How to Start a Business With an Influencer

0:00So, right now you're working with Ali Abdaal. You have Sam Parr, Viral Cuts. You have Dan Co. Dan Co, Cody Sanchez, Sahil, some other creators that I'm not going to name right now. And then you're the background operator and manage the team, basically. So, they're the distribution, you're the fulfillment. In theory. Okay, cool. You have ran agencies. Everest was doing you had one client I think was paying you $7 million a year. Yeah, it was it was eight figures. Insane. So, you have a very high-level agency. But now the productized agency model is very popular. I'm curious to see like why is that so appealing? With like why are you

0:33using the productized service since you've ran all different kinds? It's just [ __ ] easy. Like end of story. Like if you've gone and you've you've negotiated like multi-million dollar like SOWs with like Fortune 100 companies and dealt with procurement and like grown teams, you know, at the rate that I have, like going in and doing a productized service business is just easy. And so, we just saw it as an opportunity to go and do three things. One was build, in most cases, the best brand in the category. The second was the highest quality team in the category. And the third was to have the most distribution. And for me it's

1:10just it's a formula. If I have those three things, I'm going to win. And it's worked. I think, you know, obviously there are some variances if you look at like Superside or like Design Pickle like the OGs. Uh but for the most part I think each of the businesses we have is the biggest in its category at this point. But really we just saw like an arbitrage opportunity. We just saw something to where it's like with zero capital raised or invested, we could just go and build a bunch of these really quickly, have a massive advantage with distribution, take over in most cases like the majority of the brand

1:42focus in each of those little industries, and use all that free cash flow to go and just do whatever we want without having to ever sell a piece of the business. It's interesting that you have to explain it, but creator-led it kind kind like common sense like why it makes sense, but do you want to explain like how that observation came to be for you and how

2:01you guys have gone about that? Yeah, I think about it a lot because most of the time when somebody says creator-led, what they really mean is endorsement deal with a celebrity. Mhm. Right. And that I don't think is that exciting. Now, there are some cases of it to where like they're crushing it. Um obviously like Prime, I think is a great

2:22example. Um Skims with Kim Kardashian is a great example. And behind the scenes, you have an amazing operator that's growing the [ __ ] out of those businesses. I don't know how much Logan Paul and the other guy have. I think it's it's rumored to be like 10% each or maybe even less. Um that to me though isn't creator-led,

2:42right? That is the idea to where somebody just has an audience that's so big, you can almost sell anything to it. Right. Right. Um if you think about like uh Mr. Beast and Feastables, how many times in a Mr. Beast video these days do you see Feastables? You're having to go to market with that product non-stop in the same way that you would any traditional CPG brand,

3:05you're advertising constantly. With us, what I think is really unique about what we're doing and more so like the opportunities that exist in B2B for creator-led stuff is that you can go to market minimally, right? We launched Hey Friends, our done-for-you YouTube agency with Ali Abdal. We launched it on July 31st. Ali has like 5 million subscribers on

3:31YouTube. Really captive audience. He's really known as like the YouTube guy and the most followed productivity expert in the world. He's awesome. He is awesome. I love Ali to death. Um he is a savage in his own way. Um and he has like 200,000 followers on Twitter, right? We didn't launch Hey Friends on YouTube. We launched it on Twitter with one tweet from Ali. That's all the promotion we've

3:55ever done for that business. In 5 days off of that one tweet, it got I think it was over like 550 individual leads amounting to like 2.5 million in MRR interest. Right? Like to this day, we're still very carefully going through that waitlist and scaling that business based on who we think the right fit is. So, for us, what we look for is like not this idea that there's some creator that's constantly talking about the business, but as we've evolved cuz we launched six Well, we launched five of these. We're getting ready to launch

4:27six. As we've evolved launching one each month, we've really honed in on what we call product audience fit. So, who is the creator? What are they known for? Right? Like for example, if we talked about you, it might be like podcasting, right? Just throwing that out there, right? So, if you were to come and build a business that was focused on like how to help other Like let's say like nascent creators 10 to 50k subscribers, whatever, build a really successful podcast um and then handle everything end to end, there's a good chance that a huge portion of your

5:00audience would respond to that, right? And so, there's other ways to measure it. There's ways to get like more granular about it, but that's what we look at. It's like audience density. 100%. between what they're actually watching and if they also need a service like that. And so, I've always wondered if like a one creator could have like a

5:18flywheel of these productized agencies. Yeah. Like could Ali have not only just a YouTube one? Have you ever considered doing multiple different agencies? Or do you think it's more important just to nail that one that they're like most known for? I think that with the right creator, there are opportunities for a ton of

5:37businesses to exist in their ecosystem. And we're exploring that. But the difficulty there is how many times can a creator take something to market before they saturate their brand, yeah, right? And so that's something that we want to be really careful with. It's also something that's really interesting like in this space that we're in, like my buddy Nick Huber, like Nick has several businesses. And a lot of his content these days is him tweeting like this business, that business, that business,

6:03whatever. And Nick does a really good job of driving those leads. But for us, that's not a strategy that is interesting. Instead of using one audience of a few hundred thousand, I want to use multiple audiences of millions, right? Um so it gives us a much broader appeal and I think a little bit more longevity in terms of how we take things to market. Okay, so have you seen different productized agency models work better than others? And do you have insights cuz you've done multiple and you said you're canceling this one that's $2,000 per month. So I'd love to hear your thoughts that just come to

6:35your mind instantly on that. Different productized agencies. Um it's tough to say. Um we obviously haven't explored development for good reason. Explain that cuz I have one and we just started 3 months ago. And I'd love to hear your take. Let's turn this around. So tell me how your development agency works and then I'll

6:57tell you the pros and cons. Okay, so productized dev agency's no code. Okay. We use Bubble and so the angle is that you get like three full-time employees for the price of one and we can do things faster because we're using no code. Um we have development like full-stack developers but that's the angle that no code is better. And so from there they

7:11can sign up directly on our website. They get automatically onboarded with an email automation to a Trello board. They put their features list and then they immediately get on a call with a project manager and we start sketching out the Figma design with our design team. And so instead of just having people think that you can just hire one developer and then that's all you need but you really need to Figma designer, a developer, and a project manager so you know you're not getting screwed. Yep. And so they can do

7:33all of that just through a Trello board. List out the features and we do all the project management, design, development. So that's the product. They can sign up on our website or they can take a discovery call if they want questions first. So, from there it's $6,000 a month. We can develop pretty much anything. And so, in theory they're always going to need a developer. So, for our side the churn is really low and the retention's great. And then if they just have a finished product and they just want maintenance, they can down sell. Very rarely will they ever cancel. So, that's the plus side in our opinion. So, when

8:02you think about scale is where it gets difficult, right? Because it becomes a question of like, okay, right now churn is low. Well, if you'd lost customers in 3 months, I'd be really happy, right? So, like churn is going to be low, but the question is like, A, what's the average LTV? Right? So, uh or contract value, but in this case you don't have a contract, right? So,

8:21we're just going to go LTV. So, what's the lifetime value of your customer over time? And then what do you have to do to retain a customer to make that LTV like really meaningful against your your costs of acquisition, right? Which in this case is it just like your creator led? I made one single video. And that drove And I've never been talked about anywhere else. And how many like

8:39leads did that drive for you? 50 plus. 50 plus? Okay, cool. And and you guys, how many customers have you onboarded at this point? We're at 39k MRR. 39k MRR. So, I think that's seven. Yeah. So, when you think about scaling that business, right? Um what you're going to have to do is a handful of things. You're going to need to understand what does my OPEX look like at scale to get more and more talent that is

9:06really high quality, right? And that's one of the things that I think a lot of people make about these uh productized businesses where they screw up is they like it's a race to the bottom. They try and offshore, they try and get the like cheapest talent that they can to increase the margins, the quality dips, retention increases, and things go bad. Like look at what happened to Design Pickle and all the layoffs that they had to do. What happened? They did a [ __ ] ton of layoffs a while ago cuz we hired some of their people and then there were a couple of them that we hired really quickly in our

9:32need to like scale up a service. And then I was like, oh, these people aren't good. We had got them go. Um anyways, so you have to find the blended rate of you know, basically if we know that each customer requires service from like these people and over time depending on you know, the projects that we're taking on, you're going to see how that fluctuates up and down based on like time investment from the project manager or the Figma designer based on revisions or the developer, whatever it is. You'll come up with a really good blended rate. You know that like on average we need to be getting paid this

10:04amount of money per hour that we're actually putting into the project. Which might seem unconventional cuz you're not charging by the hour. Right. But at the end of the day You are. You are. Like people are spending time. constraint. Yeah, you're you're trading time for money. You have to figure that out. And then you have to look at how that scales to get to like your goal revenue,

10:24right? Um, and that's just like a really important piece of it. And so what we look at in terms of like how we look at cost, how we look at you know what our margins need to be. So the $2,000 monthly, right? That requires 0.3% Well, not percent, excuse me, but 0.3 capacity. And so what I mean by that

10:47uh, let's use Viral Cuts. So for 40 I don't know how much it is. $4,400 a month you get a one-to-one. So you just get a dedicated a dedicated animator, right? They're on your stuff full time. So we know in our model it's one-to-one. So our margin obviously is like, you know what do we pay them versus what are we

11:06getting paid? Yes. If you look at the $2,000 offering, which is part-timer that actually is six videos a month which is two high-fi, which takes us an average about two days, two and a half days and then four low-fi, which takes us somewhere between four and eight hours depending on like a handful of factors. That requires 0.3 uh, of an animator's entire capacity. So in theory, each three clients. Each animator could do three clients. So, if I look at that and I say, "Well, I can have one to one at $4,400 a month, or I could have three customers paying me $6,000 and have technically like 0.1 left over,

