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

when i talk to twelve founders a week i'm seeing six of them are crushing it with ios apps there's a guys that we interviewed on the channel that have an app that forces you to do push ups they're doing thirty k a month i feel like got rude wear i know i could be what i want to from at all in it like a days off on a road less travel and look pat is here from starter story pat hopes hubspot just bought starter story yeah it's amazing congrats congratulations thank you is the news out it is a fit technically not closed yet so i'm in a going through a whirlwind i'm gonna try to put on a good face for you guys you're seven days out right now from from selling and when this goes live it is presumably close and yet you are nervous what's that about well the deal is supposed to close tomorrow but you know it's the psychology of it needs to be signed closed wired otherwise i cannot take myself to that place yet that place to you know celebrate or tell people or anything like that and it's kinda weird you know doing the production process because you know content needs to be recorded early to go out so it's super weird to do an interview before it's done how did you do with the negotiation do you feel like walk us through how you approach that how you think you did you give yourself a score there i had a number in my head before any of this conversation happened when it just came to my head i started talking to chat g about it having a little conversation of like what is before even the the sale or anything conversations happened she said like what would be my walk away number and i just remember thinking back what that number is and when i went back to the negotiation and then it sort of was that number i was like okay well i made up that that would have been my number before any sale influence me or anything like that i negotiate to that number because i wanted to be like authentic in my negotiation of like that was like truly my number not to make up something for whatever that was actually the number do you feel any bit of regret because you're like oh i got my number i should have asked for more yeah hundred percent you haven't amazing that if that doesn't happens that's the final stage maximum regret and then it turns to maximum relief when it's done yeah yeah alright so let's let's explain what is starter story people don't even know starter story is a lot of things but it started out as a side project while was working at nine to five because i couldn't start any successful business so i said why not just start interviewing founders and sharing their stories online and maybe i will find a founder through that or i'll find a good idea through that long story short it took off we found other mediums we had the blog with the case studies we had products we had community we had a youtube channel it is all built around interviewing founders doing anywhere from ten k to a hundred k per month let me ask you would you get right because this idea of hey i'm gonna interview founders about you know how they did it that's not like a new idea and you did this only a a couple of years ago how many how many years have been three four years well long been no i've been i've been in the game longer than than you might think eight years is when i i've years started the even eight years ago that wasn't a completely novel idea but you you did well with it right you separated yourself from the pack you made a success what do you think you got right that others didn't and i really hope it's not just like a i worked hard you know yeah i think of one thing that now i'm looking back what what did we get right is that we were you had to share your revenue to get on the website so a lot of founders at the time they didn't wanna share those things because they had investors as it was private or whatever we made it requirement to share your revenue on the side the something that we got from indie hackers at the time which was big on that too shout out cor who built that but once you could see like you wanna read a story about a business and you don't know how much revenue they're making you wanna know how this business doing okay now i wanna learn from this business so having that revenue number at the top that was really really big if you guys google like starter story case studies and you could find one or and you could find this thing it's called the full case studies database and so early on you are really interesting because you would interview people and i always thought that i was like a within a very small niche of people who like this but i think it's actually a lot of people who like it where i love numbers some obsessed numbers yeah and you would do these interviews with people and they very clearly were not interviews of you speaking it was as if you just sent people a google doc the same google doc over and over and over again and you asked questions and they typed out the replies and then you created graphic at the top and it said here's one it says broom mate i think it's called broom yeah brew i grew a drink ware brand to one point one million dollars per month at twenty three years old and it said jacob and it said his revenue per month is twelve million dollars his there's one founders there's fifty three employees like the way he you did such a good job of just outlining those numbers and then what you did was and once you had like hundred of these i could sort through like d c yeah saas i could sort through all these things and frankly if i was just trying to clone someone's company yep that's probably not the right word but figure out what business model i wanted to do and my fine well if you wanted to close someone's what's covered somehow was gonna do that yeah but like if you wanted to like research that's a better word you were like you you you and indie hackers were like the best but like you had like a bunch of legends like you had david h from grasshopper and a bunch of people like that on early on and it was really cool every single week i talked to founders as i mentioned that are doing between ten k and a hundred k per month and people that have sort of their businesses have took off recently so i like i get to see i get to have these conversations every single day and see like what's working like right now we can go over some of that if you want to yeah give us one yeah sure what do you guys wanna talk about i have a couple options for you we can talk about ios we can talk about youtube seo we could talk about apis we could talk about b b video what's exciting india let's do iphone apps because to me that sounds like ten