Life Hacks From The King of Introverts 7 Business Ideas

all right Nick are you ready well I'm late because I had to go to Party City you are Party City dude you're the human Party City no but the funny thing is I went out there because I wanted to get some cool stuff for you guys for Sam I got a hot dog C thing CA Sam likes hot dogs and then for Sean you know I got the big basketball cuz Sean loves basketball and I got these balloons and as leaving this lady sees me with the balloons and the basketball and she's like oh are

you planning a birthday for your son I was like first that's sexist and second no I'm going on a [Music] podcast all right so let me let me introduce Nick and I'll introduce him with a little bit of story I don't remember exactly how we came into contact with each other but basically I was in New York maybe eight years ago somehow Nick contacts me and he goes hey do you want to go to Washington Square Park and play Frisbee and I was like I I guess yeah okay so uh Sarah and I go and

we meet him at Washington Square Park and he goes uh here let's just like walk I'll give you guys a tour so he gives us a tour he goes this is the guy that's always here selling weed hey weed guy how are you this is my friend Sam and Sarah and then he's like these are the people who are always tight roping hey tight RPP people like Nick is just a crazy person okay like we we've met him in a like you'll go out to dinner with him and he'll be like all right for the

next five minutes I want to talk about my dating life and then from minutes 7 to 13 we're going to talk about your work and then from 13 to 27 where we want to talk about philosophy on life like he do you actually do this do you show up to like lunches like this with agendas 100% with agendas and sometimes even my own keynote presentations and let me hold on I had to give this quick summary so Nick's summary is basically he made money Nick started a business he sold it he made money he put

all of his money in Tesla stock and got incredibly wealthy and now he is single in Austin and he just lives life to have fun and he does crazy stuff like he just recently did a blind date to Tokyo or he'll he just wrote a book on having a cocktail party because that's what he cares about and he just does everything to that fun is that right Nick yeah that is directionally correct I love to have fun and I didn't put all my money into Tesla and but yes I did make a lot of money

a couple times in my life and now I get to have fun and I get to I think I'm like the end game that a lot of people are thinking about how to get to and they want to make a business and they want to be successful but for what and so there's a lot of talk about when is enough and I think I found enough and this is what happens when you get there how did you figure that out because that is something that not a lot of people have been able to figure out

so how did you figure out what's enough for you and how did you actually execute that how did you figure out what you wanted what was enough and then do it you know one year I was doing my taxes and I had busted my butt in my business an absolutely incredible amount it was just one of the hardest years and I think maybe we netted out like $350,000 profit and and it was one of the hardest years of my life honestly for a variety of Staffing reasons and other things and as I was doing my

taxes my accountant said like oh wow do you realize you made like so much more money from your Investments than you did from your business and I never thought about my investments I don't even think I just buy it set it and forget it and at that moment I was like wow I'm like destroying my health and my sanity for this amount of money that's not even as much as I'm making off the investment there were a few moments like that that I've had over the last 10 years that have just made me reconsider how

I spend my time and you wrote a blog post because I went knee deep into the blog last night and you have this blog post you wrote a long time ago which was what would I do if I had $10 million I don't know when you wrote this but I found it in somewhere in the archive and you basically said you know I really want to have like $10 million and um you know kind of made me think like what would I actually do if I had it would I do today if I already had

it and you and you put photos on there we should show this on on YouTube there's like index cards and you wrote like swim more right you wrote like write a book about hosting a cocktail party which you actually ended up doing and you wrote all these things and you it sounded like the takeaway was first of all we should do this exercise because like money is a tool to improve your life but if you don't really know how much you need and what you're trying to improve like it's sort of crazy like go into

Home Depot for a house renovation project but you didn't know which part of your house you wanted to renovate or what what budget actually was and what materials you needed but that's how we treat our careers and then you got Clarity on it and you actually implemented can you talk about that that exercise you did because I did it last night too after you after reading that oh you did it so I hope to give actionable takeaways for your listeners listeners this is an actionable takeaway for you in that you can do this with your

friends with your spouse with your loved ones to ask them if you had $10 million how would you live your life differently and get specific don't just say I want to eat better what does that exactly mean now sha may know this this is a Tony Robbins exercise that he's done either at business Mastery or upw and the gist I'll forward you to the end is that the vast majority of things we say that we would do differently at $10 million actually you only need a million dollars to get there the vast majority if you

think oh if my life was was a billionaire this is what I would do you actually maybe only need 10 20 $50 million and I say actually that's still a lot of money but it helps you to realize that for example for a lot of people oh if I had a billion dollars of course I would have a private Chef so they say okay well let's track that out what does that exactly mean for you to have a private Chef you want to have meals that are set up in your fridge you want to have

