#171 - How to Generate Millions from Paid Events (Bootstrapped)
when I, I first hosted my, uh, I hosted my first event in June, and the event happened— or I decided to do it around June 1st, and the event went place 7 weeks later in August. And when I started, I had close to nothing. I had, um, a 200-person email list. So there wasn't like this, oh, it's easy for you, you had the Hustle. No, no, no, it didn't exist. Uh, there was no website, there was just a domain name called HustleCut. Um, and I hosted this event, and the first 6 weeks, it made about $60,000 in revenue and $50,000-ish in profit. And a lot of people were surprised by that. It was, but it wasn't that hard. The second event you can see here—
Explain that. So how did you sell the $60,000 of tickets during that process? Yeah, I feel like I could rule the world. I know I could be what I want to.
I put my all in it like no days off. On the road, let's travel, never looking back. Today, Sean, let's actually jump right— you I think want to do this Billy of the Week right away. And then I have a thing on events. Do you want to do events or you want to save that? What do you want to do?
I want to do that. So I want to do this Billy of the Week. I want to hear your stuff on paid events. And then I have two ideas. One is a cool idea I have seen, and then the other is a brainstorm of a potential idea. So I want to do all those things. So let's start with the Billy of the Week. This one is very interesting. Have you ever heard of this guy before? Don't Google. I want to tell you the story. So don't Google this guy. Let me tell you the story.
I googled them. I'm just thinking, oh, wow.
Okay.
Young guy.
Young guy, 29 years old.
I don't know who he is.
So his name is Sam Bankman-Fried, I think is the way you say his name. And if you heard him talk, like, I actually want you to listen to a YouTube video for a second because he sounds like an absolute dweeb. And I loved it. I was like, oh, this guy sounds like he would be a self-made billionaire by the age of 29 because he sounds like a genius. He sounds like a tech genius.
Have you brought this person up to me before?
No. I just discovered him like 2 days ago. Okay, so what's this guy's story? So this guy, you know, I'll just call him Sam for short. But so this guy Sam, he's a, he's a young guy. He's very smart. He takes a job as kind of like a hedge fund trader or something like that with a group called Jane Street, I guess. And I don't know, forget these details. They don't really matter. Guy's got a job in finance and he leaves and he starts something called Alameda Research. And it's called Alameda Research because he needed it to sound as legit as possible and not like what it actually was. So what was it? So what this guy did was he was into crypto, and there was this known thing in crypto where as crypto was getting popular, this is around 2017 when the first big run-up happened and Bitcoin went from $3,000 to $20,000, and it crashed later. But during that time, 2016, 2017, 2018, Bitcoin was emerging, and there was this, as any new thing, there's these like kind of, uh, it's like the Wild Wild West a little bit. And so there was this thing where in the US, the price of Bitcoin was, let's say, $10,000 a Bitcoin. And in other countries where, um, the exchanges weren't built or the, the country had some regulations or whatever, there was like a premium for Bitcoin. There was more demand than there was Bitcoin available to buy in those countries. Because you need, like, let's say, like in Korea, there was a famous thing called the kimchi premium. And the kimchi premium was that in Korea, there wasn't kimchi like the food. So this is known as the kimchi premium. And basically it was like, whatever Bitcoin was selling for here, let's say it was $10,000, in Korea it was trading for $15,000 because it was that big, 50% premium. And it fluctuated, obviously. And I think 30% was kind of like the average of the kimchi premium. Over time. So everybody wanted this. So everybody, you know, any smart person saw, oh wow, there's an arbitrage. What if I could just buy it in the US for $10 grand and immediately sell it in Korea for $15 grand or for $13 grand? And so you had this like ability to flip it. And so a whole bunch of people were trying to do this, but there was all these problems, right? Like, well, the reason, you know, the reason it wasn't easy, the reason there was this premium is because it was hard to buy Bitcoin in Korea. So one idea was you buy it in the US off a US exchange. You go to Korea and you sell it, but you're going to sell it in the Korean, you know, won, which is like the local currency. But now you need to, like, for the arbitrage to continue, you have to convert the Korean won back to dollars to go buy more Bitcoin in the US. The problem was you can't convert the Korean won back to dollars easily because the government was very, like, tight-fisted regulations. You couldn't funnel large amounts of money from the Korean won back to dollars very easily. So a whole bunch of people were trying to get this piñata of money and they couldn't crack it. And what this guy did was he was like, okay, fuck the kimchi premium. He went for the Japan premium, which was far less appealing. It was only 10%. But he's like, still, if I could trade a US Bitcoin for 10% more in Japan every day, I'm making 10% compounding daily. And so he went through this odyssey where for a year, All he's doing is setting up this trade. So he like, actually, by the way, first when he was trying to figure out, could I capture the kimchi premium? He was like doing calculations. Like if I filled up, if I chartered a private plane and I filled it up with 100 people and I flew, you know, they buy Bitcoin in the US and I flew them all to Korea and then they, you know, sell it there. And then I could, each one of them could convert some amount of that money and I could fly them back. And every day I could fly this plane back and forth between US and Korea. Like, could I make it work? And he was like, ah, I don't think it works.
So wait, so you had to be there physically.
It's not that you had to be there physically. You have to do all like all legs of the transaction. So you have to be able to buy in Korea or like, sorry, sell your Bitcoin in Korea at the premium. But now you have Korean won. Now you need to convert that to dollars. And so how do you do that? You need to convert it there, but there's caps. They won't let you convert it because the way he described it is like, look, he's like, what I wanted to do Essentially was to be selling $5 million of Bitcoin for the local currency and converting $5 million of the local currency back to US dollars every day. He's like, if you just go to Korea, go to Japan, go to wherever, and you say, hey, I'd like to— it's like a one-way flow of money. I have $5 million of your local currency. I'd like to convert it to dollars and exit the country. And they're like, okay, but where are you getting all this money and why are you doing such a large amount? And what is this? He's like,, you know, if you, if you go to bank school 101, that's like money laundering. That's what money laundering looks like. That, that, that is what money laundering, that is exactly what money laundering looks like. So he's like, even though I'm not money laundering, I'm buying and selling a good that's differently priced in different regions to them on the ground, to the bank on the ground where I need to do these conversions.
It's shady.
It's too shady. They won't let me do it. So he spends basically a year of his life where he's like, goes to Japan. Now he's got to find, uh, he's got to do each, each one of these was hard. So anyways, the net end of this story is this guy's arbitraging $25 million a day of, of this currency. He's making a 10% compounding, uh, you know, uh, margin every single day. And this guy, you know, in the 3 years, basically he's become a self-made billionaire. He's worth $10 billion now, which is a combination of the money he made from the arbitrage trade. As well as he then created his own exchange. Um, and like, you know, so he has a trading company that's, you know, has made hundreds of millions of dollars on this arbitrage. And then he built— he used that to create an exchange which is worth billions of dollars on paper. So anyways, this guy's worth $10 billion.
So he and his— because, uh, the currency is called FTX, right?
That's his exchange. His exchange is called FTX.
Sorry, sorry, exchange. And, uh, that is— is that basically an alternative to basically a more higher-end—
it's a more sophisticated coin a base where you can do like derivative trades, option trades on all different types of coins internationally.