years ago yeah yeah that was probably the most surprising one on the list right it's like wait that's the that's the now opportunity i feel like that was the the twenty ten opportunity right right so yeah it might it might feel like it's an old opportunity too broad but again this is all this is not something i read on twitter this is not something that i just came up with through chad g this is what when i talked to twelve founders a week i'm seeing six of them are crushing it with ios apps this is where this is coming from so a couple examples there's a guys that we interviewed on the channel that have an app that forces you to do push ups for you can go on social media like you scroll it blocks you and then you have to put your phone out there prove that you've done push ups they're doing the call thirty k they're doing thirty k a month and actually they're doing a lot more can't disclose it exactly but after we interviewed them they told me some crazy numbers and there's another one that does basically the same thing but it makes you pray makes you do a prayer to god before you can go on tiktok yeah yeah just like god intended yeah yeah to enter heaven yep there's like a feature in the ios api or something like that that allows you to screen block apps so there then there's tons of apps like this or just you know basic blocking apps there's a bunch of productivity related apps that popular like that that have some sort of sort of almost a gimmick element to them but you see it on tiktok you see on social media and you're like let me try it okay i wanna do some i wanna get a little healthier or whatever and and are these okay so i see it push up push up time blocker right push up scroll push scroll that's the one push roll okay gotcha so you go push scroll okay push scroll screen so you you replaced do strong with a healthy habit it literally has a picture of a guy doing push ups like with ai watching them and then it says it can limit your the apps you're addicted to and basically you earn you know you earn it as you as you make progress now yeah here's my question are these doing this same kind of like you make a fun kind of novelty app and then you do like massive tiktok content by giving paying influencers or affiliates or basically getting like a hundred or a thousand pieces of content posted every week yep i'm they'll come up with their own hooks like oh my gosh all are they you know check this out haven't used instagram at all this week because of whatever right yes or yep here's where these gains came from instagram what and it's like you know is it that is that the playbook that they're all doing sean just should become a take tiktok affiliate it's good that's was kinda natural what was really cool about this app it is a cool story worth telling is that they didn't actually build the app first they created the viral video first and this is a really cool story that we told is basically they created a video about them having to do push ups for scrolling they pretended that the app exists and they showed them having to do push ups or whatever the and they created a bunch of other videos about other app ideas this is the one that went viral and then when it did it got some hundreds of thousands of views they went and scrambled to create the app and then it took off so they were able to validate the idea through tick tiktok and through their marketing show they're gonna use and then build it which i thought was super cool were they technical one guy there was two guys one guy was the technical guy the other guy was the kind of the market push guy didn't yeah one guy is great push ups so this the opposite of field of dreams right instead of you know if we build it they will come it's like if they come then we'll build it i guess gotta build it then and and they went viral first exactly they reverse the whole process which i think is the right way to do things now because imagine creating ten apps and having none of them worked that would take you a year or creating one video in one day and having it work and that takes one day alright so pat has giving you guys something straight out of his playbook which is his method to finding a one million dollar business idea is a template that guides you through seven proven methods to identify twenty one problems that you can solve it gives you real founder case studies so you can build and validate your ideas fast if you want the template and case study straight from pat you could download it right now just click the link in the description and up back to the episode are there other apps that you're seeing another genre of apps that you're seeing that are working apps are the new info products i think so anything in health wealth relationships productivity self improvement these are all great spaces and i the reason why i wanted to share the dumb apps because they're the most funniest when you think about them i'm not saying go build a dumb app but build anything in these sorts of spaces right now health so fitness gym apps these sorts of things wealth money productivity these sorts of things that is a great space to be building right now what what are you seeing in wealth well there's not anything kind of the silly apps but anything that's in like crypto trading these sorts of things those are really really popular what's the stop vaping app yep so that would be another one of the health i think the health one is a good space there's a guy that just built an app that helps you track it was called puff count and i think you just track how many puffs you took and then once you get to a certain low amount it sort of ga the process of quitting nicotine that was a cool one he sold it for a lot of money and we that was that a really cool example did a lot of two bought it like philip morris and they shut that second down get that out of here you know these kids built like i i assume i i watch your channel and it's all the most young like twenty seconds are a lot of them actually technical or they just ai to make this stuff that's the thing is they're using ai coding and this is why it's big now and you thinking it was big like ten years ago it's big now because in order to build an iphone app you needed to have a team of four to build a good iphone app you needed a designer you needed a product person you need an engineer probably a back end and a front end engineer but with ai coding tools you can just have an idea it's not perfect but it's like ninety five percent of the way there you can just build it with zero obviously a team of zero apps that couldn't have existed before because it wouldn't have been cost effective you couldn't have