11:51although that's whatever." Um well, I should do that. That's more profitable, right? But, then what we've learned is that those customers, those part-time customers, they have a higher likelihood of churn. They are harder to work with and require more time from our project manager. So, then you have to start changing that model of like how profitable is this

12:11really over time? And so, when you look at it in a spreadsheet, it's really simple when you don't know the numbers long term, right? Over time, as you develop more data points, you have a better understanding of who that customer is and how you have to work with them, you learn that like, "Oh, it's actually not that sexy. Like, we should get rid of this and just focus on the one to one cuz it's less headache." Yeah. So, then you go into the whole thing of like why the blended rate, why the blended model of cost is so important to understand, cuz you have to begin to understand like the

12:40cognitive overhead that comes with a customer. Right. So, we just went in such a rabbit hole about this. important. This is like what my podcast is supposed to be. It's very interesting. Like, how you actually move work the business. So, basically you're saying that since we're going to have a developer, a Figma designer, and a project manager on each project, but each one of those people is only allocating 10 to 20 hours per client, they could each have like they basically each developer works on three three clients at a time. Each designer can work on like five cuz it's much quicker. Different. Yeah. Yeah. So,

13:08you have to find that perfect ratio. Yeah. And so, if they can work on five, it's 0.2, basically. Cool. Yeah. So, say like Off Menu is $15,000 a month. And let's say that we pay a designer $150,000 a year, right? Um on average, each Off Menu designer should work on about four projects in a month, right? So, basically, I'm getting 60 grand for my 15 in cost. Yes. Now, obviously, I have a project manager that's involved, too. Uh cuz the way off menu works, a customer doesn't make requests. Okay. You come and you tell us

13:41what you want, right? And then we handle everything. It just happens. It's outcome. Yeah, it's just outcome base. So, we run that whole project in linear. Um our project manager's running it, making sure that everything's organized, we're getting the details from the customer, we have a good brief, we're sending great updates, whatever. And then the majority of the work is just facilitated via Loom. Every 2 days, um one of our design team records a Loom video. It's like, "Hey, here's where I'm

14:06at." Whatever it is. Um maybe I'm delivering new work, whatever. And then we ask customers to send us a Loom video back, right? Um so, it's a a fairly low overhead business in terms of like our extra opex, right? So, things that are not just based on the servicing. So, extra project management or account management, whatever you want

14:26to call it. So, then if I know that I'm getting paid 60,000 a month and the designer costs me 50 Like, you know, uh let's say 15,000? Yeah, well, it's not. It'd be more, but whatever. Yeah. We'll use 15,000 just to be easy. So, 15,000, my profit, right, is 45k. So, look at that over the year. It means for every 150,000 of revenue or

14:48in opex, I'm doing 720,000 revenue. It's pretty good deal. Yeah. Right? Um so, that business is super sexy. Mhm. But then if you look at Hay Friends, that's 10k a month for six videos, it's not like, here's a designer that's handling four projects at a time. It's, okay, are you ready? I It's a lot. I already know. Here is the producer. Okay. Here's the strategist, the writer, the principal animator, editor. And then it goes into the variants of like, do you have somebody that's just editing A-roll and

15:18then passing it to an animator or not? That's what I How much script roll's involved or script writing is involved in the process like if you're a studio customer which is like 14,000 and above you get script writing, right? Um, you know, how much work is going into like the title and the thumbnails?

15:34So much work. It's all that, right? So there's there's a whole team. So a whole pod of people and a pod for Hey Friends would be producer, strategist, in some cases it's strategist {slash} writer. So there's two team members. And then you have a thumbnail designer. And then you have a principal animator. A role and then sub animators, right? So you're talking about somewhere around eight people per pod. You have 10 clients right now. That's insane to me. Yeah, so 10 people per pod and then each pod's going to do somewhere around like let's call it like six to eight customers. We're still trying to find

16:07the right number. That's impressive. That's really You must be a It's cuz we batch. Gotcha. So what we encourage customers to do is to batch record. So like we'll sit down, we'll do the we'll do the the idea generation. We end up picking the best ideas. Obviously like following all these framework. If we can't figure out the right thumbnail and the right title, we just

16:30won't have them do the video, right? And then comes under the hives framework. So how we structure the video and all that stuff. And then we ask the customer to sit down and just record six videos at a time, right? So they'll sit down and do a day or two of filming, send us that stuff and then we go through the process of making sure that they come out like one a day, right? Or I mean to me one a week

16:49roughly. Um, yeah. And that that six makes that interesting now. Yeah. Cuz you're buying time in a way with the lead time with editors. Yeah, it's a great deal. I got I I I actually think it's an incredible [ __ ] value. For sure. We'll charge more for it later. Um, it's tough because like every customer is like how many views am I going to get? It's like we can't guarantee that. Right? All we can guarantee subjective is that we're going to help you make the best

17:19video that you can. Right? Now, if you throw a Patty Galloway in the mix and Patty's like, "Oh, no. Like, I'm not going to try and do his Irish accent." But if Patty's like, "Dude, like, these are the videos that this person should be making, whatever." Maybe that changes, but that's a whole different ball game. Hey Friends is not do strategy right today. We do some competitive analysis to understand like, for example, if you were a Hey Friends customer, we'd look at other people in your space, we'd see what's working for them, what videos have popped off, like how they're averaging views per hour, all that stuff, and then come up with

17:48some ideas, right? Um as you're well aware, that's how the YouTube game works. And then you'd pick the best ideas, we'd help you create the like structure of the script. Right? But then the script is really up to you, cuz obviously like we encourage that you don't write a script. You just you have talking points and you just go. And then

18:07we'll edit the A-roll. Um so yeah, I mean, that's how it works, and I think it's a steal. It make I like how you said the batches though, cuz for me it's like at least 40 to everything you just listed is a solid 40 to 50 hours of work, and I'm like sitting down like hours, like, what is the idea? What

18:21are my competitors making? What works? Then title. The most stressful part of my job is coming up with the [ __ ] title and then the thumbnails. I need five thumbnails per video, like it's so much work, so I see that that makes sense that cuz once you So if you can have five clients per team, right? So five YouTube channels, the person that's doing the research can just go all in on one person one day, and then give you all the ideas on one day, since they're in that whole You end up just like skipping across back and forth, and so it's almost like they're

18:48going through those problems day by day. That's really smart. That makes a lot of sense. Yeah, it's it's tough though. That's a lot of talent to pack into one team, and also making sure that everybody has a good a strong YouTube background and like knows their [ __ ] It's really tough. It's a skill. You can't just throw that [ __ ] to the

19:05Philippines. You know what I mean? It's really tough, and so we've intentionally scaled that business more slowly Yeah. make sure that A, the team is right and B, the process is right. Mhm. But if you get it right, these people will be like they'll never turn in a way cuz one, YouTube is a great business model. We're we're almost there. So if you're like me, you have a software idea and you want to get it started, but you're just intimidated. You don't know how to hire developers, you don't know how to manage a project, getting it designed, you're just unfamiliar with the process. So that's why I actually had my partner

19:37start our agency, WGMY Labs, so we can help you bring your software to life. The development agency where you get a full team dedicated to your project. So you'll get a designer, developer, and a project manager. So all you have to do is list the features you want and kind of tell us how you want it laid out and

19:52then watch it get built week after week. So if you have a software idea and you're ready to get started on it, go to wgmylabs.com and we're happy to help. I think it's Is it just the async communication that has made it the most beneficial where it's like instead of hopping on meetings three times a week, having to be like hand-holding these agency

20:10clients, it's more so like hands-off. Each company has a different level of like high touch, right? So Viral Cuts for example is really low touch. You just make requests, we handle it. There is Slack, but we're phasing it out. Um as you go up kind of the food chain of price point it's much more high touch. But the difference is that we don't create variants in how we service, right? So we like to be really on top of communication. I have an expectation with our team that a customer hears from us every single [ __ ] day, right? Even if we're not sharing new work cuz we have a 48-hour

20:47grace period, I still want somebody sending a message and saying like, "Hey, here's where we're at." Just email? Slack or email. Slack. Okay. Or just updating like an Asana ticket, whatever it is. Okay. Are you guys using like the Kanban like Trello boards to communicate tasks like Brett or No. Uh we do for Viral Cuts. Um I don't know how much longer that's going to last. We're currently building our own tool internally. Um, but everything internal for us is powered by Linear. Is there any motive to make a productized agency due to the MRR vis- and ability to like exit with

21:18higher multiples than a typical agency? It's certainly a benefit, right? Like if you can keep reasonably low churn for productized agency, uh, I think you're definitely going to earn higher multiples than a traditional like SOW based agency. Um, but for us, like I don't really have intentions of selling any of the businesses. Um, we we are structured in a way that would allow us to sell off

21:42pieces of them if we wanted to. But we really intend on just leveraging the free cash flow and holding them long term. So for you, this is kind of like a private equity vision in a way? Yeah. And so you had this term that I liked, earned advantages. And this is something that I think people kind of discount or feel entitled

22:03to. But in business, it's all about having your advantages, and you became very aware of that over the last decade as in your career. And so that's why you see the creator led opportunity is so important. And your operating ability. And so I'm curious, I've just like want to know how you came to this conclusion and what you think the next 20 years You ever read Titan, Rockefeller's

