$1M Business With 0 Employees “The Simple Solopreneur”

Neville makes a million dollars a year helping people write words on the internet and the wildest part is he does this with no employees and he build his entire business to be dummy proof the dumbest awesome trick I've ever learned in my life that simple act has like got me some of my best friends some of my best investments some of my best business contacts and just like a lot of fun opportunities it all started in college after learning one skill and conducting a series of small experiments I think about it the dumb way of like let me just try a small thing experiment it's not a real business I didn't incorporate it do anything and spend 10 bucks on a domain name that's it wait if I can do something I enjoy doing and make money at it that's like better than a job right in this video he shares everything including how he got his very first clients all of his revenue streams the best copyrighting books and exercises for anyone to learn today and the exact Playbook he would do if he were to start again from scratch and that's probably my number one tip for copyrighting to get 9 and just start doing it in your head everywhere you go these three are probably the ones I've go back the most to but that was a very profound shift with me that's like okay look at these psychological triggers which combo of one to three of them am I appealing to I was like crap I can't believe like I'm just hearing about this hell yeah I mean I think it used to be like you get work from these big platforms but I think the best platform is this episode is filled with so many examples I sat down with them for 4 hours but we just took the very best parts for this video and what I love about Neville is not only does he share specific examples in how to apply something but he also might just be the happiest entrepreneur I've ever met you'll see it throughout the episode but he's just curious and excited about what he's working on and there's so many lessons enjoyed the video Let's dive in here we are Neville thanks for having us what's up man so you've been copyrighting for a few decades now how did you first get into this and and why I mean when the internet was coming out it was like very obvious that like everyone was going to be using this right and sure enough like from that almost all my best friends are from my blogging era days yeah Noah KAG and SAR these all like people I met like when I was blogging and in some ways you're finding these people across the nation across the world that have the same interests of you that are very like aligned with you in a lot of ways and that was all from just like writing words on the internet back in the day and we all still do it to this day it's fun I went digging on the internet and I found your old YouTube channel and I think the the first video that was that's still public today was from 18 years ago and you have all these little mini experiments things from like how to crash a party and meeting El John and Michael Dell and Lance Armstrong to like your homeless experiment living under a bridge 14 years ago and there's something very unique when I watch that of realizing that you're just experimenting with things and teaching as you go do you view yourself as a teacher as an experimenter as a copywriter like what how do you look at it no there's like no grand plan on this it was just kind of like that'd be fun to record it it'd be kind of funny and just like put it out and document it and and that that was really the whole impetus there's no like grand plan and I realized those types of experiments where you you take a little bit more risk and like do something a little bit more crazy in the real world do really really really well and I think you're still seeing it today with like people like people walking up on the street being like hey how much money do you make or whatever those are still like some of the most popular videos and so I think it just like educated people entertained people and also just like fun for me it's like scratching an itch it was like a fun hobby and back then I made no money off this no one was making money on the internet like that so for me I was purely doing it just cuz I really enjoyed doing it so you talk a little bit about what your business is and how these wacky experiments maybe LED you down those the breadcrumbs my whole life has been experiments it's just like let me just try this out let's just see what happens like I'm going to do a little small thing I'm going to put up a web page and see if anyone buys anything and so I always just try out these small little things and I put like a deadline on it like maybe like let's give it like a month and if I can't do it in a month I'm probably not going to do it and so it my life has been a series of those and any business that's taken off has usually stemmed from like here's this dumb experiment and then it turns out this one actually starts making some money and I'm like let take it a little more seriously so in college I did a bunch of these I remember running like 10 different businesses quote unquote 10 experiments that I was making money off of I was collecting like blogger. com templates and I put it on a website called Fancy blog. com I tried joining a company where you sign up and people get text message deals I was trying that I started a rave company where I sold Rave stuff and it turns out that was the one that paid for all my college tuition wow yeah and it's just like despite me being bad at it and I was like huhuh maybe if I spend a little bit more time on this one it'll become a business and sure enough it did and so in college I was doing like hundreds of thousands of dollars of Revenue and then you know I made a percentage of that