you are watching this you are on the frontier of AI automation automation agency AI automation and drop everything and focus entirely on AI SMA Aisa lgbtsa SAS whatever I don't know all these acronyms it's getting insane but AI agencies have taken the entire online business Space by storm as I'm sure you've already seen AI automation my first response to all this was what even is an AI agency what do they even do and more importantly what do they do that's better than what a traditional agency does so I went ahead and analyzed all of this so you wouldn't have to so after hearing various opinions and being bombarded by tons of different acronyms I think I might have found the ultimate agency model of 2023. if there is one because let's be honest there really is no Ultimate model it's whatever you want to do but there are three main models that I want to go over obviously these are ones you've probably heard before but let's jump right into it number one is the good old traditional social media marketing model basically just SMA number two is the relatively new SAS or software as a service and the number three is the weird and futuristic AI model AI agency model that is only just now starting to blow up so three models I have a really good understanding of the former two but not of the latter one but then I realized something nobody understands AI right because it's new and it's constantly improving so it'd be crazy to think that we actually know how this weird computer bot works and what its capabilities are but the reason AI agencies are starting to blow up is because it's the next shiny object imagine how cool it would be to use this AI tool to run a complete working agency without you even having to be involved would be cool right but that's not where we are yet and that's also just not what the people want yet the people want a solution that alleviates the pain that comes along with their problem and we are the people that solve that problem and I truly don't think that AI has the ability to solve that problem completely at least yet it's up to us to give them the right service or the right tools that most efficiently get them that solution that they're looking for and as exciting as the AI stuff sounds it's just not there yet AI will not yet do everything for you without you having to do anything that's just not where it is yet and so setting up an AI automation agency is a shiny object and it's something that's going to improve over time and so it's good to have it your mind but there's a better model that works that still integrates AI but not the way that you think it does so let's get into it so like I said before three models let's go through the pros and cons so the first thing is a traditional social media marketing agency now this is in my opinion the best place to start especially even just with online business in general this is the best place to learn the most about how to actually be good at helping businesses get clients this model is actually very difficult which is why it's the best one to choose because you'll learn the most from it and not that the other two aren't difficult but it's better to have a preliminary knowledge base before going into the more complicated models than to just jump right into it which is what SMA will do for you it'll make you experienced nuanced it'll get you to know what you're doing and that's how the model is so good and to me it's also an evergreen model that will pretty much always work but here's the thing a traditional agency is a model of the past and naturally the model of the past will also be the most saturated the most competitive the most commoditized all the things you don't want right everyone starting out in SMA today is pretty much indistinguishable pretty much just the same copying pasted agency messaging and reaching out to the exact same business owners on repeat every day you're just an agency fighting for more clients while every other agency around you offers the same service and is fighting for the same thing so yes you could absolutely win and uh if you watch my entire Channel if you go back to the old videos there's a bunch of content showing you how possible it is to win but unfortunately just because of where things are going there's no way you could be the best if you're a standard agency and I want to be the best right and I'm sure you guys do too and so this is what I'm getting at but I want to be clear if you are running a traditional agency right now there is absolutely no problem with that that's exactly what I would recommend most people to do why because it's the best place to start out to learn to actually progress and know what to do so you can move on to the bigger stuff it's the best it's better than all the other things that you'll find like the Drop Shipping stuff no it's it's way better than all that but if you're in a rut or you're hitting a wall with your agency or your business or whatever and you're stuck kind of like how I was or if you're just new to everything and you just want to know more about what all this means then you should hear me out for the next two models because I'm going somewhere with this the next thing is the SAS agency now software is what everyone wishes to sell because who wouldn't want to sell a product that you build once right that you could resell as a monthly subscription it's a no-brainer a packaged solution delivered via software and sold to as many people as possible is the golden model and it's the golden model because the clients never leave you just keep them for months on months on months if not years and as long as their business is running they'll be relying on your software so you could get as many clients as you want not have to worry about any churn you may be asking what is the issue with SAS what is the con well there aren't many at all really but some business owners are actually just so bad with technology that they don't have the capability to rely on a software because they just don't know what they're doing whatsoever and even though the software is so useful and you know it's useful it's too complex for them to understand also some business owners are really lazy or they're really busy so they need someone to do it for them they want a done-for-you solution instead of a done with you or do it yourself solution these are all valid concerns but there is a way around this software is an amazing model and it is truly the new meta of agencies but here is the key and this is my point Don't just run a standard software agency but rather run a software agency that integrates AI because think about it when you're selling a software people are relying on that software to do the work for them or to make the work easier at the very least right now if you implement AI you could change software from a do-it-yourself solution to a do it with you solution it's just that you're not the one doing it with them the AI is the one that's doing it with them I know this sounds nuts but bear with me if you leverage AI to do the simple like busy work that's kind of tedious that the owner doesn't want to do and doesn't know how to do and you could pretty much eradicate the only concern that comes along with software agencies that means you could sell the Google reviews you could sell the SEO you could sell the website in funnel building you could sell the email marketing templates you could sell the SMS templates you could sell the database reactivation you could sell the ad template plus anything and everything else that helps businesses get clients that you can do within your software but you could still also sell that traditional smma service which is the appointment setting right and that part of the system the appointment setting is one of the best parts of the system is because you are doing it for them if you could find a way to automate right and to and to have ai handle the employment setting for for you then you're really striking gold so that means you're combining what a traditional agency does what a software agency does and also what an AI agency does and you combine all of them and you just kind of integrate it into one big product that you sell as a service right one thing that you have to build once within a white label software like go high level and you sell as many times as you can as a subscription that again leverages instead of you AI because again you do not want to be entwined with the business because then you're actively servicing tons of clients and you're building out a massive team instead of building out that team right where the people on the team are just doing the dull tedious tasks you get AI to do it for you there's so many things that are simple that humans do that is so replaceable with AI I know you're probably wondering how the hell this works and that this is super foreign and that makes sense it should sound super form because obviously AI is so fresh but think about it this way there are certain tasks that all of us do right now that could be completely automated by just leveraging AI the only reasons that you haven't actually started using it is probably because one you don't really know how it works and how you could actually use it in like everyday life or in your business or you don't really trust it yet and you don't actually have faith in it to do what you could do so here's a solution don't go all in on AI don't put all your eggs in one basket there's so much Buzz around Ai and not that there shouldn't be but if it's very much so in its infancy so you could use it as if it was in its infancy which would be to do the things that you don't have to do the things that are super simple that AI can do if you look at any smart like solo entrepreneur or even just any big corporation like they're all thinking about ways to integrate AI right now whether they've done it already or they're about to do it and so stay ahead of the curve by integrating AI with your agency instead of just doing a complete AI agency innovating your agency with AI as AI is also evolving and this is the example that I want to give when it comes to the appointment setting stuff ask yourself if you're that much better than AI at actually conversing with people or at conversing with leads for your business right are you actually that much better than AI at doing that if you prompt AI correctly they could sound 10 times better than you and be so much more efficient than you quicker right all those responses that you have you could simply prompt it within go high level so that even the things that you don't automate within the GOI level automations are automated with chat GPT so you could have ai shoot out the messages instead of you which makes the whole appointment setting process automated and if you include this within your sort of software as a service or within your agency bundle then your client could leverage the AI the same way that you do and make everything automated for them and that example that I just gave is something that you could do right now today with go high level like literally they have that in the software so it's insane and people just aren't using it yet now everything that I just told you is my exact agency plan moving forward I'm not saying to jump on this because it's the next shiny object but I'm saying to have it in your plans for the future instead of just going on with your current model without thinking so here's my plan and in my eyes the ultimate plan that took me months to devise I will be documenting this entire Journey with this plan and giving away everything I learned along the way as well as just giving you everything that I build the same way that I gave away everything with my first agency when I was building it I want to do the exact same thing with my hybrid agency that I'm working on now it's gonna be a wild ride that's kind of why I'm doing it and uh yeah you guys are going to be here to see everything I'm currently in the process of setting everything up within go high level and there will be videos coming out soon going over what I'm actually doing in detail and I thought this video would be good to me just so I give you guys an idea of where I'm going and where I think the future of the space is going and if you don't already have high level and you're setting up either your SMA your AI business or your software as a service business then you're really missing out so if you do want to get a wide level you could obviously just use my link it's a 14 day free trial you could hop in there and see if you like it if you don't you're free to leave and not spend any money you'll also be eligible to get access to like my snapshots that I use for my own agency and everything that I go on to do you'll have access to that as well because I give away everything for people that use my affiliate link the early bird catches the worms to hop in there also helping my Discord server the link will be in the description and also in the pin comment in there you'll find a community of like-mind individuals literally working towards the exact same thing that you are we're just helping each other it's a great Community I promise it'll change your life in one way or another it's completely free to join why wouldn't you do it and lastly if you want me to help you more intimately you could also sign up for agency Builder where I'll help people one-on-one it's my program I'll be honest you'll click on a sales funnel link but I promise out of everyone I deliver the most value for the cheapest price it's like choosing between a used video game or hopping in the program getting me to help you build your entire agency instantly as well as just building alongside you in general all right it's been good let me know if you have any questions and uh if you want me to go over certain things in specific that I kind of glazed over in this video because you might be overwhelm with all the new information that just chucked at you and you might want to know how to do this stuff more in detail just comment I'll be responding to all you guys and message me on any platform as well I'm really responsive thank you so much for watching and I'll see you guys in the next one peace out everyone and goodbye

what's up everyone if you clicked on this video then you have officially joined my startup journey where i take an idea and turn it into a sass and hopefully provide great services to my community like you guys and to other people around the world and also make some money because that is obviously the idea of also creating a software as a service to make some money but also to provide great services now this video series is not going to be like the ones you have previously seen on youtube i'm not going to show you how i get out of bed or what i eat for breakfast or 50 different angles of my beautiful face this video series is about the raw stuff it's about the concrete information that are actually really important all the good things and all the terrible things that are going to go on so if you are looking for something like this if you're looking to really see what it's like to create a sas product and to build up a startup that hopefully might be successful then you should definitely consider subscribing if you're not subscribed to my channel as of yet [Music] now to give you more context of what this video series is going to cover we're going to talk about ideas and how they evolve uh we're going to discuss the decisions i make and why i make those decisions uh we're going to talk about the financial aspects of it what i spend my money on how much money i've made i'm going to be extremely transparent about that we're going to talk about the technology i use what stack i use why i'm using this specific type of technology why it's going to benefit me we're going to cover all of that we're also going to look into the amount of time and effort i put into things yes you will see me copy and paste code from the internet yes you're going to see me ask uncle google stupid ass questions of maybe how to filter something out of an array even though i'm an experienced web developer we all do it and we need people to understand that that is normal you are coming along on this journey to see a dude go for all the hardships all the successes and just see the real raw reality of building a startup now in today's video i want to cover three important things i want to talk about the idea which i came up with and give you a bit of context on that i want to show you what i've already implemented in the ui and the functionality of the code and i also want to discuss very briefly about the stack that i'm using and why i have decided to use it so without any further ado let's discuss the idea let me give you some background and enjoy now the idea i have is a platform that allows me and other people to add courses and teach people it's basically going to be an education platform now i know you may be like oh but phillip you know there is like udemy and there's teachable and there's coursera and there's all these other platforms that already exist that do the same thing how are you going to stand out well a lot of the platforms that do offer services where you can create your own course or you can purchase a course and and learn something they're built in a way that totally drives money but it doesn't focus so much on the actual experience of the person who's learning stuff yeah they just offer a platform for uploading your videos and providing a piece of text but that's where it ends and with education and learning especially to code there is so much more that you can do to really make it an interactive process and really allow people to learn better and understand things because a lot of the time with these courses you watch like six or seven or eight of videos and then suddenly you realize that what you've watched in the first one you've already forgotten and that's kind of the thing that we're going to try and uh you know fix and make better and really have people feel how amazing learning can be the other thing i want to make as part of the platform is a social community of developers of people that can interact with each other and ask questions now what i hate that we have currently out now is how stack overflow and how reddit whenever you post a question no matter how simple it may be you get criticized on why are you posting this question this question was asked before oh this is a goddamn duplicate delete delete block block oh piss off you know and instantly as a new developer you post your question you get absolute hate and people criticize you for what the hell have you done how dare you post a question and suddenly you feel absolutely hopeless and i've been in that situation so many times so i want to create a platform where developers can really ask a simple question and not get criticized over it but all they can do is get help who gives a if it's a duplicate or not like just relax it's a question let people ask the question and let it be answered and let them move on and continue learning so that is definitely something that i also want to work on now i'm talking about all of this stuff and it's a lot of work it really translates to a lot a lot of effort to create something like this so the way i want to approach it is i personally can create a course and yes i will you'll get two courses from me uh one about you know really creative web development css and animations and the other one about like 3gs and gsa blender and doing all that fun stuff so those are the things i would want to host on there so essentially i'll firstly create a platform that allows me to host my own courses and for you guys to be able to purchase them and go through them and then i'm going to expand to allow external people to register as teachers and add their own courses and gain revenue from that and then finally expand the platform to also offer a community where we all as teachers and students can interact together to help each other learn to answer questions and just serve as the most epic developer community on the web so you guys as a community you can really help me out i want you guys to interact with me to give me criticism so what you think is wrong to give me feedback to tell me what you loved i want to hear all of it and i want to use the youtube community to actually discuss all of this stuff so now from here i want to jump in and show you guys what i've built so far how it works and as i'm doing that i'll explain the technology i'm using and why i've decided to use it and i still haven't picked all of it it's just the basic stuff because i wanted to jump right into it so what you see here is my homepage i know amazing now a lot of you are probably like well philip why are you not sticking to the concepts why are you not doing mobile first why are you creating the ui before any functionality and bear with me there's pretty much absolutely no functionality in this at this point and the answer to that is because i can why not people have different ways of doing things i know there's concepts and there's rules of creating things to make it maybe a little bit easier but i find myself more motivated when i'm looking at some really sexy ui so this is exactly my explanation and you can't argue with that now this is the home page now what have i used to create this application well i've used next js next.js is a framework for building production applications not only a really easy way to manipulate front-end and build reusable components but also it has an integrated back-end you basically have the functionality to trigger api requests and deal with all that back-end data in nextgs all in one framework without having to jump in between and start servers and whatnot also it's very logical because for example there is structures to the code i'll show you really quickly for example if i have my pages if i create a account or an index or a login page it will be like slash login and that page will be reflected under that slash path uh so that's a really nice thing obviously if i have my api and then that folder structure relates to that actual url that i'm going to call so there is obviously great logic here and then that front-end and back-end has this nice separation in xjs obviously there's so many other benefits but this is just the overall overall idea of how it works i have created some components which are reusable so you'll see that this whole box here actually stays the same but the content inside it changes and that's the way we can actually reuse components i have this login doesn't work at all you can click forgot your password takes you to the recover account as you can see same kind of box uses the same components very reusable very quick to make then we can actually join the journey and this is where i've implemented some functionality the idea of joining and creating an account is for it to be fun is for it to be interactive and is for it to be a really fast and simple process so i've already written a lot of the validation for this email so if i actually create an account actually let's go with like hello at developerphilip.com and see it's not valid but now it's going to be valid it's instant validation um and as soon as you see it being validated the button actually is enabled so uh i want to go with hello at developerphilip.com now we can move on to creating the password well of course i had to be a little bit bougie and i had to create something else and i think this is a nice visual way to let people know uh you know and and have