a fulltime person Etc and it was a very helpful exercise to me to think that in the past if I wanted $500 million well actually the vast majority of the things that I wanted I could do for much less without sacrificing all that time money energy to get to that level yeah there's but Sam have you heard this Morgan Hansel quote about money he says Uh there's two ways to use money the first is as a tool to improve the quality of your life and the second is as a measuring stick to measure the quality

of your life and basically the people who are happy use as a tool and the people who are you know the bitter Rich uh the stressed Rich are the ones who are trying to use money as a measuring stick yeah the problem with that is like I on my list it's like influence politicians overthrow governments um you know like bribe officials and you need a lot more money than just $10 million for that for those of you that are listening by the way that are thinking that's not enough he has given up money is the

measuring stick in the yard and the success of life I am totally with you and I lived that way for so much of my adult life there is money is just a measuring stick right we don't spend it we just keep it and that shows how good we are and so I still respect and sympathize with those people who like Sam want more money to influence politicians to buy private jets I'm joking joking okay but go ahead you're on the record as a lobbyist okay yeah say what would you even Lobby for yeah free Z

for all I don't I me we have a proposal here for like larger serving size of bubblegum I guess sure it's all good yeah that's ridiculous uh but Nick but all right so you're like I you used to be a measuring stick guy for money but in the this blog post by the way you say at the very bottom you say um I would do all of these things which by the by the way like Sean didn't say but you have a list of like you want to go bowling you want to play laser tag

you w to go go-karting that's literally on your blog post but at the end it says uh I would also uh like to work on entrepreneurial Pursuits to get to 50 million yeah yeah something like that uh I don't want to get into the gist of this I want to say that this is an activity that's helpful for listeners to do because it helped me realize that the things that truly make me happy playing tennis riding go-karts eating more healthy going to the beach those things don't have to cost $50 million and I keep a

very low burn in my life right now so that it feels like I have a hundred million dollar Sean something that you probably don't know about Nick so he lived in New York City for a long time and he's been like a blogger a lot of people don't know this that Nick met Noah Kagan and Neville madora my good buddies in rem via blogging Nick was like one of these early bloggers what are you you're 40 let's say now Nick you started blogging when you were what like in your 20s gosh I had a website

since 1996 yeah yeah and because of that he's actually met like a lot of these guys that are kind of like luminaries now so for example he's buddies with Matt Mullen Wag the founder of Wordpress or he grew up kind of grew up in New York with the founders of Vimeo and college humor and a bunch of these like interesting people that sort of shaped the internet that we know and and you were around them when you guys were all like up and coming and doing your own thing what was that like kind of like

seeing some of these guys who were your peers become like these like people who are kind of controlling the internet or impacting the culture of the the internet well Sam I'm glad you mentioned that because this brings me into the second lesson and I'll be using this little lesson harmonica throughout today's podcast I love it hey real quick I want to talk to you guys if you are new to this podcast if you're new to business I have cool resource for you so the folks at HubSpot who sponsor this podcast have put together a kit

a guide for people who are getting started on their entrepreneurship journey and it has a couple of Cool Tools I want to call out it's free tool by the way this whole thing is free you can just go download it and the first one is a freelance calculator so most people are really underpricing themselves if they are selling a service to a company they're freelancing which is a common way to get started at entrepreneurship is to be a solar preneur and this tool helps you figure out how much you should be charging your clients I

know that most people who get started they're undercharging by you know sometimes as much as 50% so this is a great way to use this tool and get a better handle of how much should I be charging so if you're just getting started and you're a beginner in this journey of Entrepreneurship uh check out this kit the link is in the description below and thanks again to HubSpot for making this podcast possible the lesson is you know about 15 years ago when people were using Twitter a lot and there were a lot of startup Founders

that I knew like Dennis Crowley of for square and Zack Klein of Vimeo and other people and I had absolutely no name on the public internet I was a blogger but I didn't have followers I was just known amongst a certain crowd somebody figured out that all of these famous people or famous and successful people in New York all followed me I think this was when there was a list of kind of like the public follows were more available and they were like dude why do all these people follow you and I was actually waiting

to get a message like that I think there's actionable data that you can get to from finding and looking who else famous and successful people follow now follower lists are still available on Instagram so you can see the bulk of it I think on X they've throttled it back so you don't have the full follow lists available but if you are looking to make contact with some of these Ultra successful people there's no way that you will they have pretty much too much inbound but you can befriend their friends and that can be your foot

in the door that is a lesson that is an aggressive networking example you have to lead with value you have to have something good you can't just do it to take but I think there is Sigma there is Alpha in looking to see who all of the major people follow because there's reason for that why do they follow you I think people followed me in New York City because I hosted events oh my God I hosted events that was my way to become interesting it was my way to be relevant and I just started hosting

