How to Start a Business With an Influencer

So right now you're working with Ali abdall do you have S par viral Cuts do you have Dan Co Dan Co Cody Sanchez sill some other creators that I'm not going to name right now and then you're the background operator and manage the team basically so they're the distribution you're the Fulfillment that's right in theory okay cool you have ran agencies like Everest was doing you had one client I think was paying you $7 million A year it was it was a figure insane so you have a very high level agency but now the producti

agency model is very popular I'm curious to see like why is that so appealing with like why are you using the product I service since you've ran all different kinds it's just [ __ ] easy like end of story like if you've gone and you've you've negotiated like multi-million dollar like sows with like Fortune 100 companies and Del procurement and like grown teams you Know at the rate that I have like going in and doing a product I service business it's just easy and so we just saw it as an opportunity to go and do

three things one was build in most cases the best brand in the category the second was the highest quality team in the category and the third was to have the most distribution and for me it's just it's a formula if I have those three things I'm going to win and it's worked I think you know obviously there Are some variances if you look at like suers side or like design pickle like the ogs uh but for the most part I think each of the businesses we have is the biggest in its category at this point

but really we just saw like an Arbitrage opportunity we just saw something towards like with zero Capital raised or invested we could just go and build a bunch of these really quickly have a massive Advantage with distribution take over in most cases like the majority of The brand focus in each of those little Industries and use all that free cash flow to go and just do whatever we want without having to ever sell a piece of the business it's interesting that you have to explain it but Creator Le it kind of seems like common sense

like why it makes sense but do you want to explain like how that observation came to be for you and how you guys have gone about that yeah I think about it a lot Because most of the time when somebody says Creator lead what they really mean is endorsement deal with a celebrity right and that I don't think is that exciting now there are some cases of it to where like they're crushing it um obviously like Prime I think is a great example um skims with Kim Kardashian's a great example and behind the scenes you

have an amazing operator that's gr the [ __ ] out of those businesses I don't know how much Logan Paul and the other Guy have I think it's it's rumored to be like 10% each or maybe even less um that to me though isn't creater Le right that is the idea to where somebody just has an audience that's so big you can almost sell anything to it right right um if you think about like uh Mr Beast and febles how many times in a Mr Beast video these days do you see febles you're having to

go to Market with that product nonstop in the same way that you Would any traditional cpg brand you're advertising constantly with us what I think is really unique about what we're doing and more so like the opportunities that exist in B2B for Creator Le stuff is that you can go to market minimally right we launched hey friends our done foru YouTube agency with Ali abdall we launched it on July 31st Ali has like 5 million subscribers on YouTube really captive audience he's really known as like the YouTube guy and the most Followed productivity expert in

the world he's awesome he is awesome I love all death um he is a Savage in his own way um and he has like 200,000 followers on Twitter right we didn't launch hey Friends on YouTube we launched it on Twitter with one tweet for mly that's all the promotion we've ever done for that business in five days off of that one tweet it got I think it was over like 550 individual leads amounting to like 2.5 Million in Mr interest right like to this day we're still very carefully going through that weight list and scaling

that business based on who we think the right fit is so for us what we look for is like not this idea that there's some Creator that's constantly talking about the business but as we've evolved because we've launched six well we've launched five of these we're getting ready to launch six as we've evolved launching one each month we've Really honed in on what we call product audience fit so who is the creator what are they known for right like for example we talked about you it might be like podcasting right just throwing that out there

right so if you were to come and build a business that was focused on like how to help other like let's say like nent creators 10 to 50K subscribers whatever build a really successful podcast um and then handle everything in to end there's a good chance that a huge Portion of your audience would respond to that right and so there's other ways to measure it there's ways to get like more granular about it but that's what we look at it's like audience density and 100% And The congruence between what they're actually watching and if they

also need a service like that and so I've always wondered if like a one Creator could have like a flywheel of these productized agencies yeah like could Ali have not only just a YouTube One have you ever considered doing multiple different agencies or do you think it's more important just to nail that one that they're like most known for I think that with the right Creator there are opportunities for a ton of businesses to exist in their ecosystem and we're exploring that but the difficulty there is how many times can a Creator take something to

Market before they saturate their brand yeah right and so that's something that we want to be Really careful with it's also something that's really interesting like in this space that we're in like my buddy Nick Huber like Nick has several businesses and a lot of his content these days is him tweeting like this business that business that business whatever and Nick does a really good job of driving those leads uh but for us it's not a strategy that is interesting instead of using one audience of a few hundred thousand I want to use multiple audiences

of Millions right um so it gives us a much broader appeal and I think a little bit more longevity in terms of how we take things to Market okay so have you seen different productized agency models work better than others and do you have insights cuz you've done multiple and you said you're canceling this one as $22,000 per month so I'd love to hear your thoughts that just come to your mind instantly on that different product has agencies Um it's tough to say um we obviously have an explored development for a good reason explain that

because I have one and we just started three months ago and I love to hear your take let's turn this around so tell me how your development agency works and then I'll tell you the pros and cons okay so productized Dev agency it's no code okay we use bubble and so the angle is that you get like three full-time employees for the price of one and we can do things faster Because we're using no code um we have develop like full stack developers but that's the angle that no code is better and so from there

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

through a trell board list out the features then we do all the project management design development so that's the product they can sign up on our website or they can take a discovery call if they want questions first so from there it's $66,000 a month we can Develop pretty much anything and so in theory they're always going to need a developer so for our side the churn is really low and the retention is great and then if they just have a finished product and they just want maintenance they can down sell very rarely will they

ever cancel so that's the plus side in our opinion so when you think about scale is where it gets difficult right because it becomes a question of like okay right now churn is low well if You'd lost customers in three months that' be really bad right so like churn is going to be low but the question is like a what's the average LTV right so uh or contract value but in this case you don't have a contract right so we're just going to go LTV yeah so what's the lifetime value of your customer over time

and then what do you have to do to retain a customer to make that LTV like really meaning against your your cost of acquisition right which in this case is It just like your creator Le I made one single video and that drove and I've never talked about anywhere else and how many like uh leads to that drive for you 50 plus 50 plus okay cool and and you guys how many customers have you on board at this point we're at 39K Mr 39K Mr I think that's seven yeah so when you think about scaling

that business right um what you're going to have to do is a handful of things you're going to need to understand what is my Opex look like At scale to get more and more talent that is really high quality right and that's one of the things that I think a lot of people make about these uh productized businesses where they screw up is they like it's a race to the bottom they try and offshore they try and get the like cheapest talent that they can to increase the margins the quality dips retention increases and things

go bad they look at what happened to design pickle and all the layoffs That they had to do what happened they did a [ __ ] T of layoffs a while ago because we hired some of their people and then there were a couple of them that we hired really quickly in our need to like scale up a service and I was like oh These people aren't good May to let them go um anyways so you'll have to find the Blended rate of you know basically if we know that uh each customer requires service from

like these people and over time depending on You know the projects that we're taking on you're going to see uh how that fluctuates Up and Down based on like time investment from the project manager or the figma designer based on revisions or the developer whatever it is and you'll come up with a really good blended rate you'll know that like on average we need to be getting paid this amount of money per hour that we're actually putting into the project which might seem unconventional because you're Not charging by the hour right but at the end

of the day you are you are like people are spending time your constraint yeah you're you're trading time for money you have to figure that out and then you have to look at how that scales to get to like your goal Revenue right um and that's just like a really important piece of it and so what we look at in terms of um like how we look at Cost how we look at you know what our margins need to be so the $2,000 month Thing right that requires 0.3% well not percent excuse me but 0.3

capacity and so what I mean by that uh let's use viral Cuts so for 40 I don't know how much it is $4,400 a month you get a one to one so you just get a dedicated a dedicated animator right they're on your full time so we know in our model it's one: one so our margin obviously is like you know what do we pay them versus what are we getting paid yes if you look at the $2,000 offering which is part-timer that actually is six videos a month which is two high-fi which takes us

