# Bootstrapping Through A Bear Market with Noah Kagan

Channel: Greg Isenberg
Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zfhr8k4pRlE
Duration: 1 hr
Language: English
Words: 12646
Transcript page: https://viewrankai.com/tools/youtube-transcript/zfhr8k4pRlE

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[0:00] i think it's it's going to be work regardless so just find that the work that you actually want to spend time on versus i think if you're young just chase a bunch of [ __ ] and get in the reps just like in any sport but then try to find the the path like for you guys i think creating content is like so obvious how good you guys are like you guys are doing it naturally [Music] noah welcome to the show yeah well it's good to be here guys it's good to be here noah and i were just talking before we started recording before you came on greg about how i had

[0:30] to bail on this like awesome boat event that he and appsumo were throwing in new york and my excuse was that i was literally having my baby you know during the like two day window when i like i think you did that on may 15th like the kid was my son was born on may 16th like it was like right the next day but we were talking about how you know there are these like trump card excuses of getting out of things like being pregnant or like having a baby that you can basically get out of anything uh and use it as an excuse and noah said like

[1:01] why aren't we just honest about things and just say like yo i don't want to go to that so i don't know what is it greg why why aren't we just honest as human beings when we don't want to do things i think people don't want to let other people down i think like making people generally want to make other people feel good and like when you let someone down it doesn't feel good so i think it's difficult to be honest but yeah i agree with you i feel like we should we should all be more honest i'm trying to be more honest like i think we uh

[1:36] like in general when you think about your calendar like i think this relates to a lot of things you think about your calendar and how many like emails in your inbox you put off replying to just because you don't want to say no but really you're just going to say no you're just delaying it and it's like someone was just talking to me about this rich handler is his name he's the ceo of jeffrey's you know big big financial institution he was saying like the reason people don't reply to their emails right away is because they're delaying the pain of just saying they don't want to do something and so he's

[2:06] like i replied right away and i either say like yes let's do this right now or no i'm not going to do that and it's like a much more efficient way of just getting through the things and i realized when i thought about it after i went home when he said it of like yeah that's totally what my email inbox looks like the reason i'm not always at inbox zero is because i have 25 emails sitting in there that are things where i just don't want to reply to the person to say no do you owe them a reply just hit archive what do you owe them

[2:34] yeah i guess that's true step father you know like i guess like i think um it's just having standard protocols makes things easier like hey i'm only focusing on these three things so i'm not doing extra meetings right now really really standard makes it easier it's uh like or i'm phone phobic people love the phone yeah like hey i'm just phone phobic like it's actually a phobia i have i can't take this this you know i'm scared i'm scared i i actually do like the um you know hey i'm not doing call you know not doing zoom calls love to do it in real life if

[3:07] you make it out to new york um you know type thing because i do just like i i will meet almost anyone in person because i just so prefer that um but man doing zoom calls like my threshold now is so high relative to what it was a year ago um anyway i feel like we're on a long tangent no but i think the thing you're calling out is a really great point and just being honest with yourself and like how do you get more alignment in your life right and the alignment what's interesting is like when you had a baby it was easy to be like i really don't

[3:34] want to do this but you're using the baby as a nice buffer to that or i'm you know pregnant or covet or whatever these types of excuses are covets pretty they're all legit but i it's like what if you could do if you could just live honestly like i have two friends recently like i don't want to go to these weddings of my other friend how do i say no and i was like you say no but i think it's also helpful if you're like hey i really want to go i you don't want to lie to him hey your wedding sounds promising i just have a lot going

[3:59] on you can't make it yeah i do think that like you you brought it up a couple minutes ago of like hey these are the three things i'm focusing on right now so i can't take this on is a great way of thinking about it i mean it all ties into like people feel these inherent like sunk costs almost um to going and doing things like oh you know i already i've always thought about it with like oh i booked flights i i had this last year like i booked flights to go to this wedding and then the wedding was coming up and i was swamped with other stuff

[4:29] and i was literally dreading it but in my mind i was like oh man i paid for the flights already so i gotta go and the reality was i was just gonna go make myself incrementally more miserable by going to this thing and so then i ended up bailing because i was like oh it's actually just a sunk cost i need to think about this clearly and rationally and just pass on it um but we have all these like embedded reasons for doing things um that i do think if you just reset yourself you can you can step away from i think a lot of it is energy

[4:57] like kind of i think greg was kind of highlighting it a bit which is just like is this increasing your energy and clarity or is it decreasing and so a lot of times in my week like i was meeting with our head of marketing at appsumo yesterday and i was like who do you i'm not going to call i'm not going to call it people but i was like who do you meet with during the week that you're like excited about and you're like wow i have more energy and like i feel productive and who do you not and there's probably either the meeting is bad or the person

[5:18] is bad and so on my sundays and like when i do calendaring on fridays and sundays i'm like what am i really looking forward to and is is there stuff that i'm just not looking forward to and there's probably some connection that i don't want to do it and like doing that maybe in all regards yeah i love that it's like who who energizes your battery and who depletes it today's episode is brought to you by element a tasty electrolyte drink mix with everything you need and nothing you don't that means lots of salt with no sugar it contains a science-backed electrolyte ratio 1000 milligrams sodium 200 milligrams

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[8:04] real estate portfolio tailored to meet your goals it's a great way to benefit from real estate's many perks while adding some much needed diversification to your portfolio so join over 250 000 other investors building a better portfolio with private real estate signing up is easy just head over to fundrise.com room again that's f-u-n-d-r-i-s-e dot com slash room to get started today you know i used to do that with my calendar this is like this is one of my favorite frameworks actually i um i started energy color coding my calendar in real time after the meetings and it completely changed i mean this is like six months ago greg it was actually as a

