Mistakes to Avoid When Launching Your Product

- The other thing is pet peeve
is people not generating revenue quick enough.
Everyone's like, "Oh, we got to have all these things
and then we can end up going out there and making money."
I'm like, "Well, have you tried selling it?
Have you tried asking people to pay for it?
Go and collect some money.
Someone's probably willing to."
(soft upbeat music)
- How do you think about the balance?
Like I think a lot of founders struggle
with, like, these topics that we can find
on platforms like Exploding Topics, Twemex,
Taplio, SocialBlade, let's say,
that we know have viral potential,
that people are searching for,
and that they really care about.
On the other side of things, from our own customers,
we're hearing what matters to them,
what their problems are,
and that more sort of like high purchase intent,
high problem intent type keywords and topics.
How do you kind of balance that
or how do you think about that balance between,
you know, these more like growth and trending subjects
and then more of the subjects that are the real problems
that your customers having
and kind of how do you think about that
as you're building your content strategy?
- So marketing, you have top of funnel,
stuff that really just gets eyeballs,
and you have middle of funnel, people maybe doing research
and they're interested in products in your space,
and then you have bottom of funnel,
people are just like ready to make that transaction
like you were talking about.
Your goal should be to create content
for all three of those buckets.
You can do a one-third, one-third, one-third split
and create content that resonates with everyone.
That way you're continually building a new audience,
you're nurturing that audience,
and then you're converting that audience.
But you need all three because the top of funnel
just allows you to get more and more people.
- No, that makes a lot of sense.
Yeah, you need that kind of top of funnel stuff
just to kind of widen the funnel and get the growth going
and that organic traction and then, yeah,
kind of push them through with more intent based keywords
and topics and kind of strike that balance.
I'm curious, like there's a lot of founders I work with,
creators I work with, they've gotten their, you know,
email lists, their newsletter to, you know,
around that like 50,000 subscriber range,
but they have ambitious goals of getting
to, you know, 500K, a million,
like folks like James Clear, The Hustle,
and what Morning Brew's done.
You know, they're typically using platforms
like Beehiiv or ConvertKit,
and, you know, they've gotten to a good stage,
but they're looking to kind of now bring it
to the stratosphere.
I'm curious, like how do you think
about growing a newsletter from that 50K range,
like, to a million people?
- Easiest way is give away free tools.
When you give away free tools,
and we talked about software earlier,
you can get people to opt in
to continually use your free tools,
which will just cause your list size to explode.
That's what we do.
That's how our list is over a million.
- Right, yeah, no, I saw over the weekend you were saying
that your list size is growing
at something like 286,000 people a month,
I believe, if I saw that right.
So yeah, the free tool side is definitely one big unlock.
I'm curious, so that's definitely one,
is there anything else that founders can be thinking about
in terms of growing their lists
or any lower weight strategies then?
Obviously building out a tool can take some time.
- Opt-ins, free eBooks, free guides,
driving pay traffic to a blog,
but we haven't found really any of the other strategies
to be anywhere near as effective
as this giving away free tools.
Probably not the answer that most people want to hear,
but it's the truth.
- Right.
And so when you think
about that like kind of like a free tool
to grow an email list, like does it need to be
some big robust tool from your standpoint?
Are there any sort of like more, sort of like,
how do you think about kind of building
maybe a lean tool then to grow a subscriber list?
- Sure, so the easiest way is you go to codecanyon.net.
There's tools in almost every space.
You can white label them,
you can buy them for probably less than 50 bucks,
usually 10, 20, $30,
pop those on your site and go from there.
That's where I would say
is a huge opportunity for most people.
That way you can get something that has a little bit more
than the bare minimum of features.
That way it's more than the minimum available product,
but you don't have to spend that much time
building it at all.
- Yeah, switching gears here
to kind of the mentor side of things.
Like over the course of my career,
I'd say like 80% of my success has been learning from people
that are way smarter than me, understanding their systems,
their approaches to hiring, you know,
what mistakes they made,
and then translating those learnings
to my current businesses to take them from where they are
to where I'm looking to go, and avoid a lot of the pitfalls
and mistakes that they've kind of taught me to avoid.
