Multipreneurship 101 and Why It Matters

0:00the format of like a venture Studio was like really interesting for me it was like wait it would let me do all the things I love doing all the time and to me that I think finding something I could do for 50 years was actually like what led me to picking this is like I don't know if this is the highest expected value thing I could spend my time on maybe picking one idea and running with it and trying you know or being an investor I don't know but this was the thing that I actually felt most excited about a lot of people talk about growth assistant which is hit by

0:25millionaire they go Jesse why don't you focus all your time on that that seems like the obvious thing to do and I'll go yeah but what am I solving for you know anybody around this well you gotta make the most money you can possibly make I'm like well I want to focus on the thing that's going to energize me the most for the longest and so that's kind of what got me into starting Gateway X which is the name of the Venture Studio you know the three things that are distinct about it one every idea is kind of plays off of my unfair advantages so there has to

0:49something to do with customer acquisition problems that Brands and marketers have like something I understand or have some inbuilt distribution for the second thing is they're all like what I would describe as capital light businesses and I think there's a big opportunity between the sort of Lifestyle business and the Venture funded business there's a lot of businesses in between and then the third thing is they all kind of use my common cultural operating system you know types of meetings we run the way we give feedback all those things are sort of common so theoretically you should be able to sit in any of them and feel like

1:16you're kind of working at the same company I've been looking forward to this one for a while Jesse Pucci what's up Greg did you see my tweet on multi-preneurship I think I did the future is entrepreneurship yeah exactly that's a bit of like a hook to get people in but when I think of multi-preneurship which is someone who builds a company who builds companies I think of I think of you you're like Mr multi-preneurship yeah and aspiring at least no you're doing it like you're doing it I saw you know one of your companies pass 10 million ARR I believe yep um you also just have like a supplement

1:56company you've got some technology companies so I'm I'm just selfishly interested in just learning more about well first do you consider yourself a multi-preneur and and then just learn more about your businesses yeah yeah for sure I mean yeah I think so I I you know it's funny I when 2009 before I had ever been an entrepreneur I was working at Goldman Sachs and I put together this document and I still have it I'll send it to you after and it was it was to my ambush co-founder as the first company I started and it was like here's the vision for the future and I like to

2:30share especially with people like you because I was like man I was so early to this like hold code thing but the idea was literally we you know have good ideas execute them focus on generating cash flow and then once you have more and more of them like just keep multiplying it with the ultimate goal to actually be to build a an awesome organization where you get to coach teach people learn and an organization building has always been as important to me if not more important to me than the business building itself and we can talk about the difference between those two and then you know and then so I was 24 I

3:01think when I wrote the doc then I actually tried to start a company yeah turns out it's really [ __ ] hard to start a company and it takes every bit of you emotionally physically and I totally forgot about the doctor you know literally just totally forgot about it you know we end up through the trials and tribulations of a 10-year startup Journey which ultimately ended up in a success you know we exited but as I started working with a coach you know I actually completely forgot about the document but I started wearing the coach and started doing the stuff like what really lights me up you know what's my

3:28why and like you know sometimes we think of purpose as something we have to go attain or it's like a long-term thing we go get and one reframe he had for me that was powerful was like no it's just kind of how you want to be every day like what's going to bring you energy every single day I was like well there's a few things that bring me energy that that initial process of like spotting an opportunity and kind of initially peeling the onion putting the pieces together go get it I love that part I love and I'm very good at sort of like mobilizing a lot of things in One

3:52Direction and sort of that you know the early stages of something I love coaching and teaching people and I'm much more powerful as a teacher or coach usually than I am as like a straight doer I love stuff like this getting to know other people learning being challenged changed and so as I started thinking about what was next for me after after kind of that successful run at ampush this the format of like a venture Studio was like really interesting for me it was like wait it would let me do all the things I love doing all the time and and to me that I think finding something I could do for

4:2150 years was actually like the goal or 50 plus years that would keep me energized and re-energize me and so that's kind of how I got into this is that's sort of you know obviously there's lots of different people influencing me along the way but that what led me to picking this and this is a really important distinction especially on Twitter twitterland where everyone tries to be right about everything is like I don't know if this is the highest expected value thing I could spend my time on my maybe picking one idea and running with it and trying you know or being an investor I don't

4:46know but this was the thing that I actually felt most excited about and I feel most excited about and energized by and so I was like I don't really care if it's the most high expected values might not be the best Roi decision like a lot of people talk about growth assistant which is a 10 millionaire they go Jesse why don't you focus all your time on that that seems like the obvious thing to do and I'll go yeah but that's not what am I solving for you know videos oh you gotta make the most money you can possibly make I'm like well that's not what I'm solving for this that thing's

5:10already making plenty of money and I'm good I want to focus on the thing that's going to energize me the most for the longest and so anyway that's kind of what got me into starting Gateway X which is the the name of the Venture studio um you know the three things that are distinct about it uh from my perspective are one every idea is kind of plays off of my unfair advantages so it has to something to do with customer acquisition problems that Brands and marketers have like something I understand or have some inbuilt distribution for the second thing is they're all like what I would describe