And that's like a proper company.
It's a proper company. So Bala Bina Research made hundreds of millions of dollars in the span of a few months just doing this one trade over and over again every day. So I'm going to describe a couple things, but he got on people's radar because he was the biggest donor to Joe Biden this year in the campaign. He wrote like a $5 million check at the last hour, like at the 11th hour. That let Joe do as part of this last-minute blitz they did on TV ads in all the swing states. Because this is kind of interesting. This guy's like very— his whole business philosophy is this thing called effective altruism, which is basically like, go be a greedy capitalist, go try to make as much money as you can, and your goal is to give at least half of it away while you're doing it. So he's got like— it's not like a philanthropist giving away 1% of his money or 10% of his money as a tithe. His goal is to give away like 50% of his liquid net worth that he makes every year. That's kind of like his mindset.
Where did he get the money to start this?
So he started it with a very small amount of money and it just compounded very quickly because he's basically getting 10% extra every day. So I don't know exactly where he got the initial seed capital or how big it was. He hasn't specified that, but he did say at the max they were doing $25 million a day on the trade., which is basically like a $2.5 million profit per day that they were making on the trade. And so he describes that, okay, so he's like, basically, if you want to do this, you have to break it down into small chunks. He's like, okay, so I need on one side, I need to be able to go buy a shit ton of Bitcoin in the US. So how do I get an exchange in the US that's going to give me really high limits even though I'm this dorky kid who's got no track record and I have no collateral or brand name. And so he finds a way to solve that problem of being able to buy $25 million of Bitcoin in the US. Then he had to go to Japan and he had to be able to sell a huge amount of Bitcoin there. Then he had to be able to convert it from the Japanese yen or whatever to US dollars. And he had to do that all in the same day and wire transfer it all back to the US to buy it again the next day, to buy the full max amount again the next day. So he's just cycling the money every day. And so he described, like, they would just the way that the timing worked, it was always in the last hour of the banking day that he would be trying to get all the wire transfers done to get the money back to the US so that they could execute tomorrow's trade.
And any day that they couldn't get it done— What does he sound like? You said he sounds crazy. Like, I'm looking at pictures.
Oh my God. He sounds extremely genuine, humble, high-pitched voice, kind of like just a nerdy guy, um, who was like, he accounted for about 10% of all the Bitcoin trading himself, his Alameda Research during that time period, I believe, which is just insane because he was moving so much money on a daily basis. Dude, I love these people.
I love freaks. This guy is a freak.
I love these types of people. And they show his setup. His desk is him with 6 monitors hanging above his head. His neck is cramped because he just needs to constantly monitor the spot price in the US. What's the price in Japan? What's the conversion of yen to dollars? What's the conversion of dollars to yen? And anytime anything broke, it was just costing them tons of money. And he always had to make sure nobody's going to stop his trade or stop the bottleneck. And then he's stuck with all this Japanese yen and can't move it, or it gets seized by the government. And so he was like, the main banks wouldn't work with him. So that's why he picked Alameda Research as a name to be more legit. He hired this kind of sophisticated guy who spoke the local language to be able to go talk to the bankers and be like, hey, here's what we're doing. He also went to these rural banks in Japan, not the main ones in the city. He's like, okay, these rural banks will take my business because they're more open to what I'm doing than the city banks that have a tighter filter on what I'm doing. So anyways, I just thought it was super interesting to— he identified one arbitrage, like Moneyball style, and then dedicated a year or 18 months of his life to just hammering this one arbitrage and ended up making hundreds of millions of dollars and parlayed that into becoming— his paper net worth is $10 billion. And he did that, I think, 4 years total of how he built $10 billion because the, because the exchange is a combination of the research, the trading company plus the exchange. Um, $10 billion is what he, what he estimates is his net worth to be.
God, I love people like this. I, um, I mean, that's astounding. There's very, he's, that's one of a kind, but I love people and I try to do this with the hustle with email addresses, uh, with an email list, but that's peanuts compared to this and what some other people do, but basically who take a small tiny edge kind of like silly thing and just amp it up on steroids. So I love that. I think that is the coolest thing. I love people who think like that. I think it's so fascinating. I'd have to think of some more examples of that, but you totally know what I mean, right?
Yeah, absolutely. I've met this before with like people who make a poker bot and it's like, what are you doing? It's like every day they're just tweaking this little bot that's running 24/7 at the, at the 1 and 2 cent tables of Full Tilt Poker. And they have this like small edge, like this like 15% edge. And then they're just tweaking the system. And what it reminds me of is what happens a lot of times is people will go buy information. They'll go say, oh, I pay— my uncle does this. He was paying $19 a month for this guy's stock tips. And I had to sit my uncle down and be like, look, if these are amazing stock tips, do you really think this guy's going to give it to you for $19? No. If this guy really had an edge in the market, He would not need to make money educating you. He would be pounding his advantage and trying to make as much money as he can as long as that window exists. And so I have another example of this. This guy on Twitter called Haralobob, do you follow him?
No.
Pretty fascinating guy to follow. So this guy is a high-stakes gambler. He's a professional gambler, which usually is an oxymoron. There's no such thing as a professional gambler, but he was a professional sports bettor. And what he realized was back in I think 2013, 2012. I don't remember when it was. It's like, maybe it was even longer than that. I think it might've been like 15 years ago now. He realized that in Vegas, the books were like, they were so sportsbooks. It's kind of like hard to beat the house. The bookies are always like spot on. And there's one type of bet called the, you know, over-under. It's basically like in basketball. It's like, what's the total score going to be? Is it going to be, if you add up the total of both teams, is it 200? More, and then you bet if it's going to be over or under that. And the over-under is really, really accurate. But what he noticed was that, he noticed two things. One was the bookies did not take into account that actually in the first half, like in the basketball game, the second half, the score is usually higher than the first half because at the end of the game, the team that's losing will start fouling. Because they're like, look, we have to try to get back in this game. So I'll foul you to save— the clock stops, you get two free throws, and then I'll come back, try to hit a three. And so that's usually the end game for most, most teams. Like if you're down, you foul the other team, the clock stops, they score while the clock is stopped. And then I try to shoot threes to get back in the game and I'm pretty desperate. So what he noticed was that the total over-under, if you just divided it by half, that's what they would leave, just 50%. That's what they were making as the first half over-under. And very few people bet the first half over-under because it's not that fun of a bet. It's like, who cares what the halftime score is going to be? If you're going to bet the score, you just bet the end of the game score. So he realized it was this small edge where they thought they were taking the full score and dividing by half and making that the line. He's like, oh my God, this is almost always going to be under. And he specifically noticed that these 3 teams, their coaches would do that foul strategy way more in the second half. So he is like, okay, there's these teams that these coaches do this strategy more, and the first half is like my arbitrage. And he doesn't say shit to anybody. He just starts hiring people to go to the books, all the different sports books and things. What's this person's name? This guy Harala Bob. And I'm kind of like, Harala? I'm kind of paraphrasing.
How do you spell that?