as profit if I can do something I enjoy doing and make money at it that's like better than a job right so I was never against having a job I was just like if I could do my own thing and make the same amount of money as a job then I'd rather do that because the upside is unlimited the downside potentially also unlimited I remember when I learned copywriting one of the biggest things it said was just like give people examples of stuff they can do with the product cuz I was saying you could just go on a dance flort and go like this and that was all I was telling people and now I was like wait plumbers use them as a tool as a handy tool oh people go camping with them give all the people their campsite CU like it's like five bucks for 10 of these things they super disposable I listed out all the reasons why you should buy this product and that was my first like really high Revenue day I made thousands of dollars in profit and I was like wow that was just from an email and I used to send out an email newsletter and it never made any money and then when I learned copyrighting I did like the total opposite of my newsletter it was like actually kind of a very few images and just like it just told the story of how all these different people use this one product and I sold out of them immediately I had to find like a different supplier to come up with as many orders as I got and so that's when I was like copyrighting seems cool I like this I like making a lot more money than I did before and at the same time Noah Kagan one of my buddies was building appsumo off my couch and abso was one of his side projects at the time and he was really good at like collecting emails and marketing man his emails were like they were crap they were it was just he was succeeding despite the emails being so bad and the emails were like here's a $100 coupon and I was just like what if you applied this copyrighting stuff and he's like what are you talking about I was like what if you said how people could use the software why people would use it give some examples of people making a bunch of money with it and so I was like let me let me do this for you we sent that out and I think like famously that was like the first like $10,000 profit day than am suumo ever had it's a similar thing with my business where I was like wow I just made all this money and the only difference was the email content that the only difference nothing else changed the page didn't change nothing changed so it wasn't really risky I wasn't like some like extreme risk taker or anything in that sense it seemed actually quite logical to me that I'm making more doing this than a job so yeah let's do that and you still haven't had a job I still have not had a real job in my life no for for somebody listening into this has a bunch of ideas and they're like okay I'm going to just start this monthly business idea like how do you zoom in on the ones that are working it there's two aspects of there's the technical aspect of getting it built and then more so for a lot of people I've seen it's just like the psychological aspect like people are afraid to put out of business and so a lot of people like well if I put out a business and I mention it on Facebook Twitter whatever and then it fails it's kind of embarrassing right everyone talks about like failure and stuff but it's like it is embarrassing to like lose money on something and what I'm telling them is like consider it just a small experiment you're just you're just putting up a whip page you're just you calling a couple of customers to see if they'll buy something like that this doesn't have to be some Grand business that you like incorporate do an LLC all that kind of stuff don't if you're filing LLC papers and stuff you're probably just doing it wrong right instead try to get a few customers first and this is called like you know MVP validation whatever but it's like can you get a few people to pay you and then if it works take it more seriously and if that works take it more seriously keep upping the ante until it's a big business but I think a lot of people get stuck on a business idea never try it or try it for years and think about it whereas I'm like dumb and I'm like hey what if I just put up a web page and see what happens and I put up a a calendly link and it's like hey no one in three months has actually contacted me about the service I'm like maybe I'm doing something wrong here maybe I'm not getting enough customers maybe no one wants this service and so the important part about that is like every single successful business idea you've seen has like pivoted a bunch of times you talk a little bit about your business today like um maybe top line revenue or your different revenue streams I think you've shared some publicly maybe yeah so I'd say my business probably has like eight like tentacles of income total the community itself makes many hundreds of thousands of dollars a year it's a subscription based community so it's like 97 a month $ 7900 per year right and then if people renew then it's like 365 a year because we like having people on for a long Peri of time and so what that is is I was early on that like everyone's moving towards communities I realized with the course the problem was watching me talk about copyrighting that's really cool okay watching me talk about copyrighting but then you showing me your copy and I can help you with it is way cooler we made like basically like what I would call it a heavily modified Forum software where people can upload their copy to us then myself and other professional copyrights that we hire they go through and like rewrite all your stuff it's kind of like Consulting scaled just those changes within our community people see like all sorts of wins so I do