Best of July

Okay, so imagine— let's take a step back. I'm on a whiteboard, and the whiteboard, it's the universe of all possible people, everyone on the planet. And you draw a circle with one of your skills. So in Sean's case, let's say we put copywriting as one of the skills that he's in the top 1% or top 5%, whatever number you wanna associate with it. And so that's the circle. It's like, okay, X number of people are at Sean's level, um, or better, and at copywriting. Awesome. Let's say we draw another circle that's, um, we'll call it crypto knowledge. It's just how crypto works. And that's a group of people. Awesome. Um, rarer skill because it's newer. There's fewer people that know how to do that versus copywriting. We can accept that. It'll be a smaller circle. What happens though is if you intersect those two circles and turn into a Venn diagram, the number of people that know copywriting really well and also know crypto really well is 100 times smaller than either of those circles combined, right? And this is— we see the same effect like in standardized tests. If you took the SAT or the GRE or the GMAT, there are people that are really good at English portion of the test, there are people that are really good at math portion of the test, but the ones that score really, really well are the ones that are good at both. They don't have to be the best at both because that's the thing that's actually rare is the combination of the English and the quant. Same thing here. So now imagine, so this is what I call it, the trillion dollar Venn diagram of success, right? I just made that up. But so you draw those circles of your skills and say, okay, well, I am now not like 1 in a million. I'm 1 in a billion, right? Or 1 in 5 billion, whatever that is. And if you can convert that into some kind of monetizable business thing or whatever, that's when magic sort of happens. So that's kind of thing number one is like, what's your thing? What are your skills? And what drives one's value? How much value will that intersection create? It's two things. One is how rare is that intersection, whether it's two circles or three circles or whatever, how rare is it? And then the other one is how, how much does it kind of reinforce the other skills that you already have? So for instance, I'm a software developer. That's one of my, that's my core skill. I've been programming for like 30 years now, that's my thing deep down inside my core. If I combine that with, I'm gonna go off and, which I could never do, uh, become an Olympic level swimmer, let's say, like also very rare. The intersection of that, it's like, okay, well the opportunity that that reveals because the two things are so unrelated. It's like, I don't know how I would take my ability to build a web app and intersect it with my, like, yeah, there's some things I could do, but I don't know if that would be that huge. But, uh, software development is applicable to lots of, if I was gonna be an academic researcher, if I was gonna go into music, if I was like other things, there's a lot more overlap to the degree that it's like those two, you know, they reinforce each other. So software helps me do this and that helps me do this. And this is one of the reasons, so my advice here was as you're picking skills to acquire, acquire skills that are both rare but also reinforce things that you're already exceptional at. That will kind of drive that kind of that rarity. And that's what drives the overall value, which kind of brings me to like, and so when I think of things that I want to learn, it's like, okay, well, This is why I got into copywriting. It's like, if I can, and copywriting is another form of, this is communicating at scale is what copywriting is, right? Like it's, uh, in usually textual form. It's like, okay, well I don't know that many software engineers that can copyright really well. Like, like literally other than that have not started companies, right? It's like I, they don't exist. But, um, very rarely do you get like really, really good, um, engineers that went off and read 6 books on copywriting and took Sean's class. That, that's not a common event.

To your Pixar thing, by the way, the reason you might pull it off is because you have a very weird and unique and related level of skill. So yes, there are people that are better. Maybe better creatives, better animators, better entertain whatever, but they don't know crypto. And maybe that's the thing that unlocks the next trillion dollar company is entertainment intersected with crypto. It's the Netflix for the blockchain, whatever it is, right? Something like that where two things combined that never had been put together in that way before.