H-A-R-A-L-A-B-O-B. Harala Bob. And so, and now he works for Mark Cuban. He works for the Dallas Mavericks, I think. He works for Mark Cuban because he like, wow, got a big personality on Twitter because he was a sports bettor. And like the way he made all of his money was like he had identified over these like 10 years of being a sports bettor, he found like 3 different edges. One was he just like went super hard on the Shaq and Kobe Lakers. The second was this first half, like a first half over-under bet that was just mispriced. And he just took that mispricing and he just went all in on this mispricing. Wow. That's crazy. Anytime a sportsbook would limit him, he would then like pay a guy, be like, hey, go walk up and bet $25,000 on this game, please. And then he would like do that. He had like people betting at all the sportsbooks in all the different casinos at the same time so that he could be betting the type of money he wanted to bet. Maximize his advantage while this arbitrage existed. And so anyways, I love people who find these arbitrages and then like the lengths that they have to go through to maximize it. It's like the movie 21 where they're counting cards in Vegas and they're like strapping cash to their body walking through this airport because they like need to go like pounce on this cash.
You used to have this guy who worked for you named Steve or Steven, I think. Yeah. He, and then he, so basically what, if I remember correctly, what he did was he would create these I don't know if he created or bought, but like, so he would buy a really small Twitter handle that was called like Today in History, and it would just tweet like a picture of what happened 50 years ago. You know, JFK was shot. Then he would buy like a cool car Twitter one where it was like, here's all the interesting cars. And then like, I can't believe it can fly, which is like weird flying devices that when you look at them, they look silly. And he eventually bought, I believe, hundreds of them to the point of where he built a business. So he did two things that were interesting. The story you told was he goes, basically, I control the internet. Let me show you how. By the end of the talk, I'm going to have X trend. Like, I'm going to have this thing trend on Twitter.
He'd take a word from the audience. He'd be like, say a word. And people would be like, gobbledygook. He'd say, all right, cool. While we're talking, in 30 minutes, we'll just set a clock here. We're going to check Twitter in 30 minutes. And then sure enough, gobbledygook would be trending on Twitter, the number one trend in all of Europe. Because his accounts would all start talking about gobbledygook in meme format and it would just like start to go viral basically.
And nobody even knew what he meant. And he parlayed this into getting sponsorships. And now I don't know if you know him anymore. I don't know him at all, but I read about him and I, and this company went public. It went public in a really shady way. So I don't know if I believe everything. There's something about it. I don't have too much evidence.
It's just a roll-up of a bunch of, bunch of media companies.
Something was weird about it, but basically I think it went public in England for like $200 or $300 million market cap. And so it turned him into quite wealthy, a quite wealthy person.
I think he just released a book called, uh, what is it? Happy Sexy Millionaire. Yeah. So go buy Steve's book. Um, so anyway, pretty interesting principle. He found mispriced assets. So I remember the first one that he, uh, discovered was one that was like shit freshmen say, or it was like, like, but you know, whatever the UK slang for that is, is basically like a parody account that tweeted out funny things that freshmen say on a college campus. And what he found, the reason it was mispriced was most of these accounts were made by accident by somebody who was 18 years old and 16 years old, and they were bored at home and they just made a, you know, like Harry Potter, you know, Harry Potter jokes Twitter account. And it gets to a million followers and they don't know what to do with it. And then they kind of like, they get paid like $75 on Venmo to shout out some app, or they get paid like $200 to say a protein powder, or they would make a blog selling protein powder and they would just try to funnel some traffic to that. But it didn't make sense. It wasn't very sophisticated. He needed promotion for his business, so he was working with these guys. Then he realized, screw my business. This is just a really powerful promotional engine. We used him early on when he was— we brought him on, he was part of my team. We used him and we became the number one app in the UK, number one app in Europe because we used his network to talk about our app. And what he had the insight was that you don't say— our app was Bebo at the time, so it wasn't go download Bebo, it's a great app. No, he's like, that shit doesn't work. I was like, well, we need that and we need the link in there so we can track how many clicks it gets. He's like, No, that's not how people talk on the internet. I was like, okay, so tell me, what do you mean? He's like, you got to think, what you want to do is we have so many accounts that we want somebody, when they scroll on Twitter, they see Bebo mentioned like 7 times and that nobody's explaining it. Nobody's selling it to them. They just realize, why is everyone saying this thing Bebo? What is that? And then they go Google it or they go search for it and then they actually download the app because they think this is what's hot. This is what people are talking about. He's like, so what we'll do is we'll make content that's like, My mom, when she sees me check Bebo for the 50th time today, and it's a meme of the mom throwing your phone out the window. And it's like, so the implied meaning is that Bebo is this addictive app that you keep checking that your parents hate that you keep checking. Well, what is that app? Why would this person check that app 50 times? I don't even have that app. Never heard of it. Right. And so that was the genius of his marketing tactics at that time. And then he had the audience to back it up. So they got Spotify and Microsoft and all these companies to pay them tons of money because anytime they needed to spread the word about a new thing that they were doing, this was the most effective way to reach a bunch of people, a bunch of young people. And so then he parlayed that, he started launching his own consumer brands. So if they have a bunch of food accounts, they would launch like a food subscription product, or they had a bunch of fitness accounts, they would launch like a women's athletic wear, you know, like company.
It didn't all work, but man, like crazy ass like business that came, you know, if you, if you want to go research it, it's called Social Starts, right?
Social Chain. Steve, what's his name?
Bartlett. Yeah, you should follow him on Twitter. He's a great follow. Uh, now he tweets out just like, I don't know, inspirational shit all the time and like motivational stuff. Yeah, he's like a mini Gary Vee, although he's like a better Gary Vee, to be honest with you.
Probably a getter. Yeah, I was gonna say he's probably more popular.
Give him like 5 years and he's gonna be much bigger than what Gary Vee is today, I think. If he sticks with it. But yeah, and there's some articles that are cool if you go search, like, the 21-year-olds that control the internet. I think there was like a Vice article, like 22-year-olds that control BuzzFeed. BuzzFeed. Yeah, so BuzzFeed and Vice did like crazy articles about them. I mean, at one point they had 25 employees that were all under the age of 22 years old, and they were all just managing these media accounts, and they were just making tons of money. And they like, yeah, it was insane. They built like an office with like a playpen inside and You know, like, no, it's a good article.
So do you want to talk? Okay, so I was doing research. I'm pretty— you showed me this and a few other people did. Basically, our most watched recent video is something I— you, you've, you've kicked ass on Instagram. I think I've got the YouTube prize so far, but because our most watched article or most watched video is on paid communities, I think the title is How to Make $20 Million a Year Doing a Paid Community, something like that. Um, because we talked about a company that does that, and now we'll make this title like how to make like a million dollars or how to make $100,000 a year doing a paid event. And Abrey, you asked me to talk about it, so I came with a few bullet points. So, uh, you want to talk about paid events?
I want to, because this is how the hustle started. So this is like your roots.