on average about two days two and a half days and then four lowf which takes us somewhere between four and eight hours depending on like the handful of factors that requires 0.3 uh of an animator's entire capacity So in theory three clients each animator could do three clients so if I look at That and I say well I can have one to one at $4,400 a month or I could have three customers paying me $6,000 and have technically like 0.1 left over although that's whatever um well I should do that that's more profitable right but

then what we've learned is that those customer customers those part-time customers they have a higher likelihood of churn they are harder to work with and require more time from our project manager so then You have to start changing that model of like how profitable is this really over time and so when you look at it in spreadsheet it's really simple when you don't know the numbers long term right over time as you develop more data points you have a better understanding of who that customer is and how you have to work with them you learn

that like oh it's actually not that sexy like we should get rid of this and just focus on the one to one because it's less Headache yeah so then you go into the whole thing of like why the Blended rate why the Blended model of cost is so important to understand because you have to begin to understand like the cognitive overhead that comes with a customer right so we just went in such a rabbit hole about that no that's important this is like what my podcast is supposed to be it's very interesting like how you

actually move work the business so basically you're saying that Since we're going to have a developer a figma designer and a project manager on each project but each one of those people is only allocating 10 to 20 20 hours per client they could each have like they basically each developer works on three three clients at a time each designer can work on like five because it's much quicker different yeah so you have to find that perfect ratio yeah and so they can work on five it's 02 basically cool yeah so see like off menu It's

$155,000 a month and let's say that we pay a designer 150,000 a year right um on average each off menu designer should work on about four projects in a month right so basically I'm getting 60 grand for my 15 and cost yes now obviously I have a project manager that's involved too uh because the way off menu Works a customer doesn't make requests okay you come and you tell us what you want right and then we handle everything it just Happens outcome yeah it's just outcome based so we run that whole project in linear um

a project manager is running it making sure that everything's organized we're getting the details from the customer they have a good brief we're sending great updates whatever and then the majority the work is just facilitated via loom every two days um one of our design team records a loom video it's like hey here's where I'm at whatever it is um maybe I'm delivering New work whatever and then we ask customers to send us a loom video back right um so it's a a fairly low overhead business in terms of like our extra Opex right so

things that are not just based on the servicing so extra project management or account management whatever you want to call it so then if I that I'm getting paid 60,000 a month and the designer cost me like you know uh let's say 15,000 yeah it's not that' be more but whatever we'll use 15,000 Just be easy so 15,000 my profit right is 45k so look at that over the year that means for every 150,000 revenue or in Opex I'm doing 720,000 Revenue it's a pretty good deal yeah right um so that business is super sexy

but then if you look at hey friends that's 10K a month for six videos it's not like here's a designer that's handling four projects at a time it's okay are you ready it's a lot I already know here is the producer okay here's the strategist the writer The principal animator editor and then it goes into the variance of like do you have somebody that's just editing a roll and then passing it to an animator or not that's what I do how much script rolls involve or script writing is involved in the process like if you're

a studio customer which is like 14,000 and above you get script writing right um you know how much work is going into like the title and the thumbnails so much work it's all that Right so there's there's a whole team so a whole pod of people and a pod for hey friends would be producer strategist in some cases it's strategist writer so there's two team members and then you have a thumbnail designer and then you have a principal animator a-roll and then sub animators right so you're talking about somewhere around eight people per pod you

have 10 clients right now that's insane to me yeah so 10 people per pod And then each pod's going to do somewhere around like let's call it like six to eight customers we're still trying to find the right number that's impressive yeah that's really you must be a it's cuz we batch gotcha so what we encourage customers to do is to batch record so like we'll sit down we'll do the we'll do the idea generation we end up picking the best ideas obviously like following all these framework if we can't figure out the Right thumbnail

and the right title we just w't even do the video right M and then it goes under the hives framework um so how we structure the video and all that stuff and then we ask the customer to sit down and just record six videos at a time right uh so they'll sit down do a day or two of filming send us that stuff and then we go through the process making sure that they come out like one a day right or I mean ex me one a week roughly um yeah and that six makes that

Interesting now yeah because you're buying time in a way with the lead time with editors yeah it's a great deal I actually think it's an incredible [ __ ] value for sure we'll charge more for it later um it's tough because like every customer is like how many views am i g to get it's like we can't guarantee that yeah right like all we can guarantee subjective is that we're going to help you make the best video that you can right um now if you throw Patty Galloway in the mix and Patty's like oh no

like I'm not GNA try and do his Irish accent but if Patty's like dude like these are the videos that this person should be making whatever maybe that changes but that's a whole different ball game hay does not do strategy right today we do some competitive analysis to understand like for example if you were a Hay's customer we'd look at other people in your space we'd see what's working for them what videos have popped Off like how they're averaging views brow all that stuff and then come up with some ideas right um as you're well

aware that's how the YouTube game works and then you'd pick the best ideas we'd help you create the like structure of the script right M but then the script is really up to you because obviously like we encourage that you don't write a script you just you have talking points and you just go 100% And then we'll edit the a Roll um so yeah I mean that's how it works and I think it's a steal it make I like how you said the batches though because for me it's like at least 40 to 50 everything

you just listed is a solid 40 to 50 hours of work and I'm like sitting down like hours like what is the idea what are my competitors making what works then title the most stressful part of my job is coming with the [ __ ] title and the thumbnails I need five thumbnails per video like it's so much Work so I see that that makes sense that cuz once so if you can have five clients per team right so five YouTube channels the person that's doing the research can just go all in on one person

one day and then give you all the ideas in one day since they're in that hole instead of just like skipping across back and forth so so it's almost like they're going through those problems day by day that's really smart that makes a lot of sense yeah it's it's tough though I imagine That's a lot of talent to pack into one team and also making sure that everybody has like a strong YouTube background and like knows their [ __ ] it gets really tough It's a skill you can't just throw that [ __ ] to

the Philippines you know what I mean um it's really tough and so we've intentionally scaled that business more slowly yeah to make sure that a the team is right and B the process is right but if you get it right these people will be like they'll never churn in a Way because one YouTube is a great business model we're we're almost there so if you're like me you have a software idea and you want to get it started but you're just intimidated you don't know how to hire developers you don't know how to manage a

project getting it designed you're just unfamiliar with the process so that's why I actually had my partner start our agency WGI Labs so we could help you bring your software to life it's a development agency where you Get a full team dedicated to your project so you'll get a designer a developer and a project manager so all you have to do is list the features you want and kind of tell us how you want it laid out and then watch it get built week after week so if you have a software idea and you're ready

to get started on it go to WG my labs.com and we're happy to help I think it's is it just the async communication that has made it the most Beneficial where it's like instead of hopping on meetings three times a week having to be like hand holding these agency clients it's more so like hands off each company has a different level of like high touch right so viral cuts for example is a really low touch you just make requests we handle it there is slack but we're phasing it out um as you go up kind

of the food chain of price point it's much more High touch but the difference is That we don't create variants in how we service right so we like to be really on top of communication I have an expectation with our team that a customer hears from us every single [ __ ] day right even if we're not sharing new work because we have a 48 hour grace period I still want somebody sending a message and saying like hey here's where we're at just email slack or email or just updating like an Assa ticket whatever it

is okay are you guys Using like the con like trell boards to communicate tasks like Brett or no uh we do for viral cuts um I don't know how much longer that's going to last we're currently building our own tool internally um but everything internal for us is powered by linear is there any motive to make a productized agency due to the mrr VIS like and ability to like exit with higher multiples than a typical agency that's certainly a benefit right like if you can keep Reasonably low turn for producti agency uh I think you're

definitely going to earn higher multiples in a traditional like s So based agency um but for us like I don't really have intentions of selling any of the businesses um we we are structured in a way that would allow us to sell off pieces of them if we wanted to but we really intend on just leveraging the free cash flow and holding them long term so for you this is kind of like a Private Equity Vision in a way yeah and so you had this term that liked earned advantages and this is is something that