Um, anyway, the, the, the other circle that I would add that I think people underestimate it. So I tweeted this out, right? So people, I didn't even explain what the tweet is. The tweet was, I said, the next company I build is gonna be like a new, new age Pixar. Uh, like that, like the next Pixar. And, um, I think I'll— I think I would work on that project for 30 plus, like 30, 30 plus years. I'd just keep going with that company. I wouldn't be trying to sell it or flip it or get out of it or whatever. Um, so that was the tweet. And then a bunch of— I basically had two reactions. One reaction was awesome, like, where can I sign up? How do I work for this company? That's— that sounds awesome. I love Pixar. You could do it. And those are like fans of MFM type of thing, or people who themselves had been thinking God, that would be awesome to create another like Pixar type of company, you know, because I love Pixar. Then there's the other half of people that were like, what makes you think you could do this? Um, you know, like, you know how hard it is to make a movie? You know how expensive it is? You know how, how unique, you know, Steve Jobs and, you know, whatever, uh, Lasseter and Catmull, like how rare those talents were when they came together? That's a once in a generation company. And then other people were like, uh, one guy had this amazing burn. He was like, Uh, check, uh, Aqua Hire, like a green check mark, Aqua Hired, Power Writing Co— like course, podcast, next Pixar. And I was like, oh nice, that's, that's pretty solid actually. Um, and so, you know, a bunch of people were sort of all in the same bucket of like, this is so hard, this won't work. What you, you can't do it. That's some version of that. And so the third circle, where one is like, I'm really great at X, I'm really great at Y. The third is just, I have the courage to go do a thing. And like, um, Tim Ferriss once told this story. He goes, I went to a business school class, a Harvard Business School class. I gave this talk. At the end of the talk, I go, oh, by the way, guys, I'm doing this challenge, um, only for you guys, you know, whatever. I want to get in touch with either Bill Clinton, Jennifer Lopez, or, you know, some sports person, you know, Michael Jordan or whatever. Um, if anybody here can connect me over email with them, like, you know, just reach out to them. And if you get a hold of them, connect me over email. I will buy you two round-the-world plane tickets. You know, you could fly business class for a year around the world, anywhere on my dime. All right, guys, thank you very much. And he told that to one class and he's like, you know, you have 30 days to complete this challenge. And then I think I forgot what it was. It was like he did it to two classes, but he gave a slightly different message in each. The first one, he just said that. 30 days go by, nobody did it. Uh, sorry, nobody completed the challenge. He's like, ah, what happened? You know, turns out nobody even tried the challenge. The perceived difficulty was so high that nobody did it. So in the next one, he told that story and I think he added a twist, which was whoever gets the closest to it, uh, wins. And all of a sudden, like, everybody tries. And in fact, I think somebody did get in touch and actually successfully completed the challenge. And he was like, he had this principle which was sort of like, you know, everybody wants to fish where everybody else is fishing because they think it's so easy to catch fish there. He's like, in actuality, often it's easy to just go, go catch a fish where the fish actually are. And you, you don't have to base it on how, how many people, how many other people you think have tried something or how, what the perceived difficulty is. And in fact, sometimes the bigger you go, the easier something can be because nobody else is even trying to do it. And so I would say like, you know, this Pixar thing, who knows if I'm going to go do this or something else. I tweet things just almost to my prototype. It's like, let me say this out loud. Let me see how that feels. If I sleep and wake up tomorrow, do I want to tweet 5 more ideas about that or am I over it? It was just a passing fleeting moment. Um, but, but the, the core ingredient I think most people lack is courage to actually go and do the thing. And I think that's the, the, the people put way more emphasis on What skill am I top 1% in? They kind of, they, they undercredit themselves. One, one skill you could just have for free. You just gotta go. It's like at the deli, at the, at the grocery store, go pull the number is, yeah, I have the courage to actually go do it. Like, you know, I'm, I will go do, pull the trigger on this thing and not wait for other people to kind of like reinforce that it's a good idea to me.

All right. This next clip is from our episode with Peter Levels. Peter is basically like a Greek god in the indie hacker community. He runs multiple businesses all by himself that do over $3 million in revenue per year. And in this clip, him and Sean brainstorm a business idea that he thinks he could scale to $1 million in revenue by capitalizing on a trend that he's noticing in the travel community called slow-matting. What the fuck does that mean? Let's check it out.