built a stop vaping app with a team of four people getting paid a hundred thousand dollars a year or two hundred thousand dollars a year it just wouldn't have been feasible but now there's this opportunity for all these little kinda of weird fun apps that blow up on social media because you don't need anybody to build them anymore you know what's interesting is you said that apps the new info products that that didn't i that didn't hit with me until just a second ago do you guys remember the police scanner app i think it was called five dash radio or five o radio do you remember that sean sorta not really okay i heard of these like citizen this is the one i know about this is before that so i'm part of this forum where this guy is a poster and i knew he he was kind of a celebrity to me a little bit and his his name's alan wong and he started this thing called five o scanner so if you guys google them he kinda it was famous because he created this iphone app and i think his story was that he was an immigrant from another country he came here with nothing his family i think i think they worked in a restaurant something like that he created this thing called the five o scanner right when the iphone got started and he made eight figures i think he was making like five million dollars a year repeatedly for a very long time and he he like wrote the story how he was able to retire his mom and dad then he like bought lamborghini and he took a photo of himself in the lamborghini when he was like twenty four and he kinda went viral for that but he never actually taught how to make apps he was like kinda like true to like just making apps and i remember this guy and he was like one in a million there was like not other people doing like these iphone apps that were making five or eight million dollars a year with one employees he was one in a million and it was so cool and he's like a celebrity a little bit me because i kinda grew it was kinda like my ty has and that is kind of interesting to say that these these they are the new info products because info products when i was growing up when i was nineteen and twenty five trying or nineteen and twenty one try to get into the internet it was always info product people that like i i didn't i didn't exactly look up to because i thought they were flee a little bit but i was like i want that life i aspire to have that like i can make money anywhere time be on a beach type of lifestyle and it is funny that you're saying that the and apps weren't even on my radar i know how to make them i couldn't i i physically couldn't do that but now that i probably could and that is kind of an interesting way to look at and then we saw we had this one what was the kids who we had on here sean calorie tracker cal cal we had ka he was at just seen how big that business is now so he talked to it this guy zach talked to us literally he it was new on a tuesday but what are doing here he was home fifth period he goes i came home for lunch during high school to like do this interview and i have go back to school and at the time i think it was a thirty million dollar a year business how big is it now i saw on x so it's not verified or anything like that but they they said they did six million in january alone so seventy what is that put at seventy something million that's incredible well he launched a thing called app mafia which like a course on how apps and i don't think it landed i i think people kinda mocked it but anyway it was cool to like see that this is the new info product well it's cool because there's sounds like there's two trends coming together right it's apps are getting easier and easier to make with ai and vibe coding and then on other hand you have a new discovery platform tiktok that you can get your app downloaded from and both happening at the same time like charlie mu calls these like la palo effects where multiple factors kinda cons expire in your favor and then suddenly you get this good crazy sort of lol palo effect out of it so you get one two three four variables all pushing in the same direction unintentionally and it creates like a new opportunity so we were joking like dude to iphone apps is this is like twenty ten like what what do you mean that's the opportunity well there's something that changed apps got way easier to build and apps got way easier to be discovered there's a new way to get discovered as an so the playing field reopened in a way that the the window was sort of closed you know over the last let's say five years ago it was less juicy than it is currently yep that's right okay you wanna do another idea what else you got listed this b b b to b video of curious what you have there yeah i don't have like crazy business ideas here but i have just some intel on how big this opportunity is and there's so many business ideas you can do off of this so i know this and you guys know this is that video content is hard doing anything on video is hard it doesn't matter if it's long form short form paid ads organic getting authentic non ai gen wanna talk about ai generated stuff like video to work for your business that gets views and converts customers there it's really really hard at companies there's lots of functions right design that's pretty much solve you get good designers they do good stuff product it's a little tough but kinda generally solved engineering kinda solves especially with ai sales there's lots of playbook for all these right but there's no playbook right now for video i'll stop there and let me know what you guys think immediately about that i think you're spot on i've said before video is now the the native tongue of the internet the language that the internet speaks and so if you can't make good video you essentially it's like moving to america not being able to speak english you might be able get by it's not gonna be easy for you and so you're right that the the way you just put it is really great which is that companies don't even have really the job function yet at the majority of companies to be able to produce video who in who in the company should be able to produce video right now it's like it's of the youngest employee maybe gonna do it yeah you know the guy who happens to have a camera and you know understands tiktok a little bit i guess you can sort of do it the social media person supposed to be expected to do this but it's probably gonna elevate up to the level of product design project management like there's gonna be one of these functions at companies where you need to be able to produce good video because that's how we communicate with the world now yep or to be the person who's least embarrassed