all these House parties so I want to tie up the kind of like the shift from killing yourself kind of working really really hard to make money to be successful which is where you know I've been Sam's been a lot of the listeners will have been so that's a relatable struggle to then the the next thing you do you did with life shift where you sort of prioritize experiences adventure fun which I think a lot of us want to do but are sort of afraid to do fully it's hard to get off that money money

train so can we just do the speedrun of like what did you actually do in your career career how did you actually make it what did you try what did you actually do that worked yes speedrun of my career in middle school and high school I started to design websites I was not a popular kid I had friends but I wasn't in the popular crowd and I was really into computers and when I was in about n9th grade I made a web hosting company that just so happened to get lucky if you searched on Yahoo

for the phrase cheap web hosting then you would find my website you can see that at vs3 net did did you do anything to be the discovered one or literally was it lucky dude it was just dumb luck we didn't even know about SEO then it wasn't like trying to optimize it just so happened that when I wrote my description that's how it worked out so you're in high school and that helped pay for college as I understand so what what did you kind of roughly make on that business not a lot of money maybe

so the web hosting was $15 a month per client I it cost me $5 per month per client and at the most I probably had 200 customers it more average was throttled out to about 120 customers per month that helped pay for college but then I also got a scholarship for entrepreneurship which is very rare merit-based scholarship that allowed me to go to a nice college so web hosting business I did some other stuff I sell these like alpha numeric pagers that was never a huge success but I had all these little hustles when I

got to wake by the way I started to sell speakers for laptops and I named the business wakes speakers.com and I'm going around door Todo I'm like oh you bought your kids this laptop they need speakers to listen to Shazam or whatever um and then the lawyers the school lawyers called me up like you can't call this wake speakers that's like the name of our school meanwhile I'm like Drop shipping pallets like onto the quad of the campus when I was in college I tried to start a software company that was massively popular on campus

but made absolutely zero money I tried to move to India to start a software company and hire people because I thought that I could bootstrap it farther there it was a terrible success I hired two people one of them was in Boston beat the story is hilarious I've heard him say this before he's like I moved to India because I was like I'm gonna bootstrap this so I need cheap Talent so he moves to India to start a software company hires two people one guy's in Poland and one guy's in Boston and he's in India

no employes in IND you got that equation wrong you you you answer yourself like if if it's like X Plus y you put yourself in the wrong variable I know I outsourced myself to the wrong thing I did though develop a really nice relationship with the people and the country and it was just a wild experience well let me ask one question there which is nobody cares about this but I do which is even though that was kind of a failure right you go to you move to India you hire a guy in Poland and

Boston software company Nobody Knows the name of this it didn't work out but there's something if if somebody told me that somebody did that today I'd be like this person's going to be a winner this is probably going to be the failure but they were that person is going to be a winner what made you even want to do that in the first place because that's a pretty radical step most people I went to college with did not just graduate and like move to India with the idea of bootstrapping a software company it did seem

like the craziest thing to do at the time and I think that's why I was attracted to it harmonica lesson you think I think so thank you so much so I do I use this harmonica at all my events as a crowd control device and I think if my legacy has anything it's that the harmonica can be a helpful crowd control device in that you can get people's attention in a calm cool manner without a whistle or like a right so consider that there's a tip within a tip why did I move to India yeah

it just at the time it seemed like the future it did seem like a piece of the future there was all this news about Bo and Outsourcing and everything why pro moving over to India you you had said your college roommates were the were the guys who created college humor and Dio were you involved in that or you just kind of sitting by and they were doing it right next to you what what was that like I was very happy to not be involved in that and to be their friends and a soundboard I was

the first non-employee user of Vimeo I Jake the guy who started Vimeo famously said that our thinking helped him think about vlogging and stuff like that um but they were absolutely an inspiration to me and it was so cool to be in that world of people really really great guys and then if you fast forward I think you're like the first time that you kind of you said you've made money like two or three times the first time was after that India trip with your you and your father right yeah he started a a business

in the basement of our house I didn't end up seeing that money till much much later and still lived very frugally probably I still live very frugally actually but I guess I didn't really have money per se until maybe 10 or 15 years after that but yeah my dad started in the basement of our house this was my next big adventure I came home from India not sure what to do next my dad had been working on this business in our house that did inflight entertainment equipment for small Jets Sam on a plane with Nick

it's just the two of us on his plane and Nick is like we get on and instead of just like sitting down putting his bag away relaxing he's like immediately fiddling with all the gadgets on the plane he's like trying to like pull off the in screen monitor like where the the map is of the plane I'm like theyum I'm like is there something behind that what are you trying to do here and he's like I just want to see which one they have like this is what and he's like did you know this and

he's like giving me all these facts and five minutes later he finally tells me oh yeah this was the business that my dad and I worked on which was like they sold these little Parts electronic parts to planes in order to like you know hey you see how your trade table comes out and how there's this little thing here that's what we did and it was like a like I've talked to in his mom were it was the it was his mom and dad and then Nick and I've talked to them about it and it