[8:47] result of a conversation i had with you about like how my calendar was too full um and so i literally would like at the end of a day go to my calendar and color code things green when i felt like they created energy for me um kind of like orange if it was neutral and then red if it was like um you know i felt drained after doing it and it forced me to visually see how many of the things i was taking on during the week were draining energy from me and so i basically just said okay i'm going to eliminate or delegate all of those and

[9:17] that was the first step and it was like okay now my calendar looks all green and neutral and then the next step was like what can you kind of trim out of the neutral and make it mostly green and now i feel like my calendar is mostly green and it completely repositioned it just by like having this visual cue and signal dude i love that i've been trying for the past two years like a week in review at the end of the week so i have like a survey that i give myself in google forms and you can kind of see trends for like was it for me it's really

[9:45] related to appsumo it's like was i consistent how was my leadership did i move the business forward and then the last thing is like were there any blockers from this week or meetings that sucked that i want to adjust and it really does make most of the weeks get subsequently better i feel like feedback and like regular feedback just in all aspects is how we improve life that's a pretty cool idea actually just like for a business so you know you have um you know you have like a do you wear a whoop band or like any of the healthy tracker ring at night when i go to sleep

[10:14] yes me too so like the beauty of those things is that it gives you like a trend line over time right like you know you can see what it looks like you know what your different metrics rem sleep whatever over over longer periods it becomes really interesting um it's kind of a cool idea to like take something and apply that to you know your your kind of personal uh productivity energy etc like what you're jerry-rigging um you know and like jangly putting together with a google form or with a google server and sending to yourself there's probably a business to just be built around that like the

[10:45] personal energy survey or something um where you create a nice ui ux and basically overlay it on top of data that is effectively a google form that you get every week dude i love that i i think that's great here's the idea because you know sometimes with these things like we get baseline information and we're like okay if i go to sleep early it's good if i don't drink it's good it's like there's not really that much deltas of change it's more just like some level baseline to move forward so i think it's just like how do you get more consistent iterations and improvement i think i

[11:16] think the idea is like have you seen those emails where at the bottom of the email it's like hey yeah how was this good bad okay yeah and so it's basically after the email after the meeting you get an email it starts like getting data points was a good bad whatever and it starts adding those data points until it knows enough about you that it's just like hey you have a meeting coming up in an hour what's that hell and you like hate meeting with sahil or you or you know so we're gonna go ahead and like cancel that or you know you love meeting with sahel

[11:49] we're gonna when you're going to schedule it it tells you to cancel it actually yeah just like don't schedule this because we already know i actually think there's something really interesting to be built like a simple tool around this because like they all exist and there's like a massive multi-billion dollar industry around like app tracking stuff on your computer or on your phone that like tells you there's something called like rise productivity i think it's called that's like a computer app that like yeah actually i got it on appsumo noah um it was like one of your deals of the week um at one point like last year and um it

[12:18] like tells you you know it gives you all these metrics and data at the end of every week of like what apps you spent your time on where you were productive where you got drained et cetera but doing that but for like your personal energy and um sort of like using it as like a week in review type template that gives you data behind all of that and maybe it's self-reported but it's still you know actual data that tracks over time and putting a ui ux on top of it i feel like it would actually be pretty productive kind of like it yeah let's do it yeah uh so

[12:53] well i want to come back to that actually because there's something interesting to be built there so we will talk about that but noah you know it's been super excited to have you on it's it's taken longer than we should have um to uh to do this recording so i'm happy that we're finally getting to do it um and a handful of stuff that we wanted to just dive into with you but i thought maybe we could just set the stage for a little bit with like hearing a little bit more about who you are in your background because i also just personally feel like i don't know

[13:19] enough about your background and and um you know some of what has gotten you to where you are today and obviously you're a you know amazing entrepreneur and you're also an amazing creator and so i want to dig in to uh dig into a bunch of that but would love to just hear you know what has kind of like created your map of reality um over your life like where have you kind of come from and and how did you end up where you are today dude i have no idea i was on a date like a year ago and she's like who are you i was like what

[13:48] i was like could i just order my dinner at chick-fil-a and call it a night like it was a fancy date man yeah your sports are the best that's why i'm probably still single at 40. i just i just checked my gmail i just put your name in my gmail and i think i slept in your bed dude awesome we we should have opened with that yeah you guys having a sauna party 2016 matt galligan was like hey like my buddy has his apartment up for rent or something like that and i think we might have stayed at your place dude awesome i love hosting i love like

[14:24] i'm uh well that's a whole money thing we can talk about um they're short of who i am i don't know man like i'm trying to figure it out uh i try to follow you know i try to follow what what really like what i'm listening to my body you could say like what really is calling me i definitely get distracted with shiny objects but i think my my career and my life has been like what feels right uh and then trying just a [ __ ] ton of things out and most of them not working and some of them working and then really surrounding myself with just like epic

[14:53] people i've been very i think some of my talent is talent i'm just like a talent like you know those metal detectors for pennies and nickels like i kind of like that a little bit with people um and professionally yeah uh i was born into like tech i don't know how my brother became my brother's a doctor but i was born like a few miles from apple and i love tech i love the computer stuff i love like all this internet stuff i love the app stuff i love the crypto stuff i just think it's it's really interesting how it's evolving society and then appsumo you know professionally