I think people kind of discount or feel entitled to but in business it's all about having your advantages and you became very aware of that over the last decade in your career and so that's why you see the Creator that opportunity is so important and your operating ability and so I'm curious I just like want to Know how you've came to this conclusion and what you think the next 20 years have you ever read Titan rockefeller's biography not compare myself to Rockefeller we're not even close um but when you read Titan or you learn a

lot about Rockefeller you learn just how much he had the entire world by the balls right like I mean everything from like they went and negotiated bulk shipping contracts with the railroads and then They'd go to their competitors because they weren't they weren't supplying enough oil right at the time to actually handle the capacity that they were trying to ship so they'd go to the railroad and say hey we're going to ship a thousand barrels a week or whatever it is right but maybe they're only producing 100 so they'd go to all the competitors and

say okay you're going to ship with us because we're going to give you better rates and then things are Going to move smoothly you're going to have higher profit margins whatever it is over time as he grew his business he was able to manipulate that because he'd say okay well you're kind of shipping through our deal so I know exactly how much oil you're producing as my output increases and I need less of your oil on my train to get this rate I can now squeeze you because if I take away these discounted shipping rates

your margins get hit I know that's going to happen And now I have an advantage to come and just like buy you um so they did this thing called the southern improvement and basically like over the span of like a week Rockefeller bought basically every oil refinery in Cleveland and then we're not going to get into it but like that got dissolved because it was going to be this huge issue with antitrust they had to scrap it but the damage was done and then he went to Pennsylvania did the same thing like hey you saw

what Happened over there I'm going to do this his entire career he just stacked up unfair Advantage after unfair Advantage even going to the points where he had like the railroads like totally by the balls and then they came with like the idea that we're not going to put them on drums and then load them onto trains we're just going to have you know like the modern you know oil container right we're going to ship with that on the train he produced them all and then the Ones that were in the market he bought them

all so the railroads had to get them from him and then the pipelines like it's one thing after another and when you read that you're like this guy was able to win so like the advantage he had over his competitors over the market was so insane because he stacked up every unfair advantage that he possibly could and if you look at that in business it's like why wouldn't you want to do That if every person is trying to launch an agency by like having a flashy website and like getting some cool case studies and and

like a hundred agencies are chasing Apple to get scraps when the majority of the budget's going to Accenture right like it's not a game I want to play so why wouldn't I just take as much distribution as I could right and throw that at a problem and then just profit right so I mean I'm trying to play the game to win um as much as Possible and one of the best ways for us to do that is to just continue sacking up those unfair advantages what I get upset about is when people are like oh

you're cheating it's like well yeah I am but I earned it right like I'm not doing anything that anybody else couldn't do I'm just doing what like my career has led me to it's just the lessons that I've learned over 15 years of doing this and like my particular set of experiences where I was like this makes Sense for me to do why wouldn't I you have like killer energy like I can just like sense it right now and I'm so impressed by it and so I really want to understand like the long-term strategy cuz

I feel like you're at the point where you're thinking like three 5 10 years out especially that Rockefeller example when you're most people just think I need to make more oil and try to sell it where in that lead time for him before he can actually do that he's like Making other strategic deals and so I would love to hear how you see these things playing out and how is this going to be your ship squeezing moment yeah dude you know what's funny when it comes to the long term I truthfully yeah I want to

make a lot of money like I think that's cool um but I really just want to work with people that inspire me and that I get energy from and I want to do whatever the [ __ ] I want to do every day right Like that's it and for me right now that's building things I love building something from zero to one and then scaling it like nothing excites me more than just being like we should build that business because we see an opportunity and then 30 days later it's in market and you know within

30 days after that it's doing you know 83 Mr or whatever um that's insane like why wouldn't I do that as much as I can so today like that's what I'm focused on Long term I just want to there's so many things that excite me like so many businesses that excite me and I used to have this idea to where I was like oh I don't know what I'm GNA build because I don't have like the big idea right and I got to a point where I was like [ __ ] it dude I don't

need a big idea like I'm good at building businesses I'm good at building a network just based on like authenticity why don't I just put those two things Together and just go and like acquire anything that I think is making a dollar today and I can turn that into five right and so you know that's our plan really like sahill spent years in PE um you know he knows way more about that world than I do um but together with like his kind of background there his Network and then like our operational ability just use

the free cash flow invest in build or buy businesses That excite us and plan to grow and hold them long term and Own 100% of it as we do it it's interesting that this tide is turning I feel like the glorified raising 20 million then have a billion dollar exit or whatever is like really fantasized in our era and now it seems like it's shifting because I'm consuming some of those content as well it makes way more sense to just make a lot of profitable cash flowing businesses with the goal to hold and you probably

make Better decisions along the way yeah like I'm a [ __ ] idiot like I feel like I have a a far greater chance of taking my time and compounding assets over time by just making smart decisions to buy businesses that I understand and again like I'm not trying to go from one to a billion I'm just trying to turn a dollar into five if I can do that time and time again for 10 years I think I'll be in a good spot and so productized agencies have just been like that's your game at This

point get the unfair Edge you know you're a good operator get the distribution with these people and they have an audience that's much more dense so the leads are going to be way more qualified I just knew that there was one thing that was like really Central to me whatever I did next I didn't want to be sisifus I didn't want to like push the boulder of customer acquisition up the hill for all eternity I wanted to make that easy and my theory was like if I Could solve distribution I could do anything but it

was either a great decision or a stupid one when s and I were talking about starting this business it was like well how much money should we invest should we invest like a 100,000 each or a quarter million each or whatever and I was like let's invest zero I was like you know we had been kicking around the idea of taking our design team and doing like a product has offering with our Design team and I was like let's just go build product size Services because my bet is that if we have more distribution than

anybody else in that market we could probably make a decent amount of money pretty quickly and we started doing the math and we're like look if we can get 0.001% of a Creator's audience to convert probably make a fair amount of money right yeah and so we ran that at scale and it was like oh we could get to 25 million in ARR in 18 months if we did X Y and Z and so that was the path that we went down and you know we're five months in we've launched five businesses we're doing about

a we're doing a little North now of five million Revenue um it literally is going like perfectly to plan which is kind of terrifying cuz like yeah I know when it going to blow up EXA um but so far so good it's a compounding of like sharp decisions now So hopefully that is based on from your experience but well we've had to intentionally slow growth too that's what I was going to ask you about next like you have to be I'm sure you're spending more time qualifying the right customers in the sense of just accepting

everybody and it's more so they fit this model and you can be more selective since you have that consistent lead flow now is that kind of helped clean things up or what do you mean by slowing down Yeah I mean that's a a piece of it like everybody in business like talks about your ICP like who's your you know ideal customer profile like what's your what's your avatar all this stuff and it's like yeah that's a great thing to have right you need that to scale a business long term but if your business is five

months old like hey friends is two months old yeah I don't know yeah like you know how much data I would have to collect how many customers we would Have to work with to figure that out so I think for us like slowing down growth means intentionally just not onboarding customers so we'll artificially limit a company's growth like hey friends for example again like I think there's a there's about 2.5 million right now of Mr there still a lot of people it's a lot just sitting on the wait list and if you look through that

weight list you'd be shocked you'd be like oh I know this person they have you know 10 million Subscribers I know this person whatever like there's a lot of demand for that business but we've intentionally kept it it small like today it does about 100km we'll ramp it up to 200k by the end of the year and the reason why is that we have to maintain quality yeah it's like that's 10 customers right pretty much 10 at 10 it's basically 10 customers yeah I can't see that's like I do YouTube and there's just so much

to it so much and like I am not an operator and so I don't Understand how you can even handle 10 I can barely handle myself over here that's 60 videos a month so I was curious like is that are all cuz all of your agencies are like top tier quality the design just justs ands profession as but mainly I want to ask you so assembly is the main company yeah right assembly is the holding company holding company yeah and so you have these different productized agencies I was Curious how is it like one group

of people that you can use in different places or is it like very like segmented good question so assembly is the holding company um we'll talk structure real quick so assembly is an LLC that s on I own mhm okay and then assembly Ventures own C corpse yes right so there's like an assembly Corps yes so there's an assembly video C Corp that then owns llc's that are treated as disregarded entities so for example hey friends is An LLC viral Cuts is an LLC key frames an LLC that are all owned by assembly video right