what's funny is like so starting in december i started doing and i tried i wanted to learn instagram so i was like i'm a video a day i was so ashamed to be doing this yes and like that i like started learning how to do this and i was like this is so like like i know how to do this now it took me about thirty videos to master but what was holding me back was just the shame with just the tray like it's just so embarrassing to like be walking down a street and talking and be like hey so here i'm gonna wait hold i gotta redo it again hey so here i'm gonna i was like well if i hold it a certain way i could just pretend that i'm on facetime but people hear me repeating the same thing over it over again like this is stupid like i'm acting here it was horrible well that's actually why it's a huge opportunity and i have this on one of my other ideas which is around youtube seo but that's also related to video but i talked to a lot of founders or people that wanna be founders people are afraid put they're themselves on camera that's actually why there's one of the biggest opportunities because nine nine percent of people would rather write an article or you know do something with like google seo or just do something that doesn't have to put themselves out there and put their face out there and that's actually why youtube i think will be a huge opportunity because most people are too scared to actually put a camera in front of their face and start y it it's also hard right like it takes a lot of work to the youtube compared to a podcast a podcast is so much easier than doing planned scripted edited packaged youtube content and then you get the big view number in your face and you get media like slap or you know that that quick high that you're getting gonna chase right and and that's a very tough cycle on youtube i think you know short form is sort of similar there's like the phrase like two hundred view jail where a lot of people will create tiktok and they just sort of never get past the two hundred view number you just stay stuck in that state right but there's a huge amount of i don't know self consciousness as well as actual work that goes into into doing this today's episode is brought to you by hubspot did you know that most businesses only use twenty percent of their data that's like reading a book but then tearing out four fifth of the pages point is you miss a lot and unless you're using hubspot the customer platform that gives you access to the data you need to grow your business the insights that are trapped in emails call logs transcripts all that unstructured data makes all the difference because when you know more you grow more and so if you wanna read the whole book instead of just reading part of it visit hubspot dot com so what's the solve here how do you actually how you actually solve this what are different angles you could take like sam how is you let's say you believe this was the problem i think pat is accurately described the problem and the value that's there but you need you still need a key to unlock the door what's the what would be the key what would be an idea that you would create space i can show you a couple people why a one guy that i think is cool he does so big companies they wanna get into video hubspot obviously wants to get into video big fortune fifty fortune one hundred fortune five hundred companies they need to figure out youtube and they need to figure it out fast and i know a guy who has an agency that he goes for the big boys he goes for like the microsoft the fig and he basically just sends them he helps them build youtube teams and he sends them packaging ideas do this title do this thumbnail do this title do this thumbnail because you are microsoft or some massive company he charges like it's different probably per client but he's told me some crazy numbers like fifty to a hundred thousand dollars per month just for youtube strategy and that shows you how much b2b b this is a b2b b specific play here how much they're willing to pay to have this problem solved and i still don't like that's like one example i don't even know a lot of people that are solving this problem i don't know what you guys think well well there's other people who are doing like done for you right so we've we've talked about the guy i think his name is josh who does the street interviews for companies so it's like oh my gosh you know what you know what's the most shameful and awkward and difficult version of video is like man on the street interviews so he's like just niche down into like i'll give you that format you give me money i will walk around new york and i will stop people on the road and i will ask them you know three goofy questions to try to get you know try to get you some clips okay so that's like one guy who's doing the done for you service i know these other guys that do they fly to companies and they they podcast to interview them they're like look forget even getting booked on an actual podcast i'll just interview you yeah chop it up like you were on a podcast nobody even needs to know that there's no long form podcast actually underneath this the and i'll just get the clips like and and for you that's a lot easier the the user the ceo or the founder is pretty comfortable just sitting down and and being interviewed about their company in a podcast format and they just do it the whole thing turnkey and it's like wait let's just cut out the part of helping you get booked on actual podcast and cutting it we'll just fake the podcast it's great yeah and so that's like another like we will deliver this format to you for a a you know tens of thousands of dollars a month type of type of now you only need ten customers and you're you know now you're cooking at over a hundred hour yeah i like the idea of taking one popular format and then turning that into a business like you said the street interviews do that one format for one business and i actually met that guy who started that business and he told me some pretty wild numbers about his revenue we talked about it yeah it was doing i think that year is gonna do ten million dollars in revenue yeah one format it's great well here do this pat let's show okay so do me a favor you sent me a thing where you have your google sheet or saw your google doc that you have for every single video that you made i want you to show it to sean and the idea here is like what you your pre work for your your youtube video was really good and it outlined the whole story you did a really good job of when you showed me how to make youtube video and what sean describing is basically just doing that but for companies let's do it so for