[15:25] was a culmination of just a lot of rejection uh a lot of soul searching a lot of like experiments and then finally in trying a lot of companies out to finally figuring out how do i work with people i really like where i don't feel so insecure working on something i really like was promoting things and talking about these things um you know and being able to live the kind of lifestyle i want and so that that's coming together and creating content i've been doing blogging for a long time uh more hardcore lately on youtube for the past little about two and a half years specifically around like

[15:57] you know starting a business making money overcoming fear so you you were born and raised in silicon yeah valley yeah my and i was kind which was i feel very lucky because my dad is a sales guy he was like from israel he didn't know english he just started selling things and then my stepfather's an engineer so it's just really cool to to get that mix of personalities and then i was i was just it's all luck it's all i was very mostly lucky um to be born there and then all of my friends are in silicon valley are just like extreme high achievers like my

[16:30] lowest friend is like a senior engineer at fitbit like that's the worst off person i know and like not bragging i'm just like i was lucky to be born with that type of you know uh expectations i think something about success is people like it's a network it's not where it's not network it's who are who's around you and what's their ambition levels and i just had really high ambition people around me and it's really inspiring and there's a balance of that of you have to figure out your own ambition like do i want this or am i just competitive or comparative but that was inspiring to be like oh cool there's

[17:01] a lot of things i can do out there so do you feel like i mean you mentioned the ambition point i've never really thought about it much but do you feel like you're kind everyone always uses that phrase of like you know you're the average of the five people you spend your most time with do you feel like that's about ambition that like you're really the average of their ambition level like if you're around a bunch of people and you come up around a bunch of people who have tremendous ambition it's hard not to have that same level of ambition and you know and spend time

[17:32] with them i think it you know i think it sets the bar of what what things could be like if you don't know what x if you don't know what excellent food tastes like like how do you know what excellence looks like so i had a chance to be like hey i worked around zuckerberg i worked around you know mark pincus and like you know peter thiel and like the elite and they're elite for a reason because they're they're excellent and then i think there's also some just internal motivation like i'm just naturally moving i'm naturally active and that's that's a little bit just i was born with

[18:03] that i think people want to imitate like the people that generally speaking like you know if you're i think you know that's why okay i was reading a study late late late a few nights ago about how people who have friends who are overweight generally eat more than the average person um and and and then they become overweight and i think it's it speaks to this point which is like you probably grew up with a lot of people who were exceptional or tried to be exceptional and because of that like you know it might it might just you know it might have been in you but

[18:44] it also might have just been yeah yeah manifestation yeah manifestation yeah yeah i do think parallel oh sorry the real example of that is like i'm in a text group called like single guys in austin and it's like all these guys it's like my three other best friends and it's always like dude i'm out of this date look at this check this out like you know it's a safe space for for a single gentleman but then one day i'm like dude if i'm just surrounded by these bozos talking about hooking up all the time like of course that's why i'm single you know and it's not that necessary

[19:15] being single is a bad thing but it's just like if you're around a bunch of healthy people to greg's point and like you'll probably be more healthy and um i think people are probably aren't as intentional as i i'm not a brag i think i'm very intentional who i surround myself with and besides these bozo single guys who i love i'm around a lot of very like intentional people not just in making money it's not only about that it's just like an integrity and follow-through character um and just like they inspire me in different capacities and i have there's it's honestly kind of like amazing it's

[19:46] probably the best parts of my life it's it's sort of um it's interesting like i have a few thoughts on this so one is that these kind of things cut both ways um you know like i often think about uh i have friends who don't make a lot of money totally fine you know they're successful but don't make a lot of money and yet they they roll in a circle of people who do make a lot of money and who spend a lot of money and those friends of mine um that role in that circle then are constantly in trouble and stressed because they basically are like living

[20:20] at the means of somebody who spends a lot and who makes a ton of money when they don't have that and it's like they've kind of grown accustomed to living in this way by just like i don't know like osmosis or something like that and it creates a lot of issues for them as a result um because you do kind of like naturally blend into your surroundings for better or for worse um so i've often thought that was it was it's just like an interesting fact of humans that we tend to just like chameleon into our surroundings one way or another yeah is it can you tell us a little bit about

[20:54] like the insight with appsumo like what actually led to the business creation i mean you mentioned it as kind of like failure rejection things that had gone wrong and led to it but like the actual insight around what it is um what was it that sparked that for you how did you decide to go build it and you know then i kind of would love to just hear a little bit more about the business today sure um i think it was it was a culmination of all of my failure package did in one day what was your failure like you said you know you say that but like what was the failure i

[21:28] mean the failure was like intel 14 months facebook nine months mint nine months kickflip ten months which was funded by naval ravicon and then i did gambit which did really well and then facebook sued us and we got banned by another company and then it was just like i'm 30 years old and i'm just like wow i this is it's not bad i thought i'd be like super rich and like i don't know i thought you'd just get money magically in your bank account and so it doesn't happen that way or i thought i'd have a wife that should just like show up at the house they don't

[21:58] they don't you have to actually go out and make it happen um and so i think all those different experiences in my life of what i didn't enjoy and what made me feel good and bad led to be like all right well i really want to work with people that i don't know are humble and i felt facebook in silicon valley was just like this level of arrogance i didn't enjoy being around there's a little confidence and intelligence but the arrogance is too much so i knew i wanted to be with great people which i didn't really experience i knew i liked promoting things i think

[22:23] it's like for all of us there's some skill we enjoy and we're doing for free and so just find the thing you want to do for free and make that your job there's debates that i just found that for myself where i'm going to be promoting things like whether there's appsumo or not like i'm still doing this youtube thing i'm still doing my newsletter at you know okdor.com i'm doing these things and so i was like i want to keep promoting things and then through some of these businesses i realized like you talked about this one idea sahil earlier you said we should help people track uh