5:38as capital light businesses and I think there's a big opportunity between the sort of you know lifestyle business and the Venture funded business there's a lot of businesses in between that I call bootstrap Giants they're these ambitious but self-funded profitable companies that can grow for a really long time that's the type of business we want to start and then the third thing is they all kind of use my common cultural operating system and so they you know I could talk about that but it's meeting you know the types of meetings we run the way we give feedback all those things are sort of common so theoretically you should be able to sit

6:04in any of them and feel like you're kind of working at the same company um and that's kind of where the hold Co element comes into place but it's a different version of it because we're starting everything so far at least we're not buying anything but that's it that's a quick story I want to read you a text I got this morning there's been a lot of people we know including myself who've launched agencies including yourself actually too I mean growth is in a lot of ways is sure an agency so a very well-known person sent me a text message and he says I've seen so many of these

6:35agencies launch over the last six years number one big announcement number two get to 50K 50 to 100K a month mrr think you're building the next Uber and agency form number three uh-oh your way to efficiency was stealing other people's content and I'll go boosting number four clients start churning faster than you can replace them number five you hate your life number six Twitter public posts we've decided to shut down our agency number seven bring out the popcorn what do you think about that yeah I mean I think they're they're easy businesses to start they can be very challenging businesses to grow and operate I mean ampush ampush

7:11was not intended to be an agency but we turned into one um you know the story you know my quick story born and raised here in St Louis my dad is an entrepreneur always knew I want to be an entrepreneur one day I went to Penn I went to Wharton which is like the you know Wall Street trade school and that's been a couple years doing management consulting and then a couple years on Wall Street and and by the way you know Management Consulting in Wall Street we don't talk about this a lot but their services businesses just to be completely clear they sell Services they sell really high-end

7:38services but they're Services businesses so you can learn a lot about Services by actually spending time in those places and then we started ampush and we started doing it in Performance Marketing we discovered Facebook Facebook called us in our first year or so I said who the hell are you guys you know we were one of the fastest growing advertisers and we ended up being one of their earliest marketing partners and and they gave us access to their API we built software we tried to sell the software to people nobody wanted software they wanted Services they said hey I don't know how to run this and you

8:04know our customers at that time were a bunch of startups names a lot of names you wouldn't recognize but then a lot of names like uber Dollar Shave Club Peloton blue apron and and we always thought of it ourselves as a tech company until someone was like well why don't you just sell your Tech now then we were like well no people will pay us one or two percent of media for that but they'll pay us 10 or 15 of media for our services like why would we do that and that's when we kind of realized we were you know we'd become more of a tech

8:28enabled Services business there was a joke when I was a CEO I'd never call Ambush an agency because I was like we're so much more you know that's not what we are we're much more than that but you know I've talked to a lot of people since then and I think like people don't build them to scale you know I had the benefit of coming from management consulting where I saw this hugely scaled services Enterprise and I just things that they did naturally became natural to me so for example we recruited top young raw talent and we trained the hell out of them we always had a sales pipeline

8:56running to go along with the business in a very meaningful way we chose our customers carefully we chose customers who would grow over time so that like we didn't have to worry about churn even if there was some churn you would still have like your your sort of monthly Revenue would grow consistently and and you know we I was funny there's like a five-year period where I'd walk into Starbucks with my wife and I would just be like my jaw would drop and I'd be like oh my God this place is amazing and she's like what the [ __ ] wrong with you I'm like there's five employees here

9:22none of them owned this place none of them make more than 15 bucks an hour and they're all this this place is crushing it and that's actually what we became we like we need to make Starbucks and so we started designing these little pods internally where like every single you know the systems the way things work the way we manage them all became very very common um and that's how we scaled the business to you know half a billion a year in ad spending 200 people technology helped also but but it was really that Starbucks Suffocation of each pod inside the organization and then some of the reporting structures

9:52and things like that so they're really easy businesses to start then what happens is the founder runs the whole show they're never able to get away from any sort of client delivery or client service or anything and then you know all these everyone wants to take the business in-house at some point I mean that's that's just the natural uh way of things and it's just a matter of when not if that's another people lie to themselves about is like at some point they want to take it in-house one of the fun things about growth assistant is like it really is like a staff augmentation business and it's like kind

10:20of been the opposite of an agency like we get you people and so we've seen the retention in that businesses way better than the retention was at ampush because once you have a couple great people offshore you're not trying to lose them and you're not you don't care how much you're paying I mean you know you're not going to fight us over a few hundred dollars of margin that we're taking versus you or something but yeah I think I think they're tough businesses to run and scale yeah I think a lot of people are seeing Twitter People Like Us launch agencies and they're like well I

10:49want to do that there's also that guy Brett from design Joy who has a course on productizing agencies and I think that is a whole you know new new generation of entrepreneurs who are looking at this and being wow so you're saying you know going back to your asset light thing so you're saying I could basically build up a Twitter account launch a service and then all of a sudden be making seven figures a year right uh this is the dream this shit's so hard man you know I that's the thing like have you ever done the Enneagram no do you know what the Enneagram is it's kind of like a better