the audience sean and i have done a seven hundred fifty almost eight hundred podcasts sometimes they're super well researched other times we're like let's just rift do you wanna talk about tell me about your weekend just talk it requires like no work and occasionally those will get seen by hundreds of thousands people occasionally there'll be an interview that has little research and we're just friends with the person and that could potentially get a million views yeah yeah but then i saw yours and it was so much more work but worth it yeah i'm very anal re attentive and i want everything to be planned out and i don't like off the cuff i don't like spontaneous i want everything to be there in the dock before that gets filled now was saying that's better or worse that's more of my style but i can pull up let me just find the right one to show you okay so this is what we call a prep doc i mean my first million has something like this too but this one is a little different this is our prep doc for all of our videos that we do at starter story and we will do a couple things in here first we start with the package so this is before anything gets filmed and it's not post film it's prep production and we do the title and thumbnail so this is this guy here it's a different guest but we're saying hey this is the thumbnail we're gonna do and this is the video this video did pretty well i think i got like five six hundred seven hundred cave views so that's why i wanna show it's like a good example and i learned this when i read this production book it was like hollywood production book but when you sell a script in hollywood they have what's called a treatment and it's basically a pitch of a video of why someone will wanna wash this video if you wanna sell your script in hollywood and convince some director to pick it up or whatever happens in hollywood you have to sell this you don't give them the hundred and twenty page script you sell them the sales page of the script so we always have title thumb now obviously and then we have what's called a treatment i'll stop there and let me you guys let me know what you think about this so let's just read the treatment here you go this is mike founder from australia now are you thinking about this like what what needs to be nailed in the treatment what do you have to what's the important part to find when you write this pitch yeah i always try to think about how and this might have been written my by my producer but what i like to think about in the treatment is like the vibes and the feeling that the viewer will get when they watch it why should this video exist why will this why will they leave this video and think about it for the next two weeks or tell their send it to their friend i i like to think about the feeling that you have when you watch it maybe this isn't the best example of that but what is the viewer gonna walk away this isn't really like an intro this is more like sell i'm telling my producer right now sell me on this idea so that when we go to record it we know exactly we're trying to get out of this and that it ends up being how we planned so in this case is the kinda the the the main thing i would be feeling or wanting is oh man i really want the sort of exact playbook yep you know in this case the ten step playbook validated by reddit post with a hundred fifty comments of how he's built these you know he builds saas apps to two hundred k mr something like that that that's the premise of this video is that hey i have this very specific ten step playbook and this is something that we found because he had written this awesome reddit post about it and it was really like a simple tense that playbook if i do this i do this i do this i do this something that our audience really likes so we build the whole video around that checklist and that checklist almost becomes like a character in the video that we can further dive deeper on and this the whole video and this is another thing too i i kinda have it down here a little bit is that every video has like a big idea like why should this video exist i don't wanna tell the entire story of how you know he was born and how we grew up in all these things i wanna do it around one idea and for this video specifically it's the ten step playbook and then everything is built around that video because when the yeah that's something that our audience likes and is really valuable because he used it to actually build a great business off of gotcha that's very cool and then when you go to and interview them you're you're trying to extract you're trying to basically now fill in the blanks of this skeleton you already think is a winning video yep yep exactly and i like to look at i mean one thing i like look at is successful social media post successful reddit posts successful seminars or like talks that they gave at a conference those are all good bones for great and this is the checklist right here that he did or the ten step process those are all great bones for any video it's like how how i like to think about videos if they've done this sort of talk or or they've written this before it's always always a great outline i guess so you how many of these videos are you doing a week we're aiming for two to three right now so you're making two or three of these a week that's a lot yeah yeah it seems like you kinda under soldier stuff at the beginning when you were like you know i stuck with it i think obviously consistency in sticking with it mattered but it sounds like also what really mattered was building a system yep to be able to do this at scale right a team in a system you you had to do that i would say most creators don't know how to build a system right right and it sounds like you found the the growth the growth hypothesis which was if i put these types of stories on youtube there's always youtube will keep feeding me more and more audience for this type of content i can grow that way versus seo versus anything else right like yeah one of the frameworks i always like that i think it's kinda out of style was eric reese when you did the lien startup and he said basically a company you you really have two main hypotheses there's the value hypotheses that if i do this this will be valuable to this type of person right it will help this type of person with this problem and then he goes you have the growth hypothesis which is totally separate from the value one which is if i do x y z that will create sustainable compounding growth and that growth hypothesis can be if i run facebook ads i can spend this much money acquire users for this much and generate this much to reinvest to to buy the next user yeah