I'm curious, from where you're at right now getting
into this kind of a hundred million dollar per year range
to, you know, a billion and being
the most dominant digital marketing advertiser in the world,
I'm curious, what are some mentors
that you're surrounding yourself with right now
and how do you look at kind of building out your,
right, kind of like, you know, personal board of advisors
to take you from where you are
to where you're looking to go?
- Yeah, so I don't look at mentorship as like,
how can I surround myself with amazing people?
That would be great, but sometimes it's hard to do
because we all live in different places.
Like I think right now you're in, what, Medellin?
- Yeah. - Yeah.
And it's hard to do that when you're traveling.
You may not speak the language,
you may not know a ton of people.
I'm in Las Vegas, still building my network here.
What I love doing is, A, going to conferences
because you can meet people in all parts of the world,
just like how we met at a conference,
actually two conferences now.
And the other thing I love doing
is just learning from YouTube videos.
It's amazing on how much you can learn
by just watching other people's videos
and gaining the knowledge without actually knowing them.
And that's provided a ton of mentorship
for me over the years.
- And in terms of like, you know,
your own like productivity, your own happiness, you know,
curious like are there any kind of core purchases
when you look back over the last like year or two
that really like helped you in a big way,
that you're like, "Damn, that was a great purchase.
That's something that like I'm very, I'm grateful for."
- I can't really think of like a purchase
that's really changed my life.
Having a driver has helped a lot.
I can focus more on just work.
I hate purchasing homes.
That's probably one of the bigger mistakes I've made.
I would not recommend homes.
I'd rather just use a cash to grow a business,
to each their own, though.
But I would probably say drivers really helped
streamline life, make them more efficient.
I can work even when I'm in the car.
So that's been cool.
- Yeah, the driver's side of things
is definitely on the goals list.
I'm curious, why do you think kind of buying a home
has been a waste?
I hear this from a lot of people actually
that, you know, it was a big dream of theirs,
founders had a big exit,
goes and finally invests in his dream home,
and later, like a year or two after, it's like,
"Damn, like I should've just kept Airbnb,
traveling the world.
Like I don't know, this thing's just become a nuisance."
Like explain that to me.
Like what's your thinking there?
- Homes always have problems.
Leaky roofs, gardens, issues, maintenance.
Even if it's a new home, they still have problems.
I've had new homes built with leaky roofs.
If you just take that money, like everyone's like,
"Oh, my home building all this equity,
I make all this money, you got a mortgage."
Well, if you just take the mortgage and you give it to rent
and you take your 20% down and you invest it in business,
I found that if you're good at what you do,
and I recommend people bet on themselves,
you typically will come ahead more
than if you bought that home.
It's not like the home's going to appreciate
like crazy in value.
- Yeah, we're both believers
in this kind of concept of done is better than perfect.
I see a lot of founders,
they get caught up in sort of overanalyzing things,
getting lost in perfectionism,
and ends up just kind of making them feel stuck,
everything gets delayed, and versus, you know,
a focus on speed and getting things out there,
they're just kind of falling behind.
I'm curious, you know, as you're kind of building companies,
how do you think about that balance
between building something that's quality
and building things for speed?
How do you kind foster that on your team?
- So everyone's a little bit different.
I optimize for speed.
I'm all about the quick and dirty.
And if something's working,
then work on making it great and amazing and perfect.
But I'm all about the quick and dirty
and just getting stuff out there.
I don't need it perfect.
I'm okay with things not being perfect.
I just want the results.
And if it's, you know, all taped together
and tied up with some shoestring
and some glue to make it work,
but it's providing the results, cool,
then I'll go make it perfect and remove the tape
and the shoestrings and the glue
and make it amazing and people love it,
but I want to make sure it's producing the results first.
- Yeah, no, that's one of my biggest pet peeves
is when I'm talking with someone
and they've got an amazing thing
and they keep on saying they're going to launch it on Monday,
but then Monday, Tuesday comes along and they're just like,
"Oh, you know, I just needed to make this a little better.