And also we're starting to plan HustleCon again, and I have a feeling now more than ever is the time to plan a paid event, an in-person paid event, because I think you can, you can do really well because there's going to be very little competition and people are really eager to go. We've talked about it in the past, uh, about events. But so, Sean, if you go to the My, uh, the Million Dollar Brainstorm document, uh, you'll see I'm highlighting my name. Um, I actually listed all of— oh, you're on your phone, so it might be a little challenging. But I've actually listed a whole bunch of our old profit and loss statements from our events. If you hit metrics all time, you can actually see our all-time metrics. Although actually this only goes to 2018, so it's not all time. It's missing 3 years, but you can kind of see the data. You can see how much money we're making. And we are making in the first year of business about, I think about $500,000 with like 84% margin in our first year of business. And so let's talk about events. So, and this won't— this isn't gonna— this is gonna be a 10-minute segment here probably. But basically, when I first hosted my— I hosted my first event in June and the event happened, or I decided to do it around June 1st and the event went place 7 weeks later in August. And when I started, I had close to nothing. I had a 200-person email list. So there wasn't like this, oh, it's easy for you, you had the hustle. No, no, no, it didn't exist. There was no website, there was just a domain name called Hustle Cut. And I hosted this event in the first 6 weeks. It made about $60,000 in revenue and $50,000-ish in profit. And a lot of people were surprised by that. It was, but it wasn't that hard. The second event, you can see here—
Explain that. So how did you sell the $60,000 of tickets during that process?
I'm going to explain. And so I just want to give a little— I'll give one more bit of context. The second event, I think it made about $150,000 to $200,000 in revenue. And something like $150,000 in profit. And I did these events 6 months apart, right? I would basically host an event, go travel. When I needed money, I would host another one. And so I was starting each time with close to $0. So, so let me explain to you guys a little bit about how I started my events and what I would, what I would do if I was starting again, which is basically if I was starting again, I would do mostly the same stuff. But I think everyone in the next And if you're listening, if you're willing to spend 8 weeks working 40 hours a week dedicated to this, I think you could make at least $100,000 profit starting probably in September because that's when I think events, conferences are going to be okay. So anyway, the biggest thing that you have to do here is your email list is the most important thing. So the hustlecon.com, I launched that website on June 6th. Okay. And within just a few weeks, we were averaging around 1,000 to 2,000 unique visitors a day. And the email list jumped from about 200 people to about 2,500 people in 7 weeks. Keep in mind, at the time I didn't even have a Twitter, so there was no Twitter. I mean, there was, but I didn't use it. And so what I would do is hustlecon.com was basically a landing page where I explained what the event is and then you'd enter your email and that was called the front door. The side doors were all these blog posts. So I would write 2 to 3 blog posts a week on each speaker. I would post that on Hacker News. People would come to the website via the side door. Only 5% of them would say, this is interesting, what's this website? And they would click the homepage and I would collect their email there. And then once I collected their email, I would send them a variety of, of other blog posts that I had written. And at the end of each blog post that I sent them, it would say, PS, this person's speaking at HustleCon on August 1st and September. You can get a ticket right now for 10% off if you buy in the next 12 hours. By the way, that next 12 hours, that code was working all the time.
There was no such thing as next 12 hours. It was always the next 12 hours.
The countdown clock, there's a simple plugin that you could buy and it just starts to show up. So sorry guys, I'm sure everyone knows this now, but I don't even— Shopify wasn't popular at that point, so, um, not everyone had that technology, but that's what we did. Pretty easy, pretty basic.
And in doing that, give an example of the blog post because I remember, like, I remember vividly the one you did about iCracked, um, which you kind of did like as an infographic. I remember the one of Pandora. So I would do— but explain what, yeah, explain what you did and like also these were speakers, so you got speakers to agree, legit speakers to agree before you even had audience or anything.
Yes. Which is the second thing I'm gonna talk about is how to land a speaker. But the, the blog post, I basically would just use Forbes, Business Insider, all these places and just write a biography on the person. But I would do it in an interesting way. And eventually what happened is we would create infographics. So I had John who worked there and I would say, John, Here's the bulleted points of their life. Turn it into an infographic, please. And that's what we did. We had infographics. It could have been a blog post, which is what I used to do. We, this time we made infographics and it worked quite well. And it was basically, I read the book Made to Stick and I just copied that. So I took information about their company and I made it really easy to understand. So for example, Pandora streams this amount of music per hour, which is the equivalent of X, Y, and Z. They, the reason why they are able to do that is they were one of the first people to launch on the iPhone. And then I like, I just tell that story. Pretty simple. I thought it was simple, very effective. Now that's how we got our initial sales. Now the thing about sales for events, it's incredibly stressful. The reason it's stressful is typically 20% of your sales come in the first 5 to 7 days and then 20%, sometimes more, 30% of your sales comes in the last like 4 or 5 days, which means that dead time. So you, you want, you have to kick, you got to kick ass right out of the, right out of the gate. So your first launch series, you need to kick ass. Your first email launch series, you need to do really well. Then there's a fair bit of dead time and it feels we're failing, we're failing, we're failing. And then the last 10 days or so, you get a wave of sales and it all comes down to the last minute and it is incredibly nerve-wracking and anything can ruin it. For example, a pandemic, or if there was like a terrorist attack, if there was bad weather, as simple as bad weather, you're fucked. And so you've been working for 7 weeks and now eventually in our case, a whole year on this event and you're screwed. So it's very stressful, but the way that you can actually make more money, and this is something that I didn't learn until later on, for the tickets, you actually want to charge higher than you think. So let's say you want to make $100,000. And you want to get 1,000 people to pay you $100, you always charge $250 and then you give more, you give discounts in order to get to $100 average sale price. And so you want, in my opinion, you want to be very generous with discounts, but you want to charge a lot of money. So it anchors it at a high, at a high perceived value. Yeah, correct. And one other thing that you want to do is you want to run this like an e-com site. So for an e-com site, you say, well, I want to make $100 grand this month, therefore I need to get I need to get, you know, 100,000 people to my— 100,000 high-quality people to my website, of which 3% are going to convert. I know 3% are going to convert because I'm constantly tinkering with my landing page. The average sale value is going to be X dollars. Therefore, this is how you do it. Now I just need to get people to my website. That's what a lot of conference people don't do. That's what you should do. And it works quite well. And then finally, time is one of the best ways to create sales. You have to give discounts early on and at the end. And you— and the goal is you want to have 5, 3 to 5 tiers of pricing. So you want to have early, early bird, and then early bird, and then middle bird, and then you're late. Okay, seriously, this is the last reminder. You're late. Like, you— because if you actually look, so can you actually see, um, if you log into that doc, I actually put a chart of my very first event, uh, from July of '24, you're going to see big spikes. Every single one of those big spikes was a new ticket tier ending. And there's a direct correlation between the amount of revenue that I made that day and the amount of like the tier ending and me sending an email blast reminding people. And I would email some 2 or 3 times a day in order to remind them.
Wow. And so, so you were going to Hacker News for traffic. Were you going anywhere else? And is that where you would go today if you were doing it again?
Well, if I was doing a tech event, if I was doing a tech event, yes. Okay, I would go to Hacker News. And what's the secret?
Because a lot of people will say, um, like, you know, you know, when I post on Hacker News, you know, I get, you know, no traffic, I get downvoted, I get what, you know, I get removed because it's like—
well, I would say the obvious, or not the obvious, but maybe obvious is, well, your content might suck. Um, But I would say you, I would actually write content or invite speakers who I knew I could write about that would go viral on Hacker News. And also if you post 10 times, only 3 times it will go viral. But those 3 times you'll get like on Hacker News, like 100,000 views. And so that it's like a hits-driven business. So you gotta post a ton actually for it to work.