it can be seo it can be youtube it can be anything right where you you're gonna basically have some hypothesis as to how you grow and he's basically like if you get the value hypothesis wrong there's no company if you could get the value about this is right but the growth one wrong you've built a very very small business if you get both of those right you just have to be an idiot to not get the money part right at the end and i always always like that framing and so whenever i do a project i sort of trying to think about what's our value hypothesis and i called a hypothesis because we don't know until we go test it and what's our growth hypothesis we don't know until we go test it what do you do with the money once you've already made it this is a question sean and i ask our successful guests all the time and the reason we ask it is because you are successful if you do have a little bit of money information on how to spend or invest your money it's actually really hard to come by and i know this because inside of hampton which is my media founders people ask this question all the time people have made ten or fifty million dollars how do you spend it how do you invest it and so to help solve this problem and answer this question i actually interviewed eighty plus founders guys like scott gallo alex mo brian johnson people who are worth fifty a hundred even billions of dollars and we got them to reveal everything so their net worth how much they pay themselves their monthly expenses their portfolio things like that and we turn these eighty interviews into one document and i don't think you can find this type of information literally anywhere on the internet and it's completely free so if you wanna see behind the net people who are worth billions of dollars and their portfolios or expenses everything you go to join hampton dot com slash reveal again join hampton dot com slash reveal check it out i have a feeling you have a bunch of other like system related stuff up in that chrome window with all those tabs yes and yes i personally am i'm very interested in seeing you click around can you do that yeah let's do it so yeah as sean said i'm a big fan of systems and processes and maybe that's just like my more like logical brain former software engineer spreadsheet kinda guy so i try to build my company around a lot of systems and i had a note in here that i wanted to talk about which was busy people are the biggest losers i used to be in corporate nine to five and i hated when i hated urgency culture i hated getting emails in one off slack messages i worked at deloitte and you'd get an email and then all a sudden you're working a deal the whole weekend i hated that so i knew that when i started a company i didn't wanna build my business like that at all i wanted to build it around systems asynchronous systems so that i could play tennis every day at noon and also my people that work for me enjoy that too it's not for everyone but this is how we operate so everything exists on a notion so right here we have our all tasks that need to get done in the company are simply assigned out to people and there's no like real like deadline or meetings about them there are just things to get done when you can manage that deep work session that you meant to do that day go and do those and we're good as long as you get the stuff done that we plan to and we hit our kpis and all these things you can work whenever you'd like and everything is here in this notion additionally we have all of our production for our company including youtube instagram twitter everything everything we post on any sort of social media we track it all inside notion here and we have freelancers helping edit content and create the content who who who manages this board i would say well i have a like a a producer like producer light i call him who's sort of starting to manage this more but i built this over i i i wanted to get more serious about repurposing so i built this over like course of like two three months built it is more just like created the spreadsheet and created the processes and then i sorta of handed it over in the last two months to someone else so i have a a light producer who manages this right now light as in part time or light as in half a person a little guy both you're a little guy a little guy who works a little amount yeah alright i love the busy busy people are the biggest losers because i think busy is a badge of honor in a lot of different yeah circles and what a what a terrible badge to to to be proud of yes in my opinion i remember my buddy came and worked for me he used to work in in investment banking and he would he kept saying this phrase that we were like dude sam what is this thing you keep saying and he would say he's like yeah he's like can he get that to me asap or sooner and i was just like dude what is asap means as soon as possible what does as asap or sooner mean and he's like i don't know we just always say that investment banking and i was like what what are like fight or flight what a cortisol phrase right just horse injecting in your company yeah you know everyone has that friend when you you hang out with them and they're always on their phone they're always on work emails they're dropping out to take calls i remember when i was a kid i was on a hike with my buddy and his dad was on the hike i'll never forget this i was probably like nine years old or something like that and his dad was just on the phone for the entire hike really was like really nice hike and i was like man i just never want to be that person like you said it's a bad it's it's a choice it's more typically around a bad business or a flaw systems flaw or an over extension of yourself it's usually not like you're just handed that what's that eos thing up there yeah eos us is cool entrepreneur operating system is you guys are probably familiar with that right yeah i've never actually done you do you do it sam at hampton you pay for eos us well you know what to pay for it you could read a book and just make your own shit like people pay for the implement and all that stuff yeah i paid an implement for a one day seminar with our leadership team and that was like twenty grand or something no no it was like three thousand dollars for one day oh you got like the clearance integrator or what would you what would you do no like i like someone who was like a certified like implement or something i was gonna hire him and then i showed him my pre work and he's like well you guys are actually almost there let's just meet with you your whole team for six hours and i'll teach everyone how to do it and then we'll go over your