11:25Myers-Briggs I'm a huge fan of it and I'm a type seven and type seven is the Enthusiast and it's like the person who like jumps from thing to thing and you know gets excited by the shiny object and a lot of entrepreneurs not surprisingly are type sevens you know I had I grew up in a my dad obviously was you know with a lot a lot of ownership kind of an immigrant style you know upbringing I had good partners it would help me keep me focused but I think there's a lot of entrepreneurial types out there who are the enthusiasts are like oh yeah that like unless they get

11:56that going and then to run Services is hard enough to scale Services you have to become a great manager you have to become a great trainer you have to get good at writing things down you have to build it's boring ass stuff that helps you scale Services any business really but Services business in particular you got to give a lot of feedback to people you got to do a lot of things that are are the opposite of like launch something on Twitter and see if it'll grow and scale and and I think it's just you either got to pair yourself with the right person or you gotta create space

12:23in your mind that those things are important I I have the benefit of like knowing they're important not necessarily depending my strengths and so that allowed me to to kind of manage around them and find the right people to to be around um and get out of their way but if you don't really like I see a lot of hype guys and girls out there and you gotta go run these things man they're hard it's hard to run someone else's ad spend explain to them why it's working or not working manage their expectations put together a plan you can deliver against um we had this moment this is a crazy

12:56story actually so four or five years ago uh five six years ago McKinsey walked ampush in uh to Stars Lionsgate and so you know there's this huge movie house they're this like uh cable channel and they had decided they wanted to build an Ott service you know like HBO Max of stars you know it's a multi-billion dollar company they had a 300 million dollar annual marketing budget going towards like linear and billboards and all these random things and so McKenzie's like well we're going to take half of that 150 million and starts ampush is going to build you guys a digital marketing program so we built

13:33it from scratch built all the Google ads the Facebook ads they've been doing a little bit things but nothing that interesting we grow this program it starts to scale and it's they love it because it's so much more measurable than the stuff they're used to they're used like premieres or whatever the week before their biggest show Power premieres and what would happen is their CPA when their biggest show content would launch would drop by like 90 right their best show is about to show that's when all the sign ups happen and that's when you spend the most money and then when their shows aren't running you pull back the

13:59spend and we did all this optimization I think we were like two or three weeks out before their biggest show and the Facebook pixel breaks meaning all of us and McKenzie had been I don't know if they had been running it's something they basically said well no keep spending guys like and we said no no we don't think we should keep spending this no keep spending so the CPA went up to like 300 they say keep spending we keep spending and then all of a sudden they're like we're like well why can't we get the CPA back down I'm like well we told Facebook that we were okay with

14:26300 Acquisitions their pixel now thinks that they're not it's not gonna work and so this thing gets at their CMOS involved their CEO gets involved I'm on a call I get dragged down to La they're like what is going on Jesse we pay you guys 5 million a year in fees like figure this out what is happening and I said guys we need to delete this pixel we need to go dark on Facebook for a week and then we need to reboot with new pixels by show or something like I had some strategy that involves shutting off Facebook is in the room with me and they're like no we don't agree with that

14:54plan and I was like I bet my account I bet the account guys if I'm wrong then take take this you know because we every quarter one of our clients pixels got all [ __ ] up on Facebook and we knew the plan and so we did the plan finally they agreed and like the first few days were dicey but then once we turned it back on everything kind of normalized again right ahead of their biggest Premiere and then like whatever everyone thought I was a savior but there was a point to the story which was like you know the you have to agencies are hard they're hard you you you you

15:25live in St Louis you get this call you're you know you're on the hook right you're on the hook like yeah we got down this road because yeah you were on the hook for someone else's results to explain it to them to help them understand it and to be able to like take the risk and put things on the line for it and it's not even yours and even if you do it you get you know 10 of spend or something like that and yeah so it just part of the reason I got excited about starting Adventure Studio was getting to own the businesses and not

15:54you know not doing it on on behalf of someone else and so I think if they seem like great idea does but in reality they're very challenging businesses another way to think about it is it's almost like you know you're on the hook and like you're going fishing you're on the hook you catch a fish but you don't get to keep the fish you just get to keep the lure totally like you keep a small piece of it you know the hope is that you get a bunch of lures and and that you can diversify and you know you're not just you know focused on whale fishing because if you're just

16:24whale fishing like as you know like that's another downside to agencies which is churn and clients churn yeah I mean they churn and our little trick we learned around this from the folks at Red Ventures was to get long wind down Provisions in the agreements and it's funny because I'll tell this to agency owners and you'll see their head just explode when when we talk about it and you know most of them are working month to month with a week and and they'll say well how would I say it's like well tell them that you can't fully invest in the account unless you have 60 days of notice so that you can properly

16:59readjust your resources it's better for them it's better for you and they're like oh wow and I'm like just imagine how your life changes if you have 60 days notice before someone can actually fully pull back the revenue and churn but I think it goes back to maybe your original point which is like people start these businesses because they think they're easy and and whatever and they're actually it's that's never a good reason to start a business but at the same time you look at you know growth assistant in in that business is doing well like what why do you think that service based business is