And so you, I remember when you were doing your events, so okay, go 60,000, 150,000. I remember you were basically like, yeah, HustleCon brings in $500,000 of revenue and like $300,000 of that is profit or even more sometimes, you know, if I recall correctly. So is that typical that it was so profitable or were you doing something different than the average event host?
Yeah. So when we would, uh, towards the third, fourth event, we could easily make $700,000. I think maybe let's just say easily $500,000. I forget the exact But we are making 7 figures a year from events. And yeah, we could do 50% margins, but the margins get smaller as we actually grew. And so it was actually more profitable to do some of these smaller events. But we did a few things that made us profitable. The first, I paid— I'll say it, it's against the contract, but I'm going to say it. I paid Casey Neistat money to speak at HustleCon, which is no surprise. It's like you could just Google what a speaking fee is. But besides that, I've had probably 300, 400, 500 people speak. Not once did I ever pay for another speaker. Not one time. Now, what I think I did do a few times is I would pay for their flight, but I would pay economy. I had Sam Yagan, who's the CEO of Match.com, or was, who's very wealthy. I paid a $350 flight from Chicago to San Francisco. And then maybe I think we got him a hotel, but I think it was just a $350 flight. And he actually We reimbursed him for that and he would email me to remind him, oh, you guys still owe me $350. So we didn't pay for any speakers other than Casey Neistat. The second, I used a shit ton of volunteers because there's these kids, not necessarily kids, but people who will email you once you have an event to volunteer. There's a whole crew of them.
One of them, people, and they want to be around you and They do the work.
They do the work and it's fun for them. It's a lot of fun to be part of something. We would schedule it so they could go see some talks, but they didn't really even care about the talks. They just wanted to be in the mix. It was exciting for them. And so these, these people love doing that. I use volunteers for everything. Now, the third part is actually important, and this might get some flack, but I would never work with, or I would try my hardest to avoid union venues. You want to avoid union venues and Ticketmaster venues, because if you work at a lot of venues, sign contracts with Ticketmaster or something like that, and you have to work to work with Ticketmaster. F that. Sorry, Ticketmaster, you guys, I don't want to work with you. Um, and so the goal is to work with someplace that isn't bogged down by that or bogged down by a union, because there are some places where I would say, all right, I want my volunteers to be at the door, and they would say, nope, you have to have our union guy do it. We charge $50 an hour. You have to have 10 of them. Yeah, it's awesome.
So, so I remember you had the sickest venue in Oakland, um, so right outside of San Francisco. And it's the Oakland, whatever the theater, what's the theater called? The Paramount Theater. This thing, it looks so grand. And I remember you were like, dude, guess how much this cost us? I don't know if you could say, but it was amazingly affordable to rent that thing.
Like $10,000 or $15,000.
$10,000 or $15,000 to rent out for the 2 days.
Including all the people. Yeah.
Yeah. And so when you're doing an event that's bringing in $700,000 and you needed a notable, nice big venue, I thought that was— I, I thought that thing would be $100,000, right? Like, my wedding venue cost that much, you know? And it was like, right, just for me to get married. It wasn't even like a business, you know? It wasn't like—
couldn't host thousands of people. And there's a few things, which is we— I preferred hosting conferences in places that typically aren't used to hosting conferences. So I would do it there. I did at the Brava Theater in, uh, San Francisco, which I think— I don't remember exactly. I'm pretty sure that was $3,000 to host an event there, and I made $100 grand there, right? So I would do it in venues that typically weren't meant for conferences. And the reason And the reason why is if you go to a hotel or if you go to a conference center, they're going to charge you for the union stuff, which is going to add up really fast, which is actually going to be probably 2x the price of the hard cost of the venue. And they're going to charge you something like $50 a head for meals because you have to use their caterer. And that's something I would avoid like crazy. Instead, I would find local mom-and-pop places and I would call them and I would say, uh, $8 a meal. I need them prepped and ready to roll in a box. Can you do that? And I would get loads of cool people to do that. Now, the thing is, is that in my opinion, the food, not really that important when it comes to a conference. Some people will debate me and say, oh, it's actually really important. I got the cheapest shit I possibly could, and I thought it was fine enough. And then that morning or that night or the night before, we would go to Costco and we would buy every single Danish that they had, and we would rent a truck and bring it there. And that's how we did stuff. I did it on really cheaply. You don't always have to do that, but if you want to make a lot of profit early on in your career, it's a great way to do it.
You also had vendors that were like, like, I make a keto breakfast bar. You're like, great, you're providing breakfast for everybody. You know, that's your— you're paying me for marketing and you're giving away free goods to my, you know, oh, you make Vitaminwater or whatever, like some— you're the startup that wants to be the next Vitaminwater. Well, here, you need to be here.
And now that's the third— that's the fourth point, which is the way to make money is you get stuff for free. So usually when I— or when I first started, I only typically had revenue from ticket sales. That's actually foolish. As you grow, usually 50/50 ticket and sponsors is your revenue. Early on, I didn't charge people that much in sponsor money. Instead, anyone that emailed me that had free stuff, they would say, hey, we want to sponsor you. Or I would email people and say, hey, instead of sponsoring us, just bring your stuff. I've got 300 great people who are going to be there. Will you come and bring 600 bottles of Vitaminwater or whatever it is? And they would say, absolutely, I'm there. And I would say, awesome, I'm not charging any money. I just want you to provide free stuff. And people did that. We got someone to pay $17,000 for the lunches because all they did was hand out free stuff and they would just get a little bit of business from it and it would be worth it. So we got tons and tons and tons of free stuff, right? So the point of— I actually didn't provide anything. Um, and that is actually quite effective. And then a few more points. Um, a lot of times your sponsorship money is going to come in the second year because the first year you want to just invite the sponsors there and they're going to see that it provides value and that you're the real deal and you'll follow through and they'll sponsor you the second year. You have to sell the second year sponsorships and sometimes the second year tickets immediately, like the day of or, or 24 hours after.
When you're in the heat of the moment and they're seeing everything, wow, this is great. Oh, people are loving us. Next year, are you in? Title sponsorship?
Exactly. And you want to do that right away. And the big guys like the Intuits and the Microsofts of the world, they plan that cycle actually. They'll plan that cycle 2 years out. So you can actually book year 2, 3, 4. Sometimes it's that crazy and you could get hundreds of thousands or even millions of dollars from them. And so if you're going to just— so don't worry about getting, not getting sponsors the first time, you'll get them the second time if you do well. And finally, a few points on speakers. So for content, I didn't pay anyone, but what I would do is I would try to land the— I would put all my work in early on to get the biggest speaker I possibly could right away. For example, I convinced the founder of Pandora, Tim Westergen, to speak. And he was one of the first people I had. The truth is I kind of lied about who else was coming. I said all these people were, all these other people were coming to speak. None of them had actually committed. But once Tim said yes, then I went to all those other people and I told them Tim was coming and they again said yes. And it was way easier to land bigger name speakers because I got the way.
Had your anchor. Yeah. So, so, and you've actually published your cold emails that you sent to speakers, I think on either your blog or Neville's blog. So if people search, what do they search for to go find those? I've, I have copy-pasted those many times already because I'm like, this is great how Sam did this.
