah, but you can have, you can probably have a much higher revenue per employee with software versus, let's say you own a massive landscaping business, you're gonna have to have tens of thousands of people.

• 30:57Speaker 01

  But what's the difference from dealing with, how many people does HubSpot have? Like 6,000? I don't know, 5,000, 6,000 is probably a lot, I'm guessing on the number. But what's the difference of dealing with 5,000 or 6,000 people and 20,000 people? There's a point where it doesn't matter and it's a lot of people either way. Like, it's not like you're at 50 people. You still have thousands of employees to deal with and you need managers and layers and all that kind of stuff.

• 31:20Sam Parr?

  Yeah, but you're hiring, good or bad, you're hiring a different type of person. So for example, if you're VaynerMedia, they're based in New York. They can probably only afford to pay some of their lower level employees $70,000 or $80,000 a year. And so you just have to get a ton of people like that and have to have higher churn versus, say, a bigger company where you're able to pay a significantly higher salary because the revenue per employee is much higher. So... Perhaps there's a slightly different day to day with because of that.

• 31:49Speaker 01

  Not necessarily. Let's say you're VaynerMedia. He could be doing it to optimize for profit. What if I told you his LTV was six, seven, eight years, right?

• 31:58Sam Parr?

  And that's great.

• 32:00Speaker 01

  Then at that point, you can still hire high quality people and pay them arm and a leg. You get what I mean, right? Like you look at Accenture, they're charging accounts so much money and their contracts are long. And I don't know what VaynerMedia's LTV is, but there's a lot of consulting companies that have LTVs of six, seven years for clients. And their clients are spending, you know, a HubSpot, yes, it's more revenue per, you can say potentially in software, you can get to more revenue per employee. But I know consulting companies that only take on contracts that are like five, six million dollars and upwards. So you have high margins and you can have a high revenue per employee. But either way, no matter what, as you build a big business, you're going to need more people and it's a headache to manage.

• 32:44Speaker 01

  Whether you pay them seventy thousand or whether you pay them a hundred and fifty thousand, it's still more of a headache. And the notion that if you hire someone for a hundred and fifty thousand, I'm not saying you're saying this, it doesn't necessarily mean they're a better employee, right?

• 32:56Sam Parr?

  No, it just means different types of headaches.

• 32:58Speaker 01

  Correct. Exactly. Engineers, for example, are very expensive in this economy, right? So the point I'm getting at is a consulting company, I had the demand for it. A lot of people wanted to pay me for marketing. And there was just so much demand, it would have been silly not to do. And if I'm not trying to go public or I'm not trying to sell, money's money, green is green, as long as you're happy doing what you're doing, take the cash.

• 33:22Sam Parr?

  Will you ever sell the company?

• 33:24Speaker 01

  I wouldn't say I would never sell the company, but I don't care to ever sell the company because I love what I'm doing. We also have good growth too, right? Like, I don't know what will grow this year, sixty something percent, which isn't bad. You know, with the market going up and down and fluctuating sixty something percent is my guess at our size is decent.

• 33:43Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, the part I was actually talking about was a little bit more like, I think you're you're totally right that like, if you're gonna win big, you're gonna end up with a bunch of employees and like, you know, it might look like one hundred fifty, it might look like a thousand, it might look like ten thousand, but like, you know, in either case, you're gonna have managerial work and headaches and it's just different types. The part I was really talking about was like, you know, I've now built, let's say, a media company, content, and then it's like, um, done educational stuff, so courses, which are like, you know, a different thing. And then there's like, I built software company and, you know, we ended up selling that one. And then it's like, and then there's, uh, services, which is like client services, like, like consulting or agency model.

• 34:22Shaan Puri?

  And what I hate, what I, what I love about content media is it's actually pretty fun to create and it's cool because a lot of people consume it to the kind of, you know, you get that like hit, um, but you gotta like, you gotta bake the cake every day, right? So like, you know, the hustle or like the milk road or this podcast, like, we have to come on and create the content again, uh, you know, for the most part, we, we're not doing like super long evergreen stuff. Uh, so you know, like with the hustles, the daily newsletter, milk road, the daily newsletter, it's, we gotta bake that cake every day. Whereas software, it was like, we built one product and yes, we might, we will improve it over the course of a year, you know, every year we're gonna improve it. But like fundamentally, um, we didn't have to like recreate the product, come up with a new viral story or a new great content segment,

• 35:06Shaan Puri?

  uh, that would like require like a new genius. Uh, with software, it's like you come up with one genius moment, and then you sort of refine it, make it work better over time and get rid of bugs and things like that. So I preferred that part of software, which was like, making a product rather than making kind of like a disposable, uh, you know, consumable piece of content. Or like I have an e-commerce company. I like, it's a pain in the ass to have supply, physical products that are supply chain, constrained and like, we have a warehouse, we got warehouse problems with our e-commerce business. And so I'm like, man, digital was sweet compared to e-commerce, but e-commerce is quite profitable, like kicks off a bunch of profits, that's nice. So every business has these pros and cons. And I always thought agency was like,

• 35:44Shaan Puri?