Don't feel quite comfortable yet."
But I'm looking at the product, I'm like,
"Damn, this thing's amazing already.
Like ship this thing."
I'm curious like any other kind of pet peeves on your side
when it comes to the marketing space and building a business
that you concierge seeing and you're like,
"Damn, like why are we doing that?"
- The other thing is pet peeve
is people not generating revenue quick enough.
Everyone's like, "Oh, we got to have all these things
and then we can end up going out there and making money."
I'm like, "Well, have you tried selling it?
Have you tried asking people to pay for it?
Go and collect some money,
someone's probably willing to,
and get B back and then go adjust from there."
I think people wait way too long
before they try to collect revenue.
- Yeah, no, I see that all the time too.
And I see one of the biggest misconceptions there
is that too early on founders think that,
"Oh, I need to hire a head of sales
and I need to build a sales team."
When it's like, "No, you need to get out there
and start selling this thing yourself,
getting real market feedback, talking to real customers,
and then implementing their feedback on the product
and just getting the deal across the finish line."
I'm curious, as you're kind of building out companies,
how do you see that balance
between the founder selling the product
and at what point does it make sense
to then start building out a team?
- Once you figure out the process.
If you don't, if you're not willing to sell it,
how can you go hire someone and tell them,
"Hey, this is how you do it,"
when you've never done it yourself?
You need to go there, sell it,
experience the ups and the downs and the objections,
and figure out what processes
and frameworks you need to use to make this repeatable
and then go hire someone and then go train them.
- And one thing more of on a personal side,
currently building out founderos.com,
about to launch a new Webflow blog there,
be the defacto spot for founders to find systems
to scale their businesses to $5 million plus.
How do you kind of think about the keyword research
around a subject like that
and building out like a good, solid,
organic traffic infrastructure for a website?
- Yeah, so I look at the keyword infrastructure
as you need to do your keyword research.
You can use tools like Ubersuggest to do that
or AnswerThePublic
and you can even put in your competitor URLs
and it shows you all their popular pages,
all their popular keywords that each page ranks for.
And what you want to do is look at the keywords
that have a high CPC and volume.
High CPC means someone's willing to spend a lot of money
for that keyword from a ad perspective.
So if a keyword has high volume and a high CPC,
it usually means it's a money keyword,
it's a keyword that can drive revenue.
And then you can look
at your competitor sites using Ubersuggest, see what pages
and content they're creating around those keywords.
And then you can map out,
all right, if I want to get a lot of traffic,
what are the pages that I need to create, the topics,
and what keywords do I need to include
in each of those pages?
And Ubersuggest will show you all that for free.
- Damn, you make it sound so easy.
So yeah, Ubersuggest, AnswerThePublic.
I'm curious, are there any other marketing tools
you started using recently that you're like,
"Damn, this is a hidden gem.
You know, I wish I had known about this sooner."
- Midjourney, although it may not be considered
a marketing tool.
Do you consider marketing creative tool?
I don't know what it's considered.
- I guess just like, yeah, your intent in using it.
Yeah, if you're looking to use it
for marketing creative ads and such,
then yeah, it's a marketing tool.
And I'm curious like on your personal side,
you're a guy that's like traveling a lot,
you're exploring the world.
I'm very similar.
You know, I came to a point kind of eight years ago
where I knew I really wanted to travel,
like explore the world,
and I'd always seen life as this trade off.
I either build a successful business in one place
or I travel and live my dreams.
And there came a point
where I just kind of had to look myself in the mirror
and go like, "Well, why not both?
Why not travel the world, live my life,
explore new cultures, meet new people,
live the life of my dreams, inform my business, my work,
my career around what makes me passionate?"
How do you kind of think about that?
You're obviously traveling in the world, you have two kids,
you got a home base in Vegas,
you got another home in Beverly Hills.
Like how do you kind of balance
like the love of travel
and exploring new places and meeting new people
and build your business around that?
- Well, I travel, I'm on the road for,
call it 35 weeks out of the year.
So for me, I already had to travel for work,
so I get experience new things,
meet new people, see new cultures.
And I think it's great.