Yeah, just Sam Parr, Neville, cold emailing. Yeah. And you'll see it. And that stuff worked well. And I don't want to hear this nonsense if you're starting to, if you're going to start an event, well, you already knew everyone. No, I know everyone because I hosted these events. That's why I have a huge network, not because I had them before I started this event. Yeah.
And so I think, so I think what you just said is like a mountain of gold. I think people would pay you thousands of dollars to hear that How do you do this as a consultant or a course or something like that? I think you gave them the goods for free on this pod, which I think is amazing, and that's what we're all about. The other thing I would say is I think it's not just about making money doing this. The way I look at this, if I'm 22 years old and I don't want to have the traditional career, this is how you bring luck to yourself. You go host a party, you go host a Host the event. That's how Sam built his world-class network. That's how Sam made a bunch of friends. That's how we met. You know, like that's, that's how these things happen. You bring luck to you by going and taking a bunch of action and all you have to do is be the hustler who connects a bunch of dots and do it in a topic area that you're interested in. So if you're super interested in like biohacking, then you create the Biohacker Conference. You don't need to know anyone. You just go figure out who are all the biohackers that I need to speak here? How do I get in front of biohackers? Well, I need to create content about I need to get that in front of people using Reddit or Hacker News or some other source. I need to collect emails, then I need to keep telling great stories. And at the end of each of those stories, I need to say, hey, if you like this kind of stuff, there's 1,000 people like you, including these big names at this event. Come buy your ticket now to join.
I think you 100% should do that. And I think if you're going to do it, start planning now and it will change your life. And it's actually not that hard. Now, last thing, I'll wrap up with this. We've had Ryan Beagleman on the podcast. I actually, did you see that email I said, you know, so in 2017, I called people who worked at Ryan's company. Ryan's company was— I mean, I guess it was the other way around. My company was basically Ryan Beagleman's company for tech and business and entrepreneurship news. Ryan Beagleman ran this thing and started this thing called BizNow Media, which was basically what my company is for real estate, Hustle, but for real estate. And so they did about $18 million in revenue the year they sold, which they sold for about $50, $60 million, 75 employees. The revenue was made up a third from media, so a third from advertising, a third from event ticket sales, a third from sponsorships. The, uh, average revenue per event, uh, team member was around $300,000. They did 250 events around the year before they sold, with the average ticket price being $80,000, uh, $80. And they wouldn't do an event unless they could make $8,000, uh, $10,000 in revenue. Most of the venues that they got were free, and A lot of times programming was very short. So an event would start at 7:00 AM, it would kick off for an hour of breakfast schmoozing, followed by a 90-minute session for panels and discussion, and then hanging out and talking, and then you'd be back in your office by 10:30. And it was very effective. And that's my final point about events, which is, uh, the content actually not that important. All the speakers do and all the content that you're, you're gonna have, all it does is it brings the, uh, a particular like-minded person and the value is from that. People or those people being there. And the content is basically just a way to, as marketing, to get the right people.
And the way you know that that's true, if you go on YouTube, you can go watch all the talks from HustleCon, like all the years, they're all on YouTube and they'll have like 2,000 views, 3,000 views. And you would think, oh, if people are coming to hear these great speakers, they're willing to fly and pay, you know, basically it's $1,000 all in to go have this experience if you're from out of town, which I think a lot of people are., then wow, you know, 10 times more people should be just consuming the content for free from the comfort of their own home. Nope, it's not what happens. People don't actually take the, the, like, it's just like same thing with Coursera. They have Harvard's, all of Harvard's courses online. If you want the Harvard education, you can go get it for free right now online. Turns out people don't want the Harvard education, they want the Harvard label. In the same way, people don't want the content from HustleCon. They want the experience and the network and the kind of serendipity that can happen by going out there and getting amongst it with a bunch of other people and putting yourself in that position. That's really the value that you get. Sorry, that's what I should say. That's the value you're providing to the person who's deciding to come. Don't fool yourself into thinking they're coming to hear this mind-blowing content, although there is this charade you put up where you say that's why you're coming and they say that's why they're going, but that's not really what they get out of it.
That is absolutely correct. And I'm showing— I actually, if you put this thing up, you pull this thing up, Sean, called— I don't really want to share this publicly, but you can look at it. It's called Event Metrics All Time. I've listed 46 events that we've done, and I list out how many people showed up, how much revenue came from tickets, and how much revenue came from sponsorships. There's this one event series that we came up with called 2X. It stands for like 2X chromosomes, meaning women have 2X chromosomes. And it was an evening event that we would host from 9 PM until I don't know, whenever it ended, or sorry, 7:00 PM to 9:00 PM. And we would get a sponsor to pay for it and we would invite these people to come. The first one had 400 people. I'm pretty sure towards the end we would get 1,000 people. So here's one. This one had 982 people coming. We did $24,000 in revenue, $7,000 in sponsors, $31,000 in total revenue. And then it looks like $16,000 in costs. Frankly, we probably didn't even need to spend that much. And we made $15,000 in profit. And then we would host that almost monthly in a variety of cities. We would do LA, Chicago, yada, yada, yada. One night could make you $15,000. Do that 12 times a year. Then you launch a paid community on top of that. You're, you got yourself a multimillion dollar business inside 18 months.
If you just rinse and repeat this, it works very well while building a great network. Um, and being kind of the hub in between all these different people. The downside, of course, is that event planning fucking sucks. Events are stressful, and it takes years off my life every time I have to do an event. So I hate events, but I love this business model. I love that you laid it out for the person who gets energy and wants to do this, right? For me, the nightmare job would be wedding planner. But for some people, they dream of being a wedding planner. And so for people who find that fun, they like that version of stress, that flavor of stress, I think you just laid out a pretty amazing playbook. Okay.
Yes. Hopefully it's a good plan. Someone can go do it. And by the way, if you just Google The Hustle 2X, literally like the number 2 and then the word, and then the letter X, I think what's it say? We did, we did in 2018 from that event series, which is just, I think we only want, we did about $200,000 in revenue and $110,000 in profit in 12 months. From launch to the first year. It's pretty good. Anyway, that's that. That's, that's information on paid events.
Do you want to do one idea before we go? Uh, I'm kind of excited about this one. So yeah, okay, have you heard of this company Future Fitness? Future Fit?
Yes, I have.
Uh, you tried it?
I was— I, I tried it. I was one of the— I, I think I was one of their early users, and they did a good job of onboarding me, hand-onboarding me, you know, nicely. But the product didn't stick with me. But I do think it's a good idea. Well, so I don't know exactly how it ended up being, but when I first signed up, it wasn't that unique, but it was slick. It was just you have a personal trainer, so I would pay them $100 a month. A personal trainer made a plan for me and I would tell them what sports I cared about, what I wanted to be good at, and I would talk to them, I think weekly, about my athletic or about my progress. That's what it was when I first signed up. But it was all tracked via a watch. And they would send you an Apple Watch. Yeah.