current rocks and i will show you the right format and then you're good to go it looks like is this the first company you did it at no i did it that the hustle as well eos specifically yeah wow yeah i i'm a fan of it i think that i'm are you like a i swear by it kinda guy or where are you at with it i swear by a tran i we use like a transformer version so for example eos for those listening it's an operating system run your company the book is called traction by this guy named gin gin by the way sean has asked to come on whole bunch so if we if we want we can invite him on but basically it's a the the crux of the whole thing is your l ten meeting which happens every for us every monday at three o'clock it's two or one and a half or two hour meeting and each team has some number or metric or goal that they are assigned to and then task below to reach that goal and we go over each week what's going well what's not going well and how to improve typically eos is divided quarterly we actually at hampton du ours every six weeks so we do rock planning every six weeks as opposed to quarterly i think quarterly is too long for startup but we and so you can kind of like manipulate it to like fit your needs but over the course of many many years we've kind of made our own i like the six weeks that we do it quarterly but i already likes take two long just like with with a start up like with a startup up like you get you can get new information relative so what we do is we actually each team actually only we try to limit it to two rocks so each team just gets two important rocks and that's six weeks and then we change them or or keep them but whatever we wanna do every six weeks yeah yeah and then you have a scorecard and what we're looking at is your scorecard where you go over every single week what's going on so this looks like the scorecard that you go over at your l ten meeting yep it gives you nice was for someone like me with no management experience and i have a nba i don't wanna manage people it was nice we've been doing it for like two maybe over two years it's nice to just have a basic i don't think it's a perfect system but i think it's a system for someone who's a creator like we talked about earlier who wants to start building more of a business or someone who's going from sole like me that didn't intend to build a business it's a good rails or system for kpis planning and it's not perfect by any means but it is a system and most people just need a system can i say a quick disclaimer because i used to be the kind guy who somebody i'd be watching something right here at talk and somebody would be like oh i use this system you did they give me some acronym and then they're like yeah this is what i do this is it's so good for me and i'd be like that's what i've been missing just an the that's the tool i was one tool away i was one framework away one acronym away from success and turns out spoiler i was never one acronym away from success and there's a specific type of person and a specific moment in time when you need a system tool and that is when you have growth but you have a growing headache so the business is growing health but your headache is growing you know maybe even more than that or proportionately to that and i think what most will have is a business that that's not really growing enough and then they try to add systems and processes and it actually slows them down and they don't even grow faster because growth often is like a matter of like striking a vase like drilling for oil you don't need to be super efficient you just need to find the oil and sometimes that's brute for sometimes it's a little bit of gut instinct sometimes a little bit of cowboy ness to trying different little experiments but i think you i just wanna say that loud because i wasted a lot of time when i actually needed growth and then i've adopted systems of people who had growth and i've con inflated the two i thought the system creates the growth no no the system manages your headache as you grow that's that's how it's been for me at my personal experience i'll take the other side of that which is i think that there are times where the system does create growth because i think typically what happens when you have companies you can get to a million or two million or three million in revenue through a combination of either luck or you knew how to do one thing well or for a variety of reasons but what i have found is whenever i hit those that like three whenever i get to like three million in revenue i then like think like okay i need to now go do this new marketing channel or do this new thing and oftentimes the actual answer is no you should actually do less things and just do this one marketing thing over and over and over again you're saying at three million i'm saying most people are not even at the three million most people don't get the three million most people who watch this or are gonna watch any type of content on youtube are pre getting one two three million in revenue and for those people i think that's the sucker like spot where you think you might be a tool away so i totally agree with you if you've already got the thing that's again you you have healthy growth if you've gotten into one two three million in revenue and you know from there you you need you need systems to scale right but you don't need systems to scale if you don't have a working thing or even when your team size gets kind of above four people you kinda like have to like half something but yeah i i don't i hear what you're saying then you wanna show something else i wanna ask you a question about this blog post in december twenty twenty and maybe you could take us back to like how the business was doing back then you wrote a blog post says twenty twenty i am my own greatest obstacle yeah i already i am even read the post already nod in my head because every entrepreneur gets there to this realization can you explain where you were at the blog and what this blog blockbuster means yep this all this blog posts all revolves around a single week in my life where i is post covid i was about three years in a building the business and what most people don't know they think oh you just build start story and you grew that well no i was the guy with like ten side projects and i had two businesses that were like i was splitting my time on and then other side projects and other personal brand and doing all these things starter story was making eight thousand dollar these are sort of high level numbers but he was making eight thousand dollars a month and then this other business i was building was like a software plug type app was doing