17:29doing so well um like is there a framework for starting a successful agency does that exist I think um you know some of the things I would think a lot about are I've been thinking about this a little bit lately I think number one is I think it's important to figure out what you want and what you're trying to Aspire for right so do you want to grow something to run it and make money do you want to grow it to sell it do you want to raise money like what what game are you playing um you know there's a one of my mentors though says what game are you playing

18:01and then how do you win that game and like how do you win is where everybody focuses but what game are you playing is actually usually the more important question so what game are you gonna play okay I want to start an agency I wanted to get to 2 million ebitda a year or 10 million ebitda what do you want I mean there's very different answers to that question how long were you willing to take all that stuff then the next question is like to me what's your unfair advantage and this by the way this is true for all businesses not just service but but like what what do you

18:28know and typically like it has to be a multiple like it has to be a crossover of at least two maybe three things that you really like because normally in the case of growth assistant like I knew growth marketing well I knew offshore well also you know Adrian had built a lot of recruiting engines and that sort of thing like there has to be a lot of things crossing over and then you go oh now I think I can be in the top five percent of these things because even any of them individually you're probably not in the top five percent so what's your unfair Advantage the next thing is like

18:59I always think of like building your one-page offer sheet like productizing your scope and what you sell is it five thousand a month is it 2 000 a month is it 10 000 a month and then also solving for gross margins inherent to that offer so it has to be something that you can push out and deliver and you're already thinking about having at least 60 gross margins so that you can go out and like it's like you know because once you shape the front of the offer and then people want to buy that offer then the whole part of the business is how do you

19:24deliver that offer at that margin like how do you consistently deliver the quality of that at that margin and that's step three step four is is like go out and sell to people especially people you know or people who know you know right like people who are going to be friendly is I'm pretty honest about where the things are I'm like hey this is new this is a new thing we're doing right now like what do you think about this uh and then and then the last I think most important Miss is like you got to deliver something amazing on the other side that's a critical and then

19:52once you deliver that amazing thing on on the other side you have to figure out how you're going to do it without being involved as the founder or the CEO that's like that part takes anywhere from six months to six years which is how can that thing happen when I'm not involved and I always like remember at ampush the Zen moment was like our sales guy closed the deal our onboarding team onboarded it the customers you know the clients success person brought it on and they did the services for it and the in in finance team invoice and collected the money and I had nothing but bullet

20:21point updates like I nothing hit my I didn't have to get involved at all and I was like oh this is starting a business and so yeah I think it's that last part is where I usually tell people I was just talking Alex Lieberman about this you know he's starting one of these uh influencer copywriter things for for people building their personal Brands and it's like you know you have five or ten customers let's say how do you make sure that it's less than 25 of your time and they're getting a better experience that may take you months like to actually get to that point but that's

20:50the point where you can scale and then you have to hire and kind of plug people back into that model consistently and see where it goes so that's the last part of it I think the other thing that I would say in my case in both the case I think of ampush and growth assistant you know you got to ride some Trends you know I think like we rode Facebook I mean that was the best wave ever right there was a many many multi-year period where we were the only like one of the few companies who could do Dr on Facebook um and then for growth assistant this is

21:16whole offshore Trend especially for marketing like that's that's a new thing it's not it's not a thing that's everywhere and and I think there's a lot of people starting these things that they don't have any uh you know they're not writing any Trends they're not writing any sort of secular Tailwinds behind that well it's a double Trend which is one from you know covid force a lot of companies to go to a remote and then the second trend is a lot of companies are looking at Cost cutting yes and and marketing is I I think this demand for growth marketing Talent versus Supply is way out of whack there's like not enough

21:50people who know how to do things on marketing and so plugging in people from offshore and one of the interesting things we've seen actually one of the funny selling points we have especially when we're talking to more senior people for growth assistant is growth assistant helps you retain your own team like what like yeah you hire we're not talking about the talent our talent we're talking about the talent scarce on your side so you don't want to lose this awesome growth lead or this awesome Facebook ads person and if you make them do all the crappy work all the time and you don't have a growth assistant

22:21They're Gonna Leave You know if you have them sitting there uploading ads for four hours every day every other day like they're not gonna like their job so a growth assistant it takes on the work they don't want to do and guess what that person is going to stick around longer um and you we're starting to see that exciting Trend where people move companies and they're like hey I need some growth assistance now and so I think that's also been a big Trend around you know marketing as a talent it's kind of like engineering like there's always been this missing unlimited demand for engineering Talent if you can find it and that's it's

22:52really a supply driven game and I think the same thing's happening in marketing you talked about unfair Advantage a lot of people listening to this are going to be like easy for you Jesse you just sold you know ampush and have a hundred thousand or whatever Twitter followers or easy for you Greg you know you have the this big community of people that you can just seed ideas to my question to you is does everyone have an unfair Advantage yeah like if you're I think the younger you are I think the younger your college student just starting off like you know you're living in a you

