The Brandon Zhang Show

On today’s episode, I am talking with Juvoni Beckford, a Senior Software Engineer at Google. Juvoni is also the epitome of a lifelong learner as a voracious reader, a passionate community builder with a keen interest in systems, habits, and productivity methods. In today’s episode, we talk about building anti-libraries for reading, how Roam Research promotes bottom-up writing, and finding your archetype through reflection.  Links: 1. Juvoni's Twitter2. Juvoni's Website 3. Brandon's Twitter4. Brandon's WebsiteMentioned:Reading Tweet Thread (Over 6500 likes)Roam Research5 Key Takeaways:  It may take eight years to write a book and it may only take eight hours to read that book. That's a significant asymmetric tradeoff that you as a reader would take. And so when I saw these cartoons, where people had were able to acquire multiple abilities, or even like avatar, The Last Airbender, we had these four elemental traits, I realized reading, I can start acquiring multiple abilities and start skill stacking myself. So for example, I'm based in New York, and rent negotiations were coming up. So I got the book, never split the difference. And that had some very concrete tactics that helped me get thousands of dollars off my rent. I think one of the biggest things that a number of people, especially in the personal development spaces, it tends to be much more masculine energy. And even in the productivity space, a lot of masculine energy, masculine energy tends to focus on the outer world. And building things and hacking this, or shortcuts to this. And a lot of feminine energy is more so about the inner world. And I find that fiction really does a good job of sort of capturing the inner world. So fiction, I use to develop emotional models about how to feel deeper within myself and how to relate to others better. Your most valuable books are actually not the books that you've read, it's the books that you will read. So an anti-library is a way to, you can purchase or borrow or collect books that you want to read ahead of time. And this is also very vital in maintaining reading momentum. Because if you always have another book that you can pick up, it's much easier to get into that routine of reading more consistently over time. And now you can also be a little bit more strategic with your reading, and the books that you purchase. I tend to do a lot of problem-driven reading. So I tend to read books that are very relevant to some obstacle that I'm trying to overcome or a friend is trying to overcome.When it comes to meditation, I find that mindfulness is an important practice of fundamental practice, especially if you're someone who is a lifelong learner. Because what ends up happening is that you have all these ideas that build up in your head, and it becomes like this mad circus.I'm a very big believer in the Craftsman mindset over the passion mindset. Because the passion mindset, you're led to believe that you're just born into the world with this innate passion, and you just have to discover it. But I think it's more so of cultivating something that you can be good at. And then you become passionate about it, by discovering how useful this skill or ability is, and how much people appreciate you and evaluate what you're able to do. So for me, introspection was a necessary exercise to be able to fly my plane, which is me, and navigate the turbulence of life. 

Today, I am speaking with Hiten Shah, the co-founder of FYI, a company that helps you find your documents in 3 clicks or less. He previously co-founded CrazyEgg and KISSmetrics as well. In our conversation today we talk about how his upbringing shaped his entrepreneurial spirit, how to separate the forest from the weeds, and finding the definition of success. Links: 1. Hiten's Twitter2. Hiten's Website 3. Brandon's Twitter4. Brandon's WebsiteShow Notes: My Billion Dollar Mistake (Blog Post) Hiten's Never-Ending Twitter thread for startup resources. 5 Key Takeaways I really love to dig in and feel like I have the ability to learn something I didn't know anything about really fast, just by asking the right questions, digging, obviously googling around, and things like that. And I think that that like that's like something that I would want to be instilled in as many people as possible so that they can kind of achieve, you know, the most that they possibly can while they're alive.I would recommend this to almost everybody, which is throwing the mental models away and start with basically first principles or what I would prefer to call basics. And if you start with the basics, then the mental models are very obvious, because you started with kind of the core.Reddit created fake accounts early on and kind of seeded the communities, or the whole community at the time, through those fake accounts and the content that was posted on them, in order to kickstart the community. Right, that is a classic kind of example of what we would put as some somebody who was doing growth, hacker type responsibilities. While all these things around conversion optimization, those are just like marketing tactics. Those are not growth hacks.The crux of no code is just the fact that more people can build things faster. Okay. I think I think the speed part is what people don't talk about. If you're doing no code, it better be faster than writing code. If you're doing the no code, and it's not faster than writing code, then are you really doing no code?That realization, that self-awareness, once you hit about a dozen employees, or a dozen team members, you're gonna get it. And if you don't get it, like it's gonna take you years to figure that out. And by that time, you'll realize that you screwed a whole bunch of stuff up and you wish you were different. This is the consistent pattern I've seen, even for people who run organizations differently than I do.