was like a smashing success you know it took a it took a while to like work but it was like a it was a it was a home run in terms of like they were working on it together it turned out to be financially fruitful and his parents are like the cutest parents you'll ever talk to and it was literally like a mom and pop shop it was like a you know where it's like Nick Gray and son like type of business like the name is that's what really what it was and it sounded awesome

it was a very wholesome business were there any great stories from that that chapter where either unlock you guys figured out that made things work or a moment you thought he was you were screwed but then you figured something out is there any good stories from from that one thing I can tell you is that even in those early days search engine optimization played a huge role within the business and searching for FAA certified inflight monitors what a niche thing and yet all we needed was one and we really got a million dooll deal from

the SEO because I bought every domain name I was creating fake blogs I had everything pointing back to our company that we dominated not just the first three results but like the first page of results because this was 2009 is when there was a lot less SEO stuff but even now it's such a niche industry one major lesson that I think I could say was that I was lucky to come up under this salt of the earth sales guy who ran our sales team and he was the type of guy you see in movies today

he's got no social media he has nothing this was an Air Force guy who you know would pick up the phone at the at the at the shortest instance would cold call people there's a vivid memory that I have being at the trade show of somebody's badge being flipped around and they walked up and tried to talk to him and he just looks at them looks down at them grabs like like gets in their space grabs their badge turns it around and says oh Dan MCN normi you [ __ ] and and just like that

that like good old boy type of attitude that I got to come up under and so there's so many people out there that are trying to solopreneur that are trying to bootstrap that are trying to hustle that just don't have any experience that have never learned those lessons that I'm so thankful that I got to learn through him and so that was one of those experiences his name was Jay Healey he was a huge influence on how I think about phone calls and sales and outbound and things like that oh wait wait a second I

had a business idea so someone told me Jack Smith said this crowd loves business ideas and so I have a business idea for your listeners I have a couple business ideas but one of them is this you need to create a wh label Enterprise sales team quit trying to hire programmers whatever I want you going out there recruiting the guys selling Cutco knives I want you going to the mall finding the most Hustler guys selling that shoe soap stuff and I want you to start building them and training them on how to sell B2B sass

if you are looking for an aqua hire salespeople are in high demand if you have guys that can sell and girls that can sell this company will get bought I don't care what you're selling but start collecting sales people and build a sales team you'll either get bought out you can build a SAS around it or you'll just get Aqua hired in this is a good business idea Nick what makes you special and Sean experienced it because you guys hung out and I don't think that he fully understood like that this is the type of

stuff that Nick Ray does it's the weirdest quirkiest stuff but when he decides to be quirky and weird it's pretty authentic to him and he goes like a 10 out of 10 Sam is exactly right and it's the same idea of why I'm getting you know things like the hot dog hat for for Sam or the basketball thing for Shawn or like why do we just do little things to just make it interesting because I think that it's just different we can live life a little bit differently and I like to have fun yeah dude

your crayon box has like four extra colors that I don't have that I need to I need to pick up I need to go find these colors um I when I when I was doing the research last night I made a note and I go I think that Nick has chugged the biggest glass of be yourself juice and now he's just belching the the the the remainder out for the rest of the world and you had this great quote you said uh you tweeted this out it didn't go viral but I loved it you said

quit playing it cool life is too short be intense and passionate and mildly insane now whoever's left hanging is your friend yeah yeah the lesson that I would have for listeners is that I can live that way now I think because I grinded it out ground out I ground I gritted it out I think that I can live that way now because I achieved some success and I did some truly great things this is not your cart blanch permission to go an insane person that's not what I'm telling you and there's a fine line between

genius and Insanity I'm not saying that I'm genius I'm probably more insane but I am 42 years old I have had some successful business I have been playing the game of business for way more than half my life and I feel that I have the confidence today to be who I want to be because I have achieved some of that success do you get lonely probably I don't exactly know what it would be not to be Lon L but I have a lot of friends you have a lot of friends and you have a lot

of friends that are like I consider us to be very close where like I you're family to me but sometimes I think to myself I want a nin to5 just because people throughout the day can't hang out with me or I want like a routine just so I could have a family do you know what I mean but then other times I see you just jetting off to Japan on a blind dat and I'm like a that Adventure seems fun but it's hard to have both the stability of like a family sometimes and the The