23:26know small town in India and you don't have a huge Network either on social or in your own town city whatever yeah I think the the younger you are maybe the harder it is to have a super valuable unfair advantage but you definitely have some unfair advantage and I don't I don't mean to say that it should be the end-all be-all of your entrepreneurial career but it's gonna make starting something easier there's we have an intern this summer who who goes to Duke and he manages the tick tock for Duke basketball and I'm like he's super entrepreneurial he's amazing at he's doing all these different you know stuff and he's like

24:03what should I start Jesse and I was like well what do you know really well and I was like you know how to get into Duke you should start a social you know Tick Tock channel for how to get into Duke and sell people a 50 or 100 guide you know that it and I was like maybe you sell it to a thousand people a month or something like that you know I don't know there's probably five million people who apply to these these top schools or whatever and I'm like it's just enough to get you going and you're gonna learn more through that process and you're going to build other unfair

24:26advantages as you do it um and that's a big part of of getting anything going we didn't we didn't know anything about digital marketing when I was 25 when we started ampush we knew numbers and data and we had a you know decent network from our friends in college and other worlds and we just use the things we we had we you know and we tried to squeeze the most out of them that we could and then we learned as we went how to do more and more of those different things so I think it's it I think it's strange when someone doesn't know anything about anything and they're

24:54like they pick a random sector and they start going in at it like there's some people who can do that and it works but the vast majority of people you know it's a real struggle there's some people who well first of all if you're listening to this you have an unfair Advantage yeah like if you're if you're listening to this you beat 99.9 of people because you're going out there and you're trying to gain information to better yourself you have some unfair Advantage now there's going to be a group of people who will tell themselves who are not listening to this but who will tell themselves I don't have an

25:28unfair advantage and who play kind of like that victim mentality and I feel like you have access to the internet you have an unfair Advantage period yeah and I think again remember it's multiple things my definition of it is it's multiple unique intersection points of who you are so if you're in a town a small town in India but you do you read Twitter it's like okay you're you know you speak Hindi you're in the small town you have access to all these people and you read Twitter okay those are enough unfair advantages for you to construct something that's going to be of value to somebody

25:59probably it's educating those young Indian children about chat gbt or something like that right there's always some unfair Advantage when you look at enough vectors of your life overlapping that you're going to be the top five percent of that thing and that's a great place to just get going so moving on a little bit to unbloat I look at that and I'm like why is this guy creating a you know on like I first of all like a d2c product like he he he's got this like cash flowing you know eight figure business that's doing really well and then I'm looking at that I'm like oh man that is probably so hard

26:36to like go and find the product and create it and create the brand and dude like take out the Facebook ads why did you why did you what got you excited about that and where's what's the opportunity that you're saying that someone like me is not saying yeah it's a good it's a fair question you know it's it's uh I had built I had helped so many Brands grow you know Hubble contacts Dollar Shave Club Birchbox I mean you name it we had helped them scale and if not scale built their customer acquisition from the ground up and so I think more than anything I was

27:07like man I want to do this myself like I want to do I actually know what I'm doing is it actually different if I own the brand or is it just gonna feel the same you know I kind of said all right well I know what works on these things like high margin recurring Revenue solves a real problem and has fun marketing angles like okay so I kind of had this formula you know this idea in my mind of what could work and high margin recur like you know you get into the medicine supplement area pretty quickly I was also trying to find what else fit that profile that's done really

27:34well and erectile dysfunction was like a I don't know there's like at least three multi-billion dollar d2c Brands started off erectile dysfunction so it's like I want to find something as big as that and so we went and talked to seven or eight doctors and asked them a bunch of questions but the main question we asked them was what's the one thing people complain to you about that they can't that you don't have a good answer for and we got 43 different issues from foot doctors and tummy whatever and we literally just searched them try to see the search volume how much Amazon volume and then like are there products on the

28:04market for them and only one issue was as big as erectile dysfunction it was bloating and it was like wow I would just never have guessed that right I'm sure you wouldn't have guessed that either that it's searched more often than Ed um and so we're like well what is it and and we actually started talking to people and what tell me about you you blow what does that what does it feel like what does it look like and really there was two and then we started talking to kind of the people who make you know stuff and supplements trying to figure out what causes it and how do you

28:31solve it and really it like came into Focus for two reasons I think one is similar to Ed it isn't not just a medical issue it's like a very distressing emotional issue because nobody and especially women and especially pre-menopausal women who tend to be the biggest customers they want they don't want to feel fatter or look fatter than they are like they don't want to gain weight and like it's a it's a stressful issue it makes them like want to go home from the gym or not go out for the night um like oh wow okay and then the second thing was like it's pretty solvable like

29:03there's four reasons primarily why people blow they don't digest food they don't poop they have like issues with their diet you know their digestive system of the bacteria or whatever and they're not getting enough of certain things and you can kind of solve all of it and we like went out and looked at all the skus on the market and realized you'd have to buy four or five skus to get all the things you need and we sort of just did the dumb entrepreneur thing where we said can you put this all in one pill and the manufacturer was like it's like an expensive pill but you can do it so