fun with creating a password to make sure that it actually is qualified to the actual standards of a secure password now i'm going to enable the i which actually blinks and opens up if you click it and i'm going to type a password a password that's secure and as you saw whenever i typed a lowercase it highlighted lowercase when i went over eight characters it toggled the eight characters and i'm going to type a capital letter and i'm going to type a special collector character and as soon as all of these are validated well then i can have the next button enabled and i can go to the next step here you know we can enter the details uh no validation here developer philip philip and my surname grabowski and if i click next here is where i'm going to allow people to optionally add a payment method to make purchasing courses much simpler later on where here it is going to collect uh the card number it's going to collect um the expiry date and that cvc uh we can't store that it's it's a very bad practice and you should never do that so whenever they purchase they'll just enter the cvc and it's going to be a really fast checkout process for now we can skip it and look at that congratulations four out of four steps have been completed and so you know when you explore you go onto the account page and it's going to say your name here none of that is implemented but if we actually go into mongodb and i refresh this page what you will see is that it has actually added a user with the email the hashed password that i've already done username name and surname now let's log out and let's try and create an account again with that same password or not password goddamn email so hello at developerphilip.comma email is already taken do you see how fast that was now there is a really cool thing that i did here every time if i open up the inspect panel and uh if we go into network i'll just clear this every time an ad symbol is the last character of this email what it does is it creates a request to the database and fetches all the emails of the users that start with this hello at phrase and it could be different now if we look here if we look at the response what we can actually see is that well this is the only email that's already there so now when i actually go ahead and type this whole thing out we can do really fast uh developer philip validation whereas if it exists well it's already taken and i can't do that and you know some might be cheeky and click on the button and be like oh yeah i'm gonna be a cheeky boy and i'm gonna take out this disable link and uh oh yeah the bottom is gonna be instantly enabled and i can just click next no no you can't there is absolutely no way you can get to the next stage if you haven't filled out a proper email address so this is basically all the functionality that i did so far there's nothing more than that and now why have i decided to use mongodb well it's really fast and it's extremely secure so that's the reason why i decided to use i also was thinking of using maybe firebase just for a more like visual and nice kind of view but firebase is not as secure as and considering i'm going to be storing like you know car details uh well you know it has to be extremely secure and obviously those card and numbers and those expiry dates they're going to be hashed with a very secure hash uh so absolutely no freaking way even if you get access to the database there's no way uh you're going to be able to break that hash i really want you guys feedback on what you think of it so far any things you didn't like any things that might complicate uh you know the user process maybe things i should add maybe things i didn't consider let's have a discussion in the comments and if you enjoyed this video please smash the thumbs up i hope it doesn't flop uh it's really important doesn't because i really want this series to continue motivating me so i went over a video as well well i'm going to get a huge boost of motivation and i'm really going to grind at this startup so again thank you very much guys for watching and as always i'll see you in the next startup video bye [Music] you

hey fellow deadpaners how would you like to start your own software company for very little money i'm talking less than a hundred dollars in this video i'm going to show you exactly how to do just that hey my name is adam dukes and i help dads escape employment by building a wildly profitable online business so that they can enjoy more dad time now software is all the rage it's been all the rage it is a great business to get into but a lot of people are concerned uh it cost a lot of money it cost a lot of time to find developers and yes that is all very very true however you're able to white label software there are hundreds if not thousands of pieces of software out there that the developers and or creators will allow you to white label their software and in this video i'm going to show you uh explain what white label software is i'm going to reveal a couple of pieces of software that you can get started white labeling right now i'll share a tool that i used a very popular email platform that not many are aware of that you can actually white label and it's actually a leader in the industry i did it years ago and i'm going to share a couple of tips to help increase you get more customers so let's dive right in how to start your own software company for less than a hundred dollars so white label like i said it's a software that a company uses and brands as its own software so another company out there will allow white labels to pay typically they will charge a monthly fee some of it's a yearly fee some of it they do have an initial setup fee each company is different but what they'll let you do is sell their software and you can brand it as your own so it looks like you developed the software you created the software it's completely your own software in a way you know in a sense you're kind of renting it and or licensing it from the company and you can sell it and put it at typically you can put it at whatever price tag you want what i like to do is bundle things together to make it a higher perceived value and make it a much better offer than just the software itself why do this it's a win-win so the developer and or the creator of the software they get more customers for their software you're as a reseller you are a customer of theirs and the reseller yourself you're offering a software without having to spend time or money on development the reseller gets to market a market a proven tool obviously typically how it's set up is each user that you generate let's say the software company charges you ten dollars a license per month as an example and you would charge your customer twenty dollars so you would keep that ten dollars that's kind of the gist of it and you could charge obviously whatever you want but you can play with that a little bit but like i said i like to increase it so years ago i white labeled active campaign it's one of the best email platforms out there and i created a membership website for real estate agents and i white labeled the auto active campaign software i called it automated agent i think it was yes it was and it was active campaign dashboard but it was my logo as automated agent and then i included some email templates for them i included facebook ads training i included other things to it so i increased the value it wasn't just an email software it was an email software with facebook ads training it was email templates that were all set up for them so i was able to charge more money than what active campaign i think i was charging 37 bucks a month active campaign charger at the time they were charging nine dollars a month but it wasn't a comparison it wasn't it was apples and oranges active campaign and automated agent because i increased the value so if you're going to do white label software i definitely recommend kind of increasing the value making the offer more sexy more attractive more valuable for the user and there are a variety of different ways you can do that so benefits of white label software it expands your product offerings whatever you're offering now it could be a digital product it could be a physical product it could be a service this is great for agencies and services you can expand your product offering by offering a white label software it strengthens customer loyalty if customers are paying you each and every month with a software very very likely that they're going to stick with you longer very likely that they're going to buy other products and or services from you it's going to save you time and money the tool is already built you don't have to worry about any of that you can take advantage of again selling a proven product increase lifetime value again software has a sticky rate if they're using the software that's a that's a big part of it they need to be using the software but if they're using it and finding benefits from it they're going to continue being a customer for months and months if not years and years and years and again they're going to likely buy other products and services for you because they're already paying you a monthly fee as it is it's much easier to sell to a current customer than it is to sell to a new prospect no development cost again you don't have to worry about development players back in 2015 2014 it was i tried to create my own software what an epic failure that was i spent about 3 600 on it i had no idea what the hell i was doing i hired someone overseas and i was creating a software where people could put in their addresses and they would get the value of their home zillow does it there's a ton of companies that do it now back then it was relatively new there was other companies that were doing it i'm not claiming i came up with the idea but what an absolute headache it was it took about three months to finally get it done and then at the last couple of days all of a sudden the software company said they needed an additional 3 500 for like maintenance and some other services and i was like what i had no idea about this you know and so i had to make a tough decision go on with it are they going to ask me for more money in a couple of months most likely or just cut it just kill it you know so i end up losing 3 600 in three months of time of back and forth so i should have probably just white label software it would have been much easier again it would have saved me time and money and frustration and frequent trips to the liquor store because it was a stressful process uh you're selling a proven product they're already selling it to their customers all you have to do is sell it to your customers it's it's a win like i said it's a win-win for all parties involved uh it's like having an in-house developer at a fraction of a cost a fraction of the cost now you can't control the software you can't make changes to the software i mean you could certainly make requests to make some changes to the software but that company owns the software they own the rights to it they're going to do it how how they want to do it so you you do lose some control with the white label so there are some certainly some cons to it that is the big one they are in control of it so here are a couple of white label software companies so like i said activecampaign one of the best email platforms out there online and they offer a white label program so you can plug and play into that like i said spruce up the offer increase the value somehow some way make it more sexy then you can charge a little bit more money and then you differentiate your offer from active campaign another one for creating landing pages is landing eye i have no idea how to say that but if you want to create landing pages or offer landing pages you could offer landing page software and they offer white label funnel builder software simvalley i talk about this on the channel if you're interested in symbolic check it out down below adamdukes.com forward slash s i am they are a funnel building software i've used just about all the funnel builders over the years and without a doubt sim valley is the simplest one to use it's a website it's a crm and it's also a funnel builder and soon sometime in 2021 they're going to be offering email as well not sure when that comes out but symboli offers a white label service so you could offer websites and or funnels to your customers and completely branded as your own i've seen quite a few entrepreneurs doing this and they're offering sim valley they're coming up with their own name their own logo their own url and a lot of people are thinking wow you spent all this money on a funnel builder little do they know they're actually leveraging sim valley so that is a great one if you want to offer funnels yourself this is something i considered about a year and a half ago i decided not to do it but symboli would be a great one to offer if you're interested in offering funnels another tool is called another all-in-one tools called hot prospector this is from a buddy of mine named mark and it is an email phone call text messaging ringless voicemail it's kind of an all-in-one tool it's great for sales teams if you have a small sales team if you have a big sales team 500 1 000 people hot prospector is a fantastic tool to leverage and they also offer a white label version where maybe you own a call center perhaps you could white label the software and it appears that it's your software another one that i've just found doing research on this video is called invoice ninja if you send out invoices and you wanted to create a software yourself and you wanted to offer that or if you have maybe marketing agencies that you sell to you could offer them an invoice software that they could leverage and use to their customers and clients uh this is a little bit different this isn't a software so to speak but a ppc agency so if they offer if you offer google advertising facebook advertising instagram yahoo bing whatever type of pay-per-click advertising you could hire click geeks and they will be your service provider so technically not really a software it's more like a white label service provider which there's a bunch of those as well excuse me this is a popular one so i did want to mention that another one is it app builder if you wanted to offer app builder there's a company called build fire so you could say that you are an app developer or you create apps and you could leverage build fire and you pay them a monthly fee they build the apps or i think they have a soft they have a tool that you use that you can build apps with no code but you could brand that yourself and say you are an app development team another tool is a social media management tool posting on facebook twitter instagram pinterest all the social media uh tools very very hot topic obviously for the last several years a tool called sensible again you can white label their software and sell it to maybe marketing agencies or even small business owners if you choose uh last one i believe is the reputation management so people leaving negative reviews online there is a tool called ranker and you could offer that again if you're selling to marketing agencies you could offer rancor as your own software and then they could go on and sell that to their customers and or clients now i've used activecampaign hot prospector and symboli i have not used all the other tools so i'm not endorsing them in any way i just did a little bit of research pulling this video and i found these tools mentioned on a couple of different websites but do your due diligence obviously before you get into this i would definitely recommend using the software for yourself if you like it if you find value in it like i said i did with simvalley then start maybe look into offering it as a white label all right here is another tool it's called social proofo it's on the website called code canyon one of my favorite kind of underground gem websites um so what this is is i'll show you the website so this is the little proof element that pops up in the lower left-hand corner when someone purchases something from your website whether it's a shopify website whether it's a funnel builder but it's social proof and the little thing if i refresh it maybe it'll show up but it has little notifications it's very and easy to install but what this is is so you can buy this uh outright here it is right here so these little notifications pop up so you can buy this outright for 69 and have it yourself no monthly fee there's a lot of companies out there use proof is the popular one but there's hundreds of other competitors out there and they all charge a monthly fee so you could go here to code canyon and pick this up for 69 dollars for lifetime but they also offer if you scroll down they have an extended license for 449. what those extended licenses is you get this website right here you get this complete website you get your own branding you get your own logo you get your own url white labeling and you could offer this as a software and as you can see you can set the pricing if you want to have a free a free plan you could charge 4.99 a month you could charge 7.99 a month you could charge 12.99 whatever the hell you want to charge monthly annual lifetime and so this would be your complete website with your branding if they purchase everything is set up on the back end if they purchase they get an account they are able to install these widgets on their website these social proof widgets right here again all under your own branding this is a great one to get started again this is a little bit higher priced at 449 but this is a plug-and-play system you get the website you get the back end you get the account all that it's plug and play all you have to do is send traffic to your website obviously customer service as well there's going to be people reaching out for customer service so i don't want to just say it's uh just send traffic and your money's going to fall into your bank account so this would be a great tool to offer like i said there's a lot of competitors out there because this is a very very valuable piece of software it helps increase sales and then the next one from the same exact company called same exact company as this one here it's called bio links and what this is is a link tree alternative again very similar you can buy the regular license at 69 if you scroll down i think the price is the same the extended license is 449 yep 449 and what you would get is you would get this complete website right here you would obviously change the logo you can change the text if you wanted as well but you would get the same thing and what this allows people to do is create single web pages where they can have multiple links in a bio instagram and tick tock are the big ones and if you scroll down it's very similar to this website here but if you scroll down you could set up different if you wanted to have two tiers three tiers five tiers whatever you wanted you could price it at whatever you wanted for 450 bucks you could have a complete pretty much business in a box again you have to send the traffic you have to get the traffic to the website you also have to provide the customer service i'm not going to say this is easy in any way however the development the software and all that that part is pretty easy you pay the 450 one time uh from what i see this company ultem i don't know how to pronounce it they have fantastic uh they have great reviews and they seem to be very very responsive with customer service if you need anything so these are two other options for white label software there you have it 11 white label software tools that you can get started with today like i said the one a couple of them were 449 some of them charge a monthly fee like sim valley i know charges a monthly fee and it's not that much it's less than a hundred dollars i think the white label pricing is about 30 bucks a month to get started on the lower package for some valley but again they all charge different rates some of them have initial setup fee some of them it's just a monthly charge you just have to figure out which one but check it out if none of those softwares interest you just go to google and white label software white label software for marketing agencies white label software for whatever industry you're in and you should be able to find a plethora of white label software that you can offer hey if you like this type of video make sure you hit subscribe down below click that little bell notification because i release two videos each and every week for your viewing pleasure if you're interested in learning high ticket affiliate marketing i got something just for you check out the link down below it's called pissoffboss.com it'll introduce you to a 15 day business builder challenge it's seven bucks but you're backed by a 30 day money back guarantee you simply can't lose it's going to teach you how to do high ticket affiliate marketing what i refer to as the the perfect side hustle so check it out down below pissoffboss.com as always thank you so much for watching i truly do appreciate it you