22:21biography? I'm not comparing myself to Rockefeller. We're not even close. Um, but when you read Titan or you learn a lot about Rockefeller, you learn just how much he had the entire world by the balls, right? Like I mean, everything from like they went and negotiated bulk shipping contracts with the railroads. And then they'd go to their competitors because they weren't they weren't supplying enough oil, right? At the time, to actually handle the capacity that they were trying to ship. So they'd go to the railroad and say, "Hey, we're going to ship a thousand barrels a week or whatever it is, right?" But maybe

22:57they're only producing like a hundred. So they'd go to all all competitors and say, "Okay, you're going to ship with us because we're going to give you better rates and then things are going to move smoothly, you're going to have higher profit margins, whatever it is." Over time, as he grew his business, he was able to manipulate that because he'd say, "Okay, well, you're kind of shipping through our deal, so I know exactly how much oil

23:20you're producing. As my output increases and I need less of your oil on my trains to get this rate, I can now squeeze you cuz if I take away these discounted shipping rates, your margins get hit. I know that's going to happen and now I have an advantage to come and just like buy

23:38you." Um so they did this thing called the Southern Improvement and basically like over the span of like a week, Rockefeller bought basically every oil refinery in Cleveland. And then, we're not going to get into it, but like that got dissolved cuz it was going to be this huge issue with antitrust, they had to scrap it, but the damage was done. And then he went to Pennsylvania, did the same thing, like, "Hey, you saw what happened over there, I'm going to do this." His entire career, he just stacked up unfair advantage after unfair advantage, even going to the point where he had like the railroads like totally

24:08by the balls. And then they came with like the idea that we're not going to put them on drums and then load them onto trains, we're just going to have, you know, like the modern, you know, oil container, right? We're going to ship with that on the train. He produced them all. And then the ones that were in the market, he bought them all. So the

24:24railroads had to get them from him. And then the pipelines, like it's one thing after another. And when you read that, you're like, this guy was able to win so like the advantage he had over his competitors, over the market, was so insane because he stacked up every unfair advantage that he possibly could. And if you look at that in business, it's like, why wouldn't you want to do

24:48that? If every person is trying to launch an agency by like having a flashy website and like getting some cool case studies and then and like 100 agencies are chasing Apple to get scraps when the majority of the budget's going to Accenture, right? Like it's not a game I want to play. So, why wouldn't I just take as much distribution as I could, right? And throw that at a problem and then just profit, right? So, I mean, I'm trying to play the game to win as much as possible and one of the best ways for us to do that is to just continue stacking up those unfair

25:26advantages. And what I get upset about is when people are like, "Oh, you're cheating." It's like, well, yeah, I am, but I earned it, right? Like I'm not doing anything that anybody else couldn't do. I'm just doing what like my career has led me to. It's just the lessons that I've learned over 15 years of doing this and like my particular set of experiences where I was like, this makes sense for me to do. Why wouldn't I? You have like killer energy. Like I can just like sense it right now and I'm so impressed by it and so I really want to understand like the long-term

25:56strategy cuz I feel like you're at the point where you're thinking like 3, 5, 10 years out, especially with that Rockefeller example. When you're most people just think I need to make more oil and try to sell it where in that lead time for him before he can actually do that, he's like making other strategic deals. And so I would love to hear how you see these things playing out and how is this

26:14going to be your ship-squeezing moment? Yeah. Dude, you know what's funny? When it comes to the long term I truthfully yeah, I want to make a lot of money. Like I think that's cool. Um but I really just want to work with people that inspire me and that I get energy from and I want to do whatever the [ __ ] I want to do every day, right? Like that's it. And for me right now, that's building things. I love building something from zero to one and scaling it. Like nothing excites me more than just being like, "We should build that business cuz we see an opportunity." and then 30 days

26:52later it's in market, and you know, within 30 days after that it's doing, you know, 83k MRR, whatever. Um that's insane. Like, why wouldn't I do that as much as I can? So, today, like, that's what I'm focused on. Long term, I just want to there's so many things that excite me, like, so many businesses that excite me, and I used to have this idea to where it was like, oh, I don't know what I'm going to build, cuz I don't have like

27:16the big idea. Mhm. Right? And I got to a point where I was like, [ __ ] it, dude. I don't need a big idea. Like, I'm good at building businesses. I'm good at building a network just based on like authenticity. Why don't I just put those two things together, and just go and like acquire anything that I think is making a dollar today, and I can turn that into five. Right? And so, you know, that's our plan. Really, like,

27:41Sahil spent years in PE. Um you know, he knows way more about that world than I do. Um but together with like his kind of background there, his network, and then like our operational ability, just use the free cash flow, invest in, build, or buy businesses that excite us, and plan to grow and hold them long term, and own 100% of it as we do it. It's interesting that this tide is turning. I feel like the glorified raising 20 million, then have a billion-dollar exit, or whatever, is like really fantasized in our era. And now it seems like it's shifting, cuz I'm consuming some of those

28:18content as well. It makes way more sense to just make a lot of profitable cash-flowing businesses with the goal to hold, and you probably make better decisions along the way. Yeah. Like, I'm a [ __ ] idiot. Like, I feel like I have a a a far greater chance of taking my time and compounding assets over time by just making smart decisions to buy businesses that I understand. And again, like, I'm not trying to go from one to a billion. I'm

28:45I'm trying to turn a dollar into five. If I can do that time and time again for 10 years, I think I'll be in a good spot. And so productized agencies have just been like that's your game at this point. Get the unfair edge, you know you're good operator, get the distribution with these people, and they have an audience that's much more dense, so the leads are going to be way more qualified. I just knew that there was one thing that was like really central to me. Whatever I did next, I didn't want to be Sisyphus. I didn't want to like push the boulder of customer

29:10acquisition up the hill for all eternity. I wanted to make that easy. And my theory was like, if I could solve distribution, I could do anything. Mhm. But it was either a great decision or a stupid one. When Sahil and I were talking about starting this business, it was like, well, how much money should we invest? Should we invest like a 100,000 each or a quarter million each

29:31or whatever? And I was like, let's invest zero. I was like, you know, we had been kicking around the idea of taking our design team and doing like a productized offering with our design team. And I was like, let's just go build productized services because my bet is that if we have more distribution than anybody else in that market, we could probably make a decent amount of money pretty quickly. And we started doing the math and we're like, look, if we can get 0.001% of a creator's audience to convert, we could probably make a fair amount of

30:03money, right? Yeah. And so we ran that at scale. It was like, oh, we could get to 25 million in ARR in 18 months if we did X, Y, and Z. And so that was the path that we went down, and you know, we're five months in, we've launched five businesses, we're doing about a little we're doing a

30:18little north now of 5 million revenue. Um it literally is going like perfectly to plan, which is kind of terrifying, cuz like Yeah, I know what going to blow up in my [ __ ] face? Um but so far so good. It's a compounding of like sharp decisions now, so hopefully that is based on from your experience, but Well, we've had to intentionally slow growth, too. That's what I was going to ask you about next. Like you have to be I'm sure you're spending more time qualifying the right customers in the sense of just accepting everybody and it's more so they fit this model and you

30:48can be more selective since you have that consistent lead flow now. Is that kind of helped clean things up or what do you mean by slowing down? Yeah, I mean that's a piece of it like everybody in business like talks about your ICP. Like who's your you know ideal customer profile? Like what's your what's your avatar? All this stuff and it's like yeah that's a great thing to have, right? You need that to scale a business long term. But if your business is five months old like Hey Friends don't know. is two months old. I don't

31:18know. Like you know how much data I would have to collect, how many customers we would have to work with to figure that out? So I think for us like slowing down growth means intentionally just not onboarding customers. So we'll artificially limit a company's growth. Like Hey Friends for example, again like I think there's a there's about 2.5

31:37million right now of MRR. a lot of people. just sitting on the waitlist and if you look through that waitlist you'd be shocked. You'd be like oh I know this person they have 10 million subscribers. I know this person whatever. Like there's a lot of demand for that business but we've intentionally kept it it small. Like today it does about 100k MRR or ramp it

31:57up to 200k by the end of the year. And the reason why is that we have to maintain quality. Yeah it's like that's 10 customers, right? Pretty much 10 at 10. 10 customers, yeah. I can't see that's like I do YouTube and there's just so much to it and so and like I am not an operator and so I don't understand how you can even handle 10. I

32:15can barely handle myself over here. That's 60 videos a month. So I was curious like is that are all cuz all of your agencies are like top tier quality. Like the design agency is insane. The animations are like you just it just looks and feels professional as [ __ ] But mainly I want to ask you so

32:34Assembly is the main company. Yeah. Assembly is the holding company. The holding Yeah. And so you have these different productized agencies. I was curious how is it like one group of people that you can use in different places, or is it like very like segmented? Good question. So, Assembly is the holding company. Um we'll talk structure real quick. So,

32:55Assembly is an LLC that Sahil and I own. Okay? And then Assembly Ventures owns C corps, Yes. right? So, there's like an Assembly Yes. So, there's an Assembly Video C corp that then owns LLCs that are treated as disregarded entities. Mhm. So, for example, Hey Friends is an LLC, Viral Cuts is an LLC, Key Frames is an LLC that are all owned by Assembly Video, right? So, Assembly Video is the

33:23C corp. Is the C corp. And then Ventures is the holdco. Ventures is the holdco. All of the team members for each of those companies work for the C corp. Got you. Right? So, they're all on payroll through the C corp, all of the opex runs through the C corp at the aggregate level, right? Why we do that is that I want optionality in the future. So, Sahil, like from his PE days, likes to say that Assembly is, what does he say? He says it's a bond with a call option. Meaning it's it's earning, right? It's earning money, whatever, but there's a call option to like exit or do something