29:29we're like all right let's let's try that let's throw it all into one pill so that was kind of how we got started with it and then running the Facebook ads I'd say definitely has been more challenging than I expected but but you know the business is at about 3 million in sales it's making a little bit of money it's only 14 months old I think like for the most part I've been pretty happy to say like a lot of the things that we built at ampush and I learned over those 10 years has translated into being able to like get this thing off the ground

29:54successfully um it's not perfect by any means but but like there's a lot of opportunity I see in it and um and like we think it's the first of many things we'll launch like that yeah I think I actually think that there's probably some commonalities that exist uh between unbload and growth assistant so I think the you know just unbloating is a trend that you like I just been in my own life just hearing more and more people talk to me about I feel so uploaded I feel so uploaded seeing it on Tick Tock like I've Just Seen stuff people taught how to stop bloating yeah

30:30so I think you just like you tap into that I also think that both growth assistant and unbloat have really good names like and enough people don't talk about how important the name yeah is to the success of some of these products but unbloat.me I think is your url which I think is really really high quality the funny thing is you know we did a painted door test to figure it out I don't know if you've ever done one of those but we had five completely different brand names and like basically had the like fake brand where we were like sign up for 20 off of the launch

31:03and I think one of the brands was feather one was rhythm um I forget the other two and then unbloat and like we spend 500 on each just to see kind of click-throughs and sign ups and unblow it was off the charts relative to the other four yeah just it's you look at it and you know what it does uh you look at growth assistant you know what it does so that that feels very it just feels very Gateway X now that I'm starting to see what what you're creating which is really cool that you're creating and I think a lot of people should think about

31:34this is how do you how do you think about your values or your culture of creating new products and maybe you're just doing this it sounds like you're doing this a bit subconsciously but there's that and then I think you know recurring Revenue you you have a recurring Revenue component a lot of testimonials and stuff like that a lot of credibility how do you think about paid versus audience so to me growth assistant correct me if I'm wrong grew a lot from Twitter people talking about it uh it feels like I'm bloat has grown more from a paid marketing perspective how do you think about organic versus paid when

32:14you're creating new products yeah I mean I'll much rather have organic or paid if I can you know it's interesting I I'm probably to a fault I under template businesses because I just don't believe that you can you can put everything in a box and think it's going to work out a certain way well I have a question for you why wouldn't you have said if you prefer organic to paid why wouldn't you just look at start unbloat and just be like okay everyone we are not gonna spend one dollar on paid in the next 12 months just so we can build the muscle for building audiences building

32:50communities I think that's a good idea I we started the first few months with like Hey we're only going to do Tick Tock organic to learn it and you know we just didn't make the progress I think I would have liked to make and I think you you know there's a constant interplay between the people running the businesses and different skill sets and different things that start to play out and you know you can't you you have to you have to balance those two things out with one another all the time right and I think one of the things that makes this model work and and obviously one of the liabilities

33:23like I can't be everywhere at all times right or if I did want to be everywhere at all times I'd have to go much slower I'd have to do fewer things and it's like okay first spend five years learning how to audience build and Community build use Jesse's genius at doing this because I know how to do it then we're going to learn how to like disseminate that out to different things which which could have been an option for how we approach this and but but we didn't we you know and so I think we tried it we gave it I don't know three or four months the team was not able to

33:49come up with enough creative with it I'm sure if I you know if I'd spend more time we would have given us a better shot at doing that and I said well we knew we do know the paid media Playbook Let's Get Enough scale in this thing and that's going to be able to fund future ability to test different things let's get that going and the other thing is like that is a core skill set of mine or core thing I know I know like I don't know Tick Tock organic now I know Twitter organic but just I learned that On My Own by doing it over the last two

34:13or three years so I don't know I'm a little bit more random like I don't need again templatized structured ways like I think every business kind of Finds Its Own Way and I think there's different unfair advantages along the way I think you can get better at certain things I'm not huge on the like let's just do you have to do it this way like find a way the the way is not necessarily like I don't have religion around it let's talk about Kahani is that how I pronounce it SAS product you've got your service service based business you got uh your d2c business and then you've got a SAS

34:44business why'd you start that where was the opportunity and what's interesting to you about SAS yeah I think the the SAS one I mean this one has actually been the hardest probably by far um for me at least in you know I think and and maybe the right at least so like it's the one furthest away I think from what I know the other two are sort of like decomposed amps like selling things to brands on one side and then the other thing's running ads which is sort of what I did for 10 years you know I I think this one was hey what's a big

35:14what's a big bet we can go take and try to figure out a solution for and it was like Hey the Ecom experience just seems old and and seems really boring and meanwhile you know we're on Tick Tock and Instagram and they're so so immersive there's vertical media you're tapping you're swiping why isn't the Ecom experience like that also and so the first product we launched was basically stories for the Ecom experience so you could go into an Ecom site and you could tap those circles at the top and you'd be in the stories experience and this this was a really good lesson for us you know I think

35:47every single person who sees it goes wow that is super cool and then they're like all right I gotta go and you're like well when are you gonna buy this and they're like I don't know I got some other things I got some other priorities on my list and so you know it became a solution chasing a problem uh it's just no we just noticed that very quickly within six months of launching and we had you know we had some decent mrr and distribution but it just wasn't you could just tell it wasn't necessarily capturing anyone's challenges like we we went to shop talk and I had the sales guy from both