so assembly video is the C Corp is the C Corp and Adventures is the hco adventur is all of the team members for each of those companies work for the C Corp right so they're all on payroll through the C Corp all like the Opex runs through the C Corp at the aggregate level right why we do that is that I want optionality in the future so sill Like from his PE days likes to say that assembly is what does he say he says it's a bond with a call option meaning it's it's earning right

it's earning money whatever but there's a call option to like exit or do something bigger in the future right which is it's so PE but anyways um you know so for example if I ever wanted to look at our video businesses alone which I mean together just our video businesses that's a really great business um it's Very profitable when you say video do you mean like the YouTube and viral Cuts so key frame viral Cuts YouTube and there's going to be a couple more um but if I looked at that business alone like what if

somebody came and you're like we love what you're doing on video we want to buy it well I could just sell them the C nice right or or if I had for example hey friends I keep talking about it because it's it's on my mind because we're growing it now um it's going to be A big business like hey friends is going to be an eight figure business probably within 12 months um if I wanted to raise Capital to accelerate that business or if I wanted to bring on other partners or other creators I have

the optionality to do that at the LLC level while protecting C Corp group got um but if I ever wanted to do something with the C Corp like just raise a deal just for that say like hey this is going great we're going to accelerate these Companies to let's say 15 mil and maybe buy other video businesses to accelerate the flywheel there we're going to sell shares as a private C Corp valuing it based on X I can do that and I've never touched the ownership structure of the holding company right and then our designs

the same way so we have a C Corp for the Design Group that owns by- size off menu and then some other agencies that we're looking at acquiring now they'll be owned by a c cor and we'll Kind of keep doing that pattern um and then and then what's what gets it like what makes this all so [ __ ] complicated too is that the c or the LLC at the very top is actually owned by two Es Corps so like no way it's a whole thing yeah okay that's like sill has an es Corp

I have an es Corp that owns it for tax efficiency reasons obviously so like side ESC Corps that are kind of like your own pass through entities yeah instead of like Hunter Hammond's owning Yes yeah that's how me and my partner have our setup too it's makes sense yeah okay cool but so there's fluidity between the video team there's fluidity between the design team but not really across C corpse correct okay yeah if an editor works for viral Cuts MH um but we think that they're like going to be better for long form we can

move them to hey friends without having to change any paperwork makes our life super easy yeah that makes a lot of sense so you're like Categorizing them but still fluidity in between the category exactly okay awesome basically your hold Co then you have C corpse underneath then each C Corp is like a category so video design then you have llc's within each of those that people can be fluid through now my question is now since you have creators involved so like Dan olly all these people do they have Equity or is it rev share I'm

not gonna tell you okay deal okay then are they I I I say that let me So let's talk about it real quick we have confidential agreements so we just won't say I understand yeah but what I will say is for people looking at how can I work with a Creator so I gave a talk yesterday on like basically our whole Playbook um you know Cody was hosting this super cool conference in Austin I was lucky know speak at it talked about it and then somebody asked a really interesting question at the end they were

like you know obviously Everybody asked like how would how can I partner with the Creator because like everybody's like how can I get sahill to be my partner right it's like well you can't right um a I'll kill you uh no but like you can't right killer energy dude I'm telling you but there is we're talking about density right there is a ton of great creators that might have like 25,000 followers on Twitter or something or a small YouTube channel but it's a super dense audience And they're known for a particular topic whether it's like

web flow or um what's getting big these days uh like framer for example or no code bubble it doesn't matter what it is right there are so many small creators that have a super dense audience that looks at them as an expert on that topic you can go build businesses with them you don't need to go build a business with a saw Hill bloom or a s par for example you want to look at product audience fit and if they Have really meaningful product audience fit with like where your skill sets are it doesn't really

matter if Their audience isn't isn't in the millions you can build a good cash FL flowing business there and if you do that I think there are three three levers that you can pull you can pull Equity right which is fine um but it's slow it might not incentivize a creator that much because what are the odds that you actually exit the business you can pull The lever of Revenue share which is more meaningful right sharing Revenue but then like what's the right amount to make it interesting and then what does that do to your

margins and then the third obviously is like affiliate deals putting together really great affiliate deals is a no-brainer I think um if you're interested in the space so what we have as a model I think is is like it's like it's like The Godfather it's like I Made him an offer I can't refuse right right or they can't refuse whatever um it's an offer that's just so simple and so direct and so good that creators like okay because it's basically passive income right a very meaningful passive income because of the scale that we're we're working

at but the other thing too is like in our position a like make no mistake all of our creator relationships stem from sill creators are like a very peer-to-peer Like game oh 100% it is an insular Community it is like a no new friend Tye a deal um yeah it it honestly like I feel very naive not knowing that going into it like six months ago I didn't know like how insular well maybe insular is the wrong word but I didn't realize like how connected it was right um and it's deeply deeply connected um but

that is also interesting because again in this whole thing of like I want to build a career L business if I [ __ ] up like For example if I [ __ ] up with s par everyone knows everyone knows like the repercussions are huge if we if we let a Creator's reputation be diminished just an iota of a percent it's a big big deal um so there's a lot of work that we have to do to like maintain the Integrity of our work maintain their reputation do you know how many shitty customers we've had

over the past five months because we've had a lot right especially for like viral cuts for example you might Have a shitty customer that's like oh this sucks I want to refund it's like why does it suck well I didn't get a million views on this video he like dude you have 10,000 followers like you're not going to get a million views on a video and and we have a policy it's like no refunds good right good but you know what I have to do I have to give a refund I hope people don't exploit

this because we just changed our policy we will not give you a refund now um but I Have to give a refund because like I don't want to damage I don't want reputational risk right right so we've done a lot of that stuff um but anyways so like the the point of this is that we'd go originally sill talk to friends and they'd be like oh who's going to run this business he' like Hunter i' vouch for him he's 12 out of 10 like let's do it and then I talk to them and they're like

I it's like dude I've had two exits I've built big businesses I've just done it privately right which is the biggest M mistake in my career by none um and now it's different it's where it's we've built in public it's so obvious the things that we've done because like our creator partners are like oh this is great like I get a wire or you know I get hooked up on Equity or whatever it is like things are great um and now creators come to us like I had a guy with a million uh followers on

Twitter Just called DM me like two days ago being like let's build something right so they just come to us now um yeah it works really well it's powerful and so that's my advice if you want to do if you're an operator and you're world class first off you have to be world class because nothing that we care more than our reputations we have to publicly say this and we get the like if you [ __ ] up you don't really deal with the fallback as much as the Creator does on Outward facing so if

you are trying to get in this it's really key that you do have a Creator friend that can like vouch for you within this community because it's almost like the whole outside world is like parasitic like everyone's trying to sponsor our Channel everyone's trying to like use our audience in a way and so that's why it's so like we're not very trusting because I think a lot of creators have been abused by that so have was wondering on This have you ever considered we were talking about info products being a good business model before this

podcast yeah yeah so have you ever considered have you ever thought about that's kind of how Ali works right he has the YouTube what part YouTuber Academy which is great so many big YouTubers have come out of that and so is that something that you've seen work better like people are going to that Academy that's almost doing a lot of the educational process For you they know everything that goes into it and then you guys just like the handoff is that more effective of a funnel than like say maybe the animations who just like see

a YouTuber and they want animations how have you thought about info products and courses being looped into agencies CU I see that being I feel like they can go hand inand yeah we've thought about courses um like not me or sahill making them but But courses as a business um and it's really really interesting um I know some PE I know I know a couple guys that own like basically ghost course building businesses 60 million a year in Revenue I I thought about this explain that yeah I mean it is what it is like they

um partnered with a couple of creators now now Grant said like for this it's more like cringe so like you know like uh they want to be behind the scenes yeah like Financial courses where like all They do is like Hawk the idea of like you know here's how you like bur you know what I mean like like you know that's bir calls yeah that [ __ ] um what is it um buy remodel refinance repeat like Burr uh anyways I've never heard that that's interesting it's for real estate yeah um but uh I like

courses I think that like a great example of courses is what um Brett from design Joy's done yeah um like design Joys a million Topline whatever and then you built the course for like productize yourself I think that's cool right um so I think there's a lot of instances like that that's really interesting or the way you guys do it um or the way Justin Welsh does it what's crazy to me is like Justin um it's weird that like people like in a business setting what come be like I bought your course I loved it

like you'll hear that multiple times a day if you hang out with Justin it's Pretty neat um but for us courses um we think there is a business to be built around building courses but at the highest level like we're talking like Master Class level of course building um but in an intimate authentic way with creators I just wonder if people come into like your YouTube agency and they like are getting traction they're very popular then like you could like almost like partner in the back of them we'll shoot your course videos we'll make the