two thousand dollars a month i thought this was gonna be a bigger than starter story because i didn't think starter story is gonna be big and i was so burnt out that i said i heard about this think week by bill gates where you go off to a cabin and you just think about stuff so i couldn't afford a cabin in the woods or anything at that point and i decided okay i'm just gonna go get in my car i'm gonna drive across the country and i'm gonna think through that process through that week of not on the phone you know this is no social media nothing i couldn't even check my email i realized that starter story was the was the business i should be going all in on this is the business that i was meant to be billed i'm throwing basically no time into this business as doing eight thousand dollars a month i'm throwing all my time into this business that i'm supposed to be building this is how i get into yc and i do all these things i should i'm putting twenty percent of my effort into eighty percent of the revenue let's just drop everything else and in that moment after that week after i realized all this i basically sold that business stopped working on anything else and i went all in on starter story and this is three years after starting it best decision i ever made obviously and i don't know if i would've have made that decision if i didn't take that week off and essentially i doubled the businesses revenue in a single month after that and then everything went up after that and that's probably why i'm here today selling my company and talking to you guys is that i realized that i was the biggest obstacle right if i i was limiting my own success by thinking i could do everything i love that that's that's very powerful what sounds right on paper and what's actually right for me might be two different things because a lot of people would tell you you should do the saas business recurring revenue it's amazing yeah you know you could do this plug in and you it's software and all these great things but you kinda realize like the thing i'm good at the thing i enjoy the thing that has momentum is this other thing yeah and if i keep splitting focus yep i'll never know there's something that i like to call you have your ego business this is this is the business you're supposed to build the business that you look up to other people as they built those or that's the business that you're supposed to start whatever but actually follow the money where where where what's making money what are you truly good at making what are you meant to build think it's like a lot of people watching this maybe think about that what's the ego business and what's the actual business so for this thing week you just drove three thousand miles just like yeah i'm looking at the map it looks like you started where'd you start salt lake city yeah i was living with my mom at the time so the shout out my mom for housing me in this time when i was trying to figure things out but yeah went from salt lake or up through the down to the west coast and then up and around back this all drove like a giant circle basically yeah down the west coast it wasn't salt up to jackson hole but in a circle format being twenty nine and living at home and i think in this blog you say you met a girl later on so i assume you're a single twenty nine living at home trying to like do this thing that's definitely not the most glamorous place to be in yeah i was more just i would do anything i i worked in corporate for five years i worked at del deloitte i worked at some startups ups i worked at some like big companies and my motivation i was so sick and tired of that i think a lot of entrepreneurs just start early they started at seventeen they started at eighteen i actually went through college in the corporate life so starting this business was more about freedom and i knew i would do anything i moved to asia because it could be like a a thousand dollars a month i lived with my mom because i would i could not go back to a a regular job that was my main motivation and then obviously the business started working out and that's why i live with my mom so check this out this is your monthly revenue at the time so it looks like for the year preceding your think week you were basically plateau from august twenty nineteen to mid twenty twenty august twenty almost august twenty twenty june twenty twenty and you're basically at eight k a month for a year flat yep if you do the think week you make the decision six months later you're now over twenty five thousand a month and the trajectory you changed the trajectory of the business with that yep i think that's a great story also in this blog i like you know you were talking about like you know how you felt you're like i know i had so many projects in tasks i know i should do at the same time i felt un unloaded to start any of them i mean this really weird spot right now i don't feel motivated about work nothing feels super important to work on i don't feel like tweeting or writing and i don't wanna read any books you know kinda burnout out essentially and you know the solution to burnout wasn't like i need to take six months off it was like i need to do something that's just more in alignment with what i'm trying to do and simplify rather than keep adding yep exactly that's cool man well congrats congrats on all the success congrats on you know fingers crossed us that this thing closes we have to air this episode anyways yeah and it will be a cautionary tale of county tickets for the but thank you guys yeah you guys are huge inspiration to been listening to my first million obviously got a lot of inspiration to do what we do through everything that you've done both in my first million and out of so you guys are awesome keep doing what you're doing you're this shit thanks for doing this man thank you guys for having me i feel lucky i feel like cool check out pat check out starter story on youtube and yeah all the things yeah that's it that's a pub i feel like got rude where i know why i could be what i want to from at all in it like a days off on a road travel never looking back alright my friends i have a new podcast for you guys to check out it's called content is profit and it's hosted by luis and ph ka after years of building content teams and frameworks for companies like red bull and orange theory fitness luis and ph are on a mission to bridge the gap between content and revenue in each episode you're gonna hear from top entrepreneurs and creators and you're gonna hear him share their secrets and strategies to turn their content into profit so you can check out content is profit wherever you get your podcast