Like you're heading to Japan if I'm not mistaken,
in a few weeks, right? - Yep.
- So it's like, it's cool, you're in Columbia right now.
You're going to be in Japan in a few weeks.
It's great experiencing new things, new food, new culture.
I don't understand why people can't do both.
It does get harder when you have kids and they're in school,
but you can also homeschool kids and travel the world.
There's a guy named Jermaine Griggs,
I don't know if he still does it,
but he did that for a while.
That was a really cool concept.
I think kids can get amazing education doing that
versus just being stuck in a classroom.
- And as you're traveling,
like is there something that's kind of stood out as,
you know, I know over the years from traveling
as I've kind of experienced new cultures,
experienced new things,
one of my big learnings has been like, you know,
people are great all over the place, you know,
and the more you just kind of put good energy out there
into the world, you know,
the more it kind of like comes back,
and people genuinely, they want to help you, you know,
it doesn't matter what culture you're in.
You know, you give to people, you help people out.
You know, reciprocity is a universal language.
I'm curious, you know, amongst your travels,
like are there any kind of core learnings
that really stand out as insights you've gleaned
that have kind of maybe changed your philosophy on life?
- The big thing that has changed my philosophy in life
that I learned from traveling
is there's a lot of basic necessity
type of businesses out there that just make a ton of money.
You know, being raised in California, I thought,
"Oh, tech is where everything is, Silicon Valley,"
and I'm not trying to knock Silicon Valley,
there's a lot of innovation there, but we tend to forget,
there's a lot of big businesses in the basics.
People need rice.
I was reading an article a few weeks ago,
there's a shortage of rice.
You know, how much money there is just selling rice,
or how much money there is removing dirt?
One of my buddies has a dirt moving company,
and it just moves it, people do construction.
What do you do with that dirt?
Or what do people do with the garbage?
What do people do with, you know,
HVAC, like heating and air conditioning?
All these homes, in some places really cold,
some places really hot.
We forget how much money there is
in basic necessity type of businesses.
And traveling has really opened my eyes to it
because you meet a lot of entrepreneurs
who are really well off, and most of them,
their businesses are in basic necessities
and it's not like something cool, like I created a Facebook,
and sure, these guys aren't as rich as Mark Zuckerberg,
but they've done really well just doing basic,
boring old school businesses that we all take for granted.
- Yeah, no, I see that all the time too.
We're always looking for that, like that next shiny toy,
that cool tool that, you know,
all our friends are going to be impressed with
that we invented this thing, and then you, yeah,
as you're traveling around,
you're at different masterminds, different conferences,
you just see these people
that are just absolutely killing it off
the most unsexy, just boring, basic ideas.
But yeah, they're necessities
that people use in everyday lives and, you know,
they're what kind of really can generate
some serious market value and serve a ton of people.
So I'm curious like on your side too,
I talk to a lot of founders all the time, you know,
I think feel like like 80% of the battle sometimes
is you're building a business, it's not the business itself,
oftentimes as a founder, it's just your own mindset,
your own sort of like mental health, mental fitness.
You know, you're someone that's working like 70,
80 hours a week,
which for a lot of people is like a marathon.
A lot of the founders I speak with, you know,
sometimes they feel stuck, they feel overwhelmed,
depressed, anxious, you know,
many people are running a business
that's running them into the grounds.
I'm curious, like as you've been building your business,
how do you kind of, you know, when I see you,
whether it's like at the conferences we've been at
or online, you know, you're always someone
that I think has like a really infectious, playful energy.
You light up the room, you know.
You can tell that you're just genuinely having fun.
You view work as play.
And I feel like you bring
almost like an inner child kind of energy
that the conversations that you have,
the relationships around you,
and someone that really stands out to me
as like you're just here to help people,
you're just here to have some fun.
And you seem to have this very light, energetic approach
to building companies.
I'm curious, your advice to those founders
that maybe are finding that they're in a bit of a lull,
they're taking things too seriously,
and how do they kind of lighten it up a little bit?
- Love what you're doing.
If you love what you're doing,
you typically will have a much more playful attitude,
and also take breaks every once in a while.