33:55bigger in the future, right? Which is it's so PE. Mhm. Um you know, so for example, if I ever wanted to look at our video businesses alone. Which I mean, together just our video businesses, that's a really great business. Mhm. Um it's very profitable. say video, do you mean like the YouTube and Viral Cuts? So, Key Frame, Viral Cuts, YouTube. And there's going to be a couple more. Got

34:17you. Um but if I looked at that business alone, like what if somebody came and they're like, "We love what you're doing at video. We want to buy it." Well, I could just sell them the C corp. Nice. Right? Or if I had, for example, Hey Friends, I keep talking about it cuz it's it's on my mind cuz we're growing it now. Um it's going to be a big business. A K Friends is going to be an eight-figure business probably

34:37within 12 months. Um if I wanted to raise capital to accelerate that business or if I wanted to bring on other partners or other creators, I have the optionality to do that at the LLC level while protecting C corp group. Right? Um but if I ever wanted to do something with the C corp like just raise a deal just for that. Say like, "Hey, this is going great. We're going to accelerate these companies to let's say 15 mil and maybe buy other video businesses to

35:03accelerate the flywheel there. Mhm. We're going to sell shares as a private C corp valuing it based on X. I can do that. And I've never touched the ownership structure of the holding company, right? And then our design's the same way. So, we have a C corp for the design group that owns Bitesize off menu and then some other agencies that we're looking at acquiring now. They'll be owned by C corp. And we'll kind of keep doing that pattern. Um and then and then what's what gets it like what makes us all So, if I can complicate it, too, is it the C corp or the LLC at the very top is actually

35:34owned by two S corps. So, No way. It's a whole thing, yeah. Okay. Like Sawhill has an S corp. I have an S corp that owns it for tax efficiency reasons, obviously. So, like side S corps that are kind of like your own pass-through entities. Yeah, instead of like Hunter Hammonds owning Yeah. That's how me and my partner have our

35:50set up, too. the same deal. Yeah. Okay, cool. But so, there's fluidity between the video team. There's fluidity between the design team, but not really across C corps. Correct. Okay. Yeah. So, like if an editor works for Viral Cuts Mhm. um but we think that they're like going to be better for long form, we can move them to Hey Friends without having to change any paperwork. Makes our life super easy. Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. So, you're like categorizing them, but still fluidity in between the

36:16category. Exactly. Okay, awesome. Basically, your hold co, then you have C corps underneath, and then each C corp is like a category. So, video, design. Yeah. Then you have LLCs within each of those that people can be fluid through. Now, my question is now since you have creators involved, so like Dan, Ali, all these people, do they have equity or do is it rev share? I'm not going to

36:37tell you. Okay. Deal. Okay. Then are they I I I see that. Let me So, let's talk about it real quick. We have confidentiality agreements. So, we just won't say. I understand. Yeah, but what I will say is for people looking at how can I work with creator? So, yeah, I gave a talk yesterday on like basically our whole playbook. Um you know, Cody was hosting this super cool conference in Austin. I was lucky enough to speak at it, talked about it. And then somebody asked a really interesting question at the end. They were like you know, obviously everybody asks like, how would how can I partner with a

37:09creator? Mhm. Cuz like everybody is like, how can I get Sahil to be my partner, right? It's like, well, you can't, right? Um A, I'll kill you. Uh no. But like, you can't, right? Killer energy, dude. I'm telling you. But there is we're talking about density, right? There is a ton of great creators that might have like 25,000 followers on Twitter or something or a small YouTube channel, but it's a super dense audience. Mhm. And they're known for a particular topic, whether it's like Webflow Mhm. or um what's getting big these days? Uh like Framer, for example, or no-code, Bubble. It It doesn't matter what it is, right? There are so many

37:48small creators that have a super dense audience that looks at them as an expert on that topic. You can go build businesses with them. You don't need to go build a business with a Sahil Bloom or a Sam Parr, for example. You want to look at product audience fit. And if they have really meaningful product audience fit with like where your skill sets are, it doesn't really matter if their audience isn't isn't in the millions. You can build a a good cash flowing business there. And if you do that, I think there are three three levers that you can pull. You can pull equity, right? Which is fine. Um but

38:22it's slow. It might not incentivize a creator that much because what are the odds that you actually exit the business? You can pull the lever of revenue share, which is more meaningful, right? Sharing revenue, but then like what's the right amount to make it interesting? And then what does that do to your margins? And then the third

38:40obviously is like affiliate deals. Putting together really great affiliate deals is a no-brainer, I think, if you're interested in the space. So, what we have as a model I think is It's like it's like The Godfather. It's like, "I made him an offer he can't refuse." Or they can't refuse, whatever. It's an offer that's just so simple and so direct and so good that creators

39:03like, "Okay." Cuz it's basically passive income, right? The very meaningful passive income because of the scale that we're we're working at. But the other thing too is like in our position A, like make no mistake, all of our creator relationships stem from Sahil. Creators are like a very peer-to-peer like game. Oh, 100%. It is an insular community. It is like a no new friends type of deal. Um yeah. It It It It honestly like I feel very naive not knowing that going into it. Like 6 months ago, I didn't know like how insular Well, me maybe insular is the wrong word, but I didn't realize like how connected it was,

39:43right? Um and it's deeply deeply connected. Um but that is also interesting because again, in this whole thing of like, "I want to build a creator-led business." If I [ __ ] up Like for example, if I [ __ ] up with Sam Parr, everyone knows. Everyone knows. Like the repercussions are huge. If we If we let a creator's reputation be diminished just an iota of

40:04a percent, it's a big big deal. So, there's a lot of work that we have to do to like maintain the integrity of our work, maintain their reputation. Do you know how many shitty customers we've had over the past 5 months cuz we've had a lot, right? Especially for like Varicose, for example. You might have a shitty customer that's like, "Oh, this sucks. I want a refund." And it's like, "Why does it suck?" "Well, I didn't get a million views on this video." It's

40:28like, "Dude, you have 10,000 followers. Like, you're not going to get a million views on a video." And And we have a policy that's like, "No refunds." Good. Good. But you know what I have to do? I have to give a refund. I hope people don't exploit this cuz we just changed our policy. We will not

40:43give you a refund now. Um but I have to give a refund cuz like I don't want to damage I don't want reputational risk. Right. So, we've done a lot of that stuff. Um but anyways, so like the the point of this is that we'd go originally Sahil talked to friends and they'd be like, "Oh, who's going to run this business?" And they'd be like, "Hunter. I vouch for him. He's a 12 out of 10. Like, let's do it." And then I talked to them and they're like, I It's like, "Dude, I've had two exits. I've built big businesses. I've just done it privately, right? Which is a the biggest

41:12mistake in my career by none." Um and now it's different. It's where it's we've built in public. It's so obvious the things that we've done cuz like our creator partners are like, "Oh, this is great." Like, I get a wire or, you know, I get hooked up on equity or whatever it is. Like, things are great. Um and now creators come to us. Like, I had a guy with a million uh followers on Twitter just cold DM'd me like 2 days ago being like, "Let's build something." Right? So, they just

41:38come to us now. Um yeah, it works really well. It's powerful. And so, that's my advice. If you want to do If you're an operator and you're world-class, first off, you have to be world-class cuz nothing that we care more than our reputations. We have to publicly say this and we get the Like, if you [ __ ] up, you don't really deal with the fall back as much as the creator does on outward-facing. So, if you are trying to get in this, it's really key that you do have a creator friend that can like vouch for you within this community because it's almost like the whole outside world like

42:06parasitic. Like, everyone's trying to sponsor our channel. Everyone's trying to like use our audience in a way. And so, that's why it's so like we're not very trusting cuz I think a lot of creators have been abused by that. So I have I was wondering on this, have you ever considered We were talking about info products being a good business

42:19model before this podcast. Courses, yeah. Yeah, so have you ever considered Have you ever thought about That's kind of how Ali's works, right? He has the YouTube What YouTube Hard Time YouTuber Academy, which is great. So many big YouTubers have come out of that. Yeah. And so is that something that you've seen work better? Like people are going through that academy, that's almost doing a lot of the educational process for you. They know everything that goes into it and then you guys just like the handoff. Is that more effective of a funnel than like say maybe the animations who just like see a YouTuber and they want animations? How

42:51have you thought about info products and courses being looped into agencies? Cuz I see that being I feel like they can go hand in hand. Yeah, we've thought about courses. Um like not me or Sahil making them, but but courses as a business. Um and it's really really interesting. Um I know some peo- I know I know a couple guys that own like basically ghost course building

43:14businesses. 60 million a year in revenue. I've I thought about this. Explain that. Yeah, I mean it is what it is. Like they um partnered with a couple of creators. Now Now granted like for this it's more like cringe. So like, you know, like They want to be behind the scenes. Yeah, like financial courses where like all they do is like hawk the idea of like, you know, here's how you like bur Like, you know, that's Bird calls. Yeah, that [ __ ] Um what is it? Um buy

43:50remodel refinance repeat. Mhm. Like bur. Um anyways. I've never heard that. That's interesting. It's for real estate, yeah. Um but uh I like courses. I think that like a great example of courses is what um Brett from Design Joy's done. Yeah. Um like Design Joy is a million top line, whatever, and then he built the course for like productize yourself. I think that's cool, right? Um so I think there's a lot of instances like that. It's really

44:14interesting or the way you guys do it. Um or the way Justin Welsh does it. What's crazy to me is like Justin, um it's weird that like people like in a business setting will come out and be like, "I bought your course. I loved it." Mhm. Like you'll hear that multiple times a day if you hang out with Justin. It's pretty neat. Um but for us, courses, um we think there is a business to be built around building courses, but at the highest level. Like we're talking like Masterclass level of course building. Um but in intimate, authentic way with creators. I just wonder if people come into like your