On today’s episode I talk with Kaleigh Moore a freelance writer with present clients including AT&T, Shopify and Stripe. Kaleigh also writes about retail for publications like Forbes, Vogue Business and Adweek. In todays conversation, we talk about the apprenticeship model in freelancing, how she has streamlined her writing process and the future of sustainable fashion. Links: 1. Kaleigh's Website2. Kaleigh's Twitter3. Brandon's Twitter4. Brandon's WebsiteMentioned: Creative Class 5 Key TakeawaysThe apprenticeship model for freelancers is kind of like training wheels. So if you're not ready to fully dive into prospecting, and trying to get new business, but you know that there is an established writer out there who's doing what you want to do, and they are maybe really busy and need help. Just putting out the ask and saying, hey, if you ever have overflow projects, or you need help with things, I would love to use this model with you and to learn from you.So I roadmap that [client onboarding] out from the very first conversation when I work with somebody new. And then also, if I'm training somebody as well, I always make sure that they see the full process and how things are progressing step by step as well.Yeah, a lot of different things. I worked in a lot of different industries on a lot of different types of writing projects. I quickly learned was that I had to learn from scratch every time I said yes to an opportunity where I didn't know anything about the subject matter. And that was exhausting. So the quicker I could specialize and really lean into what I already had a foundation of knowledge around, which was the e-commerce world, the easier the tasks would get. But I heard somebody on a podcast a while ago, talking about how if it [a book] is not a good fit, and they don't enjoy it, they just give up on it and devote their reading time to something else. And I've just finally accepted that that's okay to do. And I think that that's also helped me maintain a better reading habit because I'm not trudging through a book that I hate. I'm like, okay, it's fine. I'm going to pass. I got what I wanted out of it. I saw what it was I'm gonna move on.I think probably the biggest theme that's emerged over the years is that especially writers are often very uncertain about their abilities, and lacking a lot of confidence when it comes to pitching themselves or feeling good about what their first draft looked like, or hitting publish on their own blogs if they have something interesting or unique take on something they have this habit of second-guessing.

Today, I am speaking with Fabrizio Rinaldi, the co-founder of Mailbrew and Typefully. Mailbrew is a product aiming to reduce our reliance on social feeds and curate a healthy information diet. Typefully creates a clean location for people to draft and write tweets. On today's episode, we cover Mailbrew's approach to growth marketing, Mailbrew's future roadmap, and how to maintain creativity as a founder.Links: MailbrewTypefully Fabrizio's WritingFabrizio's TwitterContact Me:My TwitterMy Website5 Key Takeaways: 1. We're kind of building an anti feed in a way because we were trying to give people a better way to get content online. So following their favorite creators, thinkers, sources, websites, apps, all in one place. And indeed, it started as a simple daily email digest that you can build for yourself. 2. After almost a year now, since we launched it originally, it's become much more than that because you can like add blogs, more sources, your calendar events, even your stocks and crypto stuff like that. So it's becoming more personal. We want to make it even more comprehensive in the future so that people can use it to unplug from feeds and hopefully reduce their information overload.3. We built a ton of optimized landing pages for made will tailor the different sources and content creators, and in different use cases for maybe also hundreds and soon, they will actually be 1000s of landing pages. 4.  We decided to invest more in creating actual curation tools that we want to provide as there are many information curators that use our platform to share Brews with their audience. And another very important things that we want to do is enable API and custom sources as we want to empower these people to build on top of Millbrew to create sources.5. Most of the time the most important thing you can do is to reduce confusion. So whatever you're doing, so it's not just design, you can apply this theme to many other fields. Writing for example comes to mind. If there's one thing that unsettles people, and then it can create discomfort, and also is the reason for many of the actions of people is reducing uncertainty

On today's episode I speak with Eric Jorgenson, the Product Strategy guy at Zaarly and the author of the Almanack of Naval. We spend time discussing the forms and importance of leverage, building the infrastructure around online education, and the most unexpected benefit of publishing his book. Links: Eric's Twitter The Almanack of Naval Eric's Personal WebsiteCourse CorrectlyContact Me:My TwitterMy Website5 Key Takeaways: 1. I think of mental models as just like a quick, memorable sort of metaphor for like a way that the world works.  So it's kind of a mental toolkit, I guess, is like the way I would think of mental models. 2. I definitely have a focus on the idea of leverage, where you build specific knowledge, you take on accountability, and then you apply leverage through capital, labor or product. 3. I also know that there are people selling basically scams, as online courses and their landing pages pretty much all look alike. So I think there's, there's definitely some like credibility that can get built, which is like, I started Course Correctly. Course Correctly focuses on independent, unbiased, like thorough reviews of online courses. So I've actually, like, hired somebody who starts soon here, and we're gonna like, kind of double down on starting to build that much more aggressively. 4. I think there's really interesting stuff to do around curriculum, like treating every course, as a modular piece, and building curriculums and stories and career paths. So somebody who's coming in saying, like, you know, I'm 19, when I'm 25, I want to be like, a founder of a technology company. And I want it to be like a venture-backed, scalable thing. It's like, Okay, cool. Here are the courses that like we would all put together, we're gonna start, you know, it's maybe one year of full-time education, but then five years of part-time education. 5. It's easy to overlook the fact that like, even 100 people reading a blog post, like, while you just go about your day, or like, are asleep is a fucking miracle, right? Like that is an awesome miracle. And is 100 more people, like if we were in a room and you were going to get up in front of them and read this book, like, you'd be nervous.