  The part I always thought was a pain in the ass was like the client services. You are reinventing the next campaign and the next winning marketing formula for them. And you have to keep clients happy all the time and clients are sort of like never satisfied in a way that like if software is like you can have nameless, faceless customers that like, yeah, some percentage of them will write into your help desk that's in the Philippines or whatever, but like you're not having to like, you know, send account reports to your, you know, your, your big clients to keep them happy.

• 36:12Speaker 01

  Yeah, but you, everyone has their own problems. In software, a lot of people have churned this issue and they can't figure it out. Or they have competitors who come into the marketplace and just undercut them on pricing for the same features because it's cheaper and cheaper to build software these days. Right? So they all have their own problem. To me, I look at it as if you can find the right people. So every time I start a company, I find in people to put in place that have already done it multiple times before because your risk of failure are lower and they already know everything to do. So I don't have to deal with client relationships. I don't have to deal with customer service or anything like that. I get to do what I enjoy doing, which is go and create content, be the face, et cetera. And my wife enjoys what she gets to do, right? She gets to donate the money, although we don't really consider as donations. We look at as investing.

• 36:56Speaker 01

  We're investing in people, although we really don't ever collect any money back. It's more so you're investing into making the world a better place or people's lives a better place or whatever it may be.

• 37:07Shaan Puri?

  What's a, who were, who were your first three clients at this, at this age? Because you

• 37:14Speaker 01

  I don't know. They were small companies.

• 37:18Shaan Puri?

  And right now, who's an example client?

• 37:22Speaker 01

  Like a Fortune 100 software company. Like that is a typical company. Think of any big, large corporation in B2B. That's a great example of one of our customers or even B2C. Actually, think of any Fortune 500 company. That's a prime example of a customer.

• 37:39Shaan Puri?

  What's a, and who's the CEO of your agency? Are you?

• 37:43Speaker 01

  No, I'm never the CEO. I'm a terrible manager. I'm one of the worst managers ever. His name is Mike Gullickson. He was the CEO, no, he was the president of iProspect, which is an ad agency owned by Densu. I believe in iProspect. Maybe they had four or 5,000 people is my guess.

• 38:03Sam Parr?

  And what, when you, how early into the business did you have a hired CEO or hired leader?

• 38:10Speaker 01

  Day one. I won't start a business without a CEO from day one.

• 38:13Sam Parr?

  And what did you pay them in the first year?

• 38:16Speaker 01

  First year was my co-founder, so like 100 grand.

• 38:20Sam Parr?

  And that's because you basically went and drummed up 100 grand worth of business and you're like, hey, Mike, I got, I got this client, so to give 100 grand, you want to run this thing for me and help it get deployed?

• 38:32Speaker 01

  No, our business didn't start off that way. I probably put in total of 5 million bucks into the business and my own money. So it was bootstrapped, but not really bootstrapped, if that makes sense, it's kind of cheating. And it gets easier and easier as you're entrepreneur, right? The more, the more successes you have, and I'm not saying I'm successful by any means, the more capital you have to deploy into the next thing, so it reduces chances of failure. And when it's your own money, this is just my thesis, and I could be wrong on this, I have no data points. When it's your own money, you're much more careful than when you raise like 15, 20, 30 million dollars of venture capital, right? You really look at every single dollar. But Mike was the CEO from day one.

• 39:14Speaker 01

  He's a great operator, has no agency experience. Eventually, we got in a president, and then eventually from there, we got in a CEO.

• 39:22Sam Parr?

  And have you guys crossed 100 million in revenue yet?

• 39:26Speaker 01

  Yeah, we do nine figures.

• 39:28Sam Parr?

  That's crazy, man. So, I mean, that's just pretty wild that you were able to like parlay this blog. That was our, always kind of a juggernaut, but this blog into a nine-figure-a-year business. I mean, that's amazing.

• 39:43Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's been a good run. I hope that I'm knocking on wood, although you probably can't hear it through the Chris, but I hope it keeps going and more so, we're just having fun. Like for me, what I enjoy doing is building a business. I know I have an expensive lifestyle. I generally don't do stuff for the money. Like I overpay like house staff, like nannies and stuff like that. When I say overpay, I drastically overpay, not by like 10, 20, 30, 40%. Like I really mean drastically overpay because I look at people. I'm like, if you're cleaning a house, how are you going to live on this? Like I'll give someone six figures to do that. I know that sounds kind of crazy or stupid, but like I'm not giving my kids money. So might as well take care of other people in this world who need it more than we do.

• 40:28Shaan Puri?

  Did you say you're not giving kids money?

• 40:31Speaker 01

  Yeah, I'm not going to give my kids money.

• 40:33Shaan Puri?

  Nothing? Leave, leave nothing?

• 40:36Speaker 01

  We have a trust set up. What they'll get maximum is like if they're on the street and they can't provide and they're going to be suffering, like I will help pay their bills or put them in a normal home. Or like if my kid's like, I want to be a doctor and I want to go spend all my time in Africa, helping other people out and I won't get paid for this. And I need, you know, X 5,000 dollars a month to live or 10,000 so I can just go volunteer all my time. I'd be like, sounds good. I'll pay for that. But like, I won't give them money for the sake of like, if they're like, I want to go travel to see Italy or I want a Honda Accord and like, go buy your own Honda Accord. Go travel on your own with your own dime. Like, you know, I don't believe in just giving people money because I think there's other people that need it more than we do.