if you try to build software where you don't deeply understand the problem or you don't deeply understand the customer you're never going to succeed because you'll always be one step behind a competitor that does I didn't want to just be like a Facebook ads monkey anymore if I can just stack up enough money to start a software company I think that's where I'll make the real money all three of my software companies have just been productized apis I always knew that I wanted to do something in software that's where the highest Leverage is you can sell the same thing over and over and over again you get 10 15x multiples on you know the value of your company building no code software companies or just productizing an API selling them on acquire.com they're making millions of dollars a year it's not hard to start a software company in this day and age these large language models have apis if I were to start a SAS company for the very first time in 2023 I would welcome to the we're gonna make it podcast where we talk about the nitty-gritty tactics that underground entrepreneurs are using to build their businesses to the seven and eight figures the goal of this podcast is to go into excruciating detail on the tactics and strategies that they're using right now so hopefully you can implement it into your business and see more success if you like tips like this you can always subscribe to our free newsletter but other than that please enjoy the episode Kieran I guess Karen O'Brien my longtime friend I suppose at this point but brother you have sold two software companies in what the last 18 months yeah yeah roughly 18 months incredible and it's cool because you've done two different kinds of software you have like a typical software company then you have like a micro sass yeah and Iman got what Iman actually ended up buying yeah yeah he did so that's a cool story I want to get into later in the podcast sure let's start with media kids because that was the big one for you now for legal reasons guys you know I love to ask how much money people make right out the gate but Kieran signed a contract he can't talk about it yeah but he's doing well let's just say that and he had tens of thousands of users so do the math but basically what was media kits how did you come up with the idea and just tell me all about that yeah so medikits.com was basically like it was a SAS platform for data and analytics for influencers and online creators and so basically it would take all the apis of the popular social platforms and it would put all your analytics into like a one-pager that you would then use to connect with Brands so we had some of the biggest influencers in the world celebrities using our product and they would basically take their their link with all their analytics and you know when an influencer goes to a brand and they want to do they want to promote the brand they want to do a shout out or get paid for for something like that typically they would always go to their analytics and take screenshots and so we kind of saw that that was an outdated process and wasn't it wasn't very scalable and the the analytics always get outdated and so we basically just built like a really clean ux around some apis and turned it into a product that ended up going really viral on Tick Tock and Twitter and some other places so basically people like influencers would try to get sponsors to make money to monetize their exactly yeah so they had a really hard time sponsors would want to know how many views do you typically get yeah how many followers you have comments engagement agent agent gender breakdown geographic location of your followers all of that and there's really no easy way to find that information there's a bunch of tools online that that scrape that information and guess it but nobody knows that information accurately other than the platforms themselves and so you kind of have to go to the source and then the next issue beyond that is it's on a per platform basis so if you're a brand and you want to pay an influencer for a shout out on Tick Tock Twitter Instagram and YouTube those are all different companies that don't talk to each other that don't share data between each other yes and so you'd have to go and screenshot your analytics on each of those platforms one by one to be able to give the brand of you into that and that makes a lot of sense because they'd only want a video on maybe Tick Tock for this specific campaign right yeah and then another thing you mentioned when I was watching your video guys check out his channel he makes a lot of great YouTube content on this Karen O'Brien but you in that video you were talking about not only were the they struggling to even get it but it constantly is changing because every month your views are different exactly you guys kept it live updated with the apis exactly every day every week um you know people were going in and updating their media kits previously like before our product people would use Photoshop or canva or something like that and they would be going in there updating it every single day every single week in a lot of cases graphic designers full-time job right exactly so they would have graphic designers on staff a lot of the talent agencies that we worked with so we had a B2B model too or we'd sell both smart yeah we'd sell bulk seats to talent agencies that's actually where we made most of our Revenue um and so like they would have full-time graphic designers on staff just updating media kits like changing ones to twos and threes to fours and it was just ridiculous and then the individual creators they would have Freelancers that they'd hire to do like graphic design to update their media kits or they'd be doing it themselves and it would take them hours and hours every single week so I mean ultimately the product just solved the problem that was painful enough for people to be willing to pay for it okay so two things I want to point out here one you're just referencing that you're using apis so I feel like a lot of people over complicate software can you just explain like what an API is and how you can wrap that into a software company yeah absolutely so an API is basically data structures that a company will make public to their own platform so most large technology companies have apis where sometimes they're gated you have to apply for them but sometimes they're public and basically you can tap into these these endpoints in in these apis and you can pull valuable data so for example meta's API which we used for media kits had things like you know follower account and gender breakdown and Geographic breakdown and you know follower growth over time and all these things and so we would use those apis we'd make API calls through our application to grab that data and use it in our product and so you know same thing with the company that I sold to Iman it was just an API that we put into a really nice user experience from a CRM product that did didn't have a very good reporting dashboard and so we built a reporting dashboard for this CRM and productized it and then my new SAS company too we're taking apis and productizing it so you know I always tell people starting a SAS company starting a software company you don't you do not need to know how to code you do not need to come up with the next Facebook it can be something as simple as a no code simple clean ux that just takes an API and productizes it you set endpoints and data structures I just want to clarify for everybody basically if you have a Twitter API and you tweet you can connect the API to your own software and the tweet on Twitter will show up in your software exactly yeah that's super simple yeah that's one example of it yeah and so all you have to do is find like a specific use case of that information and then brand it and Market it towards that demographic that has that problem yeah and you can sell your company for a lot of money essentially exactly and I get another simple way to break it down would be like companies have apis to make the user experience for their users better and so we'll use the Twitter example that you just gave right so Twitter has all this data but they're not using it in every single possible way that you can use that data right Twitter is using it to create a social platform right and so making their API public allows developers and you know people like us to go and build software companies that solve like more Niche problems around that same data so let's say you know Twitter is really focused on just building a social platform and they're not as focused on helping creators get brand deals so somebody like me can come along and build mediakits.com and take the Twitter API and use that data to extrapolate even more data and like make inferences and and create uh you know different data based off of the parent data if that makes sense so we'll find Trends in the data that Twitter doesn't even like hyperspect exactly and then we use that to build a product that allows Twitter influencers to get brand deals right and that's not something that Twitter is going to build themselves but they give all that data away to the public to make lot to make life easier for their users like why wouldn't they want somebody who's a Twitter influencer to be making more money it'll keep them on the platform so you know these platforms that have apis are incentivized to open source them to developers and entrepreneurs to make even more specific products around them it sounds really complicated but it's truly really simple yeah and the apis exist for that reason exactly like make them publicly available so people like you can use them for your own software your own use case because it makes their platform better exactly it's called an API key you just have to go to their website apply for one copy paste just like that you have API so you know these apis exist but how did you come up with this idea like you don't just know that you need media kids if you've never been in the industry so how did you come up with the idea in general yeah so the crazy story about media kits is I came up with the idea when I was 17 when I was in high school and then I didn't actually start the company until almost four years later and so yeah that's what a lot of people think that like you know that we just came up with this idea and then we built out the idea four years before you like started it yeah and so I'll give you I'll tell you why okay um there's actually two reasons so the first reason is basically I just didn't know what I was doing and I knew that and I was like I'm not going to start a software company because I don't have enough money and I have no idea what I'm doing I don't even know where to start um and that's totally totally a valid thing and you know maybe I could have started and who knows what would have happened if I started the company back in 2017 but um the other reason is that I just felt like the market wasn't ready so influencer marketing kind of blew up in like 2015-16 with the rise of Instagram and then there was kind of this lull from like 2017 to 2018 and what really brought back the Creator economy and kind of created this new Resurgence of um you know of of activity in in that industry was Tick Tock and so I noticed that and that's that's why we launched media kits kind of at the at the very early stages of 2020 like during covid everyone's locked locked down at home they're on their phones Tick Tock blows up that's when you know like Charlie demilio Addison Ray all these Tick Tock influencers kind of blew up and that's when we started media kits because we kind of saw that Trend and we're like okay the influencer economy is back we have an idea for a tool now we have you know the resources and the connections to actually make this work so let's do it so that's where you saw the timing which is super important because there's so many stories I know there's a company that had like a almost like an iPhone S level phone in the early 2000s and they invested millions of dollars into it but it was just too early the apps this like ecosystem internet mobile internet was horrible so it didn't work but 10 years later when Steve Jobs rolls it out it's a hit even though the technology really wasn't much different so that's a really interesting insight and I loved hearing that but how did you actually come up with the idea how did you identify that problem because with influencer marketing there's like 20 different steps that go into it and I think you did a really good job of identifying like one clunky pain point and then hyper focusing on that yeah I do want to go into how you identified that yeah absolutely so when I was 17 I was running a marketing agency and I was I was helping and when I say that I don't want that to sound intimidating to anybody because it was literally just a glorified freelance business like I was running Facebook and Google ads and helping with influencer marketing for like three three businesses and so one of them was a company that sold Auto Parts online and so they had a budget for influencers and they wanted to try to you know to spend this Budget on some on some influencers and one of my best friends uh Jr garage has a big Automotive YouTube channel right and so yeah he's right down the street and I was basically connecting my client with him to do this brand deal and they were like well can we see his insights can we see his data and uh they they actually specifically asked for a Media Kit and when they said that I'm like I have no idea what a Media Kit is like let me just Google this real quick I'm like what is Media Kit it's like oh it's like a it's like a page like a one pager with all of your analytics and data and media kits actually before the whole influencer marketing thing uh existed even before social media media kits have been used for decades in uh the journalism space so newspapers print magazines traditional media they've always used media kits to Showcase like their their monthly readers and stuff like that and so Media Kit was a very popular term in in the journalism space and it started getting adopted in the influencer space at the time and so I'm online I'm like oh cool like yeah let me just go make a Media Kit for Jr real quick there's got to be a website that just does this for you like of course duh it's like the most obvious thing ever I'm like looking around like there isn't like why why does this not exist and so you know that's I actually did kind of start media kits back then like I I got the domain I actually even did some of that yeah I did some mock-ups I got the Instagram handle got the got the uh the web domain did some initial UI mock-ups and then I got a quote from a from a web development agency that was going to build it for me and I'm like 17 at the time I'm making like a couple Grand a month like running this freelance marketing business and they quoted me like twenty five thousand dollars to build this software and I'm like that's the most amount of money I've ever heard in a sentence before I'm like I don't have twenty five thousand dollars like I barely have twenty five hundred dollars so I'm like well that's that like let me just you know keep doing these marketing services and so I kind of just shelved at the idea I always knew that it was a good idea I always thought like maybe one day I'll build it but again like the market timing wasn't right and I didn't have the the resources or the know-how at the time to do it and back then you know for everybody listening I didn't know about no code I didn't know uh you know about like building an MVP and and doing something kind of like really like low or no code and then you know building something bigger later I didn't understand these Concepts I did I knew nothing about software I didn't even understand the concept of fundraising that I could go out and get other people to give me money to build this thing so kind of just continued on with life I built I built that marketing agency into a seven figure company and I did really well with it and that's actually how I made like my first kind of like real money which I then used to start media kits you know four years later you hear that story a lot the agency cash flows and then you dump that into like a higher leverage opportunity absolutely but you actually ended up raising money for Media Kids yeah so that's really interesting first off how did you have one more backtrack how did you have the self-awareness not to start it or to wait so I'd love to sit here and tell you that I'm super self-aware and that it was like but dude honestly it was the fact that if I had 25 Grand I probably would have done it and I probably would have ended up broke with nothing to show for it because looking back at that development agency probably would not have been able we spent hundreds of thousands of dollars building media kits so knowing what it takes now uh like 25 Grand no way we would have had anything that actually worked it's safe I would 100 say with confidence that software is the best business like the best business model absolutely as far as like just objectively High leverage recurring revenue and your ability to exit yep and so many people don't think that it's like beginner friendly so now that you've gone through it because you kind of said you didn't start it at the beginning because you weren't too hard there's too high of a barrier to entry in my mind but do you think that's true now no I think software people should like if you're going to start a business objectively you want to start the best business and so it's software is the best business is there anything holding back a beginner from just jumping straight into software it's never been a better time to start a software business there are so many resources out there there's so many ways to to build a software business both conceptually and tactically um that it just kind of level the playing field like it's really a game of distribution of marketing now at this point did you study like y combinator on YouTube or how did you end up getting those skills no you know what not not really like I didn't even know about like the whole VC World until we started raising for media kicks like I didn't even know that it existed quite frankly like I was like I was in this world with with like Iman and these guys like in like the digital marketing space like that was my world from 2016 to 2019. I didn't know anything about like Silicon Valley like the of course like I knew that it existed but I didn't know any of the intricacies about like how to fundraise and how to you know take an MVP to Market or like join y comedy or any of these things didn't know they existed until I started raising for media kits so so you did raise money for Media Kids yeah what was that experience like I don't want to really go into like how to do it necessarily because we'll talk about that later yeah but in general obviously it worked out because you sold the company but I've always been like I feel like that's another level of pressure to you yeah so is that if you had the choice again would you do it again it's a complicated question um for a couple reasons but what I will say I want to preface this by saying that we bootstrapped media kits first so by like by 2019 when we were kind of thinking about starting it I'd saved up like a couple hundred grand and that was from my marketing agency and I started spending it on on media kits so I was paying for everything out of pocket so we hired two engineers and a software designer and I was spending like 15 to 18 000 a month of my own money when I only had I only had a couple hundred grand in the bank and I was spending like almost 20 grand a month just to build the software I almost ran out of money like I would cost mainly just developers uh two developers and a designer yeah they were all about like five six thousand bucks a month each and then you have server costs and you have all these other things on top of it and yeah I just started to run out of money and so out of desperation I started to learn how to fundraise and so I guess to answer your question if I had like millions and millions of dollars back you know in 2019 probably wouldn't have fundraised but I'm glad that we did looking back the only reason that we had the success that we did with it was because our investors opened so many doors to us you know we had Wiz Khalifa We had the guys from Jerry we had you know so many influential people in the space that just opened doors to us whether that was to our B2B customers talent agencies getting some of the biggest influencers in in the space on board getting some of the biggest music labels you know we we signed contracts with a couple of the I can't talk about it but a couple of the biggest music labels in in the world because of the people that we had on our cap table the people that we had as investors so as I'm hearing you say this I'm like damn this guy's like connected out the ass he's got it all it's like no wonder he's successful but I really like want to focus on like the time when you were bootstrapping sure like yeah the amount of time you had to spend waiting I'm sure because you're not are you technical yourself no so you can't code nope get your partner code at all nope it was yeah Casey couldn't either both of you are non-technical so you got to hire the technical team yep I only have one quick Interruption for the podcast today guys we're in the future and right now you can actually build software with no code on a platform called Bubble not only that you can actually plug AI into bubble to build any AI software tool you want very quickly we actually figured out how to build a AI tool to help students with their homework in just a few weeks and we actually made a free course showing exactly how we did everything from plugging in the AI building the actual app itself and then even connecting stripe to accept payments and again that's a completely free course that you can find in the link in the description below other than that guys enjoy the podcast share it with your friend if you're learning something this has been a really good one so far and it only gets better you're spending 15 to 20K a month to get it built by these developers but really you're just kind of telling them the general idea and then you have to wait like a week or two for them to build it yeah it's like first off that's stressful as super stressful and when you're making no money too and you don't even know if the idea is really validated so did you have any form of validating the idea and what were you doing in the meantime while the developers were just working yeah great question so you're trying to start a software company this is something that we did at media kits we did this kind of well um but my my next two software companies after that we did we've like obsessed over this and that is um basically going out to your to your target audience and surveying them and getting feedback on on a concept or an MVP so MVP stands for minimum viable product that's like that should be like your North Star if you're thinking about starting a software company Define what your MVP is going to be so what is the least features the the the basically the most stripped down version of the perfect product that you have in your head that you can build for the cheapest amount of money in the quickest amount of time get it to Market stress test it see if people would pay for it so like one core function that is like the main value and it doesn't even have to be software it can be a clickable prototype it can be a it can be a Wix website that has a couple hyperlinks on it like literally our first Media Kit that was like our you know our MVP was literally just a figma prototype like we put a couple screens in figma and you can like link things in figma to make it in a prototype make it look like it's a real app and we just had a clickable prototype and we would send this to influencers be like hey if this existed would you use it yes great how much would you pay for it so you would send in like a landing page explaining what it is and then just say hey is this something that you would use if it actually worked right now exactly they couldn't get any output yep exactly so so you but you're verbally asking them we're you know we were in DMS we were dming people called dming people we were reaching out to friends who were influencers and having them message their influencer friends and just like Network effect we put out a type form that I think got like three or four hundred responses okay cool um so even like down to our price point like we charged 29 bucks a month for media kits our price point was determined by surveys that we sent out to our users sorry keep going no I was just gonna say we're we were very data focused and again in retrospect we didn't even do it to the extent that I would have wanted to like it was kind of an afterthought it was like holy I'm spending 20 grand a month let me let me make sure people would use this so it was a few months into that that I was like let me just go ask people if they would actually use this yeah so we did it retroactively but you know I think anybody out there who's thinking about starting a software company if you can come up with an MBA P it could be no code it could be just a clickable prototype you don't have to know how to code the barrier to entry really is that low it's so exciting creating an MVP get out there talk to your customers everyone says that but until you're like in that moment it's kind of hard to like consider it so what what is like what did the survey say and how did you incentivize people to fill it out yeah so it would be um so to incentivize them to fill it out they would basically we would promise them that they would get like Early Access and that they would get like a discount on it when it