On today's episode I speak with Bilal Zaidi, an ex-Googler and the current founder of Creator Lab, a leading entrepreneurship podcast and digital marketing consultancy. Bilal has had over 15 years of experience helping startups and fortune 500 brands grow through marketing, partnerships and business developing, including 7 and a half years at Google and Youtube, 6 years on his own venture and 2 years at charity water. On today's episode, we talk about how he was able to get large guests like Gary Vee and Daymond John early in his podcast, the future of the creator economy and how he is hedging risk while transitioning to a full time creator. Links:Creator LabBilal's Twitter AccountCreator Lab Youtube ChannelContact Me:My TwitterMy Website5 Key Takeaways: 1. We're all getting used to seeing paid communities, substack paid newsletters, courses, etc. And more and more people are willing to spend money on those things. But there's gonna be a time where we're all sick of paid newsletters, probably, there's gonna be a time it might be 10 years from now. But you know, over time, things become saturated, the more people do it. So I think what's interesting is always, as the person who's an entrepreneur, whether as an individual creator, or like starting a bigger company, with employees and stuff like that, you always need to at least be experimenting with that 20% of trying new stuff. 2. What I do on the podcast is publicly talk about business level with the best entrepreneurs in the world. So wherever, whoever we're talking about how they grew to strategy, innovation, marketing, branding, all that sort of stuff, we cover all of it. So that is kind of my equivalent of working in public, people get to hear how I think, you know, and if you listen to the show we're talking about like real, tangible business conceptshow they invested millions of dollars in paid advertising, and how they were able to change that over time, or how did they hire their best people, etc,3. I ended up selling that knowledge as a mini consultant, I was about 18 when I started doing that, and just going around, I was doing an internship and I would go knock on doors at lunchtime, because we were in this wholesale district in East London. And I would just like pitch these old-school business people like how to build a website.4. When I left Google, it was actually started maybe two years before so in 2015. It actually coincides with the podcast because I was kind of in a pretty bad place. Like I'm quite careful to say the word depressed because I don't know if it was actually fully depressed or not, but I felt like I lacked any meaning of my work, I would go to work, I could do it really easily. I wasn't challenged, I didn't feel like I was reaching my potential. And my learning curve had essentially flattened. 5. The other big thing I mentioned are second-tier podcast platforms, so for me to be featured on Spotify, or iTunes, trust me, I've tried, right, like it's very difficult to do that. They're too busy.  I looked at well, who the other players that they have millions of people, but I can actually do something with them. So one of them was tune in radio. I ended up like pitching them finding someone who worked there, having a call speak, you know, traditional sales, partnership stuff, tracking them down saying, "Hey, I'm a podcast, I've got an idea for you can we talk about it", and they put me in touch with someone. And then the punchline is I hosted an event at TuneIn radio, where I interviewed like Rahul Vora from Superhuman, Hiten Shah and a bunch of people.

On today's episode, I speak with Kevin Lee, the co-founder of Immi, a CPG food brand paying homage to their favorite childhood dishes but reimagining them to fit our modern diets. Immi just launched three different products in their first vertical, Ramen. Amidst the busy launch, Kevin took time to talk with us about the process of creating healthy ramen, early lessons as a founder, and the goal of getting Immi into every supermarket in the country. Links: Immi Website Kevin's Twitter CEO of a Massive Japanese Food Conglomerate Tastes Our RamenWe Tasted 100+ Ingredients at North America’s Largest Ingredient TradeshowContact Me:My TwitterMy Website5 Key Takeaways: 1. We've seen that they've [older family members] just really developed more chronic health conditions because of their poor nutrition and unhealthy diets. And so my grandmother is pre-diabetic, both my parents take medication for high blood pressure, the same thing on K Chan [co-founders] family side. And so we started talking about combining our love of food, and health and nutrition to work on a better for you food brand and that was the original genesis behind the idea. 2. We actually started like, you know, how you might learn anything, which is we went on YouTube, and we literally watched videos of people and chefs making noodles in the kitchen, we watched like videos of manufacturing plants and how they would produce instant ramen. My co-founder actually would download research reports that were in like Chinese and Japanese and we would get them translated so that we could study how other people were approaching it. And it was It's funny because there was a high amount of ignorance and naivety going into this because we had no background. But I think it allowed us to operate from that, you know, that first principles approach of, Hey, we literally know nothing. So we know nothing, how might someone approach this from zero to one. 3. An important lesson that he really taught me was to have more confidence in these different things I was doing without expecting that they had to be the most professional or they followed a certain playbook. He just said, you know, carve your own path because that's the only way you succeed is you you have to make your own path.4. One thing my coach taught me really is I  think you have to remember that as a founder. You're trying to serve the needs of your users' and if they don't like your product, for one, it's like they took the time to send you that message, which means they weren't, they weren't passionate about it to begin with, you just kind of didn't meet their needs yet. And that's why they're unhappy. You should take that as a sense of, hey, it's better to have this kind of feedback, that no feedback at all, at least, it means that they were excited and expected something and now you just have to iterate until you meet their needs. 5. Our vision at me and we always say is, we chose these words, specifically is to enrich lives through the vibrant world of Asian American food. And we picked to enrich lives. Because enriching can mean you know, it can mean multiple things for us. It means enriching your health, right? So we care a lot about making sure that the food first and foremost is better for you. We care about enriching perspectives. So I think we talked about this, but when you eat another culture, food, all of a sudden, you're entering their world. 