• 41:20Sam Parr?

  Sean, are you going to give your kids money?

• 41:22Shaan Puri?

  I haven't really thought about it. Like my oldest is two, so I think I got some time to figure that out, but I, I lean more towards, so I've kind of heard both arguments. Like I know somebody who they, if some people are like, you know, you know, I do, there's some people that I'm definitely not in the camp of, I do this for my kids. I want to leave my kids with a whole bunch. So I'm like, that may be the worst thing you could do for them. Not because it means they'll be ruined.

• 41:46Sam Parr?

  Yeah, you have drug addicts.

• 41:48Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, you take away, you know, agency in a way, right? Like you, you want people to,

• 41:53Shaan Puri?

  like it's not that it's good or bad. It's actually just, it's just way lower on the totem pole of priorities. It's like, I just don't even focus on that. It's like, if I'm gonna leave them something, it's gonna be a certain set of character, character traits and skills and like mentality. That's what I'm trying to leave. Money is like, I don't know, 15th on the list of like, I don't know, we haven't even gotten to think about that yet. But I've thought a lot about what are the character traits and mentality and like, mindset and skills that I think I can help build and like, that's the focus. That's the one that matters. That's the, that's the gift. If whatever else comes from beyond that, I don't know, we can figure out. It's like the foot, it's like the footnotes.

• 42:27Speaker 01

  So like, we're very similar. My, I have a two-year-old and a less than one-year-old, right? And I look at it as you want them to be productive units of society, right? You want them to be ambitious, hungry, caring, thoughtful, happy, like whatever it is. There's a lot of characteristics that you may want children to be. But I look at it as like, they don't need money. Even like with my wife and I, we go over our expenses. And we look at what we spend on travel. And we do some of this because it's easier, but like my wife and I are actually considering cutting out all private and just going commercial now. The main reason our expenses are high is due to COVID. So if it wasn't for COVID, I would just be going in a normal airport.

• 43:06Speaker 01

  I didn't know how COVID was gonna impact with young kids could afford it. I was like, yeah, just start flying private. And we haven't gone back to commercial yet, but we're thinking about going back. Because like my wife and I look at the money as like, yeah, we spent all this money on travel and airfare and hotels. If we donated the money, people would have a better life. Do we really need it that much?

• 43:25Shaan Puri?

  What do you do when you donate that? Like, what's a good way to donate in your opinion? So there's like, you know, ranging from not donating to donating to one thing, to donate to a bunch of things, to like getting involved or seeing the impact or like, you know, I know people who, if they donate to Africa, they'll actually, their family will go take a trip every year so that they're more connected to the people. And they actually see the impact and they take their kids with them so that they see the impact. Like, what have you found that's a good way to give?

• 43:53Speaker 01

  So we have a balance. It's my wife and I team up. Um, this is gonna sound bad, but I don't like volunteering my time. My wife loves volunteering her time. I think it's very inefficient for me to volunteer my time. I should make the money uh versus volunteering my time because the money or the hours that if we donated the money would have a much bigger impact to the cause than if I actually spent my time. I don't think that sounds bad. Yeah, and my wife loves spending the time and like from going to soup kitchens or whatever it may be. So she picks the causes. We have a few theses. So like one thesis is is we are not really thesis, but rules. One rule is is we don't like money going to organizations that have tons of high overhead. We actually want our money going to the causes.

• 44:36Speaker 01

  So if it doesn't go to the cause, then we tend to not pick that um organization. The second thing that we look for is uh organizations who are um uh like uh self sufficient. Right? It's just like, how can this continue going even if someone wasn't managing? So like a great program, for example, is my wife likes donating to women's education. We used to donate also to men's education as well. So you find these people in these villages, you say, hey, you can't afford to go to school, get a degree. We'll pay for you to go to college, go get a degree, come back, teach kids in your village for a few years. Whether it's under a tree or anything, people can learn anywhere, right?

• 45:20Speaker 01

  And then, you know, go move on with your life and do whatever you want, but at least you're giving back to your own community. And what we found is when we started giving, because we've been doing this for so long now. Uh, well, actually not that long, but what I mean long, I'm talking about like ten, eleven years where we've been donating. And it it's picked up quite a bit over the last like five, six years. When we started giving the money to men, a lot of the men, we saw very low conversion rate from them actually coming back and teaching people in the village. Well, when we gave the money to women for their education, a lot of them came back and fulfilled on the promise. Cause it's not like you get a signed contract, right? It's just like, hey, we're gonna pay for everything, come back, help people out within your village. What's country?

• 46:02Speaker 01

  Uh, we've done this in both India and Africa. So different parts of Africa and uh in India. And then another program that we've done is like growing gardens. Where a lot of people who have AIDS don't take the right uh, don't take their medication and aren't doing well. They're getting, they're given the medication for free, but if your body doesn't have the right nutrients, it rejects it. So what we'll do is we'll do programs like growing gardens, we'll give them money, they grow food. And then not only do they uh eat nutritiously or well, they'll more likely to take their medication. And you're also growing enough food so that way other people in the village can also uh eat. It was like, but my wife picks all the causes, she vets them, she loves it.