[22:49] their their work stuff and i think especially now during a recession this is where a lot of this is where like some of the best innovations gonna come out of i'm really excited to see who's gonna be creative here like who's gonna win someone's gonna win winning is all subjective but who's gonna come out and create something special that they'll enjoy and so uh i think for me i was like man i like promoting i don't like doing this payment stuff uh i like software and i love deals and i saw like mac heist which was around for a br do you guys remember that yep oh wow i saw matt

[23:21] kaise and i was like oh that's kind of cool that like enables you to get people customers promote cool stuff i don't have there's not a lot of pressure and i to be candid and i think most people don't quit your day jobs when you're starting a side hustle and be clear on your vision be clear on your fan i like calling it a fantasy like what if you could live a fantasy like how cool is that and my fantasy was like make a few thousand bucks just doing it like all these things i had bad partners all this different stuff it's like just doing it the way i wanted it wasn't like

[23:49] the aspiration and this is something that someone called out that i thought was interesting most aspiration of billionaires or millionaires or multi-millionaires was not always that case like mark didn't start facebook i'm a big billionaire i was like man let me see if i can meet some chicks online if we're honest right i worked for him so i know that stuff it wasn't like i'm gonna go create this world eventually it evolved so your vision evolves but i think being clear on what you want in your fantasy and vision was really helpful so for me it was like can i do this thing and make a

[24:18] few thousand bucks promoting and getting basically deals i want on products and that's more or less how it was for the first year and and i think the thing i've got to highlight for people out there uh for starting businesses specifically and that's what i'm known a little bit for it's kind of twofold one i just picked a really great industry that's not because i'm that smart like i'm above average smart i'm not like excellent i'm like a b-plus kind of smart that's what i aim for you know i get almost the good thing but i don't do all the work and i think one thing is like software

[24:46] just grew so much and i guess i kind of assumed it would but like what's going to get even bigger like is youtube going to get bigger or smaller way bigger tick-tock bigger twitter probably bigger so go find the categories that are going to get bigger so that's one and then i think with that secondly i got very lucky and i think the other thing is when people are building these companies like that tracking thing we talked about especially during a recession are you building something a must-have like i can't live without it like right now go to your credit card bills what can you not cut that's a must-have

[25:15] what can you cut like even employee wise those are nice to haves unless they're must-haves and i think with appsumo there's two two components which is everybody wants more customers in this world we live in you guys want more listeners so he'll you want more twitter followers i want more youtube subscribers like those are just kind of what we're interested in so i thought if i can give people customers that's literally the most important thing i can do on earth for these people and then secondly i think we got very lucky with our business model which was we don't have to create anything we don't have to hold any inventory on

[25:46] anything and we promote a thing you created someone else created in some software creator we get the money up front and then we pay them 60 days later and there's a reason for that like we had to put up all this money and all this you know experience and time to get the audience and and the community but the model just was was epic like we don't need a big office like we can really do a 60-day cash conversion cycle that way like so you're like you're getting just generating cash as you grow but like negative working capital basically is it negative or positive so we get the

[26:15] money up front and then we pay our partners 60 days later yeah negative working capital a positive working capital is like a like a you know apparel business where you have to pay your vendors and then you receive money you know in 30 days and that's a pain in the ass to grow because you're having to fund all the inventory growth negative working capital is the other way where like they give you the cash and now as you're growing you have this float of a bunch of cash that you can be using to invest in things because you don't have to pay your partners for 60 days

[26:40] it's a pretty incredible business model when you make it work yeah ours has gotten really lucky i would say with all those things and i mean it's a pretty i think find a business that you just really enjoy doing like we promote like our job is literally to find cool software products get a deal and then tell people about it and that's how like the money just comes down and then we give the partners money the people get a good deal i think more businesses aren't figuring out like triple win there's like win lose like you gave me some money but you're getting screwed and i think there's like mint was a

[27:08] perfect example of that it was like free plus like the plus like these partners get money and it was just like a really cool like everyone's winning there but i think some businesses it does feel like win lose yeah can you talk a little more about like the first year of appsumo because i imagine like now it must be easy you know you have this massive audience people know appsumo um but like the first year i can imagine which dude oh my god oh my god oh dude it gets harder i thought it you know there's a what's his name jim roth jim rome quote it's like yeah it doesn't

[27:50] get it doesn't get uh easier you just get better and i like that a lot because it doesn't get easier just your problems get harder and you get better at it um the first to be in look our narratives of our mind are all liars like our like how we reminisce some things is total lies like we just totally change the history to serve whatever purpose and whatever moment we're in um but the way i recall it to the best of my ability and i looked at revenue of it recently and it's been 12 years so our first year

[28:20] revenue was 300 000. and that was me truthfully just by myself i really wanted a business where i was like i don't want to have a developer i'll do it myself don't have support i don't have anybody to [ __ ] depend on initially now i can't do without these this team and it was just like kind of where i think one of the key things that that people miss in business in general is they're not working backwards from their customer very specifically so with appsumo i literally just once a month i didn't do a lot of work i probably worked about like 10 20 hours a month

[28:48] i would be like all right i want to reach y combinator audience what are the products that i could get deals on that i know that would get it would get upvoted on hacker news it was like oh well let me get those so i got optimizely i got mixpanel um then i was like how do i get on lifehacker that's an audience i want well i looked up all of life hackers top uh top reviewed software they've ever talked about and i got a deal on that and i emailed them and said hey if i get deals on this can you promote it and they're like yeah maybe they did