Carlos Gonzalez de Villaumbrosia is the Founder and CEO of Product School, the global leader in product management training with a community of over one million product professionals. Product School instructors are real-world Product Leaders working at top companies including Google, Facebook, Netflix, Airbnb, PayPal, Uber, and Amazon.Links: Carlos's TwitterProduct School The Product School PodcastThe Product Book: How to Become a Great PMContact Me:My TwitterMy Website5 Key Takeaways: 1. The idea of Product School probably first approached me when I was at business school in UC Berkeley. I met a lot of people from different backgrounds, such as management, consulting, or finance and more traditional business backgrounds that wanted to get their hands dirty, they wanted to be closer to the action, they wanted to work to build something bigger. 2. My experience in an engineering school and then going to Business School inspired me to eventually start a product School, which is a hybrid between those two, that gets the best of both worlds, and can help people learn product management in a much more efficient way.3. I have 10 years of experience building data products. I started other companies before, and I've been lucky enough to work with incredible mentors throughout my career. So in a way, I feel like I learned a lot of things on the go, and there was no proper curriculum. So I was like, You know what? Yes, I have a big dream to make a global movement but I'm going to start by helping eight people get their first product management job. 4.  I would say the secret sauce of Product School is that every single instructor that teaches here keeps a full time job at incredible companies such as Google, Facebook, Airbnb or Uber, we believe that best teachers are practitioners, they are not teachers, actually.

Today, my good friend Robbie Crabtree is returning to the show. Robbie's course Performative Speaking was recently acquired by On Deck, a company building a private goal-driven network platform and a new approach to continuous education (the name may sound familiar as I interviewed Erik Torenberg one of the founders, 5 episodes ago. Robbie has also been a long-time friend and has helped me drastically improve my own public speaking both on the podcast and in real life. I am so excited for this new chapter of his life. On today's episode, we talk about the acquisition, the future of online education, building accountability and shipping speeds.Links: On Deck Performative SpeakingThread on On Deck Acquisition Robbie's Annual ReviewRobbies TwitterContact Me:My TwitterMy Website4 Key Takeaways: 1. Over the past couple weeks, they've [On Deck] basically released a whole bunch of tweet threads, showing kind of the process that's played out in 2020, how they hire, how they're building what their plan is. 2.  I don't want to tell people that I'm good at something. I want them to see it. I want them to understand it because I'm giving them value and I'm demonstrating it on a regular basis. And so for me building in public, whether it comes to my writing, whether it comes to YouTube, whatever, maybe even Twitter, it's a way to show that I know what I'm talking about, rather than telling people that they should believe me. 3.  The best thing is they [On Deck] have a team of people who all kind of have specialties. So instead of me having to wear every hat, as a founder and having to worry about marketing and customer service, and answering emails, and sales, and course creation, like content creation, and actually teaching and working one on one with students, you can remove a lot of that stuff. And say we have somebody who understands the questions you should be asking in the application process, we have somebody who can schedule this out and make it make sense. We have somebody who understands how to track the student or fellow experienced throughout the entire thing. And it allows me to then just get into this creative space and this teaching space to do what I do best, which is create content, create lessons, work with the actual fellows in the course, and make sure they're achieving the results that they need. 4. I love experiences and culture and history and telling stories and going and traveling and experiencing myself. So to me, I've always said like, my ideal job is to take over like Anthony Bourdain his role, and just explore that world tell those stories have those experiences. And that's really what drew me to him and why he continues to live in my head.  

Dan Go is the number one fitness coach for entrepreneurs and the owner of high performance founder. Dan focuses on helping busy founders create healthy routines and lifestyles that maximizes their energy through simple formulas. On today's episode we talk about starting an online coaching program, facing adversity and the biggest myths in fitness. Dan's TwitterDan's Coaching Program5 Key Takeaways: 1. I can't be inauthentic in what I do. Everything I do must come from the heart and the soul of Dan, or else I am not going to be proud of it. 2. During this time where you actually have no, you have less clients, you don't have as many as many people joining your program? Are you going to bet on yourself at the worst possible time? You know, or are you going to, you know, let's just say take the easy route, go work for someone else, get the salary, get, you know, some equity and, and kind of go against the values that you said. So I had to think about it a long time. And then I gave it a week. And then I just journaled out. And I was just like, you know what, I got a bet on myself. 3. So I feel a lot of people are so focused on the outcome, they're so focused on losing weight, they're so focused on actually, even when you're focused on losing weight, that's like focusing on revenue in a company, you can make a million dollars, but what if you're giving up $999,000? You know, in terms of expenses, in order to make that million dollars, right? It needs to mean something, and you're just doing work for $1,000 profit.4. And pick a niche that you Feel comfortable talking to and that you feel comfortable helping. And that niche can always change over the course of time. But you've got to choose the right person that you want to serve. Or else one you might be taking in the wrong person, you might be helping someone that you don't necessarily have experience with.5. I was gonna say it's like, when people approach networking, they approach it from a transactional point of view, right? Oh, I'm gonna meet you, you could do so much for me, right. And I'm going to, I'm going to scratch your back. And hopefully, I'm going to ask you for something a little bit later down the line, and you'll scratch and then you'll be able to scratch mine. But the whole process of networking is let's just call it what it is building friendships. Right? And I don't ever think about asking for favors from my friends ever. I actually look at them as a person. And I'm like, dude, I want to connect with you as a father, as a friend, as a man, as you know, as even as a business owner sometimes, but I want to connect with you 