make money from YouTube videos I don't think it's like a significant amount it's like Couple Grand like maybe at Max $10,000 a year but then from there people will buy our stuff which makes a lot more people get us in subscriptions then another big part of mine stuff is Consulting so I'll take like kind of higher in Consulting projects and we've done stuff for like contrarian thinking we've done we're going to be doing something for like the daily stoic we've course do stuff for appsumo and then like a whole slew of marketing companies and stuff you've never heard of so then Consulting is probably like the next largest revenue stream from there and then from there there's like Affiliates U I wrote a book a long time ago I wrote two books one does really well one was a smaller one and that'll still make between 500 bucks and $11,000 a month from a book I wrote 10 years ago and that also because people will buy the book they'll hear about my course and buy something from there and then I also do like some small affiliate links here and there and that'll make like 10 grand 15 grand a year stuff and then the other big thing is I also get the opportunity like advise companies and I'll usually take some money for advising as well as equity and everyone once in a while there's some sort of payout event like um I was an investor in like the hustle and when that got bought by HubSpot I got a pay out from that Equity but one cool thing that I'd say I probably make more money off of than the actual investing is just the the relationship with the companies yeah so we were talking about this earlier that like I have appsumo Equity appsumo hasn't sold so I've made technically zero dollars in appsumo equity but how much money have I made from the absum affiliation of like being the brand the guy behind The Voice being able to like get the marketing power appap Sumo behind some my products millions of dollars yeah so I'd say like that actual like affiliation with certain companies has been far more valuable than any P you ever got so you teach literally thousands of business owners some of these copywriting tactics and you see what doesn't work and what works well and you've sort of has distilled this into like your own almost copyrighting principles that you've of course borrowed from the greates but have made your own tweaks and you have this viral video of nine copyrighting exercises that anyone can do right now and you spelled it w r i t right now which is great good copy you know he's a copywriter uh and it's a great video everyone should check it out there's a blog post on it too but I want you to like zoom in a little bit on just the top two or three exercises that people could do right now I think you had one about taking ads and then rewriting them yourself like anybody could do that today can you talk about that yeah I call it mental ad rewriting so you take any ad that you see while looking you're driving down the street and there's a billboard you're going on the internet you're like there's an ad there there's Instagram ad you see so for example if you look up at one of these ads it's like an old Ogie Volkswagen ad and it just says lemon and you're like what what does that mean and so you look at that ad and you go how would I make that ad better right how how would I make this better or why does it work why did that grab my attention and so the reason that like that ad grabbed my attention so much and I have it framed on my wall was just like you're like wait a second this car company's advertising that's a lemon and lemon means like you know it's a bad car yeah and so then want to read that little small textt under there so that headline works with the image to grab your attention and make you read that text mental ad rewriting is where you're like how do I make that better right and that's just good copywriting practice that you can do in your head anywhere for free you don't need anyone to tell you how to do it you just think like why did that grab my attention or how would I make it better and that's probably my number one tip for copyrighting to get better just start doing it in your head everywhere you go and when I first learned about copyrighting that's what I was doing yeah every every ad I saw and like I was like in you know reading a magazine in a plane or something back in the day I'd be like this sucks I can make that better I can make that better that Billboard's terrible I don't know what it's for I could make that better yeah I like what if they just put the website on there what if they put a phone number on there and just like thinking like that makes you a little bit more of an Optimizer yeah every piece of advertising you see what if we can make it 5% better 20% better 100% better right that's what mental ad rewriting is yeah so now that we're doing mental ad rewriting and seeing like why did that ad work why did that ad suck what's what's good about that what's bad about that well now you got to collect them cuz like you're going to forget you know we're going to forget we talked about this in two days and so I started collecting a swipe file and swipe file just means like it used to literally be like a physical file that you just put like cool advertisements in in a folder and now it's of course all digital but the most impressive thing is like you just do this for free now so I would use something like Google keep and you can create your own swipe file any sort of AD you take a screenshot of it uh try out.