So, okay. So I think, I think it's evolved a little bit. So basically what FutureFit is, is it's your, it's a personal trainer. It's really like an accountability coach. And that's what I'll call this bucket of ideas I want to brainstorm within, uh, of accountability coaching. So FutureFit basically says, hey, okay, a personal trainer is like $100 per session. You know, so, so let's say it's $150 per session in big cities like New York or SF. And then, you know, a gym membership is like $15 a month. Month, right? So you have this like big discrepancy there where one is like one session is over $100 and the other one, a whole month is $15. But then there's something in between. And what these guys did was they said, well, look, for $150 a month, you're going to get a fitness coach and they're not going to come, you know, they're not going to be with you, you know, like sort of spotting you while you do your bench press. They're going to be spotting the accountability of you actually working out. So what they would do, they would ask you about your goals. Then they would send you a customized workout plan based on your goals. And in reality, they just have a huge library of workouts. It's like, oh, guys who want to build muscle, here's a bunch of workouts to choose from. You know, a woman who wants to have toned butt, okay, you know, here's a bunch of workouts to use. So the trainer sends you a workout that's, you know, for you based on your goals. And then they'll kind of text you and be like, hey, did you get that workout in? And they also connect to Apple Watch so they can kind of see if you did it and they can say, hey, great job. Or they can be like, hey, what's up, man? Like, don't, don't let go of the rope. Like, keep, keep going. Like we said, we wanted to do this. Keep, keep doing this. And so I think this is a very smart idea and a very smart business model, which is basically the core thing that stops most people from being fit is the habit of fitness, the habit of exercise. Yes, if you work out with a trainer, you can get more out of every workout. But for most people, the bigger problem is just sticking to the workout schedule and routine and actually not just feeling lazy and not going to the gym. And so I like that they basically, accountability is the primary feature of this app. And so I like that there is knowledge, there is technique, but it's packaged around accountability. So I was talking to Ben and my right-hand man Ben, and he was like, he just had a kid. I'll say, how's it going? How's baby life? You know, you getting any sleep? He's like, actually we hired A sleep coach, same model. Oh, woman, woman in Texas. And she basically—
what's it called?
So she's just like an independent person. There's not even like a service. So we talked before about Battelle, which is like my friend Damian who's starting this company to do this. So he just used, you know, somebody he found that's like known to do this in Texas. And so he just said, great, like, you know, here's kind of what we're doing today. Like, here's my, here's my current like routine. You know, we'd like to be getting some sleep and here's my rough schedule. Here's my wife's. Rough schedule, so we'd like to make it work. We don't want to have the baby cry it out. So that's like our constraints. So your coach basically downloads your goals and your limitations, your constraints. I said, great, I got a program for you. And I was like, oh, wow, what's her technique? He's like, honestly, it's not that much. He's like, just he needs to nap at this time specifically, and during these times he needs to stay awake. So make sure you're playing with him or you're feeding him, you're doing something then. Don't let him fall asleep. And then at this time, you're going to put him to bed every single night. And when he cries, you're going to go in for this many minutes and whatever. It's like a little bit of a coaching on the technique. But he's like, honestly, it's not the technique. He's like, it's just the accountability of, like, she asks us, okay, what time did he nap? What time did he wake up today? How did he sleep last night? And because we keep having to report to this lady, it forces us to not throw in the towel and just be like, oh, man, I don't know, I give up. Just let him sleep if he wants to sleep right now. It's like, no, our coach told us he needs to stay awake during these daytime hours so that he's going to sleep well at night. And he's like, dude, it's amazing. He's now sleeping 8 hours a night. He's 2 months old. Like, the first month was so rough and the second month is so much better just with this coach. He's like, and it's not even like anything that we couldn't have just Googled a schedule. He's like, it's how having this woman who we're accountable to maintain the schedule is much more important than just taking a schedule off the internet of a And the same way, like, you can go download a workout off the internet, but this coach helps you stay accountable to actually doing those workouts.
So I thought, so, okay, yeah, let's break this down a little bit. Let's talk about what this could work. So I actually use a service called, uh, do you have your phone on you?
Yeah.
Okay, go to mybodytutor.com. My body tutor, like a tutor, like a, like a, you know, like a coach tutor, right? Look at that website. How ugly is that?
Oh my God. So I'm on a 1990s, I'll just describe this. I'm on what looks like a 1990s website. It says, at the very top, it's like this awful logo, and then it says celebrating 2007 to 2021, 14 years. So that, you know, this has been around for a while.
It looks like it's 2007. Yeah. And so what it is, it's a guy named Adam Gilbert, and he's got a variety of people who are on the, um, on the payroll. And you pay— I was paying $500 a month, and all I would do, it was very simple. I would, every time I ate a meal, I would take a picture and he would comment on it. Once a week, I would do a 20 or 10-minute phone call and they would say, "How's it going?" And the stress that knowing I was being watched made me change my habits and I got— and I lost weight. It's almost like when you're writing in a Google Doc, that stress makes you do it. That's what this is.
Right. When you see somebody else's cursor there. Okay. So, so I just started using one because I was like, oh, when, when we— when you told me about this, I started looking into like, okay, Where else could you do this? And I thought, well, it's anywhere you have a goal and that the goal, like, it's not that you need like some specific strategy that no one's ever heard of. It's like, no, you kind of even know what to do. It's just helpful to have somebody who's on your side, in your corner, supporting you and keeping you focused, keeping you on track. And so productivity, I think, is a big one. So you're probably like me, you have like goals for what you want to do. And probably everybody listening to this is like, I want to make 5 more sales this month. I want to get 5 new clients, or I want to grow 20% this month, or I want to grow my email list to 5,000 people or whatever. It doesn't matter what your goal is. You have a goal. I want to get promoted. So you have a goal, and then your progress is basically like sometimes you need tactical help, like strategic advice. But really what I've found for myself is that you just need pressure. I need accountability. I need to make each day count. And if I just get like 25 out of the 30 days a month to count, I'm going to actually hit my goals. But if I'm like, I kind of had an off day there, I was distracted, I went down this rabbit hole of doing this other thing, oh, I got stressed out or whatever. If I lose 4 of those days of like, I didn't actually make the most of that day, now I'm down to like 20 days out of the 30 and I'm off track. I didn't get my goal. And what's that difference of staying on track towards your thing and off is like, for me, it's accountability. It's why I work well with a co-founder, because a co-founder helps you like every day you're kind of focused on, all right, what do I need to do today? Do I get it done at the end of the day? Did I like make enough progress or not? Like that sort of thing. And so I found this service. So you can do this actually if you want, uh, anybody who's listening to this. So you can basically go and, um, it's called, it's called WeFocus and it's basically you and your coach and it helps you focus on getting to your goals., for your professional goals. So anything you want to do with your work or your projects. And so you just text this number, right? It's like, I'll put it in the description, but it's 434-505-4769. I'll put it in the comments, but basically it's, uh, 434-505-GROW is the kind of like the, the handle of it. And you pay $150 a month and you basically get a coach. And the coach basically just texts you like, at first it's like, all right, what's your goals for the month? All right. It's, it's, uh, it's April. What would make for a great April? And honestly, just that question is actually pretty powerful because you got to articulate it. You say something, but then you realize, oh, I want to really make progress on my book. Well, what does make progress mean? You want to have a draft that's like 100 pages? Would that be the goal? And so they help you actually set a good goal. And then on a day-to-day basis, they sort of like, it's kind of like the manager you need. It's like they kind of nag you enough to make you get it done, but they're not annoying about it.