eventually came out so that was that was pretty easy and like there's plenty of ways to incentivize people to do things right um so yeah but the the main thing is it was like a logic based survey so we used a type form so it was like if somebody clicked something on the on page one it would take them to a different page than if they click something else then right yeah so there's a bunch of logic built into it so it's like would you use this if yes then well why would you use it it's like well I'd use it for this reason there's like a drop down with like four different things and it's like okay and then you know use it for that reason like well how often would you use it and how much would you pay for it and this is not it's like well if you wouldn't use this why okay for that reason okay well what would make you want to use it right so we just collected as much information from our Target users as we could and that kind of helped us inform product decisions down the line okay so that's another interesting point you said down the line yeah I'm like non-talk non-technical but we're building software right yeah and I have like a million different feature ideas that I want done but I'm getting so ahead of myself because like we're just now getting the MVP done yeah every idea I have could add two three four weeks of an expensive developer absolutely so what like First off how did you choose what's Implement what not obviously it's probably just like a risk reward yeah but like tell me more about what you were doing in that meantime while you were waiting so there's con there's this concept called called A control point so it's like you want to create something that becomes like the control point for the rest of your products so what is like that core product like for us it was the media kit at media kits right and then we can expand from there okay okay so if we can build the best simplest easiest to use Media Kit product out there then eventually we can go build a Marketplace or we can build a B2B offering for talent agencies we can do this this and that right and even so uh to give further context on that our MVP was just uh Twitter Instagram and Facebook we didn't even have Tick Tock or YouTube when we launched so that's another example of how you can do an MVP like limit Integrations limit the amount of UI that you're building limit the amount of functionality and so the idea the goal of your user interviews when you're early when you're when you're building your MVP should be to find out what is the one thing that would make them use it what is the one thing that's non-negotiable right and then from there you can build the rest of the features but you've got to get their attention you got to get them in first and so what is that thing that's going to get them in and what you'll find this goes for anybody building any kind of software whether it's a no code like bubble software or something really complex it doesn't matter what it is what you're going to find is your early adopters your early users are are going to use just a couple core functionalities and they don't care about everything else all the cool feature ideas you have in your head there are definitely people out there that would use that and that would also think it's cool but in the beginning there are plenty of the users out there that would use and pay for just the very very simple version of you know just your core functionality and so that's kind of what the goal of the survey is is to see what most people are trying to use it for exactly and you might find out I'm sure you didn't but you might find out that like almost everybody's using it for a complete different reason than why you make it so you might have an idea to Pivot but exactly was it pretty consistent it was pretty consistent I think we did a good job at collecting the feedback and understanding what people were saying you know the old saying is like if you try to please everyone you'll please no one yeah that goes for all areas of life but especially in software like if you it's called feature brain if you're too feature brain and you're thinking and this is this is both on the product product and the sales side if your product is too feature heavy and not not outcome or solution heavy then it's not going to work and on conversely on the sales side if you're selling software even and for anybody listening if you're maybe working for a software company and you're selling software for a living if you're just selling the features all day like no no one buys features people buy outcomes people buy solutions to problems and so if you can think about that from a product perspective and build software that solves problems then the features will come because all people are thinking about how is it how does it benefit me directly absolutely they're not thinking about the technical API connection they just want to know how I can use this to make my life better yeah and there's so many rabbit holes we can go down here but like what I'll say is like if you go to medikits.com and like you look at our old like our website I don't obviously I don't own the company anymore but it's still there you can go to our website all the copy on the website it's not um it's not uh you know Common you know show all your analytics it's like get more brand deals right it's like the end result exactly it's the outcome like make yourself look more professional right impress Brands like this is the type of copy that we used on our on our website because that's what the product does the product gets you to an outcome gets you to finding a solution for this really annoying problem that you've been having and a lot of a lot of software companies and quite frankly any kind of company like if you don't know what your customers are looking for in terms of outcomes and and solutions to their problems then you're never going to build a good product it's like like that's such a good point it's like why does this exist because you could say two different things in your landing page get all of your social media statistics in one place yeah that could be your landing page copy or get more brand deals yep exact same product but that one actually resonates with people much more strongly exactly why they sign up that's really cool outcome based outcome-based selling outcome based copy that's a great one okay thank you for that that taught me a really clear Insight now Okay cool so is there anything else during that like to optimize your time in that building phase when you're just syncing the money in that you decided to do that was like helpful in any way uh um you know honestly man that that part of my life was like a blur like it was just so are you still doing agency work on the side yeah oh for sure like yeah I was just like barely like I was just trying to break even every month like I was like if I can make like like because my agency at the time I was doing like maybe 50 60 Grand a month in in top line revenue so I was taking home like 20 or 30 and I was spending all of it on software and then everything personal for me yeah that's all negative at that point so I'm like freaking out and um we were trying to figure out like how like how do we get this to Market like just you know just like how do we put this out there so that people can start using it and hopefully pay for it and when it became obvious that we were too far away from that I was just kind of doing the math I'm like all right I've got this much like dry powder left dry powder is another word for like money in the bank like I've got this much money left and I'm spending this much and we need this many more months before the product is in a place where we can sell it which by the way in retrospect totally flawed thinking I if I could have shipped the product way earlier than we did and started generating revenue and that's one of the biggest mistakes looking back where you focused too much on like the design how yeah totally yeah and that's every first time founder every first time software company makes that mistake they think the product needs to be perfect before they launch it so yeah in retrospect should launched way sooner but hindsight's 2020 yeah at the time I'm like we don't have enough money to get this to a place where it's sellable and so that's ultimately why we decided to go out and try to fundraise and that's what I did with a lot of my free time is okay so I have been I think this is a good time to go into it so sure first off why did you even decide to fundraise and go through with it instead of just saying I wasn't over my head I'm just gonna stick with my agency I'm making 20K a month yeah I'm killing it I'm only what 21. I was 20 20. like I'm killing it making 20K a month what made you like take that challenge head on I want to change so like like you kind of mentioned I knew that there was a that there was a glass ceiling on agency work it was it was basically just my face like I had like a one-to-one relationship with all my clients I had a team but like it was me like I was basically a freelancer with a team at that point and I wanted more I wanted to I didn't want to just be like a Facebook ads monkey anymore like I was literally like totally good every day I was just in Facebook ads just like tweaking campaigns and I'm just like I wasn't finding fulfillment with that and I'd like I'd put away a decent amount of money I'd made a lot of great friends in the industry and I just wanted to do something different and I always knew that I wanted to do something in software because to the point we made it early in this podcast it's like that's where the highest Leverage is you can sell the same thing over and over and over again you get 10 15x multiples on you know the value of your company and so it just made sense to me logically I'm like if I can just stack up enough money to start a software company I think that's where I'll make the real money and so that's kind of how I was thinking about it and then you know my my business partner Casey Adams he had a podcast where he interviewed like a couple dozen billionaires yeah a bunch of really successful people a bunch of venture capitalists and so we're just kind of sitting one day and at this point you know we'd become co-founders of media kits and we're just again self-funding it he comes to me one day he's like hey Karen like what if we ask some of my podcast guests to like invest in media kits and that literally it broke my brain it was like a it was like a whole new frame a whole new way of thinking and I'm like wait a minute like you're telling me that there's like wealthy people that would give us their money to build this I'm like of course I know that that exists like I know that venture capital is a thing but I just couldn't wrap my head around why someone would want to give us their money to build this thing it was just it was just like a foreign concept to me and so sure enough like a couple weeks later we put a little pitch deck together and we went out and we started talking to some some of these people that Casey had on this podcast over the years and we start we got a 25 000 check and then we got a 50 000 check and then we got a hundred thousand then a hundred fifty thousand dollar check and these investors like these wealthy people are friends with guess what other wealthy people and they would tell their friends that they just invested in medikits and then they'd be like well I want to invest in media kits too and then they would write a check to us and before you know it we had a million and a half dollars in our in our checking account for this business yeah wow is there like a first off is there like a standard for how much Equity you give away per round because it's like your angel round right yeah speed round what is it yeah it was like it was a seat around yeah typically you want to give away like 10 to 20 but there's so much Nuance to it I mean it depends on I mean the type of business you're just making it up at that point though right you're totally you're pulling out I'm going to guess my company could potentially be worth 10 million dollars so well it's it's just like anything else it's whatever people are willing to pay yeah right and so it's like um I don't I can talk about this number we raised our first round at a five million valuation okay and that's like a relatively standard seed round um like even like a lot of YC companies they'll raise their first round of funding at a five million valuation did you have any customers no at that point no customers no problem available no it was it was mock-ups and clickable prototypes yeah and so yeah I mean ultimately like the fundraising process again it's a game of of describing your vision and helping other people see your vision and it's also a game of fomo like when a bunch of really notable investors put money into something you know just like any other Market oh yeah whether it's stocks or crypto or whatever else it's like other people want in right right and so it's the same thing but you just you have to manufacture it on like a Grassroots level which is the hardest part but um yeah I had no clue what I was doing and just to be clear I don't want to make it sound like this was super easy or anything we fundraised that that million and a half dollars took us over nine months to raise from start to finish how many people do you talk to oh great I have those numbers I actually have the old like fundraise CRM from media kits still on my computer because it's like motivation for me we talked over 350 people and we raised money from 30. and those are all like one-on-one calls pretty one-on-one calls usually 30 minutes to 45. if you had you talked to 350 people and only 30 people own these a lot but that's so many calls like yeah like that's so much time yeah so I mean the typical rule I always tell whenever a Founder asks me for fundraising advice I'm like talk to about 10 times as many people as you think you need to talk to how do you even find that many just friends like referral referral referral yeah friends of other investors that's that's the biggest one uh Twitter is amazing for uh for finding investors there's a whole dude yeah there's a whole VC community on Twitter a lot of like early stage Venture funds will even have like public links where you can apply ah and send your pitch deck in I guess their job is literally to give money so that's one of the things let me let me talk about that for a second that's one of the biggest Paradigm shifts for anyone somebody listening that's thinking about raising money whether it's for a software company or a consumer package company or you know even like a real estate project whatever it is if you're thinking about raising money from investors you've got to understand how investors think investors are literally capital allocators for a living their job is to put money somewhere and it might as well be with you because you're building the next big thing and the other paradigm shift that I had and this has been so helpful um you know for fundraising even like for my new venture is if you are 100 certain that whatever you're building is going to be successful which of course statistically not everything's going to be successful but if you're not 100 sure and 100 confident in yourself then you probably shouldn't be starting a business anyway yeah but if you are absolutely certain that you have an idea that's going to change the world or that's going to change an industry or that's just simply going to make money and be successful it doesn't even have to change the world if you're so confident that it's going to do that then it should it's a privilege that somebody is allowed to invest in my company definitely you definitely flip that like that's the Paradigm Founders a lot of Founders feel like feel like they are like begging for money from investors and as soon as you feel that way or that you position it that way or you give off that energy you're screwed you're you're going to lose when you come into a call it's like all right this investor I might give them the opportunity to invest in in my company because my company is going to make them so much money and it's an opportunity that they sh that they would be stupid to pass well you cannot say that you can't say that you just have to be thinking about arrogant of course that's 100 true because you can only raise a million dollars for two million dollars not just for simple math 100 000 each yeah they get one percent each only 10 investors can do that and if you're right that could turn into millions of dollars for them absolutely and so then all these investors start fomo again like exact three friends here said I invest in this company 50 Grand then he starts my other friend invest fifty thousand dollars I want to be like oh I'm gonna miss out there's something here and so you can definitely create that fomo from investors 100 I never thought about like that yeah no it's literally their job and all you really have to do is like you don't be qualified you don't need a degree of college degree to raise money no literally have to have you just have to convince a rich person to give you money is that yes for sure and I want I want to bring this back down too for you know any of the any of the younger guys or the beginning owners that are listening to this slide you were 20. I was yeah but I want to say like it's not as intimidating as it might seem once you start to understand the intricacies and I will say um there's a book out there that really helped me with fundraising it's called fundraising by Ryan Breslow uh he's the founder of Bolt like the one click checkout company they're like a 10 billion dollar company or something um if anybody's thinking about fundraising go buy that book on Amazon and read it it's like the best book for for Founders to read about fundraising but the next thing that I'll say is you don't have to know wealthy people to to raise money from uh from somebody right you can crowdfund there's platforms out there like republic.com for example um that you know where you can crowdfund invest investment um you know again you can go and you can just cold Outreach to to VCS on Twitter like there's so many ways if you're Scrappy if you're a hustler if you truly believe in what you're building that you can go and find money there's there is such abundance in this world and there's so much money out there that's looking for a home that's looking to be allocated somewhere and all you got to do is find it yeah cause I mean people have tens of millions of dollars they want their money to do the work for them and if they can find some smart person with a good idea to do all the work and they just have to fund it absolutely no-brainer and even if they lose a few million dollars that one hits they make their money back so yeah that's that's the thing I guess that makes sense again a venture capitalist if they invest you know if they have 10 million dollars and they invest in 10 companies a million dollars each and you know five of them go to zero it's like yeah they lost five million dollars but if one of those 10 becomes a billion dollar company then you know they they just you know at 10 or 100x their money or whatever in terms of like dilution and everything else that might have happened in the meantime but you know they made all of their their losses back and then some and so these investors are also playing a game too they're playing a numbers game yeah and so again you just have to believe in yourself and be confident enough to to know that you're going to do whatever it takes to make the successful and if an investor can see that in you if they know that you're going to do whatever it takes to make it successful then they're going to invest in you every time okay that's really good advice I do want to take the conversation a little different way because I know a lot of people out there are going to be like still like even though we're saying that still intimidated scary of course yeah yeah so but just to wrap this topic up if you had one 0.5 million dollars liquid at that time or moving into future Ventures would you still choose to raise money knowing that you could like there's a pressure that you're losing somebody else's money like me as a person I would rather lose my own money than someone else's even though that's probably not the best business choice so if you had 1.5 million would you do it yourself and bootstrap it or would you have investors neither I would do a hybrid okay so the reason that again it has a risk tolerance balance basically not risk uh opportunity okay so a big reason why people raise money from what we call Strategic investors is because they can open doors that you can't by yourself so I would raise way less maybe only like a couple hundred grand but if an investor that has a crazy Network or access to certain things inside of your industry that are very specialized and they can open doors to that they're much more inclined to open doors to that if they're if they have skins by Wiz Khalifa makes sense exactly gotcha yeah cool so Wiz Khalifa was one of his investors initially and so you got the money it was pretty much already built almost kind of pretty much yeah and then that just kind of gave you the peace of mind then you can start planning so how much got devoted to like marketing and growth and how much got allocated towards the Building Product yeah so this is where we can really get into tactics uh we spent forty thousand dollars on marketing the lifetime of the business wow yeah on paid marketing so that's the theory that if you make a good product that people want they're going to share it and Word of Mouth will take absolutely so if you make a good product you don't really need to Market even though you were a marketer so you could have if you wanted well we still we still marketed I just said we didn't spend a ton of money okay we absolutely okay yeah well and that's like in terms of like really tactical stuff like to get a consumer product to go viral I mean I don't think anybody does it better than than Hunter Isaacson good buddy of mine who's behind NGL app I'm gonna have him on here soon you got to he's oh my God he's gonna he's gonna dunk on anything that I'm about to say in terms of in terms of product-led growth but definitely not hold back his opinion oh man I love it he's great I I love Hunter but yeah I mean the big reason like we got to 30 000 users in like under six months because we went viral on Tick Tock and so I know you had Oliver on who talked about the same thing he's he has a cpg company but this just goes to show like we had a software product he has a you know a physical Goods product and both of us basically built our businesses on the back of tick tock organic virality but I want to understand it because his makes sense to me because it sure sex chocolate it's controversial yeah yeah catch you dry media kits I'm not necessarily going to naturally send this to my girlfriend or send this and they're not out of the boys I mean yeah and just Apples to Apples like we probably didn't have nearly as many like views or Impressions or anything like that Oliver does because he can sell to literally anybody anybody with a credit card can buy his product versus like media kits you kind of have to be like a social media influencer to do it so the key for us was we went kind of like Niche viral inside of a couple key communities so we went viral first and foremost in like The Tick Tock