Platform for you to push people to we'll set it goes back to the vertical integration right like if I have the ability to essentially like supercharge the growth of anyone's brand and then all the creative power behind it to like do that why wouldn't I right yeah but you have to have the expert in the field to sell the course so it have to be like some sort of partnership but this we look at it as the same way that we build Businesses interesting like I might bundle so um part of the idea of the

way we work maybe I'm going to give this way but like if somebody wants to do this and compete with us Bring it on Bring it on um so like Michael Ovitz um you know started uh CAA and was like the most powerful man in Hollywood talent agency yep talent agency and what was so beautiful about their model is that they flipped the way Hollywood worked so typically the studio Would have all the power and they would you know put the creative together and figure this out and be the distribution with CA started doing is

saying look we're going to package a deal so like Jurassic Park for example uh Ovitz was like best friends with Michael cron and he wrote Jurassic Park and then he's like oh this is a movie this is going to be like the big thing so they went to step Spielberg they're like it has to be Stephen Spielberg to direct this movie Right so they got Stephen Spielberg and then they got the producer and then they started lining up the talent so by the time they took this to the studio it was done it was a

packaged deal like this is how the movie is going to work this is how we're going to make it we just need you to give us the money and be the distribution and you'll get all your profit whatever um and here's how we've structured the deal and so that's how he became so powerful that's like how he Flipped Hollywood on his head and then who's the guy AR Emanuel like ran with that and went nuts and maybe as a billionaire I don't know we look at our business the same way gotcha right so we're going

to package the entire thing and we're going to look at the Creator um as a partner but also as the distribution right so they don't have to worry about much El right they don't have to worry about building the business they don't have to worry about Recruiting the talent they don't have to worry about any of that um they know that like we got it right um and so I think you can do the same thing with courses yeah so you can package the right course um you can find the right talent to help build

like an amazing offering and then all you really need the Creator for is essentially to be like the voice of authority record the content be the distribution they make hundreds of thousands if not a million Dollars off of selling it and they didn't have to do anything it's a beautiful proposition you're stacking The Leverage on your end and just literally all you need is a green light and then you get a higher percentage as well yeah so instead of the talent agents waiting for the producers and the movies to hope they pick your actor you

get the actor get the director get everything and say hey it's ready yeah bundled up ready to go if you don't want It I'm going to take it down to I'm going to take it to them down the street so you want to lose this opportunity or you want to go that's clever yeah so I've been using Dave Ramsey as an example a lot for like what I see my Creator businesses becoming what a baller right and you look at his website and he has like these verified like agencies or verified like like chural mortgage

and he has backend deals with them and it's like wow you really can Have like every possible service or vertical in your industry you're just that one like critical point in the middle and it all just Springs out and so it seems like you are like conglomerating a lot of those which I think is really clever do you ever think of it like that not in the Dave Ramsey Way um why do you think he's a baller why do you like him I just he's like this like do you know much about like I watched

one Podcast of him and his website's like I feel really rusty on the details um he lives on like Chattanooga Tennessee or something like that yeah um started in radio he owns like an incredible amount of commercial real estate right and I think I think he's a billionaire pretty close I'm sure um and has no debt like has just stacked just compounded it all over time um it's crazy that he seemingly has accured so much net worth Without Really ever Having to take on like a lot of Leverage um and then I like that he

just has this like super popular radio show and like just sits there and like writes down numbers and gives Financial advice yeah it's a baller it's like the original Creator but he was on the radio and there wasn't a lot of options you know and so like looking at him like wow this guy's had 30 years to really figure this out he's like everybody's financially wise Grandpa 100% it's awesome okay so You did make a difference between like an affiliate in a referral with these people which is like a pretty important distinction because affiliate would

mean it directly comes from Their audience where a referral would mean or not referral but rev share sorry rev share my bad rev share an affiliate affiliate would be like it comes directly from them through a specific link where uh rev share would mean like no matter where the lead comes from like I've Heard of you just from your personal brand now and if I need short form I would go to viral Cuts not because I watched even though I do watch SAR but for that example like I know who you are I need short

form I could just come directly to you right and if it was an affiliate deal Sam wouldn't get a cut of that right but if it's rev share then he would because it's like a partnership so very important distinction for anyone trying to do a Creator Le business to Make sure you understand the incentive and that's just a game of Leverage based on the Creator it is a game of Leverage and it's a game of understanding like what is the lever that you have to pull as a business owner like if you already have a

business and let's say it's profitable right uh and you're growing at a decent rate what's called 10% I don't know um if you want to work with a Creator maybe an affiliate deal is better structure right especially a Smaller Creator an affiliate deal might be better structure because then it's one to one right they're getting paid on deals that they've set up specifically if it's rev share yeah you're basically it doesn't matter where it came from you're sharing that revenue for us what's interesting because again the model for us of created uh of like Creator

lead and then product audience fit I'm essentially betting that if I pick the right business and the right Creator I'm just creating money out of thin air right I'm I'm building a business that had no reason to exist other than that Dynamic of like here's the idea here's the Creator so maybe rev share does make sense for me in that situation because like the business wouldn't have existed anyways and I would guess just from the inner workings on average the Creator partnership accelerates the business by about three to four years in terms of overall Trajectory

of like how much lead acquisition can you have how does it affect your recruiting the general trust that gets attached to it so like if we launch a YouTube agency and you don't know me right maybe I have 15,000 followers on Twitter whatever it is and I'm known as like a a badass operator whatever but I don't have anything to do with YouTube right right so you're going to be like what case studies do you have who have you worked With what results do you have whatever it's going to take me years to compound meaningful

case studies or reputation around that business that makes us trustworthy for you to be like yeah let's do this but the second it's all the OBD dolls YouTube agency all that is built in right and so I think if you're going to go down this road you just have to understand that leverage you have to understand where it applies to your business and now you're responsible for Ali's reputation in a way as well by delivering on that service yeah so trust is the biggest thing with agencies and I understand what you mean by speed like

it fast tracks it by three or four years because most agencies are going to grow by word of mouth as well so if you get an immediate in injection and the trust is baked in and then you operate it's just like the perfect most well-oiled machine yeah that's genius and then have you ever considered like maybe if this Guy like you like his personality you think he's all about it he's serious that like almost taking equity in a channel like if you like like a venture studio in a way okay so maybe you thought about

it okay cool I I think that you have a newsletter mhm 80,000 people 80,000 what what media platform do you not like are you not killing Twitter I would say Twitter yeah do you think there is potential in your your platform your brand to um build a Bigger media property on another Channel or something like that or expand what you have L Okay cool so to me if you look at the flywheel of businesses that we have right our flywheel um we think of it in three parts strategy execution amplification right okay um today everything

that we've been doing falls into execution right we haven't done any like crazy strategy offerings we haven't done anything around amplification and so what we want to do Is make sure that the next so I I say this whole thing of like 12 companies in 12 months which like crazy [ __ ] I don't know why I said that but like whatever I'm sticking to it um I didn't launch anything in October uh oh you got to make up for last time here I launched two in September there you go so you buy yourself a

month yeah we're g we're gonna make up some time but anyways um most of those 12 companies are going to be companies that fit into that flywheel Okay right it's a strategy execution amplification the reason why is I want the ability to if you think about that is like um like an engine right or or I don't know heat seeking missile I don't know I want to be able to point that to whatever and then there is so much energy and um just like absolute high quality execution focus on it that it's going to grow

so if it's a SAS company for example I want everything in house to do the strategy I want everything in House to do um that strategy for the business and the growth of the brand right I want to be able to do the brand in house I want to be able to do the site in house I want to be able to build a product in house I want to be able to market the product in house I want the creative Talent either in our Network or in inhouse that we've invested in to help grow