44:45YouTube agency and they like are getting traction, they're very popular. Then like you could like almost like partner on the back of them. We'll shoot your course videos. We'll make the platform for you to push people to. We'll set up payments and everything. back to the vertical integration, right? Like if I have the ability to essentially like supercharge the growth of anyone's brand and then all the creative power behind it to like do

45:06that, why wouldn't I? Right. Mhm. But you have to have the expert in the field to sell the course. So it'd have to be like some sort of partnership. We look We look at it as the same way that we build businesses. Mhm. Interesting. Like I might bundle. So, um part of the idea of of the way we work. Maybe I'm going to give this away, but like if somebody wants to do this and

45:27compete with us, bring it on. Bring it on. Um so like Michael Ovitz, um you know, started uh CAA. And he was like the most powerful man in Hollywood. Talent agency. Yep, yep. Talent agency. And what was so beautiful about their model is that they flipped the way Hollywood worked. So, typically the studio would have all the power and they would, you know, put the creative together and figure this out and be the

45:54distribution. What CAA started doing is saying, "Look, we're going to package a deal. So, like Jurassic Park for example, uh Ovitz was like best friends with Michael Crichton and he wrote Jurassic Park and then he's like, "Oh, this is a movie. This is going to be like the big thing." So, they went to Steven Spielberg. They're like, "It has to be Steven Spielberg to direct this movie, right?" They got Steven Spielberg and then they got the producer and then they started lining up the talent. So, by time they took this to the studio, it was done. It was a package deal. Like, this is how the

46:26movie's going to work. This is how we're going to make it. We just need you to give us the money and be the distribution and you'll get all your profit. Whatever. Um, and here's how we structure the deal. And so, that's how he became so powerful. That's like how he flipped Hollywood on its head and then who's the guy Ari Emanuel like ran with that and went nuts and maybe he's a

46:43billionaire, I don't know. We look at our business the same way. Got you. Right? So, we're going to package the entire thing Mhm. and we're going to look at the creator um, as a partner but also as the distribution, right? So, they don't have to worry about much else. They don't have to worry about building the business. They don't have to worry about recruiting the talent. They don't have to worry about anything. Um, they know that like we got it. Mhm. Um, and so I think you can do

47:05the same thing with courses. Mhm. Yeah. So, you can package the right course. Um, you can find the right talent to help build like an amazing offering and then all you really need the creator for is essentially to be like the voice of authority. Record the content, be the distribution, they make hundreds of thousands if not a million dollars off of selling it and they didn't have to do anything. It's a

47:28beautiful proposition. the leverage on your end and just literally all you need is a green light and then you get a higher percentage as well. Yeah. So, instead of the talent agents waiting for the producers in the movies to hope they pick your actor, you get the actor, get the director, get everything and say, "Hey, it's ready." Yeah. It's bundled up, ready to go. If you don't want it, I'm going to take it down to I'm going to take it to them

47:49down the street. Mhm. So, do you want to lose this opportunity or you want to go? That's clever. Yeah. So, I've been using Dave Ramsey as an example a lot for like what I see my creator business as becoming. Right? Yeah. And you look at his website and he has like these verified like agencies or verified like more like Churchill Mortgage and he has back end deals with them and it's like wow, you really can't have like every possible

48:13service or vertical in your industry. You're just that one like critical point in the middle and it all just springs out. And so it seems like you are like conglomerating a lot of those which I think is really clever. Do you ever think of it like that? Not in the Dave Ramsey way. Um Why do you think he's a baller? Why do

48:32you like him? I just he's like this like do you know much about like I watched one podcast of him. And his website's I feel really rusty on the details. Um what he lives in like Chattanooga, Tennessee or something like that. Yeah. Um Started in radio. He owns like an incredible amount of commercial real

48:54estate. Right. I think he's a billionaire. Pretty close, I'm sure. Um and has no debt and he just stacked just compounded it all over time. Um it's crazy that he seemingly has accrued so much net worth without really ever having to take on like a lot of leverage. Um and then I like that he just has this like super popular radio show and like just sits there and like writes down

49:16numbers and gives financial advice. Yeah, he's a baller. It's like the original creator but he was on the radio. Yeah. There wasn't a lot of options, you know? And so like looking at him like wow, this guy has like 30 years to really figure this out. He's like everybody's financially wise grandpa. 100%. It's awesome. Okay, so you didn't make a difference between like an affiliate and a referral with these people. Which is like kind of pretty

49:36important distinction. Because affiliate would mean it directly comes from their audience where a referral would mean or not referral but rev share, sorry. Rev share, my bad. Rev share and affiliate. Affiliate would be like it comes directly from them through a specific link where uh rev share would mean like no matter where the lead comes from. Like I've heard of you just from your personal brand now. And if I need short form, I would go to Viral Cuts, not because I watched, even though I do watch Sam Parr, but for that example, like I know who you are. I need short form. I could just come directly to you. Right. And if

50:06it was an affiliate deal, Sam wouldn't get a cut of that. Right. But if it's a rev share, then he would because it's like a partnership. So, very important distinction for anyone trying to do a creator-led business to make sure you understand the incentive. And that's just a game of leverage based on the creator. It is a game of leverage. And it's a game of understanding like what is the leverage that you have to pull as a business owner? Like if you already have a business, and let's say it's profitable, right? Uh and you're growing at a decent rate. Let's call it 10%. I

50:31don't know. Um if you want to work with a creator, maybe an affiliate deal is better structure, right? Especially a smaller creator. An affiliate deal might be better structure cuz then it's one-to-one, right? They're getting paid on deals that they've set up specifically. If it's rev share, yeah, you're basically It doesn't matter where it

50:49came from, you're sharing that revenue. For us, what's interesting, because again, the model for us of creator of like creator-led and then product audience fit, I'm essentially betting that if I pick the right business and the right creator, I'm just creating money out of thin air, right? I'm I'm building a business that had no reason to exist other than that dynamic of like here's the idea, here's the creator. So, maybe rev share does make sense for me in that situation cuz like the business

51:18wouldn't have existed anyways. And I would guess just from the inner workings, on average, the creator partnership accelerates the business by about 3 to 4 years. In terms of overall trajectory of like how much lead acquisition can you have, how does it affect your recruiting, the general trust that gets attached to it. So, like if we launch a YouTube agency, and you don't know me, maybe I have 15,000

51:47followers on Twitter, whatever it is. And I'm known as like a badass operator, whatever. But I don't have anything to do with YouTube. Right. So, you're going to be like, "What case studies do you have? Who have you worked with? What results do you have?" Whatever. It's going to take me years to compound meaningful case studies or reputation around that business that makes us trustworthy for you to be like, "Yeah,

52:08let's do this." But the second it's Ali Abdal's YouTube agency, all that is built in. Right? And so, I think if you're going to go down this road, you just have to understand that leverage and you have to understand where it applies to your business. And now you're responsible for Ali's reputation in a way as well by delivering on that service. So, trust is the biggest thing with agencies and I understand what you mean by speed like it fast-tracks it by three or four years because most agencies are going to grow by word of mouth as well. So, you're getting an immediate injection and the trust is baked in and then you operate,

52:37it's just like the perfect most well-oiled machine. Yeah. That's genius. And then have you ever considered like maybe if this guy like you like his personality, you think he's all about it, he's serious that like almost taking equity in a channel, like if you like like a venture studio in a way? Okay, so yeah, maybe you've thought about it. Okay, cool. I I think that You have a newsletter? Mhm. 80,000 people. 80,000? What what media platform

53:05do you not like are you not killing? Twitter. Other Twitter, yeah. Do you think there is potential in your your platform, your brand to um build a bigger media property on another channel or something like that? Or expand from what you have? Okay, cool. So, to me, if you look at the flywheel of businesses that we have, right? Our flywheel,

53:30um we think of it in three parts. Strategy, execution, amplification. Mhm. Okay. Um today, everything that we've been doing falls into execution, right? We haven't done any like crazy strategy offerings. We haven't done anything around amplification. And so, what we want to do is make sure that the next So, I I see this whole thing of like 12 companies in 12 months, which like Crazy. [ __ ] I don't know why I said that, but like whatever. I'm

53:56sticking to it. Um I didn't launch anything in October. Uh-oh, you got to make up for lost time here. I launched two in September. There you go. So, you you bought yourself a month. Yeah, we're going to we're going to make up some time. But anyways, um most of those 12 companies are going to be companies that fit into that

54:11flywheel. Okay. Right? So, strategy execution amplification. The reason why is I want the ability to if you think about that is like um like an engine, right? Or or I don't know, a heat-seeking missile. I don't know. I want to be able to point that to whatever, and then there's so much energy and um just like absolute high-quality execution focus on it that it's going to grow. So, if it's a SaaS company, for example, I want everything in-house to do the strategy. I want everything in-house to do um that strategy for the business and the growth of the brand, right? I want to be able to do the brand in-house. I want to be

54:47able to do the site in-house. I want to be able to build a product in-house. I want to be able to market the product in-house. I want the creative talent either in our network or in-house that we've invested in to help grow that business, right? So, I'm trying to vertically integrate every business that we grow in the future by this foundation

55:03of services that we're building today. So, I can start seeing this picture of like how they'll cross-pollinate. So, if you get a business c- business person who starts on YouTube, and they see success with you guys, they have a good experience, like, "Oh, by the way, we also have a design agency if your company wants to rebrand." Oh, we have we have customers that are are uh like there are customers of ours that are customer of every business. So, is that the is that the reason or the stra- strategic decision to do 12 companies in 12 months that you're almost building like these like assembly. And then you have 12 different