• 46:45Speaker 01

  Like she'll go, this is Wednesday, in two days she'll end up going to a function. Uh scouting out more nonprofits and organizations. I won't go. Like, I think it's a waste of time. I'm like, if I go make more money, she can donate it. It's a better ROI than if I go spend three, four hours mingling. When she could just do that and I can go make more so that way we can donate more.

• 47:08Sam Parr?

  Other than your own private businesses. What have been your best financial investments that's allowed you to to donate and and make a lot to to give away?

• 47:20Speaker 01

  Stock market has done really well. Companies like Apple, Amazon, Google, Facebook, I know Facebook's down, but they still have been a tear if you just bought the stocks early enough. Um, cause some of these companies have grown thirty, forty percent a year and the public market's compounding, right? And it really adds up. Uh, angel investments have done really well for me and I would say probably those are the two biggest. Um, stock market still has done well, although in the last six months I've taken a beating. Cause I'm in a hundred percent tech companies. Like I don't diversify, like everyone's like, oh, you need some oil and you need this. I'm like, yeah, I'm just gonna go all tech. And people are like, oh, you're silly, look how much you lost. But if you look at the whole time when I first got in, I've done well. And I invest in what I understand and I'm thirty seven, so who cares?

• 48:04Speaker 01

  You know, another ten years, everything should rebound, assuming you pick the right companies.

• 48:08Sam Parr?

  What's your portfolio look like in terms of percentages?

• 48:14Sam Parr?

  Not including private businesses.

• 48:17Speaker 01

  My public portfolio, if I had to guess, I probably don't even have more than 20 stocks. Amazon, I won't be able to name them all, but Amazon, Google, Facebook, Apple, Microsoft, HubSpot, Salesforce, Adobe, Atlassian, Shopify, I'm missing some as well.

• 48:38Sam Parr?

  And of your liquid, of your, of your liquid net worth, how much is in public equities versus other?

• 48:44Shaan Puri?

  Versus real estate?

• 48:48Sam Parr?

  Just non-agency. If, if, if, I think your agency, is your agency the only company that you own a significant stake? And if yes, exclude that, then what's your portfolio look like?

• 48:58Speaker 01

  Uh, no, I have quite a bit of other companies because I started using a lot of the cash to buy other companies for like three, four, five X EBITDA, and then you just fix them and grow them and then just cash flow. Um, I would, so if I look just at cash invested in other companies that aren't mine, like not companies I'm buying out or anything like that, I would probably say 80 to 90% is in stocks.

• 49:21Sam Parr?

  What companies were you buying?

• 49:23Speaker 01

  Uh, any that we can find that we like. Like we bought Uber suggest, it was a software company, bought it for 120, put 3 million into it. Um, it took, I think, less than seven or eight months to get to a million a month in revenue.

• 49:38Sam Parr?

  What? What's it called?

• 49:41Speaker 01

  Uber suggest, Atrus competitor, that one did well. Uh, we just bought another one. A lady named Lisa.

• 49:50Sam Parr?

  Crazy.

• 49:51Speaker 01

  And then we, we just bought another one. We haven't announced it. We bought it for 8.6, I think a month ago, a month and a half ago. Uh, so we'll see, it does a hundred thousand a month. Uh, we think we can grow it within 12 months to probably like

• 50:09Speaker 01

  four or 500 grand a month in profit. So forget revenue, we just will look at it as a cash flow.

• 50:14Shaan Puri?

  So do you have rules around that? Like, okay, I have to be able to grow it using neilpatel.com? Or it has to be in the marketing niche so the agency benefits? No, it's like, would you buy like brick, you know, like a fucking laundromat or?

• 50:28Speaker 01

  If I can grow it, I won't do too much brick and mortar, but I've invested in other people's brick and mortar. Like, I have a friend who does a lot of brick and mortar businesses. Like, one of my buddies has a roofing company, and I was like, oh, cool, you can buy it for 3X, it's good size, and I can show you a few things, and we can probably increase the profit by like 60% within 12 months. So it's like, it's just good cash flow, right? Like, if you're getting like 30, 40, 50% returns on your money, it's great. And then you also have to keep in mind, because of my, my history, and I've been doing this long enough, I also can get debt at really cheap terms and large amounts of debt. Like, I can get debt at like 3.6% plus over.

• 51:13Speaker 01

  So if I'm buying a business for 5X, in many cases, because of the economics of my whole portfolio, you know, some businesses I put down, like on the one that was 8.6, 2.6 was paid over 12 or 18 months, or something like that, but we put 6 mil upfront. I could have got a loan for it, but I was like, eh, it's just easier to put the 6 mil and not deal with the paperwork. But sometimes we'll just do loans on the 100% of it, because zero down.

• 51:40Shaan Puri?

  Right. And what do you, like, okay, so you do what you do now. So you have your time, and it's pretty much probably fully allocated, let's say, to the agency and then some of these other things. If somebody was smart, but didn't have your, you have a bunch of visibility, you kind of know where your industry's going, you see adjacent opportunities, but hey, I'm not going to go do them, I don't have the time. What are opportunities that you see that you think, somebody listening to this, who's just like, smart hustler, like, I got more time than I have ideas, I got more time than I have money, where would you go if you were that person? What would you, what would you suggest for them to look at as like, you know, opportunities that you see today?