influencer space so there was a tick talker named Josh Richards who was also an investor in our company yeah and we basically we literally posted a video you can still find it on our on our media kits Tick Tock if you scroll down enough but it got like 1.5 million or one or like almost 2 million views uh in like a week and it was literally like this is the media kit that Josh Richards uses to get brand deals with like that robotic voice from Tick Tock like that was literally all it was and it got like two or three hundred thousand views overnight and we went from we we launched we had like 2 000 users and it was literally like our launch party in August it was like a big spike and then September October we're getting like five six sign ups a day and it was just dead for like two months we were freaking out yeah and then this video I think we posted it in November so you posted it uh I think Casey posted it okay um did you have like a company Tick Tock or was it yeah we had a company Tick Tock okay yep and media kits yeah oh yeah okay yeah my business partner made it uh media kits account posted it and it went viral in November I think it's like the first week of November and it just went through the roof we went from getting like five six sign ups a day to like 500 signups a day it's not a borderline major company that one like that like one Tick Tock that one Tick Tock and then well the and the second wave of virality that we had that really that really helped was in the twitch streamer community so I don't know if I don't know if you know this I didn't even know this until until this happened but the twitch streamer Community is like massive and like they there's like this crazy crazy community of twitch streamers and they only have like a few thousand followers each but the influence they have because it's long form it's like a tick tock at that point exactly a tick talker with two million followers in my opinion has less influence than a twitch streamer with ten thousand tick tockers have the least influence exactly you don't even like search for their content it's usually like you don't even know who they are you don't know their names you don't know what their voice sounds in your life yeah exactly so these twitch streamers have these cult followings yeah and they're also another thing about them is they're all friends with each other yeah and so we then after going viral on Tick Tock we went viral on Twitter which is where all the twitch streamers hang out when they're not streaming um and that sent us through the roofing again and we actually we didn't even have a twitch integration at the time but we had a couple twitch streamers that were using it for their other social platforms and then we built a twitch integration and then they started talking about it and it just boom Another viral hit and it just went crazy on Twitter that just makes so much sense because at that point you like want your friends to also succeed and if this helps you make more money you instantly tell your friends about it exactly it's really important with any SAS and now you're going to be to be sass so that absolutely same concept B2B or b2c there is something called Product LED growth so the the terminal it's plg just if you ever hear plg in the software space it means product LED growth and that means that the product does the marketing for you and so you know you don't put money into ads you don't do any of this because the product will Market itself for you and one of the ways that we had plg at media kits is when you signed up you would get your link and you're kind of inherently you inherently you want to share your link yeah because you want to get brand deals right so guess what people started putting it in in their link trees they started tweeting about it they started posting on Instagram they started posting it on Twitter they started pulling up in the middle of their twitch streams and so it's basically just free distribution free marketing for us as a company and that was how we hit product-led growth and and specifically in the twitch streamer Community like we had these twitch streamers that would sign up for the product and then immediately post their link on Twitter and then their friends would see that and they would sign up and post their link and it was just this viral like Network effect they don't have to like tweet it say hey check out my Media Kit but it's there and then other people that are like kind of looking at what are they doing what can I add to my yeah they see that like look into it then they make their own account exactly so it has like an organic ability that's really smart so I was going to ask you that's like what that Tick Tock is what made it go big yeah kind of like your moment but you did have an interesting strategy with your launch party and you launched on product hunt so can you explain yeah real quick yeah so product hunt for those that don't know is basically a platform that allows people to like crowd vote um on certain product ideas so literally anything like there's there's B2B stuff on there it's mainly like b2c stuff but there is some B2B products on there and it's everything from like little tiny like micro SAS apps all the way up to like proper companies like companies that you that are like household names that you and I would know have been launched on product hunt um and so yeah basically like you go on there and you just vote on your favorite products and we posted media kits on there the day after we launched and uh we got second highest voted product of the day which is annoying I wish we got first we we uh it was good yeah no it is what it is but yeah the product before us was super sick so I can't complain but um but yeah it's great exposure um product hunt combined with our launch party got us our first couple thousand users and um yeah productone's great if you're thinking about launching a SAS platform like launching on product Hunt is a great way to get some initial exposure from you know mainly like the software and the development community and um yeah our launch party was kind of um it was it was very intentional so Casey and I before doing media kits we actually used to throw networking events in La we would like rent these crazy houses and then I think that's how our Network got connected exactly yeah exactly so all of a lot of our mutual friends like that's how I met them so I'd throw these parties in LA with Casey we'd sell tickets for like 50 bucks a piece we'd rent a house for a day up in like the Hollywood Hills for like six or seven thousand dollars which back then was like all the money Casey and I have like we're I'm talking like 17 18 years old we'd spend like all of our money on like renting this crazy house and then we'd sell tickets for like 50 or 100 bucks a pop and then we'd have speakers and then we'd have like a little party at the end we'd have catering and whatever we did this like four or five times was it profitable um no it never made money but it is in fact it lost money most of the time open doors yeah open doors exactly and you know even a few people that we met at those parties like ended up investing in media kits so it just goes to show that everything comes full circle but yeah basically like Casey and I had thrown these parties and we knew that it was just a great way to to bring people together and so we decided to throw one for media kits and basically we just like got this event space which is uh was owned by one of our investors again so there's another reason like why you want to bring in smart money um and strategic investors but yeah we got this event space um Wiz Khalifa gave us like a massive discount on his appearance fee again because he was involved in media kits and so yeah we had Wiz Khalifa come and perform and it was just like a great networking event and we threw it in LA too so of course um some of the biggest influencers in the world were there which also meant that pretty much everything at the event we got for free so all the drinks all the catering like all the stuff that was there for people all the products and and beverages were all sponsored because all these beverage companies wanted their beverages to be in the hands of these big influencers that they knew were going to be at our party video yeah we kind of like game the system in that way and uh and then yeah it was a hit we got a couple thousand signups off of It Wiz Khalifa got to meet him in person and that was sick um but yeah I mean like I said from there we hadn't really figured out product LED growth yet so after the launch party the initial hype couple thousand signups it just flatlined for about two months until that Tick Tock video went back did you ever struggle with the turn after that event um not really um we didn't even have our paid subscription out back then it was just free only um so so no we did have a we did have some struggles with like product adoption so people would sign up they'd make an account and they wouldn't actually build a Media Kit because there's like two steps to using our platform so it was free for that part yeah okay yeah it was always free it was a freemium product so it was free to make Media Kit and then if you wanted like the bells and whistles and like the upgraded stuff then you could pay for it what were some of the key upgrades white labeling it so like removing our logo um customizing it adding more than I think more than three platforms I think is where we limited it at so if you wanted if you had Instagram Facebook and Twitter and you wanted to add twitch or YouTube or something you'd have to pay for the upgraded program um there was uh like like Pro analytics we had additional analytics that we that we uh kept behind a paywall there was creating more than one Media Kit actually was a big one for us so like you know you might have one Media Kit that's specific to your Twitter and one that's specific to your YouTube gotcha um and so that was another big one so on our free plan you could only have one Media Kit gotcha so there's a bunch of stuff that we put behind a paywall do you know the ratio between people who just use the freemium or can you not share that can you share that um I mean I'm sure people could like reverse engineer the numbers if I share that so probably not but yeah it was a pretty decent conversion rate okay yeah that makes sense the multiple Media Kit yeah yeah and the YouTube that makes a lot of sense Okay cool so by the way the product launch was basically since you you live in LA right yeah he lived in LA influentors are your Target demographic so just throw a party of influencers put exact kits everywhere say Media Kids launch party and you have this core base that's going to look into it and then you basically started you didn't have the product LED growth but after that you learned you needed that figured it out yeah so the freemium version people could just use it if they wanted to put it into like their link tree in their bio people people initially find it yeah exactly so let me recap you had the idea in 2017 but it was too early you didn't have the knowledge or the resources then later around covid you see this probably before covet right right right after code had hit right around there you see a Resurgence in Tick Tock influencers something huge and so you're like hey that idea is something I want to pursue you hired two developers and a designer you spend way too long designing it before launching it to have to figure out how to raise money you do it with your network and then from there you're able to get it done don't do a ton of marketing you launch on product hunt uh you do the launch party get two enough users but then you find out the product like growth problem and you come up with that idea and then your strategic investor Josh Richards makes a tick tock that goes viral and that skyrockets the growth of the software absolutely and that yeah and then six months later we got acquired six months later got Acquired and you chose to sell basically because you were pretty much out of that Runway and so you kind of either raise another round you had a lot of users so you're making decent revenue and so but you still need to raise revenue to or raise money to continue that level of growth yeah exactly we actually um we literally had the acquisition offer and an offer to raise another round of funding at a pretty like a yeah like an eight-figure valuation um both on our desk it really just comes down to how far did you want to take it yeah and then ultimately who's has who's in a position to actually make this successful yeah and you basically looked at the market and you saw a lot of competitors again he made a whole video on this go watch his channel yeah but competitors that were like small companies like our size and then we also had meta rolling out a media kit tool and YouTube rolling out a media kit tool it's like I can't help but think that maybe we influenced them a little bit definitely I mean it's like it's like it's like Amazon you know like Amazon has all the data and so like they have Amazon Basics and so they'll just like see which products are selling at a really high margin right now yeah all right let's just figure out how to make that real quick yeah it's the same in software and like we can talk about this too like in software um software in and of itself is not IP anymore like it used to be because it was so hard to build but the barrier to entry is so low now that like anybody out there listening if you build a great product and you start making a bunch of money so someone is going to rip you off it's not if it's when exactly and so the way that you build defensibility and IP in software is brand and distribution and so with media kits we had brand nailed down pretty early like things like our domain and the people we had involved in stuff like that's brand right and then distribution would be things like product-led growth or Channel Partners or you know investors that are walking us into the you know the biggest music labels in the country to get us you know Enterprise deals like that is how you build a moat and how you build IP and defensibility around a software product the code itself is never going to be defensible yeah there's always someone out there that's going to be able to take what you're doing and re-engineer it it's like your advantages that other people can't replicate exactly even though they're not like you don't create them it's just your relationships or something that you other people have built up for you and you combine forces yeah cool that makes a lot of sense but this kind of actually is a great segue into microsass because yeah that was something that most Facebook and YouTube have a broad product they were neglecting that but over time they're getting a lot of things done they're ready to tackle that because now they're seeing that it's a market because they can clearly see how successful yeah it is in all these link trees your competitors see that too and so you saw a lot of people kind of starting it you saw that you weren't you were self-aware to know that you probably couldn't compete with meta in a company that wanted to buy it was like actually had a lot of those advantages exactly and so you wanted to hand it off to them because you think they could do it well did you have to work there at all I did yeah I worked there for a few months so did Casey um and then I left because I want to start something new but you were allowed to leave like it was sort of like contingencies yeah there was an earn out um I left before it was like fully vested um but it is what it is it's at that point it was an opportunity cost thing for me exactly it's like exactly you know I made a little bit of money on the acquisition and then I could have made more by staying but I chose to I chose to battle myself and start something new as opposed to waiting there okay so then let's just go straight into what you right when you left yeah I would do the same thing I don't think I could work with you like that I get it um but next you went into what we're going to call the micro SAS phase of your life yeah did you sell everything move to Bali then just make that movement no so so the crazy thing about that I don't even know if I went into this in the video but yeah basically the software company that I eventually sold the Iman um we built it so so keep in mind I had my marketing agency started media catch the marketing agency kept running and it was actually we never took a salary for minikits like Casey and I never paid ourselves and one of the reasons I was able to do that is because I had this marketing agency that was still making money of course and so I had a business partner at the marketing agency Kaden um who was running it when I was running media kits so he was just keeping you know just basically maintaining it keeping keeping the clients happy and we used this white labeled CRM and this white labeled CRM had a problem on a per client basis we could see everything like ad spend click-through rate like all these things that you need to know as a marketing agency like all your analytics but you could only see it per client and so you'd have to click into every account go to the analytics ironically very similar to the problem with media cats is like the analytics are there they're just dispersed in a way that like isn't easy to access and so I always joke that um this company agencyreporting.com was like it's like media kits for marketing agencies it's like kind of the same concept it's just taking analytics from an API that already exists and just centralizing them in a nice UI like that's basically what it was but anyway we had this problem where like we had we had over 100 clients at one point and we just couldn't keep track of all the different metrics and like we jump on a client call and it would be like oh well like how are the leads doing this week or where's the ad spend in relation to the monthly budget or where is the click-through rate where you know versus last month and like these are just basic answers that are basic questions that we couldn't answer as easily as if we had it all in one dashboard so what we did in the spirit of building an MVP uh we went and just basically pulled the API into a Google Sheets originally but it was a disaster like my my business partner Caden's like a wizard on on Excel and Google Sheets and so he did it and it worked but it was just it was slow and it was like things would break all the time like you know the logic that connects everything would like break and like things would like air out like man what if we just built our own software to do this and so I found the domainagency reporting.com bought it for way less than you might think I bought it for um and basically we went and we took all of the data from this white labeled CRM across all of our clients and we basically built a dashboard the way that we wanted to see that data and we built it for ourselves and we net we never even thought that we would sell this to anyone else we just built it for our own agency and we used our own profit from our agency to pay for it and uh and then once it was built we shared it with a couple buddies that were using the same white labeled software and they were like yo like can I use that like sure yeah how how difficult was it to transition from internal use to productized I mean in terms of like you know productized I guess yeah kind of like we we built it in a way that it was scalable um we just didn't have like a way to take payment so it was basically yeah I was just creating a new user account or like okay yeah I'll just put like okay let's put a stripe paywall on this thing and see if people will buy it their account interesting so yeah I mean basically what we did is like this this white labeled uh CRM company has like Facebook groups with like tens of thousands of people in them that are all like agency owners like we were and uh I went in there and again just like media kits I was like Hey guys like if something like this existed like would you use it and then I went and everybody that said yes I just PM them on Facebook I'd be like hey check this out and send the link and go sign up and they originally it was a waitlist and then eventually we started taking taking payment um yeah we had like 400 agency owners that signed up for the wait list oh my god um in like a day holy and so we're like wow well this is very clear product Market fit um that's another term in software that's used very often pmf product Market fit it means that your product actually resonates with your target market um and validate that they want it exactly yeah so yeah that's that's how we uh that's how we got our first customers for that and um yeah we're like okay cool well we're selling this now we got it up to a decent like mrr run rate um but it wasn't something that like we wanted to do long term and when we launched it was right around the time that I sold media kits like we were kind of like working on this just like in our free time yeah and um it was like making decent money and I was like I have I want to build something else like I already knew like the next like big company that I wanted to build and like this is just going to be like a distraction it's like I don't want to have a side hustle I don't want to be distracted by this thing and there's a whole Market out there for micro Acquisitions there's even um there's even a company called acquire.com that's literally built around like Andrew gazdecki he's amazing if you if you guys want to follow someone in the software space on Twitter follow Andrew he's amazing um but yeah he literally has a Marketplace that's for this for these like ten to a hundred thousand dollar Acquisitions of just like these software companies that are pretty basic that just solve one problem really well and uh anyway so there's a whole market for that and we actually listed on micro acquire and we got some inquiries but then I was like hmm like who has like a large following of agency owners that like might get value from the software so you reached out to him directly and uh yeah and I was like Iman like let me let me just text Iman and like Iman Iman and I have been friends for years like we we connected in 2017 we hung out in London a couple years back so we've always stayed in touch so I shot him a text and I'm like hey bro like I've got this software that does this and it's like built for agency owners to like consolidate their data and we're doing this much in revenue and I just want to get rid of it because I'm building something else I don't want like I don't want to be distracted by it like do you want it and he goes yeah bro I'll buy it like name your price I'm like okay well like here's my price this is like this is like how much we put in and like I want to make a little bit of profit obviously so like this is what I'm willing to sell it to you for he's like cool yeah let's just jump on a zoom call and figure out the details we jump on a zoom call it's like 30 minutes we're just like shooting the I'm just giving them like the rundown on the numbers and then he's like all right cool like yeah just let me know like send like send me wire info like I'll send the money and then yeah like a week later he sent the money and we just transferred him to the domain and the the database and that was it super simple yeah it makes sense it could benefit his user base exactly yeah you didn't need it anymore yeah that