55:34sister agencies. And if someone comes into one, they can immediately lead. So, they come in from one creator, Ali, they have YouTube down, you guys execute, and then they could potentially bounce over to another one cuz they need that complimentary service. Is that part of the strategy in a way? That's not No, that's not the reason why. It's It's a

55:52wonderful second order effect, right? But it's not the reason why. I think the reason why is that I didn't want to do something small. Mhm. Right? Like, I turned down a big number to go and do this. And so, part of the deal to myself was like, I need to make sure that I can get back to where I was or bigger within less than 3 years. Mhm. And then, I think too, it's just this notion of having

56:17like ambitious [ __ ] goals. Right? Like, what What is it? Like Sean and Sam say like no small boy stuff, right? Like, it's just the idea like you and I were joking around before we started taping this about private jets, right? Like, I want a [ __ ] jet, dude. And own it. Yeah. And I'm not going to get I'm cool

56:33with NetJets, by the way. But I'm not going to get there by running like a productized service, right? I'm going to get there by compounding value over time. And so, when we look at trying to own every ounce of what we're doing and not really raising capital, I need a lot of free cash flow to go and take really big bets that can compound quickly, right? And so, the whole 12 companies in 12 months, A, I don't know,

56:57it just it flows really well. It does. Good tagline. But it also seemed like this audacious idea of like, if we commit to launching 12 companies in 12 months, we know that we have to maintain a pace that's [ __ ] crazy. And what are the second order effects? Like, if that's the forcing function to know that like we're going to move really, really hard, what does that really do to the business overall? What does that do to our mindset? What does that do to the way that we build the business, the way we think about business, the way we think about stacking leverage and unfair

57:28advantages? It has like I don't know, dude. It's like steroids, right? And so it's like business steroids, literally. It's the whole idea that like where's the whole thing that Admiral Raven or McRaven or whatever his name is says about making your bed in the morning, right? Like if you make your bed in the morning, you've conquered like a mundane boring task, but you've told yourself that you can like keep doing that all day. I think it's the same thing about building businesses. If we know that we're going to launch a business in the next 30 days, like we're in that mindset of creation, we're in that mindset of like

57:58hustle, of going from zero to one. It keeps us scrappy. Uh that's important. It's so important and it it allows us to just move really quickly, but yeah, underneath it all, it allows us to accelerate that flywheel to begin to stack up leverage and vertically integrate and do bigger and bigger things. So with each one of these, can they you're scaling slow, but do you see a cap to how far they can scale? Cuz I'm assuming that's what Design Pickle ran into and why they like had some quality issues or they hired some not so competent designers. Maybe that's a tough word, but do you understand what

58:31I'm saying? Like is there a Since you're scaling slow, do you think that means you can scale further just in general cuz you're focused on process or do you think there is like a cap to each one of these? So you there's a cap. Tell me like where you think that would be and why. I don't know where it is yet. Like we're

58:46too young. Um like Viral Cuts for example, maybe the cap is like maybe the cap is like 5 million. Mhm. Right? I don't know. Um does it make sense to me with like how prevalent AI is getting that a short-form video editing company can like grow past 5 or 6 million? It's possible. Um we're certainly continuing to grow. Like obviously like this was the best month the business ever had, right? Like

59:14everything's growing. But inherently there's going to be a ceiling for some of these businesses and I'm okay with that. What do you think that is though? Like is it just like you cannot manage enough people to get quality assurance? Like there isn't that much talent out there. Cuz I do have a question on Viral Cuts is how do you even compete in cuz there's so many people doing short form

59:33agencies and there's so many [ __ ] ones. Name them. Name them? Yeah. Interesting. What do you mean? Name them. Like just name the short form agencies? Yeah. Like how many people are doing it? Are you asking me or you saying this? I'm I'm asking you. Like how many short there are I don't know a single I could

59:47say media scaling.com. Sorry for promoting a competitor, but you asked me to. Media scaling. ClipCo. Those are the only two I know. And then Viral Cuts. just said there's so many. Well, I get a million DMs. Yeah. Okay, but you just said there's so many. You can only name two. Yeah. One of them I've heard of. Off menu actually

1:00:04designed the Clip site. Um. Long story there. But like I think if somebody's looking at short form video, Viral Cuts is the biggest. Mhm. Right? So um I think that you know, if we continue at the rate we're going with that business, it it I'm sure it's the biggest short form video editing agency there is right

1:00:26now. Um but the question is just like how much demand can that market support? Like for example, uh I think Clip is doing somewhere around like I don't know, 1.5 to 2 million revenue. Like how much of their revenue do I have to take for Viral Cuts in order to keep growing in that space, So you think it's a

1:00:43market share thing? No I'm not saying it is. I'm saying is that is that Is that a problem? Is that a problem, right? Um and not not that I want to do that. Like I have no interest in their customers. We're coming for you guys. No, Henry and Henry and Dylan are super sweet guys. Um I don't know I don't know Dylan that well, but Henry's a super sweet guy. Um and they're doing something else now anyways and I think they use Clip to fund it. But like that's a different approach too. That's what we do with our dev agency. You sit

1:01:08to fund. That's a different approach. Like I think making a mistake like I I come into these markets and I'm like yeah, I I want to You want to monopolize it. Like that is Yeah. That is should be your mentality as a A entrepreneur. Absolutely. So we point a pistol Yeah, right. That's why we live in America, dude. Like I'll have people on my channel be like, "This isn't as easy as you say it is." I'm like, "There's no such thing as an easy business." Like you This [ __ ] ain't easy. You need to play to [ __ ] win or you shouldn't play at

1:01:34all. Go work for somebody. So what do you think the Design Pickle problem was? I don't know much about Design Pickle. Okay, just do you think that it's just too big, not enough quality assurance, very low quality? Yeah, they have low ticket clients, so. I'm going to say this and maybe I'm totally wrong, but I isn't it like just

1:01:48a few hundred bucks a month? Yeah, it's low quality like Like super low quality restaurants. Low Not a good business to be in. I mean, I'm sure it's a great business. a lot of revenue, but probably low margin, I would have to guess. Yeah, like here's the thing, like at the end of the day, like I don't know who runs Design Pickle. Shout out to them, whoever they are. Like if you're running a profitable business, [ __ ] You're winning. You're winning, right? I'm obsessed with the way things look. I think if you run a service to where like you're producing low quality stuff that doesn't look good, then it doesn't

1:02:12interest me. If it's a good business for you, great. But if it's producing low quality stuff, whatever. That's why I had you on the podcast. Like the person you met told me who you were, I looked I'm like, "Woah." Like he's not only this is the best literally the best design agency branding slogan in your tweet Twitter bio, like everything I've ever seen. He has four of these that are

1:02:30all equally the same quality." Five. Sorry, at the time at the time it was four, my bad. But my question is, how are you how do you think about differentiating yourself in such a competitive market as Shortform? Other than I know the creator letter is like a huge cuz you get the trust. That makes a lot of sense, but even your like I can feel the quality. I don't. I just I just think about I think about having more evidently uh higher quality work and having more

1:02:57distribution. I don't need to differentiate myself if I have wider distribution and the work is just like really good. Mhm. So how do you the work that's really good are I would love to hear like your is your hiring just from network? Since you have a really strong network now? Um Like you've worked in the an earned advantage that you have is you've worked in the space for 13 years. You know the big players. Yeah. And it's like accessible to you? For our higher-end, uh, like hiring and talent, yes. Um, for

1:03:26like our short-form video stuff, no. That's all referral driven based on our animators. Um, and and we're I'm pretty ruthless about like getting rid of low-performing talent. Mhm. Um, like there's there's no worse thing a boss can do than tolerate Tolerate. low performance, right? And so, I think uh, last month we probably churned out like seven or eight team members cuz like if you look at the the pace we've moved, we've had to hire a lot. Like we've hired close to 70 people over the past like

1:03:57four months, I think. Um, so there's there's a huge scale-up of the team. And like we're not playing some game to where like I'm interviewing everybody. I don't have time for that. Um, so inevit- like inevitably we're going to get some lower talent that's going to like maybe just test really well, interview really well, whatever it is, but then maybe they are slow or uh, they can't do creative that well or

1:04:21it takes them too long, whatever it is. Um, so we'll get rid of them. But all of our best talent, especially in video, has come from referrals, from us like incentivizing our team members to refer people. What is the incentive? Like a bonus? Well, there's actually two things. So, um, we have a huge team in the

1:04:36Philippines and they're awesome. Um, the first thing is that we just pay more. Period. Yeah, right? Um, a lot of our team members are probably making double with us than they than they were before. Um, and the first thing is cuz like people treat that in a very predatory way. They're like, "Oh, [ __ ] it. Like race to the bottom again. Like we'll pay

1:04:55these people 800 bucks a month." Which is crazy to me. Um, so if you're making 800 bucks a month, I might look at you and say, "Hey, like we're going to be like way uh, better about balance and I'm going to pay double." Right? It falls on me then to just run a really good business so I'll have a margin, right? And I'm willing to play that game. I think that's one of our motes, frankly, um it's just like operational competency. Yeah. Um And and so that's a big one. So, they know that they're referring their friend to a place that's going to like treat them better and pay them more, and then

1:05:29they get money on top of it. Mhm. So, it kind of is there them doing a favor to their friend in a way once they've worked with someone who's so And you want to work with your friends. 100%. Like if you like where you work, you want to work with your friends. Mhm. How did you learn operational Not how did you learn that. I don't hear like your origin story, but like I learned the majority of what I know about operational competency from fighting with procurement. Procurement is a [ __ ] We worked with We tried to work with the Fortune 500 company, and oh my god, I'd never want to do that