Eccentric like excitement that you get to have so do you ever get lonely leaning into one of those sides versus The Other Side the largest and most valid critique of me and my lifestyle would be that I am 42 and single and no kids and that people will say that that will be one of the greatest fallacies that I've waited so long to begin my life and my family and that no happiness can come from the the happiness of a parent loving their child and I think that that is 100% valid I also do not

agree with the critiques that say just get married as soon as you can business will follow get married first Above All Else make that your priority I lived my life thus far through at least my late 30s making business success Financial Freedom my number one priority my number one in fact I hired a Matchmaker for a little while when I was in New York and she set me up with like 20 or 30 dates and at the end of it she was like Nick you know what I don't think you even want a girlfriend she

said I think you just want to go on dates she said with your business right now you have no room in your life you would never make a woman your number one priority and I said that's exactly right yeah we should have talked about this beforehand there's like there's no chance like my business is my number refundable yeah yeah and I said like like this is my number one priority is my business I it's all that I think about it's all that I do I would wake up I had this girlfriend in New York who

was a poet and we would wake up in the morning and she would want to you know color and and drink coffee and hang out I'm like babe I gotta grind like I don't I don't have time to call her there's no time to color we can't color today color me unimpressed with this plan yeah yeah no time it's like babe you got to go uh and I'm not here to hang out and that was a different time in my life when I was so focused on that so this leads me to my next business

idea I am going to do potentially if enough people ask me for this the first seven figure millionaire Matchmaker that is only based on a contingency fee so I'm gonna have no cost I'm only going to take the top ofth top clients we're talking people like um I'm not going to name names but but folks that have a minimum probably 50 million net worth five million social followers I'm going to be matchmaking for these people and if they get married only success Gentleman's Agreement handshake million doll minimum success fee I think that that's interesting for

a few reasons number one because think about all the cool people that I'm going to get to meet if I have this little roster of close friends and incredible people that I get to go up an approach and I'm like oh I'm matchmaking for such and such number two is most matchmakers will never work on a contingency basis they only work on a retainer but I don't need the money like I have plenty of time like I'm happy to let this play out over five years C can you explain how a traditional Matchmaker works I

don't think most people know how much is it how much do a good Matchmaker New York cost and what do they give you I think there's a variety of different matchmakers and it's not just in New York City you can find these in Dallas Texas you can find them in San Francisco and Chicago matchmakers by the way gosh let's talk about this there's a huge range there's a huge range and actually PE companies do like to buy these businesses I've heard of two of them Brent B's company has bought one and someone else we both

know looked at acquiring one of them but matchmaking services can go from $5,000 all the way up to $100,000 and the ones that I have heard of it's it's roughly a thou or sorry it's roughly $5,000 a date and they set you up and they extensively pre-screen these women yeah and in advance you get like a PDF like I've I've helped some of my buddies like review some of them you get like a PDF yes of like five different people and they it's crazy it says like lives in Jackson Hole but willing to relocate uh

and then it like does a profile on them and you kind of pick and choose and how how much better is this PDF than just a if I went to somebody's Tinder profile and right click save as PDF what would I be getting that's different in this oh my god well the next piece of advice for listeners is you need to delete your dating apps you guys need to get off of the dating apps because you are not going to be able to make a difference nobody cares about you unless you're above 6 foot you're

devilishly attractive the vast majority of men need to delete their dating apps please and I'll give you one tip you need to join a sports club specifically consider joining a kickball league now why kickball kickball has the largest number of teams so the team size is larger than any other Sport and generally both teams go out for drinks afterwards now you've heard other things like join a run Club go to yoga classes things like that if you do those things you basically can talk to two people at each one you can talk to somebody before

four and you can talk to somebody afterwards but if you're trying to pingpong around this run Club to get numbers it's going to be very very low signal and you're not going to look good think about that start a match you got you gotta answer Sean's question and you have to run which sucks U okay Sean's question was how much more details do you get from a Matchmaker the one that I worked was a different way and so I would not get these detailed Advanced prep sheets for the $5,000 date ones they are checking to

make sure that the things that are important to you are important to them as well and sometimes they do they do background checks on on everyone they do yes they do five grand a date I don't know if this is like the Indian DNA in me but it's like that sounds insane $5,000 a date sounds insane and obviously even if you're wealthy I get the rationality of why it would make sense but that sounds crazy especially when you have a low hit rate or low success rate with it but if you asked me today how

much would you pay if I could introduce you to your perfect person that I'm a Believer in if you said and and I've actually told figures I'm like you should set up a bounty which is that if you introduce me to somebody that I I you know you fall in love with or get engaged or get married to like why would you not put up a million dollar $2 million do for that for them it would make such a huge difference in their life it's it's the best thing money could buy for those people and

that is why I'm retitling myself to be Nick Gray babe Bounty Hunter and if you are listening to this and you are interested in putting up a seven figure bounty to find your person give me a call dude babe the Bounty Hunter such a good moniker you can have your own TV show with us Sam Nick is so funny because when we hung out he was the only person I've ever met in my life who calls people babes but not like not he call Turbo yeah he's just like I was hanging out with these two