36:17companies there and from Kahani and growth assistant and growth assistant you know they do all this matching stuff the growth system guy got 25 meetings that kind of guy got five meetings and it was just very clear and now the five meetings that Connie got were interesting Nike was one of those meetings and we were why Nike we asked him why'd you meet us they go well we need it we need better ways to do discovery on our site and we think this is really Innovative and blah blah blah and so that one has been one where I'd say we're definitely dealing with the more classic product Market fit issue

36:43we're trying to reboot the product now a little bit because the signal we got was that people really want ways to leverage their influencer content and repurpose it and then the other big one was like if you can help growth marketers lower CPA that's when there's a real people will pay you for something like this cool little thing at the top like they may buy it but it's just not that interesting for them and so that one has been an interesting one but but I think like SAS I mean obviously it's it's it scales it's software it's recurring Revenue I think there's plenty of problems I have a decent understanding

37:13of but Building Product is hard and like one of the big differences I learned between services and and software is in Services a growth assistant or ampush you could kind of tell me your problem in a vague term you know here's my issue and I'd say well here's a human this human can probably adjust themselves to solve that really nuanced specific problem you have in software the code has to do that and that means you really have to get intimate with a problem and understand in a really deep way and I think like it's just a very different challenge how do you know when to quit

37:43so how do you know with Connie you know you're at this moment where it's like okay we've got to change this we've got to move this uh uh you've got some signals that are suggesting like wow there's something here but you've got others being like I don't know how do you how do you know when to just put it up on acquire.com or just like shutter it versus like we need to double down because you know Nike is huge and they spend millions and millions of dollars a year you know Nike itself could be a five million dollar a year account there's no perfectly right answer for it I think from my

38:24perspective my point of view and like I I used to chase things a little too long I think early in my career and learned this from the guys at Red Ventures and and Rick my mentor there you know it's a little bit like there's a there's an adage in trading that you never go broke by taking a profit and what they mean by that is like yeah you may sell the stock early but if you always sell when you're when you're when your stocks up a little bit you're never going to go broke you're always going to make a little bit of money and yeah you may give up some

38:50upside whatever I think the entrepreneur's version of that is like you never go broke by making a quick pivot and so you know I think how long have we given it a year in change like I I think the to me it's like no more than a year you know and six months of like really out there selling it pushing it pressing it hundreds of conversations most great businesses you know they start out great meaning and yeah there's a classic story of the pivot but even the pivot it's all I was two years in and I kept going but I did something totally different and that thing took off right the idea that

39:24something you've done for multiple years and then one day it takes off I mean again you can also hold a stock too long and lose your ass like it's it's the that may work for some people or the Laura is it there but I'm one of these people who goes I don't actually care why it's not working anymore it's just at some point I gotta blow the whistle and I gotta I gotta like you know re reshuffle the deck and and do that and so I think it's like arbitrary it's you know a year six months a year like it's it's not that long yeah I feel like the

39:52the Hallmark of a good multi-preneur is someone who who knows when to shudder things even though closing things down or selling them those are those are really hard to do because you're kind of admitting yeah you're admitting defeat and as multipreneurs we're kind of just like we've got a lot of conviction in the ideas that we want to put out um especially when we're putting it out publicly right if you're putting it out on Twitter and you're like hey you know this is the future of shopping and then six months later it's like you're like no it's not here's here's the thread on we're shutting it down yeah eat some

40:31popcorn uh so it's it's well I think it's the most brutal part is like you know you you hire people I care a lot about the people who I work with and then you know in this case we had to let go of a few people like you know there's the people join they sign their careers up for it and then you're just honest and you say guys I just don't think this is going to be what we thought it was and you know I hope over we have enough scale of Gateway X over time to absorb people into different parts so it doesn't their jobs don't have to be on

40:56the line but we're not quite there yet and that that part's you know it's it's a your idea your things and then having a big human impact on on other people and I think that's something you know I never want to get comfortable with but but it's a big part of of what we do if someone wants to build their own Gateway acts if someone wants to become a multi-preneur how to what what advice do you have to them to do to be successful you know if I could do it all over again I would have remembered that document earlier in my my journey at ampush I

41:32think the the best multipreneurs you know we talk about this on Twitter me and you and people are doing it but like you know Mark Zuckerberg is a multi multi-preneur yeah you know how many p l is running like he's got WhatsApp he's got Instagram he's got the big blue app he's got his Oculus stuff he's got some AIS I mean there's a lot of organizations you know and Elon Musk and him aren't all that different even though they're technically separate companies right or GE or Microsoft or Red Ventures or apple I mean these are all anyone running these scaled businesses is running multiple things like there's just no way they're not and

42:08and the same challenges come up you got to have the right peoples you got to have the right culture operating systems in place all these different pieces of it so if I if I could do it all over again or if I was giving someone advice I would say find one thing like find one business and just go really hard at it for five to seven years and and make it enough scale so that you can either sell it and make a lot of money or it generates enough cash flow that you can you have some flexibility and make sure along the way you built a culture and you train to