1:05:59again. So, I think certainly Everest like our first year we did like 350k revenue. And we knew how to design, we knew how to build. Um so, we felt pretty competent about those things, but we didn't know how to sell to big companies. And we knew if we wanted to make a lot of money, we had to

1:06:16go get deals with big companies. So, we recruited this guy named Matt Williams, who's a dear friend of mine to this day. He was the CEO of the um I think I don't even remember the name of the agency, but it was a it was a big like $200 million a year agency that was

1:06:30owned by IPG. Um I don't know why the name's blanking me, but anyways, he came on as like our executive chairman, and I wasn't going to him and saying, "Matt, how do we get customers?" Cuz that's a stupid question to ask. I was going to him and I was saying, "Matt, how do we work with procurement? Like

1:06:47Like teach me how a big company works. It's my job as the entrepreneur to hustle my [ __ ] ass off, be resourceful, and find out how to get in the door, but you tell me once I'm in that door, how do I navigate those hallways? Right. Right? And I think that's what a lot of people screw up that want to be entrepreneurs or want to build a service business or productize. How How get my

1:07:05first customers? Dude, if you can't figure that out, you're [ __ ] Like that's your job, dude. It's your job. And I hate to be harsh, but like There's no answer. Like Just hustle. Figure it out. I tell this to my kids all the time. I have two 14-year-olds. And nothing they do, like if they like are, you know, teenagers and they don't behave or they mouth off, that annoys me. Mhm. But when they're not resourceful, it [ __ ] makes me lose my mind. Like I Like you would do it like they're like a

1:07:343-year-old baby. Like you're not a baby. I have a 6-month-old baby. Okay. Yeah. And when he It's okay. Yeah. But if the 6-month-old isn't resourceful, that's okay. Anyways, so I grew up my mom was a meth head. She was a meth addict. I moved everywhere when I was a kid. My dad is like the sweetest man in the world. He's super intelligent, way smarter than me, but never applied it. Right? He was like a service manager at a car dealership and my dad's like kind of a [ __ ] Like he's he's one of those guys that like just doesn't know how to bite back

1:08:07that last little bit of anger. And so like never made a bunch of money. So like growing up was just super hard. It sucked. I spent a couple of years in juvie when I was a teenager. Like growing up is really tough. I had a kid when I was 18. I was going to say you're

1:08:21not too old and you have 14-year-olds. Yeah, I had a kid when I was 18. Also started my first business when I was 18. Statute of limitations, so here we go. Like I I made like, you know, money selling pot when I was a like a [ __ ] teenager and I was like, okay. Okay. So

1:08:35I had like 70 grand. What I do with it? I started a T-Mobile store. Damn. Yeah. Well, yeah. Damn, you were selling to people. You were selling it. Scale. Anyways, but I was the youngest person ever at the time at least to be like an authorized retailer for T-Mobile. That's so cool. how I became an entrepreneur. And when I was 19, I got custody of my younger brother. I had to sue my grandparents for custody of my younger brother cuz like my grandma was like dying and my grandpa like wanted to go back to Appalachia where like like total hillbillies. You had to grow up fast. I

1:09:06had to grow up real [ __ ] fast. Um and so like my entire life has been the definition of like I have to be resourceful, right? You know, sold my T-Mobile store, started my uh first agency when I was 20. Uh hired my lead engineer, he was my age, we became friends, we started our first startup, we figured out how to like hustle our way into an accelerator. We went to the Brandery, which was the top 10 accelerator at the time. Um and in Cincinnati, raised VC, figured out how to run a company, moved to Chicago, like consulted, like you know, like it's just been resourcefulness

1:09:40like my entire life. And so there's nothing that drives me crazier than when somebody just can't do the work to figure something out. And so for me, that's my biggest thing. I don't know where we're going with this, but there's my story. We're talking about resourcefulness, that's what it is. Getting That was getting your first customer. Yes, that's what it was. Yeah, if you can't figure that out,

1:10:05don't do it. Go get a job. Yeah, literally, like there's only like four things you can do. You can do cold email, you can create content, you can get affiliates, or you can just go out in the world and try to knock on doors and do sales. Like good cold emails do you get? One a year? Two a year? How many good cold uh Twitter DMs do you get? I don't check them. Zero. Zero. Does your

1:10:26assistant check them? Yeah. Yeah. And I haven't heard one this year, so. Yeah. Um I I I I had to let my assistant go recently. Um I'm looking for a new one now, so that's going to happen. But now I'm checking my own Twitter DMs. So DM on Twitter if you want an assistant job. Don't do it. Oh yeah, if you want an assistant job, please DM me. If you're

1:10:42awesome. Like if you're a badass. Um maybe I'll hire a chief of staff, I don't know, but I get so many and I actually look at them cuz they crack me up. They're so bad. Oh, horrible. favorite one is like I see you're building 12 companies in 12 months. Are you staying in shape? It's like people trying to sell like,

1:11:00you know, I got Brian Johnson, brother. I'm good. Yeah. Um and I'm like, "Why would anybody ever respond to this?" Or my favorite's when somebody uh reaches out and tries to be like, "Oh, like you're killing it on Twitter these days. Have you thought about short-form video?" The worst. And I'm like, "Dude, I literally own a

1:11:17short-form video." Do like an inch of research. Those people will like insult me. They're like, "You could be getting way more views." I'm like, Yeah. "Dude, this isn't my job." Yeah. be telling me I could get more views. Yeah. That's the one that they could just send me a short-form example. Like if you are going to make short-form, you could just send me a video. You don't even need to say words. Yeah. And if I like it, I'll use it. Yeah. I don't know, man. I think resourcefulness is underrated. And I think too, like going back to what we've been talking about about like earned advantages, part

1:11:44of the reason that I've been able to stack them up is because of like the way I grew up, like the adversity that I had to go through. And like nothing scares me. My risk tolerance is like through the roof. And I'm willing to just eat whatever [ __ ] sandwich I have to to like go through the work of figuring something out and like trying to get better to scale or better at, you know, at some part of operations that I don't know, or sales, or whatever it is. Like I'm I'm just like scrappy until I die. It's

1:12:12resourcefulness and resilience. Yeah. That's really like the name of the game. Have you back to you going through your uh agencies if you have to do 12 in 12 months, do you I know you got you got asked this in the last podcast, but do you know what the next ones are going to be? Like did you make a list of like 50 potential That might be a lot, but 50 potential like

1:12:29list? know what the next like four businesses are going to be. Yeah? Yeah. And so how do you scope out creators? Like is that like that's like literally the framework like I know the industry, then I need to do creator research, or is it Sahil's like immediate I'm sure if he's not in network already, he can get it. So I'm sure that's not really a

1:12:46problem. Yeah. Um well, for two of them, we already have creators. Uh And then for the other two, one of them will not be creator led. Sort of. It will be creator led but by a lot of creators. Which is really exciting. What is it? Go keep going. I don't want to interrupt you. No, and then the the other one um the other one will will have to find the creator. So if you have multiple creators, is that going to

1:13:16be mainly affiliate driven? Nope. When you as you're running these uh productized agencies, I'm curious. I always ask everybody, what are all the software tools they use internally to run them? And so these are a little more technical questions, but I think it's interesting for people who might be a little newer. And so I was curious, A, what are the software tools you use and B, how much they vary across other than I assume like you would use frame.io. So like little details like that would be really interesting for me to hear. So there's two levels. There's there's the tools that I use as CEO

1:13:46and then the tools that the team uses. Let's go top down. Yeah, so for me um I pretty much live inside of reflect. What's that? It's a note-taking tool. Okay. It's my favorite. I was with Obsidian, broke up with them for reflect. I love reflect. Um so I pretty much live inside of reflect, Raycast I use the [ __ ] out of. Um and then I will do uh so I'll generally like create things in reflect for all my notes and then I'll start like a memo in reflect and then that gets moved over to to notion

1:14:24to where we house like all of our memos. Um anything that's like a document or an SOP or something that has to get delegated lives inside of notion. Um but we don't allow actions to live inside of notion. I don't care what anybody says. I'm willing to die on this hill. Notion is dog [ __ ] for project

1:14:42management. I agree. Um so I think it's great for information, it's great for wikis, it's great for like, you know, meeting notes and all that stuff. I think it's dog [ __ ] for information. You get lost. You get lost, you build some custom thing that works for you and only you and it can't scale like

1:14:58And the interface is makes no sense. I agree. Um so everything action base lives in linear Yes. um for our team. Um they use frame.io. Mhm. God who knows how many subscription services we use to power like uh creative assets that we pull from. Um Slack obviously is huge for us. Um What else? Um I I think these are the big ones. My tool kit is like reflect, Fathom for financials,

1:15:28uh Slack, Raycast. What's Raycast again? Raycast is a it's a spotlight search uh replacement, but it's like incredibly powerful. I don't even know what spotlight search replacement You mean space bar? Oh oh oh oh. Yeah. Like hot keys almost. Yeah. Okay, cool. But it has like AI built in. So at any point I can hit like control command space bar and then like

1:15:49chat GPT just pops up. Nice. Or I can like Like if I'm editing text and then I can highlight text and I can just command like command control J and it instantly that's a shortcut for like improve this writing. Right. And AI is already doing it. That's cool. I love that whole that tool. If there's a if there's like a startup that I would invest in, I stopped investing in startups, but if there's one that I would invest in right now, I'd probably invest in Raycast. Raycast,

1:16:13okay, I got to look into that. Is it just like a good Chrome extension? Shoutout to Raycast. If you're taking checks, let me in. We do a lot of image generation that then we then manipulate the [ __ ] out of. Um but we use AI to generate a lot of that stuff like assets. Instead of like instead of using Unsplash for example, right? We might generate something in AI that's a little bit more bespoke um fits