Noah Kagan is currently the founder at Sumo Group which is made up AppSumo, a marketplace for the best deals in software, Sendfox, the most affordable newsletter solution, KingSumo, a giveaway platform to help you grow your email list. Before that, Noah was employee number 30 at Facebook and number 4 at Mint. In today’s episode, we talk about the million-dollar weekend, growing on Youtube, and setting goals for 2021. Links: Noah's Office Hours on Goals Noah's Youtube Channel Noah's Twitter Contact Me:My TwitterMy Website5 Key Takeaways: 1. I think YouTube is gonna, in the next 10 years, it'll probably be one of the biggest job creators on the planet. There are so many jobs around it. There are thumbnail designers, there are producers and writers, there are operation marketing people. There are hardware companies. 2. I think this going to be surprising, yet not surprising. The most interesting person making money on youtube is Gary Vaynerchuk. And everyone has heard of them. If you're an entrepreneur, up and coming, a lot of people have known of him. But I think what Gary's actually done from a business perspective is really fascinating that he doesn't sell you courses, doesn't make money on ads, he doesn't sell you merge, he doesn't do a lot of like, Hey, here's a sponsored video, I'm gonna talk about, you know, this wallet, check it out. He has these external businesses that he uses all of his attention from YouTube and pushes that traffic into so we have a video coming out two weeks about him where he does somewhere around 150 to 200 million a year as a marketing agency. And that's because he has a big YouTube channel, people know about him. And he says that he sold over almost a million copies of his book, which makes him more popular. 3. I think I always thought I was gonna be rich. I just when I finally got rich, I didn't really believe I was rich. So I still act poor.4. 90% of your YouTube traffic comes from YouTube. It's not your external traffic. So what that means is you need to pick one of the topics today and that are on YouTube that people are really engaging in within whatever vertical you want to specialize in. Within gardening, clothing, audio, business, whatever. 5.  I think there's basically there's kind of like three types of goals that I think are the only ways you can do it: either very objective-based, system-based, or interest-based. So like, I want 100,000 subscribers by the end of this year, that's a clear objective. Then there are system goals. I think James clear, made this popular, which is like, I'm gonna go to the gym three times a month. That's a system goal.  And lastly, I have around 150,000 people on my email list and I don't care if it gets to 160 or 170, I just want to keep it growing because it's fun. That's an interest based goal. 

Today, I am speaking with Romeen Sheeth, the president at Metasys Technologies, a workforce management advisory firm based in Atlanta. Romeen is the host of the Square One Show, where he hosts conversations with founders, investors, and executives at the cutting edge of business. His past guests have included Andrew Yang, Sahil Lavingia, Hunter Walk, Keith Rabois and Allison Barr Allen. Romeen invests in 25 startups a year and in this episode, we go over his frameworks for operating and investing, why the 2020s will be the renaissance decade and why Atlanta is the rising tech hub of America. Links: Atlanta Tech is on FireThe Top Lessons Learned Angel Investing $1 Million in 202050 Things I learned in the First 90 Days of Running a CompanyRomeen's Thread on 2020-2030 TrendsContact Me:My TwitterMy Website5 Key Takeaways1. The biggest learning for me investing has actually been surrounding myself with world-class operators. A couple of my really good friends - Dave Tisch at Box Group, Arjun Sethi who runs Tribe, Steve Schlafman, Bradley Tusk, and others have been instrumental to the development of my thought process in investing. And that’s really important because you understand what “good” is really quickly. The toughest thing when you’re new to something or you have limited time to dive in because you’re doing something else is knowing what the standard is.2. We’ve developed a higher ed system that’s frankly really out of touch with reality. It’s disconnected to the job market, with the skills you need to succeed in the real world and most dangerously it reinforces mindsets that I don’t think are necessarily pertinent to where we are today.3. Jobs aren’t just about “what skills do you pick up, etc.” they’re about how you grow as a person. It’s always funny to me how on one hand we talk about how startups are unique and every startup has its own path, yet we then revert to generalized platitudes.4. Phase I is all about access. One of the most difficult things about tech in general is being in the “in crowd.” And a lot of people have called this out for the not good thing it is and that’s a separate debate. But the first prong really is about did you even see the company. Because if you didn’t phase 2 and phase 3 don’t matter.5. When you’re looking at a startup it’s so easy to ask what could go wrong or look at flaws. Getting a startup off the ground is a herculean effort. I think what people new to investing often miss is when they think about risk, they think about all the things you can see. E.g. does your product end up working, do customers like you, is your pricing right, is their competition, etc. 