• 52:23Speaker 01

  I would look for opportunities in anything that they're good at. And I know that's not the answer that you're looking for, but what I found that the issue is when people go look for opportunities that make some money. When you're not passionate, you don't put in the time and the energy required to actually make it successful. That's a big issue we see. Maybe some people have it in them where they can make something successful because they'll just tough it out. But most people we see will just quit because they just hate what they're doing.

• 52:45Shaan Puri?

  And so, but I think a lot of people don't know what they love to do. They don't have like, they don't, if they already had what they love to do, they wouldn't be, you know, looking for opportunities. So, you know, uh, sort of like a by definition problem there, right? So somebody who's, who's thinking about, okay, I don't love what I'm currently doing. I'd like to, I want to get to where this guy's at, which is basically like, seems happy and successful. Right? Um, he, he seems like he, he said he loves what he's doing. I'd love to do that, but what if I don't know, right? It's like when my sister was going to college, my dad asked her, you know, she's like, what should I major in? And he's like, I don't know, what's her favorite subject? And she was like, lunch? Like, you know, I don't, I don't have a favorite subject. I don't love any of these subjects. Uh, so what am, what am I supposed to do? Like, am I just out? Uh, I'm just not one of those.

• 53:23Speaker 01

  No, you just have a lot of different, until you find what you're passionate about. Cause if you try a lot of different things, you'll typically find something that you're naturally good at. Usually what you're naturally good at, you'll also tend to favor in what you like. And then just double down on that. Uh, but if you're looking for industries with opportunities, I see a huge slowdown in e-commerce. Not necessarily the e-commerce market shrinking, I'm not saying that, but the growth in the e-commerce market isn't as what it was once, used to be, right? When COVID first kicked off. So you're going to see the multiples go down to buy e-commerce shops, D to C brands, right? So great opportunity for buying and go fix them up and grow them and scale them. Another great opportunity right now is, uh, free. So I look at the whole software market as really backwards. Okay.

• 54:08Speaker 01

  In which right now, it doesn't matter if you're HubSpot or Canva. Eventually someone can just create a me too company and just undercut you on pricing. And what I've learned is if you can create a software company that already has a brand, that has a free product and you just make it really good or free. And you just keep adding more and more to it. Um, a great example of this is PhotoP. There's this company called PhotoP, it's a, uh,

• 54:31Shaan Puri?

  We love it.

• 54:32Speaker 01

  Photoshop. And it's like, they make very little to no money. So I had up one of my buddies who, uh, is great at outreach and I told him I want PhotoP. Offered him 10 million, he said no, offered him 20 million, he said no. I can take PhotoP, make it a really good Canva competitor, undercut them on pricing, whatever be worth 10, 20, 40 billion, whatever they are, no. But I probably can cash flow that thing to like four or five million a month in EBITDA. Right? It's like, who cares what it sells for, what it's worth?

• 55:01Shaan Puri?

  But you're saying, you're saying make it free and you're saying a cash flows like a motherfucker. So what, how do you take a free product and cash flow like, how would you explain that?

• 55:08Sam Parr?

  Well, he said, he said a Canva, a Canva knockoff.

• 55:12Speaker 01

  Canva knockoff. So you make, you make almost 99% of it for free. You charge for 1%, but that 1% is enough where you can drive in the revenue. So you don't ever make as much as like a Canva or like a MailChimp or a HubSpot. But hey, if you can make millions a month in profit, it's still good.

• 55:29Sam Parr?

  What's your math there? So when, what's the calculus when you were thinking, so like, let's say PhotoP, according to SimilarWeb, has 10 million uniques a month or something. What was your math? Is that right?

• 55:41Speaker 01

  Yeah, it is right.

• 55:42Sam Parr?

  Yeah. We researched it.

• 55:45Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 55:45Sam Parr?

  But like, what was your calculus to get to 4 million in EBITDA a month? Like what would, how many people would you need to run it? And what was the, what's the calculus there?

• 55:54Speaker 01

  Sure. So I can probably get the thing from 10 million visitors. I can, so let's say I bought it for 20, right? He wouldn't sell it to me for 20. I've never outreach to him, but I had a buddy outreach to him for me, who just does all my outreach. So let's say I bought it for 20, I would put another 10 into it. So now I'm out $30 million. I'm really good at growing traffic and I know I can grow the team to roughly 40 million uniques a month. I just have a, I don't know how, but for some weird reason, I know traffic really well and how to calculate what I can get it to and all this kind of stuff, right? And I've done enough research of competitors of what features drive X amount of traffic, just looking at so many competitors in the space. So let's say if I get it to 40, what is it called? 40 million?

• 56:37Sam Parr?

  And what, what, one of the, one or two things that you'd get it to 40 million?

• 56:40Shaan Puri?

  Like SEO, basically?

• 56:42Speaker 01

  So more SEO, more virality, increasing the quality of the templates, increasing features, adding AI in there like click a button, we can automatically detect backgrounds, remove it, filters for social media because a lot of people use them for social media.

• 56:57Shaan Puri?

  Logo generator website as a lead gen shit like that.