google. com it's really cool and it's free and you can basically make like your own Pinterest board of all the things you like so that's the benefit of keeping a swipe file and I will say that more and more all my swipe file stuff like I'd say 80% of it comes from my phone now and how do you create a swipe file in your phone it's actually the easiest one take a screenshot of anything you think is cool you don't have to annotate it you don't have to do anything and then in your photos go to the screenshot page yeah got your Swip file right there so just take screenshots of stuff and on your screenshots you look at it every screenshot you have is right there that's your entire sweat and so I can just click that and browse back on it and be like oh that was a cool Instagram ad that was a cool YouTube video and then the step further to categorize it use something like Google keep and you can send it to Google keep and categorize it under pricing videos images whatever but keeping a swi file stuff that you like and don't like is super important and then when you collect it all it's easy to like just say like oh yeah I like those let's move on caveman mode the pro C copywriter himself the caveman what is this this is caveman mode so what caveman mode is whenever you're reading anything so whether it be a sales page an email most people are not like paying attention to it they're reading kind of like like a caveman so imagine this kind of like dumb doesn't care caveman blurry eye like uh whatever and so that's the way I read people's copy the caveman is an editing method to like you read through your copy and if you're like should I keep it is it good you dumb right third excise I always recommend to people is copy work and a lot of like the legends of the past used to do this and what they let's let's zoom in on one of these like cool advertisements up there so for example how to create advertising that s That's a classic ad that in the 80s made the ogal V Corporation they're a big agency like something like $2 billion there a tremendous amount of money back then and what they did was they basically listed out all their top marketing methods in that in that onepage magazine ad and if you go through and hand copy it what you're going to notice is like oh he writes in really short sentences oh he really small words he never uses like big fancy words oh he kind of writes like a person would talk like he doesn't sound like some Aristocrat he sounds just kind of like a dude and so if you also go and and do the the lemon ad the volswagen ad you read how that was written and you're like oh very simple words short sentences keeping the subject on track there's not that much copy there's actually only like maybe like two paragraphs of copy on the entire thing and they're using that to sell an entire car car and so you just learn a lot by picking this skill up and would actually say find a couple classic pieces of copy like that you can go on my site and find it you know copyrighting course. com copywork and find a bunch of pieces of copywork and the cool thing is you probably only need to do about three pieces I'd say you get kind of diminishing returns from there but once you do that first piece you're like oh interesting you learn quite a bit just by copying someone so think about it when someone learns to play the guitar they're not making up their own music they're playing Metallica or Green Day or something that's already been out there anytime someone's learning something new they just copy what someone else did and then they can make their own later so for beginner copyri I'm like start copying some of these ads handw write them out yeah that's a that's a great exercise called copy with the modern form of copy work I'd say I actually do a lot but with canva so instead of hand copying something I'll take it into canva and break it down by layers and make something mine like I saw a cool uh chart like a flowchart of a guy's business with his emails and I was like W that's really cool and I recreated it and made it for myself that was kind of like a form of copywork of like taking this thing that's really cool and making my own and it actually made me think I was just like holy crap how do I make money off this part of my business and then it flows into that on his one but on mine it doesn't do anything and so from that I actually like modified my business model a little bit Yeah I think just like there's so much content that goes out that like anything that stands out a little bit often gets a little bit more attention and quite honestly like I mean here's the it's just more fun yeah right so when I say like Hey listen up chunk someone's just like oh that's that that starts off in a kind of an interesting tone it's not like hello there fellow internet reader it's not like that it sets the tone a little bit and it gets people to read on and some people might actually hate it but then some people will really love it yeah so anything that stands out just a little bit more tends to get a lot more attention this is actually a well-known thing that David oabi always talks about in his stuff is like when everyone's doing this one thing you do the opposite it doesn't mean that it's going to be better just cuz it's different but it is something to experiment with like what boundaries can I push here to get more attention you have tons of books in here books over here books over here I know you're very well read can we talk about just your three favorite most impactful books for learning copyrighting dude I've let's let's go grab them all right we got your top three favorite books why these three books these three are probably the ones I go back the most to this one ogal V on Advertising man I go back to this one all the time just for inspiration and the cool thing about this book is like first of all it's filled with tons of examples stuff that worked stuff that didn't work but he would also be like how do I get the entire United Kingdom to buy a certain brand of rice how do I get people