Today Justin Mares joins the show to talk about the benefits of starting side hustles, the health and loneliness epidemics in the United States and his journey building two large CPG companies. Justin founded Kettle and Fire, the fastest growing bone broth brand in the country and Perfect Keto, which aims to offer better keto food and supplements to people. Justin’s goal is to improve the health and wellness of over 1 million people over the next decade, let’s find out how in the episode. Links: Perfect Keto Kettle & FireJustin's Website Justin's Twitter Justin's Newsletter "The Next Brand" where he covers healthJustin's Most Popular Article on Side Hustles (over 100k views) Contact Me:My TwitterMy Website

Today, Erik Torenberg joins the show to talk about unbundling higher education through On Deck, the best way to build career moats, and his favorite frameworks for hiring. Erik is the co-founder of both On Deck and Village Global. On Deck is an education company for the future and I greatly admire On Deck’s vision and prolific production, as they seem to be launching new fellowships each week, expanding into verticals such as writing, podcasting, no-code, angel investing, and even Chief of Staff. Village Global is a network focused venture capital firm which is backed by the likes of Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos, and Diane Greene. Erik also hosts his own podcast, venture stories, which takes you into the world of venture capital and technology, diving into new fields each episode.  Links: On DeckVillage Global Erik's Twitter Erik's Post on PodcastingErik's Post on Building Personal MoatsErik's Post on Frameworks for Hiring Contact Me:My TwitterMy Website5 Key Takeaways: 1. I learned about personal moats the hard way, which is not having one. And just, you know, feeling like I was always pushing this boulder up a hill and if I stopped it would roll back down and reading Cal Newport's book "Get So Good They Can't Ignore You" at the same time just reinforced the idea. So in order in terms of the most powerful moats, I would say, at least in technology, starting a successful company, building an angel portfolio, build an investment portfolio, and then I put newsletter or podcast, probably newsletter above podcasts, but they're both fantastic. 2. COVID is really a land grab opportunity for us in the sense that people's, the opportunity cost of people's time is lower. And these new sort of cohort-based courses are so hard to get off the ground, but once you get them off the ground, and once you're a couple of cohorts in, there's really defensible and they just have a lot of momentum to it.3. When I look at unbundling university, I think of the sort of three core things. There's the education itself, which has largely been unbundled, because of MOOCs and the internet. Then there's the network and then the credentials. On Deck is probably starting with unbundling the network. And the crudest way of describing is like, what Y Combinator did for founders, you know, it created a better signal than Stanford or Harvard. But that should not only exist for startup founders that should exist for writers or podcast hosts or, or engineers or designers or whoever. And that's what On Deck is building. 4. One thing I would recommend doing, even if you're not yet starting a company is having a list of people that you would dream of working with. Who if you start a company, or you join a company, would be the 20 people that you'd love to bring on. And just continuing to add to that list, and getting to know them, and checking in with them every few months. One thing I did is I had a retreat, where I invited all of them to the retreat, and I would do this every quarter every six months or so. 5. I've really been inspired by peer to peer credentials. I'm inspired because I want more people to have great opportunities. And right now universities have monopolies over credentials. That's really what's keeping it alive. I mean, why are people paying quarter-million-dollars for zoom University when if there was no credential, they would just be doing other stuff. 

On today’s show, I talk with Ben Tossell about the future of no-code, starting his own rolling fund, and the keys to building an online education community. Ben is the founder of Makerpad, a no-code education community. Makerpad started out as a side-project while he was running platform at Earnest Capital, but eventually Ben took the leap of faith to go all-in on the project.  Links: MakerpadBen's Twitter Creator Grants Ben's Rolling Fund Advent Calendar of No CodeContact Me:My TwitterMy Website5 Key Takeaways:1. I'm a maker, I'm not a manager. But now I'm like a manager of a company that has makers in it. And I think there's a good balance, we need that. And I think I've realized a lot of times, I've got to get back into making mode so that I can, like, enjoy the stuff I'm doing. And that's where I'm best. 2. Don't bother with like interviews. It's more about finding someone based on a certain set of criteria. So for me, it was like, find some people who can actually do tutorials who can build stuff and know code and record it. For us it's about doing 2-week trial periods where they are fully involved in the work environment and at the end we talk to one another to see if we are the right fit. 3. One of the key things I took away from my time at Product Hunt was how to engage the community, how to keep people engaged and how to make people feel like they're part of something. 4. I think that no code is not a speck of not like a textbase, like AR or VR or any of those things. I think it's like a fundamental shift in how software development happens. We're just going to see the rise of this passion economy, this creative economy, like, it's never been easier to have your own business and no-code is just going to give people more options, setting up a membership community, having been paid events, and all that sort of stuff. 5. I think I think the biggest opportunity is in b2b space, where I said about sales automations, or marketing automations. There's just so many things that can be automated, and, and done with like, there's just so much there. 