babes and I was start laughing like I've just never heard someone say that he's like yeah they were it was cool um okay so you're babe the Bounty Hunter million dollar contingency fee sell to private Equity I kind of love this idea you know I don't know if you're raising for this but I I'm interested we can get you some Distribution on the Pod we could do some special episodes once a month we talk about our our our our Suitor here I'm super stoked I'm excited I'll cut you guys in easy it's a yeah yeah

it's a good deal look here's the thing it's very very hard for extremely successful people whether it's men or women to sell and to Market themselves appropriately and I don't necessarily believe that having money is a bad thing I think it is something to be proud of but there's no good way to say that about yourself anyhow do you know a lot of single wealthy men Sean yeah I know so many of them I call them Peter Pans uh like I've got I've got yeah sorry Nick you're Peter Pan um and what's crazy to me

is Nick's not one of these guys typically I would have thought you'd be good at some type of public speaking whether even if you just have a team of 10 people like you could talk to them in in front of them there's a lot of attributes that you would think would translate to women not the case not the case with a lot of friends and I and that has always boggled my mind you know what I mean do you have friends like that Sean and doesn't that seem kind of crazy yeah I mean the crazier

part honestly is that you know you'll talk to them and it's basically like yeah this is the one thing I really want that's the area of my life that I want to you know invest in I want to to to grow to bloom that's the part of my garden I want to bloom and then then you talk to them they say that to you but in the next four weeks they're like I'm on the road I'm doing sales calls I'm going to this pitch it's like dude you took you took 49 pitches in the last

two months but you know one date and it's like the priorities don't match the calendar but I get it it's because there's a human tendency which is that whatever is not going well for you wherever area you're struggling in it's easy to just avoid that and gravitate towards the things that are giving you that immediate dopamine hit of success of progress of being great at something and I wish that they wouldn't do that you know the the ones I respect the most are the ones who like fight against that grain and they're like dude the

incremental dollar does nothing for me at this point but meeting you know my life partner would be an amazing thing for my life and really put Match their calendar with their priorities dude I have listen to this Nick I hung out with my friend yes uh last week he's worth probably $200 million sold sold the company fabulously wealthy he's 6'4 he's polite nice he's awesome he's just an awesome guy and I met with him and my wife and I met like we hung out with him and he was like Hey I met this girl on

hinge and we matched I don't know what to say to her can you guys like can I like run some idea I'm like are you kidding me you're nervous to have this text based conversation I'm like dude you're the catch here like you're like the you're like perfect what are you talking about and he was nervous and we had to like go through each line he's like does that sound weird does it sound weird if I say this and I think there's a shockingly large amount of men that are like that which is which is

insane to me the dating thing is interesting I Sean I put my hands up when you were doing this because I was like yes the calendar doesn't lie if this is important to you but you know what I'll say something that folks are saying online if you're listening to this podcast because you want to be financially successful I think you need to have priorities in life and it is very hard to run and be laser focused on your business when you're trying to build a relationship dare I say it's almost impossible just a bunch of

dudes playing with harmonicas with balloons talking about how to get chicks yeah oh what are you doing over there Johnny I'm listening to this guy in the harmonica talk about how to find your life partner oh he must be very successful is he married no he's single what was what was your other idea idea okay I got another business idea I think we should bring back web hosting companies specific specifically Services agencies to help local small businesses build very basic WordPress websites we poo poo these simple ideas notice what the focus is the focus there

is sales can you sell it to them but you go to somebody and you say look for 50 bucks a month I'm going to host your site I'll make sure it doesn't get hacked I'll keep it lightly updated you know you can buy an additional thing if you want to make updates but this is a SAS business you are now creating websites where you are selling them this hacker web hosting whatever you're just doing the basic stuff I think we think that we have to come up with this new AI stuff go back to the

basics like start making web pages for restaurants in town and start at the basics I think we need to bring back web hosting companies I got a cool Twist on this which is uh the why now or what what you could do differently now I have a friend who's doing this right now they took I won't give away the category because I don't want them to feel like I invited competition for them but they they found a specific category so a specific type of business it's not pest control but let's just pretend it was pest

control for a second so they picked a category and then they were like cool if I hired like a fancy New York design agency to make an awesome website for this company doesn't have to look super super slick but like much slicker than what they have by default and checks all the boxes of what a company like that needs oh they need to immediately be able to request a quote they need to be able to do XYZ cool got the requirements got five design templates made and then with what they did was they were like

cool you know AI is actually amazing at this so they told the AI they were like ai go find every let's just use pest control as an example every Pest Control business in New York right now that you can find on on the online easy to do it crawls it gives you a spreadsheet of all the the names of the companies and their URLs says great then it created another AI agent that said take their existing website pull out the info and then apply it to one of these five templates and it did that and