to visit Puerto Rico before it was like a famous destination and he talks about how to sell on TV how to sell through newspapers how to sell through radio and the combination of all of them and I love that because to me copywriting is about getting a message into your brain or getting a message into a million brains and the medium is like whatever the best medium is for that it could be text it could be images it could be video it could be whatever and so I think David Ogie was like under the same impression and that's why I like this book all the time and sometimes if I'm stuck on a project I'll just open this up and start reading through it and not only does is he just fun to listen to and uh kind of a fun read but also there's so many different angles and ways that he sells stuff in here that you're just like oh that would be a cool way to sell this and then you get an idea and you're off to the r so I read this book all the time I give it out as gifts all the time it's great all right this one's called the ad we copyrighting handbook by Joseph Sugarman I've actually met this guy a bunch of times he recently passed so even in here he has a bunch of examples of things he sold back in the day but the Brilliance of this book is he has a chapter where there's like just under 30 of these psychological triggers that make people want to buy for example belonging to something like being included in something is a psychological trigger why people want to join a membership or a club or for example he tells a story where they were selling these collector's items where it was like a silver airplane wing with with the different like American Airlines United Airlines all that and they were made out of silver profound to me cuz before I used to sell something I was just like uh maybe we could just say that we got this on sale and I'm like wait wait wait what's the thing that we're going after with this audience right are we trying to save them money are we trying to make them look better what is the trigger that we're going after sometimes there can be multiple but that was a very profound shift with me that's like okay look at these psychological triggers which combo of one to three of them am I appealing to and let's go hard on that third one is this book called getting everything you can out of all you got by Jay Abraham this isn't technically a copywriting book it's actually just more like a business book Jay Abraham was like this guy that was big in the 80s 90s but this is one of those books that I I pick up and I go to any chapter I don't want to like read it through each time I pick up go to any single chapter and then it starts talking about something super interesting and I get really good ideas I just open up a chapter it's about like the best client to find and I'm like oh what does that say and then I'll read it and be like holy crap I'm doing this all wrong and so this is one of those books that I think it's taken like his entire career and compressed it into like the minimum amount of space and it's one of those books I just can open up to anyone and find something interesting to read that's why I keep going back to it and this teaches you a lot about business a lot about copyrighting a lot about marketing campaign it's kind of like the lot of those three if you were starting again in your career young young Neville what would uh what would you advise to him I mean I might be a freelancer at first just to generate cash that's actually what I did I did like web design and stuff for people and they're like we'll pay you a$ thousand dollar to make a website I was like what like I know how to make a website I'll do that so if I was I would start a freelance business and I think a lot of Freelancers whenever they start they don't realize they're starting a freelance business and so one of the things I probably would have done done back in the day differently they would start getting reviews right away so if you go on Amazon and something has one review you're like I don't trust this it has 20,000 reviews you trust it it's not a big jump to see that if a freelancer agency whatever has more reviews on a trusted site like Google local listings or something that it' probably be more trusted you probably more likely go with them right they get more exposure Etc first first I think you need to identify what you're good at so what do you do what do people come to you for help with right so a lot of people come to me saying like I want to be a copywriter I'm like cool what have you written they say I've never written anything and I'm like well I don't even think you want to be a copywriter write me three blog posts and tell me if you still like this by the second one they're like I'm out I'm like cool we identify that you don't need to be a copywriter what other skill sets do you have a lot of people will come to me and be like oh I was an accountant for a long time now I want to do my own thing I'm like can you start an accounting thing on the side is that something you'd be interested in yeah um I think also think a lot of people don't want to do their current job and they say they don't like it and I say do you not like it or do you not like the money you're currently making and that's a big thing to realize I'm like okay let's say you're an accountant you don't like it what if you get paid a million dollars a day would you like it they' be like I love it I'm like okay the problem is not the accounting it's just like you're not getting paid enough is there something we could do about that increase your prices only work with larger clients Etc yeah and a lot of people if they don't like being an accountant or something but then they are just like an an adviser to a bunch of different companies it might actually