On today's podcast, Thomas Frank is joining the show. Thomas is a Youtuber, Podcaster and writer focused on providing content that will make you more productive. Thomas launched the blog College Info Geek in 2010 and it is now one of the largest student advice sites reaching over 400,000 visitors, and his personal YouTube channel recently crossed 2 million subscribers. Today, we talk about work-life balance, his new Notion course for creators, and what it is like being the co-owner of a Youtube agency.  Links: The 1% Rule Thomas's WebsiteThomas's Youtube ChannelMatt D'Avella's Youtube ChannelNotion Tips and Templates3 Habits for Better Work-Life BalanceContact Me:My TwitterMy Website5 Key Takeaways:  I think Notion is not a notetaking app. Notion is a graphical programming language. It has more in common with JavaScript than it does with Evernote. But instead of coding, which you can do a little bit of with the formulas, instead of coding, you use graphical interfaces to create tools for yourself. The biggest thing that sticks out to me is just the production value, my friend Matt  D'Avella puts into his work. In 2019, I went out to his place and we did a bit of a breakdown in his work process: the gear he uses, and that was really fun. But more importantly, doing that video with him inspired me to finally sort of get off my butt and really start pushing myself in terms of content, production quality again, because I think, after five years of doing YouTube, I had sort of gotten into this space where we're making some improvements every video, but I'm not really pushing it anymore.There are risks in going super niche, but there's also a lot of upside to it. Because people love to say YouTube is oversaturated and you can't make it there now. And they are correct. If what you're trying to do is the worst version of something that somebody has already done. If you are trying to review apple products, there are already creators who have been doing that for years with incredible production quality and it’s going to be hard to standout. But if you niche down and you're like, alright, we're gonna review Apple technology from the perspective of an illustrator: I'm a digital artist, here's how this benefits me. There are a lot fewer people doing that so you instantly gain a little bit of protected niche where you're kind of maybe the only player.You know, people discount this, but face to face conversation is how people make the strongest connections between one another. If you want to have work-life balance, I find that the best way to do it is to create social obligations. And this sort of goes to a more general idea that I have around habits, and specifically breaking bad habits or modifying them into what you want them to be. Is that the idea is you don't break a bad habit, you replace it. 

On today’s episode Benji Hyman is joining the show to talk about managing agency work, building an online community and course, and how he and his co-founder Devesh created and sold a side project. Benji is one of the best content marketers in the space building in public and the co-founder of Grow and Convert, a content marketing agency separating itself from the pack by being accountable for converting quality leads, not just the content they produce.LinksBenji's TwitterBook: ContagiousWordable Acquisition Grow and Convert Website This Songwriter Accidentally Executed Influencer Marketing Perfectly and Got 40k Viewers OvernightHow we turned a failed product business into a $34,000/month service businessContact Me:My TwitterMy Website5 Key Takeaways:For trends that I see: I see the move to freelance and remote work accelerating, I think fewer people are happy working for others in the traditional sense of going into a job nine to five, having a fixed salary being a fixed location, I think COVID just accelerated the move to freelance and independent work. I'm also anticipating some sort of market correction or recession in the next year, three years. And coming out of the recession, service businesses will benefit because you can hire an agency or a freelancer and not have the risk of hiring someone full time. And the last trend is probably the growth of the reliance on video content. I think that it won’t ever replace written content but more and more people are learning through video content. Most other content marketing agencies measure themselves based on output. How many 1600 word articles can they deliver for you. However, they never hold themselves accountable for the quality and quantity of leads that they generate for you, which in the end is all that matters. We wanted our agency to take on that accountability.  The book that influenced a lot of my thinking on Marketing was “Contagious” by Jonah Berger. For me, a lot of the reading is not tactical marketing advice but really understanding how people think and to reverse engineer that process. You learn that people are actually very irrational in their decision making and  Money also can cause more challenges than it can solve. When you’re more resource-constrained it allows you to focus on solving problems quickly and focusing on the right problems to solve. When you have a ton of money, I saw companies just throw a lot of money at headcount and spending money on things they shouldn’t have been concerned with.  I was in Bali, and we had really bad internet. And it took me four hours to upload that blog post. So I get all the images, get all the text, and then put it into WordPress. And I was just like, this makes no sense, there's got to be a better way to do this. And so I started looking for different plugins, that would just help move the blog post from Google Docs into WordPress. And there was nothing out there that worked. And so I called Devesh from Bali and he was with a developer friend who created a tool that tackled this problem over the weekend. We initially thought of it just as an internal tool but soon realized there was a real gap in the market for this. That became wordable.  