So you tweeted something out there the other day that's related to this. You go, not sure if people realize it, but if your app does $20,000 a month in revenue, you're probably already a millionaire. $20,000 per month times 12 months. Assume you could sell for, let's call it 4 or 5x multiple. Yeah. That's a million dollar selling price, right? You, you're sitting on a million dollar asset. And when you put it that way, I think that sounds, and it is way more achievable than this idea of like, oh, I gotta build a, a million dollar business. Like, I don't, I don't know. I don't, do I have the big idea? Whatever. But getting something to $20,000 to $30,000 a month in revenue is feasible, right? It seems approachable. It's approachable. And That's kind of awesome. I think that's an amazing, like, just a—

Yeah, I agree.

Yeah, the problem with Airbnb is that I've noticed is the quality is very, very high. There's a big range of quality and there's problems. There's no daily cleaning. It feels too much like unexpected, like you don't know what's gonna happen. The water, stuff might break. If things break here, you just get a new apartment, right? And I've done this in Europe and I've done this in Asia too, in Thailand. And I spend about usually 2 to 3K, 3.5K. So it's a lot of money. It's more than normal rent. But the cool thing is that it solves a lot of problems you have in your daily life because it's serviced and stuff. And it's a huge thing in Asia. It's a huge thing in Southeast Asia, even in Korea, Taiwan and stuff. So I think that's gonna be bigger because of remote work. Because you have remote workers, even with families, with kids, and you don't want to live in a hotel room. A hotel room is very depressing. Like, I go insane in hotel rooms. It's just like a bed and you can barely walk around the bed. There's no space. I need to cook food. I need to buy steak from the local butcher. I need to cook it with broccoli and spinach and with my friends and stuff. And you can do it in an apartment hotel. And I think the, if you target, it's a high-end market, I think, of remote workers that make a lot of money, like $200K or $100K something. If you target them, you can make a lot of money because it's serviced, furnished.

100% furnished for me. And I've been looking at these and there's a few startups in the space that are doing furniture rental. And furniture rental is not popular right now. And I tell people all the time, I'm like, I just want to rent all my furniture. I don't want to own any of it. And they, they, they think it's nonsense and they think it's crazy. But if you run the math, it's significantly like, it's about the same in terms of price. But in terms of headache, I think it's 1,000 times better.

I think the biggest problem with the digital nomad thing is that there's a, maybe it's a good big podcast to say that there's a perception that people travel really fast. And I have the data that they don't travel fast. They travel like every few months or even I think the average is 7 months now. It's very slow. So the word digital nomad is a horrible word. Of course, it has so many connotations, but it's mostly remote working people who want a little bit of a different life, who want to see different places a little bit. You know, they have boyfriends, girlfriends, wives, husbands, they have kids even. There's families doing this as well. Moving around every week doesn't really work. Being very slow is big. And if people are more aware of that, they can find a lot of products built for this long-term slow-mad market. Which most of us are, we're mostly slowmads. Slowmads. Slowmads, yeah. Think about education, think about like homeschooling is taking off also because of remote work. If I have kids, I don't know if I want to put them in a regular school, maybe, you know, Elon Musk builds his own school, that's kind of cool. But you can do things in a different way. And like now, it's still very, we're still niche, like this remote work thing is still niche, it's gonna get only bigger, there's only gonna be more and more people doing this. Once physical jobs get automated. So if you make products, I don't know specific product, but if you know, if you build products for those people, that's a high-end market of like tech workers that are remote.

It's also like, um, for my personal trainer, if he sits down on a bench and there's like, I don't know, whatever, 200 pounds, and he could, he could bench it, it's easy for him because he's put in 15 years of hard work so that that is now easy for him. And similarly, I got my ass kicked for like 9 straight years from the age of like 20 to 29 with a startup failing over and over and over again. Nothing could have felt harder during that period of time. And so that now things are relatively feel much easier because I'm better now than I was 3, 4, or 5 years ago when I kind of sucked. So that's the first part. The second reason that we say it's easy is because this is a podcast and we're trying to be entertaining. The third reason that we say it, or at least that I say it, is I am tired of everybody telling everybody that shit is so hard. And if you go anywhere on the internet, right? We joke about the multi-trillionaire mindset. All of the like entrepreneurship content is like how hard it is, you know, uh, Elon Musk says starting a company is like chewing glass and looking into the abyss. And some companies maybe, yeah, maybe for you, bro. But like, you know, I do a power writing course.

It's fine.