makes a lot of sense and I love the story about both your ideas because they both came from first hand experiencing the problem that is the biggest thing in software if you try to build software where you don't deeply understand the problem or you don't deeply understand the customer you're never going to succeed because you'll always be one step behind a competitor that does I think that's a lot of like people don't understand the big companies like the ones in the hundreds of millions or billions are the ones who have just built these softwares for their company yeah and that's why they're able to scale because they have advantages or they have better information or they can communicate more quickly so they save time so they can talk to twenty percent more customers a day yeah it's like these internal softwares four companies are what make them great and so if you have the problem firsthand you work at a company and your job is something and then you have the problem that's a huge opportunity for you just go build an MVP in on the side and then start trying to use it at your company or sell it to other companies like yeah that's just a tried and I think this is one of the biggest points like we were talking about before the podcast like this is one of the things that I want to drive home it's not hard to start a software company in this day and age all you have to do is find a product with an API a software with an API that has an underserved segment of the market so with media kits we found that analytics were convoluted and they didn't talk to each other across platforms so we took all these social media apis we built a really nice UI on top of it and just show like a UI is just the analytical data exactly it means user interface it means like what you can see like so there's the front end and back end in software the front end is what you can see the back end is the code that makes it all appear on the screen right and so yeah basically if you find an API and productize it you can sell that and you've got a software business and that's literally what I've done all three of my software companies have just been productized apis with media kits it was social media apis with agency reporting it was the API of this CRM platform and then with my newest company it's apis of these like small business point of sale softwares have you been plugging in AI apis of course we can talk about that we'll say that for the end but I think that's like this is like the biggest generation for our age yeah absolutely our parents are the generation before us at the internet we have ai every software is going to use Ai No software has AI just a big opportunity there's no absolutely and no code apis no code SAS Builders like bubble it's never been easier and so I think the reason most people say that software is not for beginners is because it's only not for beginners who have no experience working anywhere because you don't know the problems that exist you have to have a job or be working on something every day to see a problem yeah but now with the no code tools that you mentioned earlier like if you see a problem you can build it without knowing how to code there's API no code like make.com or zapier yep and then you can literally just start bringing it to Market without having to put any money into it so now the best business model is beginner friendly yeah you just have to find an idea and then validate it by taking surveys yeah fun fact my business partner Cadence on make.com's homepage because he's like a power user of mate.com yeah we've been using we've been doing exactly this like that's what we're doing exactly what your new business is yeah let's just go ahead and go into that so you sold the microsass the agency software yeah because you saw one micro problem on go high level yeah and saw that they don't I show one aspect of the analytics yeah so you just made this for yourself you realize hundreds of other people could benefit from it and then you sold it to someone that serves those people yeah super straightforward and again you just happen to know Iman personally but you could have sold it unacquired yeah no I want to yeah I want to uh say that too like we had offers on acquire.com Iman was just willing to do the deal faster and yeah and of course you know and easier like there's a lot of paperwork exactly yeah no commission Etc like acquire.com is an incredible platform and if Iman had said no to buying agency reporting I can guarantee it would have sold on on acquire.com for sure I mean do you see sales all the time on there like I know someone who literally just makes the same CRM every single month he makes one a month makes the same CRM and just sells it on there for 30. there are people that make millions of dollars a year just building software companies building no code software companies or just productizing API selling them on acquire.com they're making millions of dollars a year yeah it's literally just like this guy makes he just connects the analytics and makes a ERM for one specific industry and then just sells that to one company and plugs in their actual API Keys exactly so they get their analytics he could make it and then productize it but then you have to like he just doesn't want to do it so he just likes making it selling it it's kind of like an agency almost like an internal dashboard agency yeah it's cool but okay so this this product had product Market fit your microsass and it was clearly working and you could have scaled it so why but you saw a bigger opportunity yeah so even without that validation you still chose to pursue this one that you didn't have validation on yeah first off how did you find this problem yeah and then tell me if you want to go into it yeah sure so so I'll talk about it at a high level but um we did have validation on this one um because I've been doing this so it might seem like on this podcast like I'm kind of all over the place but I've kind of I've always done one thing um and for a long time like when I was 16 years old my very first job in high school was working in an auto repair shop so I've always been a car guy I've always been in the automotive industry so so my first agency was first how you got with JR which is exactly yeah exactly so yeah media kits was like a weird tangent like it was like a consumer SAS company in like the influencer marketing space which is so foreign to what I was used to like my first two businesses were both in automotive and so and even like agency reporting we built that for my Automotive marketing agency right so everything like the non-sexy stuff in my career has always been in the auto repair industry which is kind of crazy because it's like one of the most unsexy Industries ever but um but it's an underserved industry and it's it's an industry that I know very intimately and that I've been involved in for like a long time and uh yeah basically we're building uh kind of an AI powered vertical SAS company for uh for the auto repair industry and that that's my new Venture I'm telling you like I'm gonna scream it on my YouTube channel for the last four or five months and I really feel like people aren't like grasping first how important is speed is but how big of an opportunity this is right now like this is like Drop Shipping in 2014 2015. SMA at 2016. like it's you could scale up to the highest level and you don't have to make the product anymore you just plug in an API it's crazy yeah yeah and like to your point like so open AI you know went viral back in November December for launching chat gbt um the irony about that is so gpt3 has been around for years yeah and there there's actually a bunch of companies that are multi-million dollar companies that started Jasper is a great example that started back in 2016 17 18 just productizing gpt3 and then chat GPT for some reason is probably just the UI ironically um I didn't even really think about that until just now but like literally chat gbt was an internal tool that was just a productized API of something that already existed at openai so if you think about it that way like that is the epitome of what we're talking about is what openai did with igbt but furthermore um you know these large language models have apis so a lot of these AI startups that you're seeing out there all they are is open ai's API with a wrapper around it that's geared towards a specific industry and like you can build a big business doing that you like that's why they were but that's specifically why they released the API you didn't see because they don't have like there's only 100 people there they don't have the creativity or knowledge in these industries to know all the different ways it can be used yeah since it's such a broad thing so they open it up and give these people access to the apis then collect all the data on who's actually using it and then they'll make better decisions from there and they want you to yeah there's also this concept of guardrails so gpd4 gbt 3.5 like these large language models they have access to all of the information on the internet but they they don't have the context to put guard rails up around what's important and not important in a certain context so to to make that even simpler um for a dentist office like sure you could just use the raw API from from openai to respond to somebody who wants to book an appointment at your dentist office but what would be even more important is if you can provide context and guard rails almost like at a bowling alley like the little things that pop up on the side like that is what the big opportunity is because if you're a dentist or you own a dentist marketing agency and you can go and say all right I have all of this data from previous customers or from their point of sale software or whatever it might be and I know XYZ needs to happen before they can make their appointment or I know that they um were supposed to get braces last time and they didn't right now I can build that into my product and it's going to inform this open AI uh endpoint to say something with more context so you know instead of being kind of like this very generic uh you know text generation you can actually make it industry specific by giving it more data that's contextual to that specific use case and so um yeah we can dive into that if if we want to get more taxes when people say they're training AI That's all they're doing is like say your dentist and you recommend one type of toothpaste yeah and so and then they want to ask what's the best toothpaste you don't want them to answer your competitors toothpaste you want them to answer exactly what you record you did a much better job you know yeah so that's kind of like the private data that's what stable diffusion's whole business model is exactly they give everyone access to the large language model but then they go ahead and train private companies private data for their own use case exactly exactly every company needs that every company yeah so it's massive if I were to start a bootstrapped SAS company for the very first time in 2023 I would take a large language model API like open AI I would take a no code platform like bubble and then I would go find a really Niche very unobvious problem in a specific industry and I would solve it using contextual data comp combined with so so contextual data from an API from something that's already in that industry combined with the large language model from openai and I would use that to create a product that solved that problem really really well and then I would sell it on acquire.com for 500 Grand pause the video go back 30 seconds watch that three times and tell you exactly understand what he means because that is exactly what me and my partner are doing and I have not told him that word for word what me and my partner are doing out of all opportunities we could do with our Network and everything that's what we're doing and he said that without knowing that I'm doing that I did not and if you think he's a smart person if you think maybe I'm a smart person re-watch that and really internalize what he just said but you're doing it you want to share the industry over yeah we're doing it in the auto repair industry so only solely really because you're a car guy I would say yeah car guy and just happened to have like a lot of cool like knowledge and Connections in that industry and so it's just something that I'm very familiar with that's another really important thing yeah we're doing it in the real estate industry neither me my partner have any experience in the real estate industry but we have a friend here who is killing it in the real estate industry and that's such a big market so it's like choose the big Market find a specific non-sexy problem make the UI better and add AI anywhere you can first want to do it like she's like a no-brainer playbook in my opinion you know the less sexy the problem is the better um there's somebody on Twitter called Cody Sanchez she's yeah so she's an investor in my neighborhood oh really yep and she talks about boring businesses and that's literally she buys laundromats for a living it's the most unsexy thing ever but if you can build some car washes too and car washes yeah you can build software for laundromats or car washes or dentists or whatever it is and do exactly what I just said like there's a big business opportunity there again it's like the mobile app change like every company already had a website but now it's mobile app so you can that's an opportunity make them their mobile app and now every company will need AI so you just make them their AI version most of them aren't going to figure it out internally and so if you just make it for the industry you're in then you can sell that to other people you know the unfortunate part Brett this video is going to get I don't know tens hundreds of thousands of views and 99 of people listening are not going to do anything about it I can't it's not complicated like we are we like we have four developers on our team yeah and we're choosing bubble and make.com we're choosing both no code to learn it I'm gonna look in the camera right now and I'm gonna say if you are listening to this podcast and you are one of the people that actually takes action on things and it actually listens and applies the information that you're finding on the internet like this video like you did not end up watching this log into this video for no reason go and actually make an effort to do what we're talking about because if you just watch this video and then you skip to the next video and then the next one and then eventually you forget about this video entirely and you never take action on it then you know there's nothing better I can do to help you so and we're not selling anything yeah we're just what we're doing we're just hanging out man we're just talking about life like I just don't know how else to word it for people like you don't need to have the problem yourself find a friend that's in a big industry and see what problems they have and then just be the bubble person or if you don't want to start that business just hit me up and come work for me and I'll teach you the ropes yeah our IR agencies I guess yeah it's not whatever so but how are you going about like actually building it out or hiring like finding your developers or what's your team structure this time around we have a great development team they're all in-house we're doing it right we're doing it um we're doing it like the I guess the more traditional way um but for us it's like you know this is going to be a big business for us this isn't this isn't like sell it on micro on on acquire.com or anything like this is like a proper like multi-8 maybe nine figure business that that we're building and um you know we want to have the proper infrastructure to do that what do you think out of all the software companies you've started like what were problems you ran into that you didn't think would be problems or what was something that you basically like believed going into it that turned out to be completely untrue um build it and they will come is not true okay it's true to an extent yeah and it's it's not that it's completely untrue it's just not uh it's not like the most accurate description of how things actually work um you actually have to Market your product believe it or not like you actually have to get eyeballs on your product for it to work that should be a core thought process before even choosing what product to make is your ability to get eyeballs on it in the first place in my opinion absolutely a first time founder focuses more on product than they do on distribution a second time founder focuses more on distribution than product and I am even with product LED growth absolutely I'm I am a embodiment of that we waited way too long to launch Media kits we even talked about that right because I was too focused on product I thought the product had to be perfect versus this time around our product has been launched for six months already in a beta like we we've had paying users for six months and we haven't even launched publicly yet has the course of the product changed absolutely your initial idea was yeah absolutely now 100 and this time around we focused on distribution through Partnerships and through um you know we own one of the largest Facebook groups in our industry and like there's these other like you built that first yeah absolutely so we built the distribution channels before we even built the product versus at media kits we built the product and then we were scrambling to figure out distribution so go into the Facebook group that's kind of interesting I don't think a lot of people would think about that I'm a huge Community guy and I see the value of that so explain your thought process yeah um yeah basically we uh we started a Facebook group that now has thousands of members in a very specific Niche um and we're just in their thought leadership we don't even we don't even sell our software in there it's literally just for business owners in this Niche to connect with other business owners and that's that's literally all it's for and they just kind of help each other out they talk about certain things and then the best part is we don't have to promote our software because our customers will promote our software for us in this Facebook group and so all we have to do is just be the stewards of like Good Vibes and like you know good conversations like you know as long as as long as nobody's in there selling or promoting anything you know as long as there's no spam as long as there's no negativity or hate happening in the group like that's all we're there for is to moderate that um it just Grows by Word of Mouth you know these people invite their friends and then our customers will go in there and talk about how amazing our software is without us even having to ask them to do it communities are probably the most valuable part of the internet and absolutely all you have to do like it sounds it's not you create a place and then you like just maybe share some resources to start it off and you start telling people one by one by one hey there's this Facebook group for all car people there's a Facebook group where you can learn about this and we can share this interest and share our problems yeah then you get like 20 people in there they start talking to each other yeah then someone else comes in they're like hey welcome to the group and it just starts to like yeah live it's like a living breathing organism dude I think Facebook groups are the most underrated thing in 2023 Facebook specifically there's online groups Facebook groups specifically specifically Facebook groups I use Circle so why Facebook or Discord so why Facebook well so for me specifically like because we're in like we're selling to small business owners like that's where they are like that's really the only place they are that's the only answer to that question yes um but no but I see your point though I think Discord communities are great for young um discords for younger people absolutely circles if you want it proprietary but Facebook is where if you are older demographic that are into cars that's where they live then you make Facebook groups sure you pick one you need to be intentional I guess yeah if you can be and this goes back to like this this is the human nature in general this goes back to like Casey and I throwing those parties in in the Hollywood Hills to to network and meet people like if you can be the steward of like a good time or a positive environment for people to hang out and meet peers like you will be seen as an authority in that industry right and so it's like I had no business like the founder of Myspace came to one of my parties in LA that Casey and I threw and like I have a cell phone number now because of that and and this is just it's just one random example but like No 19 year old kid has has enough like enough credibility to to like hang out with the founder of Myspace for three hours at some crazy mansion in the Hollywood Hills the only reason that that happened for me and for Casey is because we were the stewards of this event and he wanted to meet the people that put it on and this same thing goes for online communities right it's like if I can bring a bunch of like-minded people together on the Internet or you on Circle you if you can do that and bring people together and have them enjoy what they're doing and have a great time and and talk and network and you're the one that's facilitating it like you're going to reap the rewards of being that facilitator so Community is everything on the internet and but the reason he does this for your SAS and you're doing it preemptively because this is this would have been a good answer you didn't do it with media kids I guess but when you're building the product this is a perfect answer build a community of people that have that same problem preemptively yeah so then you have a group of 3 000 people that you can then be like oh and magically guys out of nowhere I found this software tool yeah exactly we created it but I think it'll help you guys because it helped us a lot so you fostered that now you have your core user base and there's a Facebook group for them to give you feedback and iterate what you're already benefiting from yep it's genius and so same thing goes for like that's why I have my YouTube channel like yeah I was talking about a way different subject a year and a half ago then I make a video on AI when chat gbt came out it's not when the API came out but when chatgpt came out got popular I understood the concept made a video on it now everyone thinks I'm an AI guy yeah and like some huge AI expert I get how it's good for people and how it's going to benefit in business yeah but like on the internet people perceive you yeah and there's always like there's always got to be somebody who can articulate information in a digestible way yeah and even like the example earlier that you made where I tried to explain something and then you explained it way simpler than I did it's like that's that's a skill like that's super power and I think that's why your content does well it is solely my intention like yeah I optimize for understanding in as few words as possible yeah that's the goal of the channel yeah so I'm glad I appreciate you saying yeah of course but brother you are super successful in software and that's what we're tackling right now so this is something that I'm actually genuinely interested in and so have