then it said and then he said another AI agent was draft a cold email to this list of prospects and include a mockup an attachment that was made by agent 2 that that redid their website and so they're getting this crazy response rate because they're going to these business and they're saying hey I was checking out your site just so you know I'm a web developer I help companies like you I actually made a mockup of your I made a mockup of your your website like of what I think I could do with it if

you think this looks cool I'd be happy to do it for you for this monthly fee and they're doing lead gen they're getting amazing lead gen because they're coming with a hyper personalized offer which is not just hey do you need a website or hey I make websites for companies like you but hey I looked at your site I thought I could you know improve it here's what it looks like improved do you want it and that is is just that makeover can now be automated with AI which again I don't think you need to

make your idea successful but it does add a turbo juice that like didn't exist before that now can work what do you use for that that I mean that that's that outbound seems amazing for everything it is amazing it's the the AI sort of go to market idea which I think right now the people who are going to make the most money in AI are the people who the AI tool providers but then ALS but then the second one is going to be people who can string together AI tools to like turbocharge sales I want

to use them do you know what they are yeah I mean it's three different things right so there's like let's say for the automated emails there's a c tool called clay that's really good at that clay sends personalized emails it basically takes gives you a prospect list it'll enrich the prospect list so it'll cool give me all the companies who fit this criteria it'll give it to you then it'll say add in how many employees they have roughly their revenue range who is their CEO and what's their phone number and it'll it'll fill that whole

table out for you automatically and then you could say cool draft some email scripts for me to email these people and it'll basically create templates that then can be sent hyper personalized templates but before that let's say you need the other piece well you might use claw or something like that where you're going to say build a tool build a little tool for me where I can basically input this and I can get out a website in this format so you maybe use claw with artifacts to do that or some custom work around that and

then the first piece which was just the prospecting that's pretty easy there's a lot of tools that can do the just just the prospecting side for you that's crazy that is crazy God damn help me think about this guys is there something here that I want to RI on which is that Sean just had this great idea notice that my idea was go to local restaurants and try to sell them a new website Sean took it to the nth degree no write a script so now you can do 5,000 a day and blah blah blah

and I want to pull listeners back to my side of the aisle yes I think I think I midwit MD it for you which is to say like there is Beauty in the Simplicity of getting started and and calling and hand coding building your business and that has shown up for me when I did my Museum tour business I was a tour guide you guys I built a multi-million dollar business out of being a tour guide every Friday and Saturday night I was literally leading people at the Museum and I did that for two years

before I even hired my first person how much money are you making just you doing that during the tour guide each ticket was like $80 I would tour for 10 to 20 people a night and doing it every Friday Saturday night so you can do that math dude Sean my uh so Nick had this compy called Museum hack where like was it was it Moma or where what museum the Metropolitan Museum of Art the best museum in the whole world that's where we started he just hijacked it so like he didn't ask them permission if

he could give tours there yeah you called it Renegade Museum of Tours right so not part of their their offering and so he built that business sold it whatever Sarah my wife and and Nick are are close friends and she was like hey Nick can you give my mom and I like a private tour of of Moma or the Met something like that and he's like yeah I got you so apparently my mother-in-law was like you know I like Nick but I kind of felt dangerous being around him because like the security guard would be

like hey you can't go through that elevator and Nick would be like oh no no trust me it's okay and he would just like walk on the elevator like like he would tell them like no you're wrong it's okay trust me and would just go and do whatever he wanted to do and that's is that how you ran your business yeah I like to think that some of those guarded off areas are more suggestions rather than rules and that as long as you're being fence yeah exactly exactly whoa can't go under it watch me um

no no no um I have a lot of respect for these museums and for the art but we would do different non-traditional things we would lay down on the floor to look at the ceiling we would sit down to talk about the art we would talk about how much the paintings cost which is a very taboo thing in the art world and we would do all these non-traditional things in a museum space to really do Museum tours for people who didn't like museums and I want to just say that again I did tours myself as

a side hustle while I was still in the family business this was my thing to build up enough money so I could quit the family job and start my own every Friday Saturday night like like that is why why I had no dating life because I was running this business which brings me to my next business idea Airbnb experiences if you are interested in starting a new side hustle you can sign up on Airbnb experiences to lead a tour in your town and charge people for it this is a way for you to immediately start

to get money from people searching for cool things to do now this only works in major towns where they've launched Airbnb experiences but it's generally tier one and tier your two cities find your favorite stuff do tours for locals show them around to some of your great stuff provide a great experience beg for five-star reviews and you can literally create a side hustle on Airbnb experiences dude I love Airbnb experiences I've done probably 15 of them I freaking love them you ever do those Sean I've never done one but I've looked at it a bunch

I like Nick framing of this which is like I've been thinking about this a lot like starter businesses because I wrote I wrote this blog post post uh this essay last week that was about my kind of like first two years out of college this like really I called it being strategically broke I like just avoided getting a job I said I'm not going to get a job I want to have Max freedom and so I calculated instead of how do I make the most money how do I make like what is the minimum money