[29:14] and so it was a very intentional approach of uh you know customer first is how i like to label it and working backwards in that and i treated it very casually greg i wasn't very like this is going to be a big-ass company i was like i make you know a few thousand bucks every month or so for not too much work and i think one thing that people need to be clear on especially or whatever you're on your career i lived so cheap that i didn't have to make a lot of money i didn't even have like i was doing consulting for speeddate.com they were paying me 5 000 bucks a month

[29:42] and i didn't really do much for them but they loved me i was like dude that's awesome i was like a product manager for them as a consultant but i had the 5000 i lived crazy cheap and it gave me the flexibility to really find stuff i enjoyed and i did it very comfortably until probably around a year in i hired you know i had a i found a developer named chad who's still my business partner and that's an amazing story and then andrew chen who's one of my best friends was like no you got it why don't you take it seriously and he you know he tiger bombed me he's like you're

[30:10] gonna try to be rich and you're gonna grow this big and i was like dude i'm just chilling man just let me chill dude he's like no make something of your life and so we switched up the model we went from bundles to single deals and we went from single deals to like tremendous amounts of advertising and giveaways and different things and the business went from 300 000 to 3 million the next year and it was that's not normal and uh and so the way i think of the first year greg it was it was enjoyable it was um i wouldn't say professional in the sense it was very hobby and i think this

[30:40] is a very clear difference as a baseball player and as a professional in sports or as a professional in business or a professional in a hobby is that are you treating it like a hobby are you training like a professional and we had a lot of we eventually people copied us and we're just very professional like i worked at these very impressive companies i have a very it's not bragging but i have a a like we got blocked by paypal and then i literally emailed or texted the vp at paypal and got unblocked within like 30 minutes that's just it was just luck because i have that network from being in silicon

[31:12] valley and stuff and so i think that gave us an edge over other people as we started professionalizing the business and you know 20 to what you're in 2022 i mean it's [ __ ] hard man i used to think ceo so i hired the ceo his name is amy abdullah you should check him out on twitter and i had i hired eamon he ran the company for five years and i basically just like got pretty rich during that time period and i really didn't do do a lot of work and i was like this is this is very unsatisfying getting a lot of money is satisfying i

[31:42] will not deny that but like not working is pretty unfulfilling and i just thought he didn't do [ __ ] all day i was like this [ __ ] guy dude like he makes good money i don't want to i can't say his numbers i'm like this guy's making all this money and like what does he do ceo ceo do nothing he sits around has everybody else do all this work and then he quit last year and i was like oh [ __ ] man i guess i'll try to do it myself and it's it's it's not like a boohoo story for me but it's like oh wow

[32:11] there's until you're in someone else's experience and really understanding it um it was hard to really grasp like how challenging it is day to day and like the level of responsibility he had and so i definitely empathize more with him and anyone leading a team and being responsible for jobs and you know running a business did you did you raise money or or has it been bootstrapped it's been bootstrapped it's so cool to um you know it ties back to the working capital point that we were making earlier but like you know the inherent feature of the business model you built is that you're kind of being just funded

[32:45] by customers along the way so you know most most venture-backed business models they're like gross margin negative from the get-go or you know or you're having to you know fund a bunch of upfront technology build out and it's you know you're you need a tremendous amount of money up front in order to build that so that you can hopefully get to the point where like you're kind of at the uh you know the benefit point of like the marginal cost of zero of the deployment of the technology but the reality is then you have to raise a bunch of vc capital and dilute yourself in order to

[33:13] get there with your business model negative working capital you're like you know pulling in cash and you don't have to pay for a while you're able to actually fund all of that growth and all the growth initiatives with customer money and so like you don't really need to raise money uh along the way and you can maintain that ownership so it's a pretty cool um it's a cool thing to see how it actually played out and flowed that way yeah i can't say is that i'm not smart about it i think more with raising money we never really had a good use for it because we did have capital we were

[33:42] profitable from day one and i think more businesses can be i don't think we're unique in that i think people get uh deceived i think the other thing that's interesting is the advantage we have we've talked about going public like you know our revenues are in eight you know very high eight figures and um i don't know i just don't want to be at the mercy of other people i like being at the mercy of our customers like if they like us and we like them and we try to do our best they buy and give us money and we can live our lives and hopefully they benefit the partners we

[34:08] promote get a bunch of money for us from other stuff um i like the idea that and not having it is good to have adult supervision like we have a board um they can't fire me which is you know good and bad but i think having a board of advisors in general like i'm seeing one of them tomorrow because i'm having a bunch of issues is uh is critical as in the personal life is i have a council of wise men is what i call it uh but also in your professional life yeah it's um it's interesting i mean you bring that up right now like you know not everyone

[34:41] needs to raise money and there's a lot of businesses that could be profitable from the get-go i just think that there's been this i mean it's probably just a relic of the fact that we've been in this raging 10-year bull market where like money was free and you could go raise at a billion dollars after a year of existing and you know i think in general people have created this storyline that they're going to follow as entrepreneurs and it's like here's what i'm supposed to do quote unquote and what i'm supposed to do as an ambitious founder is i'm supposed to start this business i'm supposed to

[35:10] raise money from andreessen horowitz at this valuation and then i'm supposed to be a unicorn by a year from now and get my forbes article written about me uh you know then i'm supposed to go public and it's like okay but take a step back zoom out and as you said i mean and greg would definitely agree with this it's like why do you actually want to do that is that going to make you happy are you going to be incrementally happier from going and running a public company and like in your case what does that entail running a public company it's like now i have to