that business right so I'm trying to vertically integrate every business that we grow in the future by This Foundation of services that we're building today so I can start seeing this picture of like how they'll cross-pollinate so if you get a business business person who starts on YouTube and they see success with you guys they have a good experience like oh by the way we also have a design agency if your company wants to Rebrand oh we have we have customers that are are uh like there are customers of ours that are a customer of

every business so is that is That the reason or the Strategic decision to do 12 companies in 12 months that you're almost building like these like assembly and you have 12 different sister agencies and if someone comes into one they can immediately lead so they come in from one crater Ali they have YouTube down you guys execute and then they could potentially bounce over to another one because they need that complimentary service is that part of the strategy in a way that's not no That's not the reason why it's it's a wonderful second order effect

right but it's not the reason why I think the reason why is that I didn't want to do something small right like I turned on a big number to go and do this and so part of the deal to myself was like I need to make sure that I can get back to where I was or bigger within less than three years and then I think two it's just this notion of having like ambitious [ __ ] goals right like what what is it Like Sean and Sam say like no small boy stuff right like

it's just the idea like you and I were joking around before we started taping this about private jets right like I want a [ __ ] jet dude and own it yeah and I'm not gonna get I'm cool the NJ C but I'm not going to get there by running like a product High service right um I'm gonna get there by compounding value over time and so when we look at trying to own every ounce of what we're doing and not really raising Capital I need a lot of free cash flow to go and take

really big bets that can compound quickly right and so the whole 12 companies in 12 months a I don't know it just it flows really well right good tag um but it also seemed like this audacious idea of like if we commit to launching 12 companies in 12 months we know that we have to maintain a pace that's [ __ ] crazy and what are the second order effects like if that's the forcing Function to know that like we're going to move really really hard what does that really do to the business overall what does

that do to our mindset what does that do to the way that we build the business business the way we think about business the way we think about stacking leverage and unfair advantages it has like I don't know dude it's like steroids right and so it's like business steroids literally it's the whole idea that like what is the whole thing that Uh Admiral Raven or Mick Raven or whatever his name is says about making your bed in the morning right like if you make your bed in the morning you've conquered like a mundane boring task

but you've told yourself that you can like keep doing that all day I think it's the same thing about building businesses if we know that we're going to launch a business in the next 30 days like we're in that mindset of creation we're in that mindset of like hustle of going From zero to one it keeps us Scrappy um that's important it's so important and it it allows us to just move really quickly but yeah Underneath It All it allows us to accelerate that flywheel to begin to stack up leverage and vertically integrate and do

bigger and bigger things so with each one of these can they you're scaling slow but do you see a cap to how far they can scale because I'm assuming that's what design pickle ran into and why they like had Some quality issues or they hired some not so competent designers that's tough word but do you understand what I'm saying like is there a since you're scaling slow do you think that means you can scale further just in general because you're focused on process or do you think there is like a cap to each one of

these so I think there's a cap tell me like where you think that would be and why I don't know where it is yet like we're too young um like viral cuts For example maybe the cap is like maybe the cap is like five million M right I don't know um does it make sense to me with like how prevalent AI is getting that a shortform video editing company can like grow past five or six million it's possible um we're certainly continuing to grow like obviously like this was the best month the business ever had

right like everything's growing but inherently there's going to be a ceiling for some Of these businesses and I'm okay with that what do you think that is though like is it just like you cannot manage enough people people to get quality assurance like there isn't that much talent out there because I do have a question on viral Cuts is how do you even compete and because there's so many people doing short form agencies and there's so many [ __ ] ones name them name them yeah interesting what do you mean name them like just name

the short form Agencies yeah like how many people are doing it are you asking me or are you saying I'm asking you like how many there are I don't know a single I could say media scaling Doom sorry for promoting a competitor but you asked me to Media scaling clipco those the only two I know and thenal cuts you just said there's so many well I get a million DMS yeah okay but you just said there's so many you can only name two yeah one of them I've heard of off menu actually Designed the clip

site um long story there but like I think if somebody's looking at short form video viral Cuts is the biggest right so um I think that you know if we continue at the rate we're going with that business it it I'm sure it's the biggest short form video editing agency there is right now um but the question is just like how much demand can that market support like for Example uh I think KP is doing somewhere around like I don't know 1.5 to two million Revenue like how much of their revenue do I have to

take for viral cods in order to keep growing in that space right you think it's a market share thing no no I'm not saying it is I'm saying is that is that is that a problem is that a problem right um and not not that I want to do that like I have no interest in their customers we're coming for you guys no Henry and Dylan are Super sweet guys um I don't know I don't know Dylan that well but Henry's a super sweet guy um and they're doing something else now anyways and I think

they use clip to fund it but like that's a different approach too that's what we do with our Dev agency yeah use it to fund that's a different approach like I think Mak a mistake like I come into these markets and I'm like yeah I wantan to you want to monopolize it like that is yeah that is should be your mentality as A serious entrepreneur absolutely MH so what's the point of business yeah right that's why we live in America dude like I'll have people on my channel be like this isn't as easy as you

say it is I'm like there's no such thing as an easy business like youy you need to play to [ __ ] win or you shouldn't play at all go work for somebody no so what do you think the design pickle problem was I don't know much about design pickle okay just you think that just too big Not enough quality insurance very low quality yeah they have low ticket clients I'm going to say this and maybe I'm totally wrong but I isn't it like just a funer buck a month yeah it's low quality local restaurants

yeah not a good business to be I'm sure it's a great business they do a lot of Revenue but probably low margin had to guess yeah like here's the thing like at the end of the day like I don't know who runs design pickle shout out to them Whoever they are like if you're running a profitable business [ __ ] you're winning you're winning right I'm obsessed with the way things look I think if you run a service to where like you're producing lowquality stuff that doesn't look good then it doesn't interest me if it's

a good business for you great but if it's producing low quality stuff whatever that's why I had you on the podcast like that person you met told me who you were I looked I'm Like wow like he's not only this is the best literally the best designed agency branding slogan in your tweet twitter bio like everything I've ever seen he has four of these that are all equally the same quality five five sorry at the time at the time it was four my bad but my question is how are you how do you think about

differentiating yourself in such a competitive market as short form other than I know the Creator Le is like a huge because you get the trust that Makes a lot of sense but even your like I can feel the quality I don't I just I just think about I think about having more evident uh higher quality work and having more distribution I don't need to differentiate myself if I have wider distribution and the work is just like really good so how do the work that's really good are I would love to hear like your is your

hiring just from Network since you have a really strong Network now um you've worked in the an earned advantage that you have is you've worked in the space for 13 years you know the big players yeah and it's like accessible to you for our higher end uh like hiring and talent yes um for like our short form video stuff no that's all referral driven based on our animators um and and we're I'm pretty ruthless about like getting rid of low performing Talent um like there's there's no worst thing a boss can do than tolerate low

Performance right and so I think last month we probably churned out like seven or eight team members because like if you look at the the pace we've moved we've had to hire a lot like we've hired close to 70 people over the past like four months I think um so there's there's a huge scale up of the team and like we're not playing some game where like I'm interviewing everybody I don't have time for that um so inevit like inevitably we're going to get some lower Talent that's going to like maybe just test really well

interview really well whatever it is but then maybe they are slow or uh they can't do creative that well or it takes them too long whatever it is um so we'll get rid of them but all of our best talent especially in video has come from referrals from us like incentivizing our team members to refer people what is the incentive like a bonus well there's actually two things so um we have a huge team in the Philippines and they're awesome um the first thing is that we just pay more yeah period yeah right um a

lot of our team members are probably making double with us than they than they were before um and the first thing is because like people treat that in a very predatory way they're like oh [ __ ] it like race to the bottom again like we'll pay these people 800 bucks a month which is crazy to me um so if you're making 800 bucks a month I might look at you and say hey Like we're going to be like way uh better about balance and I'm GNA pay double right it falls on me then to

just run a really good business so I have a margin right and I'm willing to play that game I think that's one of our Moes frankly um it's just like operational competency yeah um and and so that's a big one so they know that they're referring their friend to a place that's gonna like treat them better and pay them more and then they get money on top Of it so it kind of is their them doing a favor to their friend in a way once they've worked with someone who's so and you want to work