1:16:35the design. Firefly AI you're saying or like No, like Dolly. Um uh Petter, our head of design, actually runs a custom model um on his PC. He has like a crazy PC. Um, does some some stuff there. I don't know a lot about it, so I'm not going to say any more. Um, but Midjourney, DALL-E 3, stuff like that. Um, we use Blender

1:16:55Okay, for 3D. 3D scenes that we use as like image backgrounds, stuff like that. Um, I mean, OffMenu, like the design team at OffMenu's Mhm. [ __ ] insane. Oh, I can You can just tell in 2 seconds. If you ever look at OffMenu, it's mind-blowing. And it's all custom. Yeah, they're really, really great. They're I mean, what's crazy about OffMenu, and not to like sell our own [ __ ] for a second, but like

1:17:16the way. it's the best value in design, period. Mhm. 15 grand a month to work with a team to get the level of output that you do is insane. Um, I mean, we could easily charge a quarter million for like a full branding and and like site project, but you can go to OffMenu and get it done, you know, for like let's say 60 grand overall. And that churn is going to be low cuz at that price point you have real companies that are making real money, and they're always going to need assets or Well, I think even though um the team is really great, people love

1:17:47working with us, churn inherently for something like that's going to be high really cuz yeah, a project gets complete, right? Mhm. So, they're like, "Well, we don't need a $15,000 a month design subscription now. Um, we got the brand, we got the site, we got the product, whatever." You know, they want to spend a little less. So, only if I had a cheaper design

1:18:04agency that they could funnel to. Mhm. Is that a wink? Are you winking at That's why we have it. I thought it was. That's why we have it. That's why we have it. was thinking. And so, is there one out of all these services you've seen as the stickiest? I think uh today Viral Cuts has incredibly strong LTV

1:18:29um for certain customer profiles. Like the set it and forget it kind of creators. Um, like Lewis Howes, for example, um is one of our like big creator customers of ViralCuts. Um you know, and it's great. Like his team's fantastic to work with, I think. I hear great things. And, you know, they use ViralCuts to do all their like um like podcast episode openings and trailers and short-form like And that's the thing to where that budget's committed, they're just going to be creating that content non-stop. So, Hal Bloom, for example. Um so, that is

1:19:01really good. It has low retention. Um but inherently, any any product or service, you're going to have a decent amount of churn. Okay. How much is ViralCuts is that like that's a public, right? at 4,400. Starts. What are the 4,400 or I think it's 7 grand. What is the difference in the service? Just uh like

1:19:17It doubles. video planned It's 40 hours a week, and then it becomes 80 hours a week. So, you charge by the hour of your team? Again, it's one-to-one. So, we just like if you're a customer, if you're a creator customer, it's the the plan is called creator. Um you just get somebody assigned to

1:19:31you. Mhm. Yeah. And then you just get either 40 hours or 80 hours for that. Yeah. So, either one person assigned to you or two people. But if you're But if you are on the higher end, which is called the studio, where you're you're committing to 3 months at a time. So, in intervals. Oh. Commit for 3 months, and then you do it

1:19:48again, you do it again. Okay. Yeah. Interesting. Yeah, we're about to do the same thing same thing for Hey Friends. Really? Mhm. That's We think about it differently. That's interesting. That's smart. Yeah. Thank you. Everything is like no contract. Mhm. Um but I think having people commit is important if it's something to where there might be preconceived notions that like, "Oh, I'm going to try this for a month and see if I grow." And that's not

1:20:15going to happen. Mhm. Right? Um so, we set all kinds of expectations around like output's going to be lower your first month or your first few weeks while we generate like your style. Like obviously, there's a ramp-up period before we're like The learning phase, yeah. Yeah, before there's a fire hose of content. Um so, we're at the point now it's where like our our like lead gen is so strong, our customer acquisition is so strong, like why wouldn't we just say, "No, you have to commit to the service for X period of

1:20:41months?" Interesting. Okay. And the last question I always ask people is really just what is like, out of everything that you've learned in your life, it's Everyone takes a while to answer this, so take it take your time to think about it. But, what is one thing that you used to think was like true in business, like you were like that was your life philosophy, business philosophy, and then now you have like a complete opposite belief? I mean, I really came up in my career like originally when like in the TechCrunch days, right? Like person's raising money, person's doing this, like

1:21:10whatever. And like my first real company, like I raised VC, and so I thought that's the way it was. And I just think it's total [ __ ] Like not I have a lot of friends that are VCs, I'm not saying like VC in general is [ __ ] But, the idea that like that's going to be how you create wealth is needing to like raise capital and defer revenue and like just, you know, acquire a bunch of users and then figure it out later. Um, it just doesn't make sense to me, right? Like it's funny that when I started to have real success in business, it's when I

1:21:40just stripped out all of these preconceived notions of how things had to be, and I just went down to first principles and common sense, right? Like, oh, if I want to run a business, I should probably get people to pay me money day one, and I should probably make sure that I'm turning a profit, right? Um, that's the biggest thing, it's just like instead of focusing on these glamorous things,

1:22:03focus on ways to make money, right? That That might be the best answer I've heard, because VC is like that's like the most extreme way to run a business. Like, we're going to raise $10 million. We're not going to make any money, and then 5 years, hopefully we can sell it to like a huge company or go public. Yeah, and maybe you go around that journey and you're successful, and like how much time did that shave off for you, really? Um, where you could have owned more, right? Or found other ways to get that capital instead of traditional venture investment. Like how helpful was your board, right? You know,

1:22:39where where did they guide you? What path did they push you down that maybe it wasn't right? Like again, not saying it's all bad. Like I know some great VCs, but I also know a lot of really bad ones. So if you're going to do it, be very strategic and intentional. Okay, great advice. Or raise with leverage. Raise when you're already or like able

1:22:56to raise with like [ __ ] you terms. Okay. So last last question is now you've been talking I saw you had a tweet about starting your YouTube channel. Yeah. And you can now kind of I mean this is a good opportunity cuz you have these creator led businesses, you might as well be a creator yourself too to bring

1:23:11them in. It's not that I want to be a creator necessarily, but I see the power of having an audience, obviously, right? But for us, like it's [ __ ] crazy that like I'm a nobody, right? Like I have, you know, I think I have like 14,000 followers on Twitter or something like that. But people will get on a sales call with our team and they'll be like, oh, I heard about you guys through like Sam or Cody and then I checked out like your stuff and I saw Hunter and like love your companies, love what you all do, whatever, and they become a customer, right? And then because they know my

1:23:45stuff, they see the other brands and they become a customer of another brand. Or it is insanely helpful for recruiting, right? And plus I just I honestly just have a lot of fun doing it. Like I've had a lot of fun just like doing these podcasts, talking to people, sharing like what I know. Like I don't think I'm qualified to give advice, but I'm happy to like talk about like my experiences or what I might do in a given situation. And YouTube, you know, I spend so much time thinking about it cuz we're building a YouTube business. I think that 90 9% of entrepreneurial advice on YouTube

1:24:19is just dog [ __ ] It's like grifters. under pressure. I'm like, "Look, I would rather just go like all [ __ ] like Sam Sulek and just have like some super raw ass content and just like tell the truth and try and be helpful." Mhm. Um so it seems fun to me. So you said earlier in the podcast that it was like something you really regretted not

1:24:35documenting your like journey. 100%. Why? That Is that why mainly or This circle that I'm in now has convinced me that for some reason I'm like I'm interesting and I don't know if that's true. But if some people believe that, it tells me that it's like, "Okay, I probably could have built an audience."

1:24:52Mhm. And I just look at it and I'm like, "Okay, I know where I'm at today. Where could I have been today if I had built an audience along the way?" Like the extra leverage that I could have stacked up. And just being in the position that I'm in now, um having the network that I have, the resources that I have, it just makes all the sense in the world. I'd be an idiot not to do it. Yeah, I think the things that you touched on on that answer were actually the important things. Like if you have content out there, then potential clients can go see who what

1:25:21you're all about and they might want to work with you now cuz they build trust watching that content with you. In recruiting, you can like put your mission that can inspire talented people to come like join the mission. Getting a millions of views like that's cool, too, but like that what you're talking about, you can achieve that without a million subscribers. You could achieve that with just a thousand subscribers and the right people see it. Yeah. So I'm excited to see your content. I'm going to learn a lot from you. Dude, I don't know. I don't know, but I'm going to do my best. I learned a lot from you in

1:25:43this podcast, so I appreciate it. Guys, Hunter Hammons, check him out. He has a good Twitter account, YouTube soon to come. Anything else you want to plug? No. I mean, check out our companies. Yeah. Okay. They can Where they find all of them in your bio on your account? Do you have them all four listed or assemblies? think so. Yeah. Offmenu.design, bitesize.design, heyfriend.studio, barcodestick.co, keyframe.design. Will Assembly have like a website where it has like everything listed on it eventually or Yeah, dude, that's such a good

1:26:08link free website, you know. No, so Assem- like we're going to launch the Assembly brand when we have all the big pieces. So like when we have the fund, when we have all the companies, when we have some of the other things that we're building out, we're going to be doing events, like really, really

1:26:22Oh, cool. I want to go. Yeah, they're going to be really good. Um and we're going to I think we're going to test one in New York soon, all about the creator economy. All right, guys. So, it'll be awesome. That's perfect, dude. You guys want to follow that journey? Follow him. But, dude, thank you so much. Appreciate it. Absolutely. Thanks for

1:26:34Good man.