• 57:01Speaker 01

  Right. So then, so let's say you got it to 40 million, right? At 40 million, I can easily monetize, let's call it like 1% of the traffic, but let's be even more conservative, like a half a percent, 200,000 people. If I have 200,000 people hypothetically paying $3 a month, okay? That's 600,000. The reason I give you on average $3 in certain countries, you may want to charge different pricing like India and stuff like that. So it's more affordable. So $3 a month and at $3 a month, if a customer stays for 10 months, that's $6 million. You can probably run the thing with less than a million, million and a half and burn each month.

• 57:42Sam Parr?

  So then you think, oh, so then for a million and a half burn, you would need.

• 57:47Speaker 01

  Once you have tons of revenue, right? When you don't have tons of revenue, your burn is much lower on a monthly basis.

• 57:51Sam Parr?

  Yeah. But so then how many people, then if it's, you're looking at 30 people, you would need to run that operation?

• 57:58Speaker 01

  I don't even think 30, but let's say 30 total. So I think I can actually run the thing for under a million dollars a month.

• 58:05Sam Parr?

  Right. So I'm just trying to do the math in my head, but I mean.

• 58:08Shaan Puri?

  Revenue was like under, under a million too there. It was like 600,000 or something, right?

• 58:14Speaker 01

  600,000 a month, but if a customer stays for 10 months, you're looking at $6 million.

• 58:20Sam Parr?

  Because it's hard to front.

• 58:22Speaker 01

  No, no, no. Okay. If they're paying $3 a month, if you have 40 million, not 4 million, but 40 million, you're converting a half a percent, that's 200,000 paying customers a month. If they pay you $3 a month, that's 600,000. They last for 10 months, that's $6 million a month in MRR over a year, you're making 72 million dollars in revenue.

• 58:46Sam Parr?

  That's crazy. You're a very interesting person. You uh, I just, I think I dig you because you've got your hands in so many different things.

• 58:55Speaker 01

  I honestly don't. At this point, I don't run anything. I come up with ideas. I have really good operators for great execution. Like, go do this. It'll make money. Here's a play with go and just do it.

• 59:05Sam Parr?

  So how many businesses do you own?

• 59:07Speaker 01

  I don't know. I don't really count. I would look at.

• 59:10Sam Parr?

  Over or under 10?

• 59:12Speaker 01

  Over.

• 59:13Sam Parr?

  Over or under 20?

• 59:17Speaker 01

  I don't know. 20 is probably getting close. So probably under if I had to guess.

• 59:22Sam Parr?

  And how many of those 20, how many of those 20 companies have more than five employees? Full-time employees?

• 59:29Speaker 01

  I don't know. I don't really count employee headcount. I only know my ad agency headcount because they do reports and I get in my board meeting decks. I was like, oh, we got 700 people.

• 59:37Shaan Puri?

  And you own 100% of most of these companies, it seems like. You're not raising external capital. You might, do you give your CEO?

• 59:46Speaker 01

  Really anything. I always give equity to profit share. I usually have a partner who runs things will get equity and then I'll do profit share.

• 59:56Sam Parr?

  What's the ideal setup for profit sharing and equity for your partner?

• 1:00:01Speaker 01

  Partner, give them maybe 10% of the business. They run it plus a really nice salary. What I mean, nice salary, industry or more than industry. And then you have a pool for employees, like another 10% pool. So then you lose in total 20%. I'm left with 80 myself. I put up all the money. If it does well, great. If it doesn't, I lose the money. No one else is on the line. If it does well, no one has to pay me back the money. Everyone just takes their distributions the moment it turns profitable from a monthly standpoint. Does that make sense? They don't actually have to pay back any of the other stuff.

• 1:00:33Sam Parr?

  And then do you also do give them 10% of the distribution or do you make that even heavier for them?

• 1:00:40Speaker 01

  Well, if I'm losing 20% in total, which is my ideal structure, then 20% of the profits gets distributed on a monthly basis.

• 1:00:50Sam Parr?

  This is crazy. I love hearing about this. What do you think, Sean?

• 1:00:53Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, I think it's dope. I had just seen you kind of from afar for a while that I got, I know he, you know, loosely like we're friends, but uh, so you know, I didn't know a lot of the story. I know, I knew Sam has talked about you before on the pod, I think it's, or maybe off the pod. I'm not sure. But Sam had told me some cool stuff. Um, but I didn't know a lot of this. So for me, this was dope because I got to learn a bunch of new things. Uh, sometimes when we have a guest, it's like, dude, I've already listened to 10 of your things. I've been following you for five years, you know, so it's like, I already know a lot of it and I'm doing sort of like translation work for the audience. I'm like, tell them about this. Hey, tell them about that thing you did. Uh, versus in this, like I genuinely wanted to know a bunch of the stuff and I thought, you know, uh, this is interesting to me. Yeah, you're great.

• 1:01:37Sam Parr?