[35:37] get on quarterly uh you know earnings calls with a bunch of analysts and have a bunch of people grilling me and have news articles written about me every time i do something you know there's just a bunch of headaches that come with the traditional path that everyone thinks they're supposed to follow and so i think like one of the great things that hopefully comes out of this you know bear market if we're in it is that people actually reassess and take a much more first principles approach to thinking about what they really want to do when it comes to building companies yeah yeah yeah i would encourage anyone just

[36:09] to get started like especially if you have a day job like you know i was talking with a buddy of mine named sam from financial samurai and it was like if you have a day job number one kiss your boss's ass a lot right now a lot it's a good time to kiss ass it's a [ __ ] great time to build your network because you know when people are looking to cut costs they're like well who who's who's who's showing up or who's calling it in right and the people showing up generally we'll have a higher chance and then also build the network right there as well

[36:37] uh for those times i think we're going to see a lot of profitable products being created right now just because all that vc money is drying up and you know i think it's just gonna we're gonna see uh over the next 18 months just some profitable businesses come out like you remember groupon like groupon was like a 30 billion dollar company at its peak like that came out of the gray financial crisis and i think we're gonna we're gonna see a lot of businesses kind of like appsumo where people are gonna want deals on one side and companies are going to want customers on the other side

[37:27] and entrepreneurs are not going to want to raise money not because it's impossible to raise money but just because it's like difficult and and annoying right now to raise money i felt like is that true though because sometimes i'm like if you're good looking you're always going to get hit on like i would say i was on a date a few days ago and she's like i have 6 thousand guys to choose from and i was like i'm one in six thousand she's like you are one of the last ones it's like that's fine but it's you know i think if you have if you're an air table or a you know figma

[38:00] or a notion and there and you're you have a model that works i i still think you can raise like stupid easy uh i think the challenge and you know i think that's what you're saying so is like if it's like uh yeah we're gonna have to do a lot of stuff and there's a lot of uncertainty it's gonna probably be a lot more challenging experience when you're doing zero to one like pre-seed seed that's where it's going to be more difficult to raise but yeah once you have product market fit and you have something that's working like there's always money yeah it's a flight to quality at that

[38:31] point too i mean it's like all the same money is going to pour at the ones that are working and doing well um you hit on i i do want to greg i want to talk google chrome extensions um for sure but before i do that there were like three frameworks that noah hit on in the context of um in the context of his business building that i thought were awesome to reiterate for for any entrepreneurs or builders listening one was to go like just think about what industry is going to be growing a ton in the years ahead and like that is a great place to go and build if you know that

[39:02] like you know for you software was going to be much bigger and you can go and build in front of that trend that's a great place to start um the whole like must-haves versus nice to haves framework that you dropped i thought was really interesting i've always thought of it as like um painkillers versus vitamins is the way i always like thinking about that where you're just like vitamins are nice to have they might make you feel okay and good painkillers like you need to position if you're going to be selling well you need to position what you're selling as a painkiller because people are way more

[39:30] willing to pay and they if you make it feel urgent and then that final one was triple win businesses which i loved like try to create a business model that is a win-win-win where you have like the companies winning customers are waiting the partners are winning in it and when you can do that uh you know it becomes much more effective and it's a much easier sell from the early days of it so a bunch of stuff that you hit on that i thought was just um that was just gold uh greg can i pass it over to you to kick off this um little bit of ideation

[39:57] around the google chrome extensions because i absolutely loved uh loved the writing you did on that so i invested in a company in 2012 called vid iq and the founders this guy named rob sandy he raised like a million dollars from mark cuban and gary vaynerchuk and all these guys to go build uh the hootsuite but for youtube or the buddy media for youtube so a platform that gives you analytics on on youtube he did like the pure silicon valley approach like he got like an awesome office he hired like all these like well-known people he was burning money like crazy he was down to his last dollars

[40:44] this is like 2014 2015. and he basically got rid of everyone except a few people he went remote when remote wasn't a thing and basically was surfing every day living in santa cruz kind of like to your point noah like almost like the first year of your business he was just kind of like what can i create that generate some revenue and that would be fun to create he ends up taking vidiq and turning it into a chrome extension that when you're on youtube you go on youtube and let's say i'm you know at the you know let's say you're on our our channel right the where it happens

[41:26] channel which by the way you should subscribe we have like a crazy low amount of subscribers on it so go subscribe we got to get on noah's we got to get on noah's level man and you're there it'll say you know when you're on this video let's say it'll say the vid iq score is 92 the average um you know views per hour is 2.1 um you know here's the ratio of likes here's like the engagement it basically gives you deeper analytics for people who are interested in getting a leg up on uh on other creators and then he started he so he created that for free and then he

[42:05] started charging for it today fast forward to today you know he's doing millions of dollars of revenue a year his team is like 50 people um the chrome extension has two plus million users it's now no longer just youtube uh they're on tick tock too and it's also a web app and it's an incredible story of a business that like you know pivoted did their own thing passionate guy and use chrome chrome extensions as a great way to get an initial group of users and then just charge for it so that inspired me to write a tweet thread um around chrome extension extensions which i'll just pull up really quickly here

[42:56] i basically said people sleep on google chrome extensions but it's secretly a gold mine grammarly loom metamask and honey are companies that started as chrome extensions and created billions of value and then here's why it works people barely uninstall extensions the barrier to install is low extensions are quote unquote always on so people are daily active users of it and then people pay for many of them so noah and sahil i want to get your perspective as to what do you think about chrome extensions as a place to be building i love it um i texted you as soon as i saw this because i um

[43:36] so i invested in this bit it was the first time i'd ever really encountered chrome extensions and this is kind of embarrassing but like i had just never really used google chrome um and so i was like completely unfamiliar with the chrome ecosystem and then i started using it and basically had gotten approached right around that time by this founder who was building a chrome extension that allowed you to um split payments across multiple credit cards so like you know how you know if you go to a store and you're buying like a big purchase you know like a laundry machine or a fridge or whatever you can