with your friends 100% like if you like where you work you want to work with your friends how did you learn operational not how did you learn I want to hear like your origin story but like I learned theity of what I know about operational competency from fighting with procurement procurement is a [ __ ] we worked with we tried to work With a forge 500 company and oh my God I'd never want to do that again so I think stting ever is like our first year we did like 350k in revenue and we knew

how to design we knew how to build um so we felt pretty competent about those things but we didn't know how to sell to big companies and we knew if we wanted to make a lot of money we had to go get deals with big companies so we recruited this guy named Matt Williams who's a dear friend of mine to this day he was The CEO of the um I think I don't even remember the name of the agency but it was a it was a big like $200 million year agency that was owned by

ipg um I don't know why the name is blanking me but anyways he came on as like our executive chairman and I wasn't going to him and saying Matt how do we get customers because it's a stupid question ask I was going to him and I was saying Matt how do we work with procurement Like like teach me how a big company works it's my job as the entrepreneur to hustle my [ __ ] ass off be resourceful and find out how to to get in the door but you tell me once I'm in that

door how do I navigate those hallways right and I think that's what a lot of people screw up that want to be entrepreneurs or want to build a service business or productize how do I get my first customers dude if you can't figure that out you're [ __ ] like that's your job Dude it's your job and I hate to be harsh but like there's no answer like just hustle figure it out I tell this to my kids all the time I have two 14-year-olds and nothing they do like if they like are you know

teenagers and they don't behave or they mouth off that annoys me mhm but when they're not resourceful it [ __ ] makes me lose my mind like I it's like you like they're like a three-year-old baby like you're not a baby I have a six-month-old baby Okay yeah and when he it's okay yeah but if the six-month-old isn't resourceful that's okay anyways so I grew up uh my mom was a methhead uh she was a meth addict um I moved everywhere when I was a kid U my dad is like the sweetest man in the

world he's super super intelligent way smarter than me but never applied it right he was like a service manager to a car dealership and my dad's like kind of a [ __ ] like he's he's one of those guys that like Just doesn't know how to bite back that last little bit longer and so like never made a bunch of money um so like growing up was just super hard um it sucked I spent a couple years in juvie when I was a teenager like growing up is really tough I had a kid when I

was 18 um I was going to say you're not too old you have 14 33 yeah I had kid when I was 18 also started my first business when I was 18 um statue limitations so here we go like I I'd made like you know money selling Pot when I was like a shitthead teenager and I was like okay so I like 70 grand what I do with it I started t- Mobile store damn yeah well you know damn youen you were selling it scale um anyways um but I was the youngest person ever at

the time at least to be like an authorized retailer for T-Mobile that's so cool and that's how I became an entrepreneur and when I was 19 I got custody of my younger brother I had assume my grandparents for custody of my Younger brother cuz like my grandma was like dying and my grandpa like wanted to go back to Appalachia where like like total Hillbillies you had to grow up fast I had to grow up real [ __ ] fast um and so like my entire life has been the definition of like I have to be

resourceful right you know sold my T-Mobile store started my uh first agency when I was 20 uh hired my lead engineer he was my age we became friends we started our first startup figured out How to like hustle our way into an accelerator we went to the brander which was a top 10 accelerator at the time um in in Cincinnati raised VC figured out how to run a company moved to Chicago like consulted like you know like it's just been resourcefulness like my entire life and so there's nothing that drives me crazier than when somebody

just can't do the work to figure something out and so for Me that's my biggest thing I don't know where we're going with this but there's story we're talking about resourcefulness that's what it is getting that was getting your first customer yes that's what it was yeah if you can't figure that out MH don't do it go get a job yeah literally like there's only like four things you can do you can do cold email you can create content you can get Affiliates or you just go out in the world and try to knock on

doors and Do sales like how many good cold emails do you get one a year two a year how many good cold uh Twitter DMS do you get I don't check them zero zero does your assistant check one yeah yeah I haven't heard one this year so yeah um I I I I had to let my assistant go recently um I'm looking for a new one now so that's gonna happen but now I'm checking my on Twitter DMS so DM on Twitter if you want an assistant job don't do it don't do it oh yeah

if you want an assistant job Please give me if you're awesome like if you're a badass um maybe I'll hire a chief of staff I don't know but I get so many and I actually look at them because they crack me up they're so bad oh horri my favor one is like I see you're building 12 companies in 12 months are you staying in shape it's like people trying to sell like you know I got Brian Johnson brother I'm good yeah um and I'm like why would anybody ever respond to this or my favorites when

somebody uh Reaches out and tries to be like oh like you're killing it on Twitter these days have you thought about short form video the worst and I'm like dude I literally own short do like an inch of research those people will like insult me they're like you could be getting way more views I'm like yeah dude this is my job like don't be telling me I could get more views that's the one that they could just send me a short form example like if you are going to make short form you Can just send

me a video you don't even need to say words yeah and if I like it I'll use it yeah I don't know man I I think resourcefulness is underrated and I think to like going back to what we've been talking about about like earned advantages part of the reason that I've been able to sack them up is because of like the way I grew up like the adversity that I had to go through and like nothing scares me my risk tolerance is like through the roof and I'm willing To just eat whatever [ __ ]

sandwich I have to to like go through the work of figuring something out and like trying to get better to skill or better at you know some part of operations that I don't know or sales or whatever it is like I'm I'm just like Scrappy until I die it's resourcefulness and resilience yeah that's really like the name of the game have you back to going through your uh agencies if we have to do 12 and 12 months do you I know you got you got Asked this on the last podcast but know what the next

ones are going to be like did you make a list of like 50 potential that may be a lot but 50 potential like list I knew what the next like four businesses are going to be yeah yeah and so how do you scope out creators like is that like that's like literally the framework like I know the industry then I need to do Creator research or is it s's like immediate I'm sure if it's it's not his Network already he can get it so I'm sure that's not really a problem yeah um well for two

of them we already have creators um and then for the other two one of them will not be Creator Le sort of it will be Creator Le but by a lot of creators which is really exciting what does it go keep going I don't want to interrupt you no and then the the other one um the other one will uh will have to find the Creator so if you have Multiple creators is that going to be mainly affiliate driven nope when you as you're running these uh productized agencies I'm curious I always ask everybody what

are all the software tools they use internally to run them and so these are a little more technical questions but I think it's interesting for people who might be a little newer and so I was curious a what are the software tools you use and B how much they vary across other than I assume Like you would use frame.io so like little details like that would be really interesting for me to hear so there's two levels there's the there's the tools that I use as CEO and then the tools that the team uses let's go

top down yeah so for me um I pretty much live inside of reflect what's that I've never heard of that it's a note taking tool okay it's my favorite I was with obsidian broke up with them for reflect I love reflect That's interesting um so I pretty much live inside of reflect raycast I use the [ __ ] out of um and then I will do uh so I'll generally like create things in reflect for all my notes and then I'll start like a memo in reflect and then that gets moved over to to not

um to where we house like all of our memos um anything that's like a document or an sop or something that has to get delegated lives inside of notion um but we don't allow actions to live inside of Notion I don't care what anybody says I'm willing to die in this hill notion is dog share for project management I agree um so I think it's great for information it's great for wikis it's great for like you know meeting notes and all that stuff I think it's dog [ __ ] for information you get lost you

get lost you build some custom thing that works for you and only you and it can't scale like and the interfaces makes no sense I agree um so Everything action based lives in linear yes um for our team um they use frame that iio God who knows how many subscription Services we use to power like uh creative assets that we pull from um slack obviously is huge for us um what else I think those are the big ones my kit is like reflect fathom for financials uh slack raycast what's raycast again recast is a um

it's a spotlight search uh replacement but it's Like incredibly powerful I don't even know what Spotlight search replacement command space bar oh oh oh like hot Keys almost yeah okay cool but it has like AI built in so at any point I can hit like control command spacebar and then like chat GPT just pops up nice or I can like like if I'm highlight text and then I can highlight text and I just command like command control J and it instantly that's a shortcut for like improve this writing right and AI is already doing it