And this is wefocus.app.
There's no app. There's no website. There's no app. It's just a phone number. It's literally just a phone number you text. And so they have these like coaches.
My friend was using it. And so I was like, okay, what's the number? So he just gave me 434-505-4769. And so anyways, they have like a waitlist, I think. But I got let in recently. So basically you pay $150 and then what happens is the coach will basically say in the morning, they'll be like, all right, great. Like we said, your goal was, let's say, to, you know, grow revenue by 20% this month. And you said you're going to do that by ramping up your sales efforts. So it's like, all right, cool. Hey, man. Hey, you know, it'll be like, hey, Sam, like, let's get it today. Like, you know, what would make today a great day? Like, what would be really satisfying at the end of the day if you've done what? And you're like, oh, I want to make like 10 sales calls. Like, all right, great. And then like in the evening or the afternoon, they'll check in. They'll be like, you know, like, remember, keep the vision in mind. We want to get there. Like, go for it. Make sure you get those 10 in today. At the end of the day, they'll text you something that'll be like, hey, did you get the 10 calls in? If not, what do you think held you up today? Let's reflect on it. Or if you got it, it's like, awesome, high five. Plus think back to one of those calls where you really kicked ass. What made it kick ass? And so it just helps you, and you could put in as much or as little as you want. So if you just want it to be like, just check in with me once a day or once a week, it'll do that. But if you want it to be like more reflective, like I like it where it's like, all right, let me, let me think back on my day. Like, what's, what's something I could have done better today?
So I actually disagree with you strongly on this one. This is far too broad. I would want to make it incredibly narrow. So, for example, we guarantee you're going to be a better writer or sorry, the service to make you write more. Right. And you have to log in every day. And if you don't get 1,000 words, you get You get your coach yells at you like, dude, what the fuck? Do you even want, do you really actually want to be a good writer? Cause you're not writing. Um, and so I actually would make it far more vertical specific for goals. So relationship, I think could actually work. You know what I would do? Another one, I would just call it gratitude. I'm going to make you happier by, so hey, why didn't you write? Why didn't you write here what you were thankful for this morning? What the hell? Um, you could show gratitude. Um, what else? We said, you said relationships. I actually don't know how you would do a relationship one.
Well, I think for relationships, it's like people think relationship is— when people say they want a better relationship, what they're really saying is, fuck, my partner does these things and it annoys me. Why don't they just not do those things and not annoy me? And in reality, to make a better relationship, it's like you need to be the best version of yourself in the relationship. And if your partner agrees to do the same for themselves, you'll have an amazing relationship over time. And so what you would do for relationships is you would basically say, Awesome. What is the best version of you you're going to bring to your relationship? And they would just coach you on you doing your part and not doing tit for tat measuring. Oh, I'll behave if my— I'll be great if they are great. It's like, well, that's a recipe for failure. It's I'll be great because that's who I am. That's what works. And in the context of being a great boyfriend, great girlfriend, great husband, whatever.
Okay, so that could work for relationships. So we've— diet and fitness is easy. I think that's easy. Yeah. You know, you have to run, you have to hit this mileage.
Anywhere you have a goal. So it could be like as narrow as people who are training for a triathlon. I know a lot of people hire like a marathon, they'll hire a marathon coach who helps them like structure their ramp up running and all that stuff. So it could be as narrow as any, it's anything you have a goal on. So the reason I like this one is because my, I have like goals when it comes to work, right? And I know that if I can just, if I can be a little bit more productive every single day, if I could be a little bit better at my projects, make a little more progress every day, $150 in a month is like nothing compared to the value I create By actually doing better at my project. So it's anywhere you have a goal, fitness, diet, relationships. And so, you know, whatever those goals are for people, I think that accountability coaching is going to be a bigger thing because it's like anywhere that there's a, like, so for example, relationships, you have a relationship therapist or a couples therapy, right? So you have this thing you could go pay $150 an hour or you could read a $10 book. Well, now there's something in the middle.. It's like a human on the other side, but you don't have to pay $150 an hour. You pay $150 a month because they're digital and they're managing multiple clients this way in a light touch model. Same thing with fitness. You can have a personal trainer or you can have a gym membership, or this is the thing in the middle, your accountability coach. So same thing with work. You can have an executive coach who's like thousands of dollars as your CEO coach or whatever your job is. If you're not a CEO, you can have an executive coach or you could go read a management book. Well, this is something in the middle. It's a way for you to be better at work with accountability coach. So that's the model I see here. And I bet there's a bunch of areas where this could apply.
How big do you think FutureFit is?
So FutureFit says that they're trying to get to 1,000 coaches this year. They've raised $35 million, uh, uh, Series B. So I think they're, you know, they're probably doing fairly well and they're kind of in that Peloton model, right? They just need like, you know, if you're making $150 subscription per month, it doesn't take that much to be at $15 million, you know, a year of revenue. It doesn't take that much to be at $150 million a a year. Um, like, it is an achieve— these are achievable numbers as you get to like 10,000 subscribers, 100,000 subscribers type of thing. I don't know what their subscribers—
so the issue is churn though.
The issue is of course churn. Yeah, because— and I think that's why the harder the goal, um, the more the churn. This is the unfortunate part of this business, is like fitness, people fall off that horse. And even if your product is great, sometimes they just stop wanting to work out, eat right, you know. So I think diet is going to have a lot of churn. I Fitness is going to have a lot of churn. Um, work I think will have a little bit less churn, but maybe, you know, still will have churn. Uh, relationships, I don't know where that would fall, but I don't know, I find this pretty fascinating. So, and I, I, I now been trying it for a few days. I like it.
Have you invested in FutureFit?
No, I invested in Fitness AI, which is an AI version of it.
I wouldn't invest in FutureFit because of the churn. That was, that would be something I would be concerned about. Um, But I would love to own one of these companies. Yeah, totally. I for sure would like to own it. Do we want to do one more?
No, I got to run.
All right. Well, by the way, do you know that we get criticized for Irish goodbyes? We just end the podcast.
It's our thing. I actually do the same thing with my family too. Like if I'm talking to my mom or my sister, like there's no like, okay, well, you know, I'm going to go run to the store now. So it's been great chatting. No, it's like, I'll be like, gotta go, bye. Or I'll just be like, bye. And I'll just hang up the phone.
Yeah, I do the exact same thing.
They know the deal and they can do the same right back to me. You don't even need to tell me why you need to leave. If you need to leave, you just yell bye and you hang up before I reply.
I do this at gatherings too. I actually don't say goodbye. I just walk out.
Yeah, I do that too.
Because I think goodbyes are pointless. Like, what's the point?
It's just like, I don't know. It's just a lot of effort for something that's uncomfortable for me to do.
And like, Yeah.
Once I've decided I'm moving on to my next activity, like, I've moved on already. It's too late. I'm there. I'm not here anymore.
I'm gone. Right. Like, I gave you the beginning and the middle. I don't need an end. The ending's stupid. You just need the— it's pointless. All right. So that's the end of the podcast. I put my all in it like no days off. On the road, let's travel, never looking back.