you found like any sort of like actual marketing channels outside of organic product like growth that worked for you guys like you said you use tick tock with Josh Richards but he was an investor did you guys try Facebook ads anything you didn't see working um I mean yeah we've done everything we've done Facebook ads Tick Tock ads Snapchat ads um you know my new company is a lot of like in-person like uh trade shows and and Expos and stuff like that um but yeah I mean I think it's different for every SAS company I think you just the fundamental question you need to ask because I I don't want to I don't want to go into a whole monologue about Facebook ads even though I even though we could um if it's not applicable for you but like as a as a software founder what you have to ask yourself is where do my customers live where do they hang out where do they spend their time and then where are my competitors hanging out and spending their time and that should lead you to the answer to that question of how do I Market to these produce your competitors you more so mean where are they like marketing to if you take one of your customers and open up their credit card statement all the other businesses that they're buying from where do those businesses find your customers how are they marketing yeah and then just do what they're doing essentially okay well don't don't copy what they're doing but understand that there are certain channels in certain ways whether it's um you know like inbound outbound selling like you know uh organic marketing paid paid marketing like whatever it might be like there's so many different marketing Avenues and strategies and channels that you can utilize but you have to first understand which ones your customers are actually on and where they spend their time and their attention and odds are if they've if they're marketing on those platforms they've been doing in the business for years they probably have figured that one out yeah exactly take an educated guess yeah that they didn't they know what they're doing yeah okay so who do you learn from because you found success really young how old are you now 23 yeah you're still really young you're killing it so where did you learn this from um so I think that I've always I like to think that I'm like a student of life like I just love I love just digesting information and it was a really weird uh pivot for me like from like the internet marketing world to like the venture-backed like startup World those are two very different communities that very rarely overlap ironically Jasper is a great example of one company that did overlap because those guys came from like the marketing internet marketing world and now they're like a big VC backed SAS company but it's very rare um and so yeah I mean I I try to consume content kind of from all sides whether it's like you know a uh a keynote on Venture Capital by Sam Altman or something like that on YouTube or you know a video by Iman or by you like I'm I'm always trying to just kind of learn from everybody that has different perspectives on things and take the things that apply to my business and and apply them um and I think that's one of that's one of the skills that that if people can learn that early is is really powerful is understanding that not every piece of device even not every piece of advice that Brett and I are giving you in this video is going to be applicable to what you're doing but there's at least something I'm sure and if you can identify what that is and then take it and actually take action on it then you know that's the most important part so again software's like really honestly straightforward to see success with if you can see a problem and you can fix the problem yep it'll work for you it'll work for somebody else now you just need to tell other people that this solution exists it's simple it's not easy that's a really that's that's what I like to say why do you think I guess the barriers to entry you raise money for your new one yeah I did a little bit strategically so you also you just found investors that you think could get you into those type of businesses exactly that you saw before yeah and so you're this is the now you have the mindset of giving them the opportunity and then it's a no-brainer because they know they have the connections yeah and and of course like the second time around you know once you have like an exit under your belt it it instills a lot more confidence in investors they're like oh he's done this before he knows what he's doing right and that's why I say that to say that it's really important in my opinion that everybody's first business is bootstrapped I do not recommend raising money for your very first business I do not recommend starting a software company as your very first business I think if you can start a Professional Services business a marketing agency something similar to that Iman talks about this all the time on his YouTube channel if you can start as a freelancer turn that into an agency turn that into a cash flowing business have some cash and then start something like you know even um to use Oliver as an example again like a cpg company that's selling physical Goods cpg software very similar in the fact that they have very high startup costs you're not going to do that as a first-time entrepreneur you have to sell something that's scalable that has low overhead like marketing services or or some sort of agency model that you can do to stack some cash get some experience then you've kind of like earned the right to move into something like d2c or or software and I truly feel that way and the cool thing is you can start a Services business that's in the same niche as the software company that you might want to eventually start right you did you were a marketing agency for car people exactly yes so that that's a great example like if you can go and figure out the pain points of a certain industry by providing services to them that you know something that's unscalable that's that's not sexy that's not you know gonna get get you some crazy multiple or some crazy acquisition but purely just to learn about your Target customer and to learn how to run a business and file your taxes and just the basic stuff right then you can go and and start a software business I do believe that like your first business has to be a service agency business of some sort it could be mowing lawns you could have a lawn mowing business and then the people that are booking your services don't like they are just calling you on the phone you're like what if I just made a Marketplace for people in my local area to find people to mow their lawn yeah that's your software company and you can build that on bubble with a template with no code absolute lawn mowers of Arizona even though there's no grass here you might not see that success yeah maybe not here but if that makes sense in your area you just sell that as a service then you see a problem that people are having a hard time booking people and then you make a software company around that and you just use those people and they're like oh I don't like it it's clunky I'd rather just call you then maybe you have a bad problem you're making me want to go start an artificial turf company in Arizona but that's a service is literally anything just so you can learn the problems yes and then you can build a software out of that because objectively software is the best business model but it's not maybe so it's good software is beginner friendly but not first business not first time friendly yeah not first time so you could it could be your first business if you understand a business if you have a job you need to have some conceptual understanding of how to run a business and and at least some conceptual understanding of how software works and how it scales and how to get distribution and if you've worked in a business you understand how business works for sure I think another another great thing I I really like to to push back against this idea on like on YouTube and like this whole like internet marketing like kind of like self-help industry I think pushes like the anti-college anti-job kind of narrative and I completely disagree with that I I push it hard my next video is very anti-collete so here's the thing that's fine that's fine for context I've never had a job and I didn't go to college the point that I'm making though is I think sometimes for some people it might be good to go and get a job at a company that's similar to a to an in an industry that's similar to something that you want to start a business in and I think sometimes you might even learn more doing that oh yeah than trying to start something from scratch and just failing over and over again I am anti-college yeah a thousand percent not anti-job necessarily I wouldn't I don't think I could ever do it unless it was for that specific reason if I was so aware of what I wanted to do for a living so intentionally then it would make sense to go work for a company to learn the industry three learn the tools they use learn how they communicate and learn their problems then go do it myself but it'd have to be hyper intentional yeah I just don't think people that are just starting out at 18 are even close to knowing what industry they want to work in yeah and so they don't do that but yeah that's a really good point but going and just going and just working for a business that's run by an entrepreneur that is like an entrepreneurial culture is it doesn't even matter what industry is in you're going to learn so much about how to run a business how to do customer service how to you know take care of your employees like there's so many things that are intangible that you and I probably had to learn the hard way because we've never worked somewhere yeah right it's like I think about this all the time I'm like damn like things like HR and like payroll taxes and like all these things that I I don't know how they work because I've never been on the flip side so I'm like oh man like if I had just worked a regular job for like a year I would probably know how these things work but I don't and so I have to figure it out on the Fly and you pay for that yeah exactly you literally pay for that yeah yeah that lack of knowledge and typically you just have to hire someone who then has done it before exactly the only way you do learn exactly interesting so do you think that I just don't know like what how what age were you when you started consuming YouTube oh like 15 14 because I feel like all everyone I've had on this podcast all of us in our Circle all lived the same life 14 to 15 years old we were all watching the Ecom smma YouTube yeah yeah yeah then we all kind of went to these networking events out in California until we all met and then now everyone's at this 22 to 25 range making hundreds of thousands if not millions of dollars dude that's how that's how Iman and I met I was making smma content on YouTube when like I had like a couple thousand subscribers and so did Iman he had like a couple thousand subscribers and this is back in like 20 16 like late 2016 and he like shot me a DM I still have it I went back and like read it the other day because I was like I was like looking at his channel I'm like damn I'm so proud of this guy like this is crazy but like he reached out to me he's like hey Karen like you know great to connect like I like like your smma content on YouTube's cool and like we just kind of hit it off and we've stayed in touch ever since and now he's like the biggest Creator on the platform in that industry it's like it's so impressive yeah it just takes everything so serious and it's just become such quality so he deserves everything absolutely but it's also interesting to me to see and he's so young dude yeah just been in the game since 14. it's so cool yeah but uh it's cool for me to see also because I'm a little older I'm 26 and so I'm starting to see like this like because I was watching Iman when I was like five years ago in my SMA yeah but now we're seeing like these new wave of like a new generation of influencers all in the same coming up with no code SAS AI yeah the new like generation businesses of the future is what I call them yeah and so it's really cool to see that it's like it works we kind of laid that framework down because it's like almost like one of the first generations of like internet money kids running Facebook ads the gurus abuse everybody yeah like if we just went through it I love I love uh Bia haza yeah he's like one of my favorites and then there's this kid called uh Kaden boof I don't know if you've seen him on Tick Tock but you gotta check it out he's hilarious he'll take like these these like super basic concepts like like mowing lawns and stuff like that and he'll just go out and like make a bunch of money doing it but he has like this comedic effect to it and the videos are hilarious kids like 17 or 16. what's the angles like because it's like it's easy he's just showing people how easy it is to go out and make money doing stuff almost everyone's just like in their mind yeah but but he makes it into like a skit so it's hilarious but anyway yeah like there's so many kids doing this and it's it's incredible to see so I also find it so interesting of like the influencer dynamic of like growing a following then do you start the business or start the business then grow following and so I do want to ask you because you made YouTube videos like way back in the day and you have what like over like probably 11 12 kids yeah something like that yeah but you have videos with hundreds of thousands of views but you took when you started Media Kids you stopped yeah so and I still I I've been like basically not on the internet for like the last six months because I've been building my new business you sold everything yeah I did um I'm of the opinion that like so my new business my new business does not benefit from my personal brand at all right it's just not like my my personal brand is like in the same space as like younger guys that are like up and coming in business and like I'm selling to you know brick and mortar small business owners with my new my new company so I just kind of made the decision like my personal brand has been amazing to me over the last six years it's allowed me to connect with guys like you and Iman and Casey and Jr and all these guys and it's amazing but but for me like I've just recognized that I've I've picked a lane that doesn't require me to be like on the internet and so I've kind of taken a step back do you prefer that I do I think it's more peaceful um and I don't want my business to be dependent on me because it's less sellable and so I think there are people that do it really well like there's plenty of people that have a personal brand that's really big and also a business that's unrelated that makes a bunch of money and that's great but if if somebody's business relies on their personal brand that's just that's not for me it's not something that I want to do because I don't see it I don't see it as having longevity I prefer to talk to people who don't have personal Brands because even though I'm in this group too like a lot of the success of your business if from a personal brand is solely because of your personal brand and that actually almost is the business you know what I'm saying yeah and that's why you're successful so when I can talk to people who don't have a huge following but their business is making millions it's like you know it's because they're tactics and their product was so good yeah and everybody everybody realizes this eventually like you see all these influencers launching product lines that are like branded separately and like all these things and uh even Iman like his software company it's like yeah it benefits from his personal brand but like hopefully they'll be able to keep that separate yeah so it's like you know people people realize this eventually and and you know I think for me it's like maybe I'll come back on YouTube and Instagram one day and like try to grow my personal brand in you know in the next few years but for now I'm kind of just keeping a low profile I mean I guess that's why but that's why Alex hermosi came back like so heavy for sure YouTube for sure because he saw how like powerful like Kylie Jenner and well Mr beastware but he also sold his business and it was it was like that's it and he was doing something different now so now he has a really cool model yeah the acquisition.com model is really cool why'd you sell everything move to Bali you don't know how much time how many times I've fantasized about that dude I haven't texted you all day dude dude I know I know like yeah it's uh it was amazing yeah so for context I lived in Bali for four months um and it was it was a few things so selling media kits was like it's a big thing for me because it was like my identity like it's all I did for two and a half three years it's all I was focused on and so having that weight off my shoulders like you know investors employees like you know among like issues with the software bugs I asked you about that one what was it like was having investors really stressful it wasn't stressful like on a day-to-day basis but like on a macro level yeah because like you owe people money and you got to make sure that's psychological I think that would really impact me yeah so it was you know it was the first time in my life where I had no responsibilities or obligation like when I sold media kits I stayed at the company for a little while and then I then I left um and I had no responsibilities I had gotten rid of my apartment I had uh I had sold all my cars I had sold media kits um and I literally just had zero obligation I had no employees I had no investors I had nothing I was just free and I was like I knew I wanted to build my next SAS company and you know my so my business partner Caden and I were like all right where can we go for like 90 days to just lock in and be focused time zone doesn't matter um you know distance doesn't matter um you know price to a certain extent doesn't really matter because like we're just gonna go somewhere nice and just enjoy it and like especially like in your early 20s like having like basically no responsibilities I don't have a dog or anything like I don't have a girlfriend like car guy I'm surprised yeah you know I had it for like two and a half years so I was kind of ready for the next thing but um but yeah man it was just great like being able to go there and just live out of a suitcase for four months and just do whatever you want like was there like a clear goal like an outcome you wanted or like to build my next company to decide what it was or you already had the idea we already had the idea it was to build the MVP gotcha and also that was on like the business side it was to build the MVP for my next business and then on the personal side it was kind of like just like this sounds super cliche but like ReDiscover myself like what are my core values and beliefs what do I want the next three to five years of my life to look like how am I going to kind of like reinvent myself after media kits because so much of my personal brand and my like reputation was wrapped up in media kits and I I wanted to you know pivot away from that um you know hormozi has even talked about this recently he uses the example with um who's the actor from Wolf of Wall Street yeah no the other guy Jonah Hill um Matthew McConaughey Matthew McConaughey yeah I think her Mosey made a video about this he's like Matthew McConaughey McConaughey used to do you like rom-coms and then he disappeared for a couple years came back did like you know more serious characters and like I kind of went through the same thing as like you go through these Ebbs and flows in your life and your career like almost like these character arcs where it's like Kieran O'Brien the the marketer like the internet marketer guy and then it's like Karen O'Brien the SAS founder in like the influencer space and so you know 23 years old now having gone through the kind of those two phases like this next one is is a whole different identity it's a whole different kind of like like brand and and it's a whole different way of that I want people to think about me and more importantly that I want to think about myself and so it was kind of just like a reset it was like I was off social media I deleted everything off my phone it was just like a cleanse so it's almost like people the world's always trying to put you in a box to like categorize you to understand you yeah I love the fact that people like Kanye West was like the best one like yeah completely reinvented yeah great example yes because he used to be the shutter Shades guy when I was like yeah and he went to ease this was completely obviously like sometimes sometimes you just gotta change your environment to be able to see things like from a different perspective so I highly recommend oh yeah you know if if any like young people are watching like go out and see the world like you don't have to have a bunch of money to do it either like you know you can these businesses were talking about starting you could do that from your laptop from anywhere you like evolve as a person if you go to like a third terrible country or like not necessarily third world but like I went to the country Colombia by myself oh yeah like traveled there by myself or one of my agency clients and trying to just communicate with people who don't speak English and like a meals two dollars like dude your whole worldview shifted yeah traveling to a third world country and then more importantly what you just mentioned solo travel is so important like I think everybody should do a multiple week if not multiple month long solo trip somewhere with no friends because it's 100 on you to figure out and solve every problem you're facing exactly and then you don't have Wi-Fi half the time yeah yeah it's such a it's such a paradigm shift and it's it's just like a different perspective on life and um yeah I recommend it to everybody yeah so what have you thought about like as you've come back from that have you like tried to like I feel like there's a huge shift in like team size going down are you like optimizing for like the most lean team possible or do you like view this is like I want to make this a thousand person company no headcount is not a measure of success and that one of the things in Silicon Valley it always used to be raising money how many raising money and how many employees you have like those are stupid metrics no what's your ebitda what's your Revenue you know what's your net retention what's your what's your Revenue per employee like those are the things that I care about and yeah for this new Venture like I'm focusing on quality of people way more than quantity of people and one a player is worth five C players how have you gone about finding them I think it's just intuition man and like this is one of the things like it's all this stuff when I was coming up when I was like basically like a freelancer running my agency I always thought stuff like stuff like culture and stuff like um you know your values and your mission statement and all this stuff I thought it was like cliche and kind of stupid but if you actually do it right and you actually like do it in a way that's that's profound and that that people can get behind and like turn it into like a real movement um then you know the results of that are like crazy so