be a totally different job to you and it's a lot more fun when you're working on something on your own them being told what to do like you you don't have to do this work you want to do it so I think there is a difference over there but also I think so number one finding like an offert to do and and this is like a I think like a throw spaghetti at the wall see what sticks you can offer multiple things so a lot of Freelancers start out as like total generalist so try to find something that you're already good at or that people already pay you for and that's like the best way to just get started later you can expand your offering but here's the evolution of a lot of Freelancers I've seen I'm sure you've seen this a lot too someone becomes a freelancer and then some come is just like Hey we're a really good match why don't you come on why don't you come as adviser or get some equity in the company or be our early first employee freelancing is a lot of serendipity at the same time out of a 100 gigs you do one of them might be like your Golden Goose that for years pays off or or that company gets really big and you were like I was the head of marketing at this XYZ insert big software company right so a lot of those types of things happen and a lot of people that I see become Freelancers and are really good at freelancing they don't stay in freelancing Forever they end up transitioning like become part of a company or own piece of a company or start their own company right that's why I like freelancing like if you're not sure what you're going to do it's just like let's just start bringing in money and bringing in money is the universe's way of saying like yeah you're good at that if you're bringing in a ton of money from video editing maybe you're good at video editing we had we had this one thing we had this string of hot releases like three in a row of hot releases on appsumo that I was involved with and I was like I'm on fire I'm invisible I don't need I don't need any more feedback I know what people want and previously all those products were like people asking us how to do a thing and then we showed them how to do that thing this one was called like the Sumo diet course and it was when I started like eating healthier and working out and stuff and I was like wow I just have a lot more energy everyone should know this and so I spent like a couple months putting together this product we launched it and I was like everyone's got to know this information it's great and it was like the biggest flop ever like no one bought it like I mean maybe two three people but it was like sad yeah I mean it was a total waste of time and what I realized was like no one has once ever asked me Health advice no one comes to me for that I'm not just like not the guy and so I was just like wait I'm making this whole product about this that no one comes to me for but you know what people came to me for for copyrighting advice help with their web pages do types of things and so I was like oh I got to stick to what people are coming to me for what I'm good at next we got a tour of Neville's house which included his home office SAA Jim and rooftop one cool thing I noticed is he's dummy proofed his entire house so if he wants to record a video he clicks a button if he wants to open the blinds he clicks one button in so many aspects of his life have been dummy proofed let's check it out yeah this is the bedroom and right now it's in night mode but as you can see we can transition to open mode over here these blinds open it's one of my favorite things in the morning to do that and like all the light comes in it's pretty cool little outside balcony area this is a structural bar but what I use it for is pull-ups also so come out here in the morning do a couple pull-ups pretty fun yeah I asked Noah before this interview what's the number one biggest thing he has learned from you any idea of what he said keep it stupid keep it simple uh similar but he said how to be happy and your ability to be happy and not want more more more but to optimize for happiness uh no I actually found this out in high school I read a book called the male midlife crisis and I think what happens is at middle age a lot of people realize they're like holy crap I'm going to die and it helps you answer those questions really well by knowing that like at this dat I'm going to die so what do I want to do in the metime and I think that's made me a lot happier some people find it a morbid thought I think it's very logical and I'm just like yeah this makes me a lot happier it makes me appreciate the journey through life rather than trying to like reach some end State and so for me my whole life has been defined of like I've shared my ideas with the world and people have come out of the Woodworks and be like I like that idea let's meet up that simple act has like got me some of my best friends some of my best investments some of my best business business contacts and just like a lot of fun opportunities and so I do think that sharing your ideas with the world maybe it's not for everybody but if you're hesitant about it like what do I have to say maybe you do have some UniQue Ideas maybe you do have some fun stuff to share why wouldn't you want to share them with the world like really what's the downside unless you're talking about really crazy controversial stuff I don't think there's really any downside you never know where that small bit of writing can really launch off an entire career or a whole chain of sing Dippity down the line amazing where can people find you on the internet or uh any final messages for for somebody watching yeah my name is really easy to Google Neville madora and then you can also look me up at copyrighting course you can look at Swip file.