42:37people so that you can be done you know you can move yourself out of the day-to-day at around year five or year six and then from there start to like expand out into multiple different areas be using the unfair advantages you developed over those five to seven years right but I think the idea of people come to me yeah I don't think I could have done this I couldn't I tried to do this at 25 I had the document and I totally forgot about because I didn't even know how to do anything and so I think you need some foundational skills knowledge Capital have to a certain point now in

43:10this case I started Ambush I learned all these things I sold it now I'm doing it in this new format and there's some challenges with that you know in and of itself but I think you need a foundation I don't think it's a thing you can do with starting at age 25. I just don't um there's this you know Michael Rubin I'm sure you you saw him it was so funny when I was 19 there was a Wharton summer camp and we met him and at that point you know his business like it's just just to think about where a guy like that started he had he had

43:40three ski shops and he had just launched Sports Authority's website as GSI Commerce which was his first business it was this business that took over the dot-coms or created.coms for retailers and fully operated them on the back end and he ran that business for 12 years I mean it was the most unglamorous business you could imagine he had warehouses for Sports Authority and he'd run all these outcomes and he had the same he was kind of a big agency because eventually they'd want to run it themselves you know I don't know if you know his story but they you know his story at all I do uh yes and he sells it

44:13to eBay then he spins back the best assets to himself and the best of the best assets like his brain clearly like like I did with unbload he was like what's the one group of people who's always going to want to Outsource this that have the highest value apparel out there oh sports teams okay I'm gonna sell my whole business to eBay but then I'm gonna buy Fanatics back now Fanatics is worth 10 times whatever GSI was ever worth but that was like a 25 year journey I mean he spent a lot of time grinding and learning as he went and so I think I think you need a good five to

44:41ten year period of depth and building fundamentals and then from there you can spawn into launching multiple different things using those unfair advantages yeah fnatics is actually a client of late checkout and dispatch or design subscription and just learning about that business has been like nuts nuts I did a business breakdown on I don't know if you've ever heard that podcast that I record but we interviewed their main investor at Insight Venture and it's a Nutty business yeah it's pretty cool but like but like again he couldn't have started that without 10 to 15 years at GSI Commerce which was this like really unknown unheard of whatever business it

45:23was a grind yeah I think the the MVP of being a multipreneur is can you create content in one Niche that people resonate with like can you before you create product Market fit can you create content Market fit in one topic then can you do it in two topics and then can you build one product and then can you build two products and then it's just you layer it on as you get older it's definitely easier in your unfair Advantage grows um but you know unless I I don't want to dissuade the 17 year old who's listening to this who you know because I think there's you

45:57just just start yeah just start I mean that's always the answer is just try to do something yeah I you know my one of my biggest mistakes in college and I always tell this when I talk to college kids is like I always used to joke my brain was bigger than my legs so I could think I was a Wharton kid I was like oh here's the market size and oh you know we had a we had a teacher of business in college that did 200 000 a year in sales and like 70 000 need but uh like it's a good business for college kids and we thought we we

46:23thought about expanding it once to be a national college we basically did bulk apparel for all the fraternities and sororities that was the business and our Big Wharton brains are like ah the Market's too small this is not a good idea and meanwhile like our legs didn't know how to actually build a business like that but just learning anything we could have gotten you know to something that would have been very meaningful and actually one of my co-founders friends started a similar business on his campus and he came up with this genius idea of like I'm gonna have uh I'm gonna sell a sponsorship to like Pepsi on the t-shirts and provide

46:57them for free to sororities and fraternities and I'm gonna make twenty dollars a shirt instead of seven dollars a shirt and he turns it into a multi-million dollar business that he ends up selling right and so the lesson is just like just start get things going solve the other thing I always tell college kids is try to get your just your hall on an app before you think you can sell the world on something can you get the 20 people who you see every day to do it like to use a common app to like plan groceries or something just you build the app build a simple app and

47:27I'm like you'll learn how hard it is to get something done like to build something and that and that lesson is super valuable that's why I think building an audience or building a community even like a WhatsApp group chat or a group chat is such a great place to train yourself on can I create something that people are going to want to do because people are busy they don't have time to download your app unless you're Mark Zuckerberg and you're launching threads um you know so I think that's why I love just starting with audiences and communities anyway yeah it's one of my earliest pieces of advice too to people

48:03is they're like oh I want to start a business that sells life insurance to Millennials and blah blah blah I'm like well can you just why don't you just start a newsletter for them and see if they'll just like read about what you're talking about right before you sell them something yeah you give them information for free exactly it'll actually read it totally and they're like oh that's really hard actually yeah Jesse if people want more of you where do they go and follow you in the journey uh Twitter and threads I guess Jay Fuji uh jspu jji Jessie gateway.xyz you know we're always looking to to meet

48:39potential people who want to partner with us to build businesses uh always looking for interesting opportunities to collaborate across the spectrum of what we're doing love it well thanks for the time this is uh this has been great Mr multupreneur thanks Greg appreciate it yeah see ya