  There's two people that I've wanted to talk to Sean who are like Neil. So, I mean, there's Neil. So I wanted Neil, I like finding these people that like are doing really well and a lot of people know about, but there's also this whole other world of people who have no idea who they are. Neil, you're one of those folks. I've been, I'm an OG reader. So I've known you forever. The other one is Syed. So Syed, we've talked about Syed a bunch on here. Him and Neil, I think are very similar, which is very generous, but also like pretty cutthroat when it comes to business and has their hands in just dozens of different things and they're just quietly crushing it and not even talking about it. And

• 1:02:13Speaker 01

  Very generous person too. I know he has a school, I think in the same city I have a school in or a different city. I don't know. He actually went to go see his school, but a really generous guy. Uh, him and I have built schools in their rural countries and stuff like

• 1:02:27Sam Parr?

  that. Yeah, it's just like you two, you guys are, I don't know if you're like this Neil, but I know it seems like he's like this where he like, has this, uh, you know, software business that's making, who knows, tens of many tens of millions, uh, in revenue and probably that much in profit, but, and he like buys a gas station or like he like, but it just, it's just like, dude, are you kidding me? Like you're a, you're like a tech tycoon and you also own like 30 gas stations. It's just kind of funny.

• 1:02:52Speaker 01

  Here's the thing, some of those businesses sell for like 3X EBITDA. You get 33% returns on your money. If you have good operators and you can put technology in place and marketing and you can grow to maybe 50 times IRR, that's great. It's just a question of can you scale it up and you can you do ones that are large enough?

• 1:03:09Sam Parr?

  I know. I'm just saying it's cool that you know this stuff. That's what, you're eclectic.

• 1:03:13Speaker 01

  Yeah, him and I, actually, I shouldn't speak for him, but I'm a little off, right? But the madness or the methodology, I think, is great for cash flow. It's terrible if you want to be like, oh, I'm going to create the next Airbnb and take this thing public and be like on the Forbes list. Like, it's not what I do.

• 1:03:30Sam Parr?

  Is that, are you motivated to become a billionaire? What's your motivation factor? What are you motivated by?

• 1:03:36Speaker 01

  Well, I won't ever be a billion. I'm not saying I have the opportunity to, but even if I did, I would never be there because we donate our money. And what I mean donate, like, not wait till you're dead to donate, like, actually donate on an annual basis.

• 1:03:49Shaan Puri?

  How do you figure out, how do you figure out how much you want to give? Because there's always like, like, when I think about it, I think like, well, I could also invest this money, it's going to grow, I'm going to give more later, but then I'm not helping somebody now. And so what's the right number? What's the right percentage, basically, for me to be giving on an annual basis? How do you figure that out for yourself?

• 1:04:07Speaker 01

  Whatever my wife wants to give.

• 1:04:09Shaan Puri?

  What percentage does that come out to?

• 1:04:12Speaker 01

  We don't have a percentage. Keep in mind, businesses are so large, I can get loans for anything on almost any type of business. I can't go buy a business for a million dollars, a billion dollars, but if I wanted to buy a business for a hundred million dollars, I can go get a loan on that, like, literally for most of it.

• 1:04:28Speaker 01

  So I still, I don't have to worry anymore about, do I need more of it to invest? It's just, we find the right causes and is it going to make a big enough impact? That's more, that's more about how we look about donations. We don't really look at it from the aspect of, am I donating X dollars? There's too high of a percentage. We look at it as, do we actually think it's going to make a big impact in the next year, short run, or two years? We don't want to wait like 10, 20 years to see an impact. We also don't want to put money towards like, things like cancer research. I think cancer is really important. I know a lot of people who have died from cancer, but I don't have enough money to make a bet into cancer versus, you know, solving some of the basic things out there. Like, I can make an impact on things like education in a region.

• 1:05:11Speaker 01

  I can't make an impact on cancer, I just don't have enough cash for that.

• 1:05:16Shaan Puri?

  What is your school? You said I have a school. It sounds tight. I want a school.

• 1:05:21Speaker 01

  Uh, I've never seen it. We have a school. I think it's in Cambodia and we've done a few others, but I don't really keep track. My wife does and you know, the bigger thing is it's not my school. It's more so the kids' school and are they learning and getting value from it?

• 1:05:36Sam Parr?

  I uh, I remembered the first school that I bought and forgot about.

• 1:05:40Shaan Puri?

  I was gonna say, uh, when I buy my school, it's for sure gonna be my school. They might attend my school in Cambodia.

• 1:05:47Sam Parr?

  Yeah.

• 1:05:48Shaan Puri?

  Yeah. I'm like that.

• 1:05:49Sam Parr?

  I bought a couple, I, I've bought a couple of schools in this couch cushion back here. It just, I just forgot about it. I just, it's a little scene I played in a while ago.

• 1:05:57Shaan Puri?

  I remember when I was on college camps, I saw like, you know, whoever the Rothschilds or like the Rockefeller's uh, nameplate or whatever on the like, uh, the, the library at, at Duke campus. And I was like, who would do this? Why, what's the point of this? You know, like, so it's already nice.

• 1:06:11Speaker 01

  Not that kind of schools. I don't have that kind of money. Mine's like little kids.

• 1:06:15Shaan Puri?

  I didn't understand the appeal until you said, you basically described a school you have and forgot and have never visited. And I was like, ah, that sounds like something I want. I don't want my nameplate on, you know, the Villanova, like 10th library on campus, but like, just to know that there's, you know, 12 kids in Vietnam attending my school. They're wondering, why does this name have so many As in it? You know, who is this? Who is this benefactor? Silent benefactor who has forgotten where our school, where his school is. That sounds like a perfect blend of giving and egomaniac that I live for. So that's perfect.