there's more fulfillment that people can get out of like working on a problem that feels important yeah absolutely than just money yeah especially people who aren't naturally entrepreneurs they want to feel like they are important at the job they're playing a big role and they're working on something that's actually making the world a better place yeah 100 and you have to be you have to evolve so much as a leader to attract and a lot of it like the law of attraction is very real in every aspect of of life and to attract a player talent you have to be an a play and like an A plus leader right and not saying that I am I'm working towards it every single day I I don't think anybody's a perfect leader but like I've been like another thing I did in Bali is I studied leadership a lot and I read a lot of books and um really went down like this Rabbit Hole of like human psychology and how that like relates to leadership and so you know for for people that are watching if you're thinking about you know starting like an AI startup or starting like a no code like a bubble company or or starting a lawn mowing business it doesn't really matter what you're doing um eventually you'll get to a point where you need to start hiring employees and building a team and understanding how to do that in a way that builds real culture and that actually gets buy-in from your team members and like truly does that right not just you know like the facade of doing it where people stick around for six months and then they leave like if you can really nail that like business at a high level is a people game and that's it like product IP patents trademarks you know all that stuff it doesn't matter you're in the people business if you can't nail that then none of the rest of the stuff I just listed really matters too much because it'll just implode yeah it's like human capital your company is the average value of the average IQ of your company in a way yeah it's like if you have really high quality people you're going to take it away further absolutely I really do you like go for all full-time employees or do you lean towards contractors more um we're very contractor heavy yeah so there's no right answer um everybody on our team right now uh except for like one person I think is is full-time and that's very intentional because we want to build the culture in that way I think sorry is it because sorry you finish no no you're good I think a hybrid is is the right approach in the beginning even like this new business that we started we were a hybrid approach in the beginning um but like the status of an employee being a 1099 or a W-2 isn't what makes them a contractor right it's it's about how ingrained they are in your culture and so you can make like someone who's technically like on paper or contractor you can make them a part of your culture and then you know eventually transition them over to like a full-time position when you're when you're able to so that's all semantics it doesn't matter is it more so to sell your company though yeah I'm not I'm not worried about that it's it's like it's more just like building building a team that actually cares about what you're doing right like a freelancer is not going to care about what you're doing so I think there's like there's different types of of tools in the toolbox right it's like you've got like your exacto knives and you've got like your machetes it's like you you can hire and and the the verbiage that I like to use is like missionaries versus Mercenaries so your mercenaries like your I know this one yeah exactly yeah your mercenaries like your machete and your missionaries like your exacto knife it's like they're for different purposes and so your your mercenaries are the Freelancers the guys that are just going to come in they're gonna get done and they're just gonna do it because they're getting paid to do it and there is a time and a place for that in every business sometimes there's a time and a place for that in you know in a business for a very long time even once you have an amazing culture there's still a place for outside Consultants you know mercenaries to come in and just and just do one task really well and then leave like there's absolutely a place for that um but the core of your team should be missionaries they should be people that are there for the mission that you're on that are Marching with you that are like side by side like shoulder to shoulder with you in combat so to speak like those are the people that you want there day in and day out and every now and then you might have to bring in a mercenary to get something really specific done do you try to optimize for everyone to work in person uh we're balancing that we're about to open an in-person office here um but uh but yeah we do have employees that are in other cities that are in the same city as each other and they'll work in person together at like wework or something yeah Okay cool so you were able to achieve a lot of success very young like you're still young but even before your software companies you were successful and like what do you attribute that to what do you think it was in you that like so many people like can't ever wrap their head around making ten thousand dollars a month or can't ever wrap their head around even starting their own company so what like what was it how were you able to do that bro I you know I think about this a lot and I don't know like innately what it was like I always as a kid like I always wanted to do things like differently I always had like this yeah like I I had this like I never did well with authority like coaches and teachers and stuff like that I I always wanted to kind of do things my own way lemonade stands flipping sneakers on ebay like I did all that stuff and I don't know like innately what drove that but I always think that it was like kind of a fear of being average like I grew up in a like a middle class family like I wasn't I wasn't poor by any means like I never had to worry about where my next meal was coming from but like you know I went on like a vacation like every other year maybe and like my my dad drove a Honda Accord and like we lived in a like a modest house in a modest neighborhood and like there just wasn't anything crazy like I never I never saw an entrepreneur no no but both neither my parents were entrepreneurs so I didn't even know what the word entrepreneur was until I was like 17. and so I say all that to say that like I grew up in that like typical like white picket fence type you know type situation and you know sometimes like a lot of people that grow up in very underprivileged situations they they hustle because they want to get out of that and I totally understand and empathize with that for me it was more so like I see the people around me and they're kind of like they're just scraping by like they're they're they're fine like they're living for the weekend essentially exactly and the bare minimum to get my next to get off exactly and I just didn't I didn't resonate with that I always knew from a young age I'm like I want to do I know there's something Beyond this like I know there's another level above this that I can get to um and I just wanted that I didn't even know what it what it was necessarily I'm just like I want to do more with my life than than what I'm exposed to on a day-to-day basis I'm so fascinated by how many like pure quantity like 20 to 25 year old millionaires there were 20 years ago or 30 years ago before the internet it'd be interesting I know so many kids making 100K a month so many people that have cracked the code with whether they're a go high level affiliate or they're running an smma or Drop Shipping whatever it is there's so many and it's just because like if you just fill your mind with the right information on the internet like just got to do the work it's just execution yeah like there's I don't I just don't get it how whatever I've just always felt like an entrepreneur naturally so I've just always been watching these YouTube videos yeah and over time to start doing something one thing leads to the next one thing leads to the next you meet better people cooler people yeah slowly rise to the top feels really long in the time like when you're in it but dude I want to touch on that too man like the people you do it with is everything like everything like having a friend having a friend group and a network of people that are like killing it in their own respective ways and being able to be around them and spend time with them like that's why like Casey Jr and I and a few other people like we all moved out here Seb two like we all moved out here to Scottsdale around the same time like when we're all like 17 18 years old you know and like that was I think I attribute a lot of My Success to that just being around those guys like most important thing we weren't even doing the same stuff none of us are even in the same industry doing the same thing we're all doing like the stuff we're doing couldn't be more different in terms of how we make money but we were just around each other and like we go to dinners and we'd hang out and I think that's like a big big piece of it is just being around like-minded people I mean how much has been seeing ishan's success been motivating you from afar oh dude absolutely absurd like I love that guy and so it's just like we're not even remotely in the same industry but just seeing that makes me want to be better and so yeah that's so so critical and that's what I was seeking for a long time which is what online communities are also great for especially when you're starting and the problem when everyone is Young is I feel like they think money is the issue and that is like really not the issue from to go to attended 100K really isn't money no it's just information and your T like you're who's who you're doing it with essentially yeah have you been are you doing the next one with Casey uh no Casey's uh Casey's not involved in this one he's he's doing his own thing also in the AI space so if you're not doing something if you're not building Ai No code SAS or AI SAS I don't know why bro yeah Casey's got a really free one I know is doing an aiss Casey's got a really cool product it's basically like uh you could even use it for for this episode it's like AI for podcasts so it does like show notes and descriptions um and titles for podcasts you just uploaded I'll do my uh timestamps timestamps yeah you got a customer Bud there you go because I hate doing that oh let me just do half of it and like loading yeah but that's really cool okay so but ultimately like you should be doing things for free for people like getting access to higher quality information getting access to an industry whatever it is do a favor for people show them you have a skill yeah is there like any skills that you had or like what are like your most if you had to like Flex right now and you're good at something like what are your hard skills like I can say for me video lighting oh dude oh by the way yeah dude like this your setup is crazy I'm a nerd bro yeah I love it I'll talk about lighting for 10 hours if you want but dude I need help with mine this is my first I got you yeah do you record yeah I just in my apartment like I'm like I'm even just my zoom call set up let me come over I'll get you um nice ass webcam the whole hell yeah uh I think my skills are um like product and marketing and when I say product specifically I mean like understanding consumer psychology and why people want something like I I can look at a software product or I mean to an extent like any kind of product but um software products specifically and I can understand why people would want it why why they maybe wouldn't want it um and if I had that product like how to Market to them did you choose that skill you know to an extent I think some of it is innate some of it is like just like Nate it's like nature versus nurture type thing right I think some of it is nature but I also think that spending the first four or five years of my entrepreneurial career in marketing and having to think like a marketer has always made me now that I'm building software products makes me think about my software products through a marketer's lens like when I'm building a product I'm thinking about how am I going to Market and sell this once it's once it exists and I think thinking about it through that lens kind of allows me like a unique perspective versus if I was like a software engineer by trade you know you might not be thinking through that same lens okay and then what about uh marketing as far as like yeah myself yeah I think I think marketing I mean it's it's a very broad term but like in software specifically just understanding how and where and when to reach your target audience like how to do activations which channels to pick how much to spend on things like you know the the little like the little hacks like the like the like hacking the organic Tick Tock algorithm for media kits or you know you know getting into Facebook groups and like you know doing organic like guerrilla marketing on Facebook groups for my new company like um you know understanding paid ads I've spent like tens of millions of dollars on paid ads um as a as a marketing agency I got to manage like you know almost 100 million dollars worth of AD budgets and that gave me like a plethora of knowledge about like things like pay-per-click and and right and Facebook ads and so um I'm always just trying to kind of expand my skill set in like the realm of marketing and understand the different types of marketing the different channels how it's done but the most important thing is is human psychology that's the one thing that's never going to change say it louder right so it's like the channel might change the strategy might change the tactics might change the one thing is never going to change is why does somebody buy something 100 if I started my YouTube channel when I was 20 would not be successful at all but the fact that I was doing a marketing agency around 2122 that's where I learned to say make like optimize for understanding yeah as few words as possible guys go go study Brett's thumbnails and titles go back and ask yourself why did you click on this video what made you click on this video like making thumbnails and titles on YouTube is a science and an art but mainly a science and it's like that's marketing like understanding understanding what makes people want to click on a video like in and of itself someone from Iman yeah Iman is another the best I hope he's watching this because we've shouted him out so many times but yeah the best titles yeah every single person I tell absolutely it's a clear point you know exactly who it's for and what you're getting out of it and yeah seven words 50 characters it's so impressive yeah it's an art form but that's what I was good at marketing like messaging yeah making people understand something really quickly but as far as like the tactics or the media buying or whatever never my strong suit but the language so yeah that's a skill that has now translated to every business I've ever done or every aspect of my life that I've gone through yeah and psychology is like my most I just watch psychology videos all the time yeah all the time it's one of the most interesting things for me to learn about um I talked to Dan Co the other day and he said he told me about the nine stages of ego development watch that because you can like really I will that sounds interesting actualized.org it's really interesting dude but this has been like really like I don't know how else to put it because this wasn't like one where we were like getting like all like excited and hype and yeah and like mind blown but it's like that should be why this podcast is so valuable for people because it is so straightforward and how to build a successful SAS platform we've talked about so much too like all over the place yeah I feel like there's so many nuggets in this and again I I truly hope that people watching this like take something from this video and apply it to their lives and their businesses and and and do something with it and send us a message if you do like like let us know that um you know that you've taken it and and applied it so are there any YouTube channels that you're a big fan of right now I mean hermosi big one um Iman of course um yours um that's probably not helpful because you're already here um but uh but yeah though I watch I watch those and then um for SAS like Dan Martell makes good content um he's a good like like kind of SAS YouTube channel so yeah it seems pretty straightforward dude understand a job or a space find a problem try to fix it with software how did your hire developers can I ask that real quick sure yes one um there's a bunch of great platforms of higher developers you can find them on upwork sometimes you can find good ones um there's a platform called lemon.io that we've used in the past that's that's really good um if you can like if you have the luxury of this try to find them through your network like if you know anybody that has a software company or you like you know someone who's a software engineer try to get them to send referrals your way that's always going to be the best way um you know just because they're going to be a little bit more vetted and you're not completely going into it dark um you know and then another piece of advice is like just try to have at least a baseline understanding about how software Works um and like specifically like the types of languages that you're going to be building your product in you need to have like at least a baseline understanding there's plenty of YouTube videos out there to teach you how like react native works or how a node.js works or whatever it is just have like a baseline understanding so that you're not completely like confused by what's happening when you eventually do hire a developer yeah I think uh Brandon always says to hire like a a like a technical advisor yeah for someone to help you hire exactly at least you can explain the idea to them then they can explain it as like a translator from us yeah because I would be people would take advantage of me if I just started talking dude it happened at media kits man we went through two Engineers that that we burned so much money on and it just didn't work out I don't know if I ever met a developer who's told me they can't do what I'm asking for so just keep that in mind they're all going to say they can do it better than the other guy yeah and so you kind of have to really put those types of people to the test absolutely but or you just learn bubble but that is one thing I want to say there's a really cool I have a friend who literally started learning about bubble like right when I started talking about in January within two months had a good grasp on it and within two months after that had 25k a month in bubble development agency clients wow so not only can he use bubble to build his own SAS he can now cash flow a bubble Dev agency that's amazing so I thought that was pretty interesting because that's a really fast come up and yeah it's a good skill that's going to be relevant for a long time but guys follow Kieran this can cameras that follow Kieran on all social media platforms Karen O'Brien what is your main that you're most active on dude none honestly right now sorry to disappoint um yeah I mean like Instagram I'll post stuff here and there um yeah I don't know I I think maybe the best way is to keep tabs on what I'm doing like with my companies that's probably a better way to to really learn versus like the content I put out because again I'm kind of like kind of in like monk mode right now just kind of focus on the business so do you put a lot of focus on health or like like are you not on social media specifically for like dopamine reasons that and yeah I mean I'm doing 75 hard right now it's my fourth time doing it good um thank you yeah I work out twice a day so just don't have time to make content to be honest have you like but have you like consciously like put this is something I actually do want to talk about real quick yeah we're not saying goodbye yet it's like monk mode you went to Bali for this like how much that is something that I actually neglected for a long time was like quality of food I was eating how much dopamine can like using social media can affect your desire to do work is that something that you were big on at all or have you just been like stent I so deleting social media off my phone has been a big one like the owners the only social media app I have on my phone is Facebook because that's where my customers are yeah but like there's no Instagram like if you search Instagram on my phone like it doesn't exist so I think that's so yeah I think the best advice I got from Alex Becker was don't put yourself in a position where you have to use willpower yeah just make it not an option yeah and then do the same thing like man if there's a if there's a box of Oreos in my in my pantry like I will eat it there's a if there's a tub of ice cream in my freezer I will eat the whole thing in one night why don't you why don't you have Oreos why don't you eat high school that's the whole thing like I I just don't let let myself have them like if I really have a craving or something like that like I'll get in my car and drive to like an ice cream shop and have like a little thing of ice cream but like yeah I just try to keep my environment like conducive with the type of life I want to live so I keep healthy food in my fridge I keep social media off my phone I don't my phone is on my desk away from my bed like you know I I just try to do what I can to control the controllables why is that important to control though what if you didn't what would happen to you day-to-day life I just noticed like you just notice you're more distracted uh you like you don't like you don't the dopamine hits kind of like you have to always search for more so you spend way more time on these platforms like now when I do go on Instagram and like look at stuff or Twitter or whatever like I'm going there I'm seeing like a couple of my friends couple things that I like and that's good enough for me like I don't need to keep like Doom scrolling because I'm so used to not having it in my hand it's just it's they're designed to addict you yeah food social media video games yeah everything so I don't know do you feel like there's I feel like there's too much content on self-help out there but it's just so like it's like a fundamental thing yeah and I always just ask like I want to be a top performing person so I if I'm like feeling tempted I'd be like what a top performing person do this no and that way you just optimize every aspect of your life to get the most things done absolutely and it's all just noise okay sorry side note everyone every one of our friend group like has an extreme emphasis on that yeah and I just want to point that out yeah it's it's a common denominator I don't know a single person that is at our level just eating like doing all this stuff we have we have had our fair share of uh of dopamine and you know nights out in Vegas but yeah here and there yeah yeah here and there but yeah it is important to have fun that's what we do it for yeah I love to have fun yeah but not in the work week or and it's like phases dude it's phases of life we're dragging this goodbye out okay guys Karen thank you see you later thanks for watching guys appreciate it that's fun bro