[44:07] like take two credit cards and be like hey split it across these two and they'll do it for you like at walmart or sears or wherever you were um you can't do that online incidentally like it literally didn't exist um you can go and you put in one credit card you have to spend it and that's challenging for big purchases it also presents an issue where like you know if you want to manage your credit you don't want to over extend within one credit card and then also you might want to optimize across points and rewards across different credit cards and so this guy invented this chrome extension that

[44:36] basically creates a kind of an instant card that splits it however you want across multiple credit cards and i had no understanding of like chrome extensions or how he was going to go to market with it anyway now fast forward like three months after initial launch and they're doing you know 10 plus million of gmb through this thing um without having a single dollar of marketing expense yet um have not spent a dollar it's been all completely organic and like product like growth of people sharing this stuff and so that was what opened my eyes to the power of these things of like just how much you

[45:07] can do with them especially because they're cross-internet like you just have it plugged in you can use it wherever across the internet now on different transaction sites for this honey was the same way i imagined in the early days so i am i think it's super interesting there has to be a lot of cool stuff to be built here that business is called kashish by the way k-a-s-h-e-e-s-h like cash jeezy well then work on they should work on their name [Laughter] they need to put a little zhu on that sahil i i think uh my just two comments and you know maybe you don't want him i'll

[45:43] shut the hell up but i i think you know two observations here one is i think it's wrong to look at where necessarily the biggest size of audiences and be like i need to build a business there versus like what's the actual problem and then what's the best way to resolve it and i think this is where people get trapped like a lot of entrepreneurs are like i need recurring revenue what's the best way to get people to give me money every month i'm like well make something they want to give you money for every month but i think that that line of thinking needs to be reversed generally which is

[46:12] working backwards from the customer's problems that they're excited like i think that's the thing without sooner was like they were i've tried a lot of other businesses since then and before then it was like this person was like they're like please let me give you money i was like damn this is cool and the second thing is that um i do think google chrome is big uh i've bought google chrome and i've ran google chrome business it's called leo.io and things always seem easier or cooler or bigger than when you when you actually do it and you're like damn this is hard and so we tried to monetize it didn't

[46:44] work we tried to drive ads to it didn't drive ads from it didn't work the growth loops wouldn't work that hard and then a lot of people if you try to buy a google chrome app are actually pretty premium priced but i think you guys are on to something that there's there's a lot of people here they're probably actually rich like wealthy for internet standards because they're on chrome right versus probably like maybe other browsers or they're maybe on android i guess android would be chrome but i think they're definitely having more money um i i think what you're seeing so it's also is interesting is like you could study the

[47:13] ones that are doing well like rocket reach i think is a huge one that no one talks about um i think there's a lot of these ones but i would try to work backwards on the customers and then not assume that this one thing is going to be easy because it almost never it sometimes is but we bought it i spent 25 000 i paid a dollar for every active user and then two years later now it's just like collecting dust and getting emails from people wanting to monetize it in some scammy way i agree with you know i think like the trap the trap that entrepreneurs make are

[47:42] like okay there's a lot of action here in chrome extension now i need to like build a chrome extension like rob sandy from vid iq like when he was surfing in santa cruz he was like he was a yout he was he actually created a youtube competitor called biddler in 2005 around when youtube came out in 2005. like he he was he under like he's og day one youtube video creator so you know to your point around your earlier point around passion and you know two things that you basically have a competitive edge on like he understood it and then he was like okay the the tool is gonna be on an extension

[48:29] because it's just way easier for creators when they're on youtube to have this extension and use it and it'll be ten times quicker um he wasn't he wasn't like oh yeah like uh i i you know this is a huge opportunity i need subscription revenue um at all it just came once yeah i fell in love with it i think you're calling out the right thing though which is like what are industries or categories that are getting bigger and then where is it being underserved i do think sometimes though as an entrepreneur i always think my the other thing is going to be so much easier than mine i'm

[49:04] like dude i'll do chrome finally it'll be so cake i'm going to get i'm going to finally get super rich and then i do it i'm like ah i thought it was like i read greg's tweets i thought supposed to be super easy i think it's it's going to be work regardless so just find that the work that you actually want to spend time on versus i think if you're young just chase a bunch of [ __ ] and get in the reps just like in any sport but then try to find the the path like for you guys i think creating content is like so

[49:29] obvious how good you guys are like you guys are doing it naturally naturally now after putting it in but it's kind of like uh lubricant versus friction so i try to find the areas that i'm like i like korean content i like sending emails like that's kind of what appsumo does why do you do all the content like you've built a massive youtube presence you do a ton of videos they're great by the way like you go i see you like knocking on doors talking to talking to people oh [ __ ] [ __ ] dude on the internet a few weeks ago for for suggesting um but uh yeah no like just

[50:03] what uh what has um what has led to that like why are you why are you excited about creating content probably insecurities and ego if we're all honest you know some form of legacy like i hope people remember me or think i'm like smart or special do you think that's a thing like do you i think anyone will remember any of us no not at all yeah no one's even no elon musk that guy's [ __ ] gone yeah lame like not lame in a bad way but like in like a hundred years maybe remember maybe and people today's like god here fine no problem like thanks for building

[50:37] this cool stuff but i think we're overly fixated on the reality that like there's almost none of it like any like building i always said about this colleges like you get a building dude they're gonna rename that [ __ ] in 50 years if it still exists sayonora i think i wrote about this recently like i just i think it's like i think it's such a false pursuit i just think it's like an unfortunate false pursuit actually the whole idea of legacy because the reality is in like i like you said 100 years i was going to say a thousand like no matter what in a