And whether it's go play at a park with your children
or go play a game basketball with your friends.
If you do things that you genuinely enjoy,
you're just going to be in a better mood,
especially when you work,
and if you love what you're doing while you work,
it also helps you be in a better mood.
- Do you, I'm curious, like I know a lot of founders that,
you know, they think about either buying something
when they hit a certain milestone
or maybe like taking some awesome adventure
when they hit some sort of big goal.
You know, I'm kind of currently
getting a bunch of my business on autopilot,
getting a bunch of systems offloaded,
bringing on a couple more operations people,
and then, you know, peacing off to Japan
to go on a big adventure
and putting myself in a really uncomfortable time zone
so that the business just has to kind of run on autopilot
in the new ways I'm kind of automating.
I'm curious, like how do you kind of think about, you know,
rewarding yourself for, you know, things well done?
- Yeah, and I haven't done the Japan thing,
a different timezone thing, technically I have,
but I have CEOs and stuff who run the business side.
I don't really have that issue.
But from a reward perspective,
I used to try to buy things, like I have Patek Philippes,
like the watches, don't really wear any of them.
Bought cars, bought a Maybach long time ago.
Just sold it during COVID.
Bought the new Maybach I think last February
when the new model came out.
But I don't really buy much.
And the new Maybach, it wasn't like a reward at that point,
I was just used to, and I was like,
"Oh, new one's out, I don't have one, want to drive her again,
everyone's going out and about."
And got another car and got a driver again.
But the rewarding, like the watches
and stuff like that doesn't really make me happy anymore.
Giving and helping other people out,
that's helped out a lot.
That's put me in a really good mood seeing, you know,
other people have a smile on their face
because you helped them.
That's been one of the biggest rewards
making money as entrepreneur for me.
My wife, you know,
focuses 100% of her time to help others.
I think that's great.
I'm not as, you know, as amazing of a person as my wife,
so I focus on making money.
She spends a time giving it away and we make a great combo,
but that really makes me happy
to see other people come up in life
because our checks helping.
And we don't really make that much of an impact
compared to like Elon Musk or Bill Gates
or any of those guys who can really donate money,
but we try to do whatever's in our means.
- Is there like a moment in your life
that you feel like your mindset sort of shifted around that,
where you're like, you know, I feel like this next watch
or this car is going to bring me a level of happiness
and then you maybe had bought that thing
and you're like, "No, you know what?
Like my mindset's now shifted on this.
This actually maybe didn't bring me any more happiness,
it just brought me more problems."
- Yes, not really problems,
but it shifted for me the moment
I started buying more watches.
And I'd be happy for a few days
and like, "Okay, what's next?"
Now, like if I buy a car, I was like,
"Whatever, I got a car, I don't even care."
I got a legit car back from my dad.
We used to have a Honda Odyssey.
My dad took it for a few months,
gave it back to us because we needed it for our kids.
And like I love driving that thing.
That's awesome and amazing.
So when I'm not getting driven around,
and when I get driven around, by the way,
like we have a Lincoln Navigator
that a driver also drives like as a family car.
Even if he's driving me in the Lincoln Navigator
and it's just him and me,
I sit in the front seat so we can converse
and stuff like that,
and I'm like, "Oh, how's your kids and wife?"
And he'll tell me stories.
But yeah, it's just, I don't know,
and all this materialistic stuff doesn't make me happy.
Even our house in Beverly Hills,
my wife and I are debating just getting rid of it.
Had it for a year and a half
and we haven't spent any time in it.
It's like, might as well get rid of it
and donate the money or use it for something else.
I don't want to buy another home,
I'd rather just donate the money.
- Love it.
Well, you know, this has been a lot of fun
and I appreciate all the insights over the weekend
and here today on the show.
Appreciate all you're doing to give back to the community
and, you know, sharing all the knowledge
you've done to build, you know,
an incredible business, incredible brand.
And so want to thank you for taking the time today
and excited to do following your journey
and seeing you build up
the most valuable digital marketing agency in the world.
- I'm going to try. Thanks for having me.