Cool um I love that love that tool if there was if there was like a startup that I would invest in I stopped investing in startups if there's one that I would invest in right now I'd probably invest in raycast raycast okay I gotta look into that awesome is it just like a CHR shout to rast if you're taking checks let me end we do a lot of image generation that then we then manipulate the [ __ ] out of um but we'll use AI to generate a lot of that Stuff like assets instead of

like instead of using unsplash for example right we might generate something in AI That's a little bit more of spoke um fits the design like Adobe Firefly AI you're saying or like no like dolli um uh pet our head of design actually runs a custom model um on his PC has like a crazy PC um does some some stuff there I don't know a lot about it so not going to say any more um but mid Journey toally three like that um we use blender A lot create 3D scenes that we use as like image

background stuff like that um I mean off menu like the design team at off menu is [ __ ] insane oh I can you can just tell in two seconds if you ever look at off menu it's mind-blowing it's all custom yeah they're really really great they're I mean what's crazy about off menu not to like sell our own [ __ ] for a second sell it all the way it's the best value in design period 15 grand a month work with that Team to get the level of output that you do is insane um

I mean we could easily charge a quarter million for like a full branding and and like site project but you can go to off menu and get it done you know for let's say 60 Grand overall and that churn is going to be low because at that price point you have real companies that are making real money and they're always going to need assets or well I think even though um the team is really great people love Working with us churn inherently for something like that's going to be high really cuz yeah a project it's

complete right M so they're like well we don't need a $115,000 a month design subscription now um we got the brand we got the site we got the product whatever you know they want to spend a little less so only if I had a cheaper design agency that they could funnel to is that a wink are you win that's why we have size that's why we built that's What I was thinking and so is there one out of all these services that you've seen this as the stickiest I think uh today viral Cuts has incredibly

strong LTV um for certain customer profiles like the set it and forget it kind of creators um like Lewis house for example um is one of our like big Creator customer surval cuts um you know it's great like his team's fantastic to work with I think I hear great things and you know they use Viral cuts to do all their like um like podcast episode openings and trailers and short form like and that's the thing to where that budget's committed they're just going to be creating that content nonstop sill Bloom for example um so that

is really good it has low retention um but inherently in any product of service you're going to have a decent amount of turn okay how much is viral cut is that that's a public right starts at 4,400 starts what are the 4,400 or I Think it's seven Grand what is the difference in the service just uh like it it doubles it's 40 hours a week and then it becomes 80 hours a week so you charge by the hour of team again it's one to one so we just like if you're a customer if you're a

Creator customer the the plan is called Creator um you just get somebody assigned to you yeah and then you just get either 40 hours or 80 hours for that yeah so either one person assigned to You or two people but if you're but if you are on the higher end which is called the studio we're you're you're committing to three months at a time so in intervals for three months and then you do it again you do it again okay yeah interesting yeah we're about to do the same FR same thing for hey friends really

MH that's we think about it differently that's interesting that's smart yeah thank you everything is like no contract M um but I think having People commit is important if it's something to where there might be preconceived notions that like oh I'm going to try this for a month and see if I grow and that's not going to happen right um so we set all kinds of expectations around like output's going to be lower your first month or your first few weeks while generate like your style like obviously there's a ramp up period before we're like

a learning phase yeah before there's a fire hose of Content um so we're at the point now it's where like our our like lead gen is so strong the customer acquisition is so strong like why wouldn't we just say no you have to commit to the service for X period of months interesting okay and the last question I always ask people is really just what is like out of everything that you've learned in your life this everyone takes a while to answer this so take take a time to think about it but what is one

thing you used To think was like true in business like you were like that was your life philosophy business philosophy and then now you have like a complete opposite belief I mean I really came up in my career like originally when like in the tech crunch days right like persons raising money person's doing this like whatever and like my first real company like I raised VC and so I thought that's the way it was and I just think it's total [ __ ] like not I have a lot of Friends that are VCS I'm not

saying like VC and General [ __ ] but the idea like that's going to be how you create wealth is needing to like raise capital and defer revenue and like just you know acquire a bunch of users and then figure it out later um it just doesn't make sense to me right like it's funny that when I started to have real success in business it's when I just stripped out all these preconceived notions of how things had to be and I just went down to First principles and common sense right like oh if I want

to run a business I should probably get people to pay me money day one and I should probably make sure that I'm turning a profit right um that's the biggest thing it's just like instead of focusing on these glamorous things focus on ways to make money right that that might be the best answer I've heard because VC is like that's like the most extreme way to run a business like we're going to raise $10 million we're Not going to make any money and then in five years hopefully we can sell it to like a huge

company or go public yeah and maybe you go around that journey and you're successful and I like how much time did that shave off for you really um where you could have owned more right um or found other ways to get that Capital instead of traditional Venture investment like how helpful was your board right um you know where where did they guide you what path did they push You down that maybe wasn't right like again not saying it's all bad like I know some great VCS but I also know a lot of really bad ones

so if you're going to do it be very strategic and intentional yeah great advice or rais with leverage rais when you already are like able to raise with like [ __ ] you terms okay so last last question is now You' been talking I you had a tweet about starting your YouTube channel yeah and you can now kind of I mean this is a Good opportunity because you have these Creator Le businesses you might as well be a Creator yourself too to bring him in it's not that I want to be a Creator necessarily but

I see the power of having an audience obviously right but for us like it's [ __ ] crazy that like I'm a nobody right like I have you know I think I have like 14,000 followers on Twitter or something like that but people will get on a sales call with our Team and they'll be like oh I heard about you guys through like Sam or Cody and then I checked out like your stuff and I saw Hunter and like love your companies love what you all do whatever and they become a customer right and then

because they know my stuff they see the other brands and they become a customer of another brand nice um or it is insanely helpful for recruiting right and plus I just I honestly just have a lot of fun doing it like I've had a lot Of fun just like doing these podcasts talking to people sharing like what I know um like I don't think I'm qualified to give advice but I'm happy to like talk about like my experiences or what I might do in a given situation um and YouTube you know spend so much time

thinking about it because we're building a YouTube business I think that 90 % of entrepreneurial advice on YouTube is just dog [ __ ] it's like grifters 100% And I'm like look I would rather just go Like all [ __ ] like Sam suic and just have like some super raw ass content and just like tell the truth and try and be helpful um so it seems fun to me so you said earlier in the podcast that it was like something you really regretted not documenting your like Journey 100% why that is that why mainly

or the circle that I'm in now has convinced me that for some reason like I'm interesting and I don't know if that's True but if some people believe that it tells me it's like okay I probably could have built an audience and I just look at it I'm like okay I know where I'm at today where could I have been today if I had built an audience along the way like the extra leverage that I could have stacked up and just being in the position that I'm in now um having the network that I have

the resources that I have it just makes all the sense in the world I'd be an Idiot not to do it yeah I think the things that you touched on on that answer are actually the important things like if you have content out there then potential clients can go see who what you're all about and they might want to work with you now cuz they build trust watching that content with you and recruiting you can like put your mission that can Inspire talented people to come like join the mission getting a millions of views like

that's cool too but like That what you're talking about you can achieve that without a million subscribers you could achieve that with just a thousand subscribers and the right people see it yeah so I'm excited to see your content I'm going to learn a lot from you dude I don't know but I'm gonna do my best I learned a lot from you in this podcast so I appreciate it guys Hunter Hammond check him out he has a good Twitter account YouTube soon to come anything else you want to plug no I Mean check out our

companies yeah yeah but they can can they find all of them in your bio on your account you have them all for listed or assemblies um I think so yeah off menu. design by. design hey friends. Studio bars. Co key frame. will assembly have like a website that has like everything listed on it eventually or yeah dude that's such AE website you know no so ass like we're going to launch the assembly brand when we have all the big pieces so like when We have the fund we have all the companies when we have some

of the other things that we're building out we're going to be doing events like really really oh cool events I yeah they're going to be really good um we're I think we're going to test one in New York soon all about the Creator economy right so it'll be awesome that's perfect dude yeah you guys want to follow that Journey follow him but dude thank you so much appreciate it absolutely thanks for Having