[51:08] thousand years you're all forgotten like we don't even know what half thousand years ago yeah like we don't remember [ __ ] like you know like socrates and like a few random p you know jesus whatever like there's a few people out there that we remember but the is the only guy that we know from 2000 years ago and there's still debate if he's true well we're all jewish here right so like abraham isaac you know we got we got some other guys out there we got some other dudes out there hunter you had you're half indian half jew yeah i'm a hindu dude i've only i think you're the first

[51:42] ever i've only heard about you yeah well i heard about 2000 years ago you're in the bible yeah yeah like mostly like when i tell people i'm jewish most people because they see me they think i'm sephardic like they think yeah just because of my brown skin but yeah no my mom is indian hindu um yeah my dad's white jewish from the bronx okay let's ask that i think that's a little bit why do i like doing this [ __ ] because one i like marketing and it's really a marketing problem it's like who is the audience i call them underdogs they're 18 to 35 year old

[52:09] men that want to start a side hustle or a business or solopreneur and they don't know what to do and they want inspiration and i make content that inspires them uh i do it because i like making the content i like seeing what goes viral i like looking at the metrics and then tweaking it and then i personally i get a lot of joy engaging in the comments i really like responding to almost all the comments myself um and so there's that i think the question i was curious though is like what's with jews it's always fun when you start with that what's with g what's with jews and all

[52:37] of us is that the end of the question no no no why do we love broadcasting like all the jews like comedians twitterians like disproportionately like there's a lot of jewish people i don't know there's something interesting about our culture goes back to the bible it goes back what happened in the bible so it goes back i've never read the bible the golden calf and you know the story no go on okay so i mean this okay so basically the story is moses was in the desert with the israelites they flew they fled from egypt to go to israel and in the process of that walk i

[53:18] believe what happened was the israelites started worshiping pagan gods and symbols and uh that's when moses went up to mount sinai and got the ten commandments from god so to speak and i feel like moses broadcasted to all those people at the bottom of mount sinai to help them sort of see ba see back judaism and and give them the the ten commandments was that the first tweet would you say the ten commandments he's like here's a listicle i've gotta i've gotta i've gotta ten times to improve your life [Applause] i mean you know you guys both put out a lot of content that i think does that

[54:12] you know i mean it's it's it's a tried and true right like uh buzzfeed uh you know created a billion dollar business around that um you know just the numbers grab people you know you get the like um you know the cl the clear effect of like hooking people in i mean let's be real like youtube like every single platform the people that have built big presents like you you uh continue to lean into the things that are grabbing people like how many youtube videos say like how i bought eight lamborghinis in for 10 grand in a weekend like that's every video when you go to it because those

[54:47] are the things that are hooking people so it's like human nature in some way shape or form um you know these like neatly packaged things i mean it's the brilliance of the ten commandments it's like ten commandments i know like that encompasses my whole world it's like great marketing if jews believed in hell all of us are i'm definitely go i don't know if i'm going i think i'm doing my best to stay wherever the hell jews go i the other thing that's interesting so hell about that is um i think more people should do like calling the calling the right word which is like a pruning like i pruned

[55:15] really aggressively on all my content like on instagram i think i followed 20 people because it's just like attractive people and some watches i think youtube is like really i watch poker and squash and then my videos i don't like i see these other business guys they drive me crazy i'm like just block them then you know on twitter too like i go through seasons i'm like oh i really want to get this kind of content and then i'm like i don't know it's not certain i think people could be a little bit more intentional uh about the the inputs and then just get over get get like brainwashed with

[55:44] positive inputs right like if brainwash would take i don't i try to get addicted tick tock it's hard for me i just think it's so garbage it's a it's a relatively state-owned corporation that controls the data of a whole lot of american teenagers and that is scary what does that say though that the american seniors don't give a [ __ ] about it they're like i don't care and even teenagers there's a lot of adults even myself i put up on tick tock and i'm like they can have my garbage videos i think they're taking out my diarrhea and uh follow me it's just so abstract

[56:13] on a micro level it's so abstract it's like hard to it's one of those things where it's like for one person it's very hard to conceptualize what that means but in the aggregate if it means that you know in a hot or cold war with china they could make slight tweaks to the algorithm that completely influence what all of our teenagers are seeing and how they're thinking on a daily basis that's pretty scary but like for an individual i don't really know what that means for me i'm not gonna be skewed by whatever i see you immediately you know you have an arrogance around it so

[56:44] i think it's scary geopolitically i really do if you're anything like me your portfolio is a mix of the usual suspects stocks bonds and mutual funds maybe you've even dabbled in some alternative assets like crypto but those investments can be incredibly unpredictable you know what typically isn't unpredictable apartment buildings rental homes industrial facilities places we go every day to work eat and live that's all private real estate and thanks to its historical stability as well as its reputation as a reliable income stream these investments could be a valuable addition to your portfolio this is where fundrise comes in fundrise is changing the game when it comes to real estate investing and

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[59:38] of this special offer try element you won't regret it dude this was this was awesome thank you so much for uh for joining and doing it yeah my wife is getting me to leave right now i gotta go she's like oh the kid yeah i can actually legitimately i can actually hear a screaming baby um and so that's generally my cue to leave thanks so much for listening to today's episode if you have any questions that you want featured in a future episode email us at hi trwih.com leave us a review at apple or spotify to help us grow the reach of this podcast until next time we will see you soon

[1:00:14] [Music]

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