On today’s episode, Cathryn Lavery joins us to talk about how she prepared for her jump to entrepreneurship, picking the right co-founder, and the keys to a successful Kickstarter campaign. Cathryn Lavery is the Founder & CEO of BestSelf Co — an organization dedicated to helping people become their best selves, fulfill their potential, and lead happier lives. Cathryn has sold launched and sold over $25 million in DTC products and was placed #318 on the Inc 5000 list in 2019.  Links: Cathryn's Company Best SelfCathryn's Personal Website How to Name Products Article on Finding a Co-FounderArticle on Kickstarter Campaigns Article on Building Relationships as an IntrovertContact Me:My TwitterMy Website5 Key Takeaways: The Foundation was a program that helps people build their own businesses to create their own freedom. And it was focused on helping you find a problem industry and finding a solution, it gives you accountability partners, different lessons and modules, and guides you through that process. It was one of the first times I was surrounded by other entrepreneurs and it was actually where I met my co-founder.  The most important part about a Kickstarter campaign is being able to understand who you are selling to and why the product will help him. This was easy for me to articulate in my first product as the audience was me and just writing about my personal experience helped me find that audience.  People often think that introverted means anti-social. That’s not true, it just means that I might need time to regroup alone. I think introverts and extroverts just have different ways of managing their energy. This is why I think introverts often think that they can’t network as effectively because of this idea that being social is tied with being extroverted.  I think looking back at my search for a co-founder, obviously complementary skills were really important but I also should have had more conversations to understand their values, their goals for the future of the company, etc. A business partnership is basically a marriage and you want to have the same level of trust and belief in a business partner as you would a partner in real life.  I just read this book “The Five Dysfunctions of a Team” and the first domino was a lack of trust. And this is because you have a group of people that are all afraid of being vulnerable and it creates this artificial harmony where no one is able to be themselves. The best way to deepen relationships is by being vulnerable.  

Today, Corey Haines, joins the show to talk about the mental models and psychology behind marketing, the keys to building internet communities, and how he used no-code to build a marketing job board. Corey writes marketing case studies at Swipefiles.co, teaches SaaS founders how to acquire and retain customers through his course Refactoring Growth, and provides companies and marketers a way to meet through his job board Hey Marketers. Links: Corey's TwitterCorey's Website Swipefiles (Marketing Case Studies) Corey's Courses (Mental Models for Marketing, Refactoring Growth) Corey's Article on building his job board Contact Me: My TwitterMy Website5 Key Takeaways: 1.  I got my job at Baremetrics unknowingly using a method Ramit Sethi teaches called the Briefcase method where you come to the job interview with a plan on how you want to do things so you have the power in the conversation. I emailed Josh Pigford with some suggestions I would have for whoever takes the position at Baremetrics and he encouraged me to go into the application process. 2. If I had to go back and teach myself about marketing, I would focus on starting a podcast, learning how to grow listeners there or starting an e-commerce store, spending money running ads and other campaigns. Those two methods would basically be worth a degree. 3. An important view for marketing is that your product needs to be the power-up mushroom in Mario. You are not selling powered-up Mario, you are focused on selling the transformation. 4. Copywriting is more about psychology than about writing. The best copywriters don't do their own writing, they let their customers do it for them. They conduct surveys, get on calls, read reviews and use the phrases the customers use to understand their wants, fears and needs. 5. That's why I love community because it's a really fundamental and core owned platform. And then once you have the rented platforms, where you have a big audience on Twitter, for example, then you can push people to that owned platform and build that up. 

Today, Ari Lewis joins the show to talk about why everyone should start a newsletter, actionable lessons from Disney and Barstool, and what he learned from hiring a writing coach. Ari helps companies and thought leaders earn attention without paying for it. He hosts the podcast, “The Attention Economy,” where he talks with entrepreneurs, executives, and industry leaders on how they capture the scarcest resource on earth. Links: 1. Ari's Twitter2. Ari's Website 3. Brandon's Twitter4. Brandon's Website5 Key Takeaways I had around 1200 Twitter followers and I had zero people on the email list. So I just started to write, my goal was to write twice a week. As I began to grow, I realized there were like, all these advantages and to have you know, an audience. A lot of people they talk about, you know, build a product and go find an audience. And I'm really big on like, if you have an audience, you can sell them anything, you can figure out the product later. (Attention Merchants by Tim Wu) What I'm beginning to realize is like, yes, growth hacking works, but it only works to a certain extent, if you don't have good content, or if your content is not like serving a purpose, you're just not going to grow at the end of the day. And if you don't know how to growth hack, but you do have good quality content, you will grow in the long run. If you become like “The Everything Bundle", a great example, they're really turning into a traditional, “publication." They have like six or seven writers. Now they have multiple newsletters, multiple sections, they're doing events, they're doing podcasting. Well, how much money are you willing to give this up substack, how much does it cost is build out the same features internally and be able to personalize it. What barstool has done in a very similar way to Disney, is that they're not just good at creating content. They're good at monetizing their IP.If you want to play college sports if you want to go to the pro level. you need many coaches, right? You need a fitness coach, you need a coach for the sport, you need maybe a wellness coach, you know, there's all these coachings you need? And well, what's the difference with running a business? If arguably running a business, there could be more money on the line, then, you know, playing a sport. So why wouldn't you have a writing coach? Why wouldn't you have you know, a psychological coach? Well, you have all these different coaches.