• 1:06:49Sam Parr?

  Neil, we uh, we usually, so we don't have guests on often. And when we do, we typically never just ask them questions like this. We like, it's more of a conversation where we're brainstorming stuff. We asked you tons of questions because you're just a very fascinating person. I hope you'll come on soon and you could actually brainstorm, uh, like the, another Uber suggest or something like that, you know, like actually go through some of this. I, I, I hope you'll come back again because this is awesome.

• 1:07:14Speaker 01

  Yeah, it was so funny. I was doing the interview. I'm like, oh, crap. I should have never told people how much I spend a month. Should have never told people I donate money. And I was just like, it goes against a lot of what my wife and I do. We're more of, don't tell anyone anything, live our lives and do whatever makes us happy.

• 1:07:29Sam Parr?

  You only told it because it's not like you're bragging. We like kind of begged you to tell that like we were kind of got under it. We were like, yeah, tell us, go, go, tell us. It's not like you're like, I don't think that's bragging.

• 1:07:40Speaker 01

  It's not even bragging. It just feels weird to talk about expenses, right? Because there's so many people who struggle for like clean water or shoes, right? It's like, eh.

• 1:07:49Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, yeah, but this is interesting. Those people, if they ever listen to this podcast, they've already been filtered out by our douchiness in other episodes. So don't worry. Anybody who's sensitive to that is probably gone by now. But also, there's, there's actually a lot of good, like, I actually pretty passionately believe this, like, not only am I curious from like a, oh, I want to know, I want to learn. But like, I actually pretty strongly believe that the way that people are like, treat money as a pretty taboo thing, actually is like a net, like, a huge net negative on most people. So like, you know, people don't know what other people make, therefore they don't know what, like, they don't know when they're underpaid. They don't know what's possible. They don't ever, like, sometimes the most valuable conversations I have with somebody

• 1:08:30Shaan Puri?

  is just somebody for whom they do something, like, something is very normal to them, and it would be abnormal to me. But it has now expanded my worldview of what's possible and what could be normal for me. Like, oh, maybe it could be normal to actually like, give more, donate more, have a school. Actually, that sounds like something I actually go to go talk to my wife about today is like something we should go do that like, it's not because you weren't bragging about it. You highlight, you just kind of were honest about how you live your life, which is no, there's nothing wrong with that. That's, that's great, in my opinion. And it expands other people's worldview for something that maybe they want to go do or something that they haven't considered. And like, it's really weird to me that we keep this stuff under wraps. And if somebody's just honest about like the way they live their life, it's sort of like, there's like all this like negative taboo around it and like, fuck that. I don't like that at all. And,

• 1:09:16Shaan Puri?

  It's been like when Sam first met me, I think this, I think I've told the story before, but like the second day I met him and then like the next day he messaged me on Facebook, investor was like, so like, well, how much you make? And he was like, no, like, what do you pay yourself? He's like, so then what do you? And then I like, I was like, whoa, that's like super forward. And he's like, but he told me why. He was like, so I'm trying to figure out how much to pay myself as an entrepreneur. I have no fucking clue. And like, my investors think I should make this much, but I don't know. Is that normal? And like, I can kind of ask you and dance around it or like, I'm just asking like five friends what they make in the same role as I am, like startup CEO. And like, that'll help me figure out what's normal. What's the range of like, possibilities here? And then after that, he was like, so what do you do with the money? Like, what do you invest? He's like, wow, that's a lot. Are you investing that? I was like, yeah. And he's like, what are you

• 1:09:58Shaan Puri?

  investing in? I started telling him and he's like, cool, I'm investing in this. And now I got new ideas about what I could be investing. And I, it really became very obvious to me in that moment. I was like, oh shit, you're at a massive advantage if you have a few people you trust that you can talk openly about this sort of thing with. And the podcast was basically taking that and doing it at scale. I was like, all right, well, what if me and Sam were pretty honest about like the shit we do? And like, what if we could get guests to be honest about the shit they do? They're like, that's actually a pretty valuable resource for people who don't have five, they don't happen to have that lucky group of five friends who are all motivated entrepreneurs who are also open and honest about what they do. It's like, well, not everybody is located in a place where they have five people geographically around them that they can trust to talk about that stuff. And so the pod kind of like serves as that. So that's my justification for why you shouldn't feel bad about, about sharing that information.

• 1:10:44Sam Parr?

  Did it work, Neil? Do you not feel bad?

• 1:10:46Shaan Puri?

  But if you want, we'll bleep it out or whatever, if you feel like that too.

• 1:10:49Speaker 01

  Okay, it is what it is. I still feel bad, but it is what it is.

• 1:10:53Shaan Puri?

  Mission accomplished.

• 1:10:55Sam Parr?

  I thought it was a great speech, Sean. I felt good about that. Thank you, Neil.

• 1:11:00Speaker 01

  It was a great speech, but I still feel bad because I look at money as like a tool to help other people. And I'm not saying that's right or wrong. That's how I just do. But I also know I spend more than I should. And I probably should cut back and live a more humble life and spend a lot less.

• 1:11:16Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, dude, I'm inspired by how you spend and how you live. And it's, you know, you've done some good in the world by inspiring me.