I need to have Max freedom and that shift what everybody else that I graduated with was just like how do I get the best job get make the most money which you don't even make that much money anyways it's an entry-level job they all suck and so I think skipping that level of the game altogether was a great choice but at the time it looked really bad like my apartment looked like [ __ ] I lived super Scrappy we slept on air mattresses like all of that stuff you know we couldn't afford a dog so

we got a mouse like you know we did a bunch of like random things like that but then we did little things that were starter businesses like I had a little Tutoring company and then I started doing like a Basketball Camp once a you know during the summer and then we did this like thing where we sold wristbands to like sororities and fraternities who needed like just like a themed thing like they wanted their name written on some [ __ ] and that taught me how to make a website and go to Alibaba and like

none of these were like businesses that were super lucrative or most made no money some made a little bit of money nothing you'd be impressed by but they were amazing starter businesses that get you your first dollar which is like a very addictive feeling and it it's it gets you out of theory and into reality and it gets you moving and it teaches you a bunch of the core tools and skills that you need like sales and marketing that you're going to have to figure out when you're ready for a bigger business and Airbnb experiences

I love this idea because it doesn't even sound like a business it's that much of a starter business anybody could do this this is literally now just a question of like are you willing to actually do something or are you just going to talk about it for the rest of your life and anybody could sign up to do one of these like can you walk in your the area where you already live and can you point your finger at things if you can do if you could do that you could host an airb me experience

and I think it removes all excuses and it gets the ball rolling for people I love these starter businesses love what Sean said that it takes you out of Theory and into practice my first million listeners some of y'all have never run a lemonade stand and it shows okay and so we're going to give you some ideas world star got him here's the next one it's a similar one because you may not like doing tours like I'm not a tour guide Geek Squad type neighborhood computer service I'll give you one that is a genius I

was hanging out with a friend yesterday her laptop was disgusting the screen is all smudged up there's cookie crumbs in the keyboard there's all this stuff and I've had this fantasy of doing of dressing up and just going door too to help fix people's stuff I'm talking boosting their Wi-Fi cleaning their computer helping them with some basic tech support stuff measuring the power another pet peeve of mine is a lot of people have really bad cell phone chargers and cables they're not charging with USBC with the full max power new business idea it's Geek Squad

as a service where you go door too maybe even just to clean up their laptops and phones I found this Gunk online that's this like gel sludge that you put into keyboards to suck up all the dust and the dirt you can walk around with a little toolkit and for $100 make some massive improvements for people all you need for that is about $100 worth of supplies you need a little bit of knowledge on the tech side and need to dress up nice and look respectable but thinking about these things that don't necessarily scale do

those things start there you need to get your hands dirty in these type of environments that's my suggestion did you see Sean when Nick travels did you like did he show you all the gadgets he keeps in his bags yeah he well I didn't see too he he had a pillow he had like an apple Vision Pro uh I don't know what he had like you know some juggling balls he he had you know the essentials dude he he's so funny when he travels like he researches stuff like crazy like he'll have like the best

charger uh but he also is um he knows how he wants to live and he lives that way so for example apparently I don't even know what buckwheat is but there's a buckwheat pillow that he loves and whenever he goes to a hotel he buys that $50 or $100 pillow and he has it shipped to to the hotel room because he's like I have to have this buckwheat pillow Nick what's up with the pillow think how Wild this is that we will spend three four sometimes $500 a night for a hotel even2 $1 a night

and yet your sleep can be ruined by some of the smallest things the pillow was the one variable that as I traveled the world I realized that I could control and someone once said to me strange pillows equals strange dreams and I realized that I might might not be able to control the mattress but I can at least control the pillow and so I learned about these Japanese buckwheat pillows when I was over in Tokyo you kind of even love them or you absolutely hate them the largest hard as a brick have you ever had

one of these I think I might have done it wrong it's mine is so hard yeah you need to remove half of the holes okay so if that's a complaint that you have that it's too hard then just dump out half of the holes and the good news is it's buckweed you can have it for dinner I guess what I appreciate about you is so like I think Sean's the same way as me where I will see something or something disappoints me and I'm like [ __ ] it I'll live with it you know to

be like oh uh you brought me pesto Pizza I ordered a steak Yeah [ __ ] it whatever like I just I don't even like pesto but like I'm just going to deal with it whatever or my haircuts bad and I don't want to complain it'll grow back [ __ ] it uh you are not that person yeah when when the barber asks you do you want it rounded or squared you have an opinion whereas whatever fine you don't have to do it just I like game now you want the money like [ __ ]

me right uh you have opinion about stuff and I appreciate that thank you thanks I and you like put in the effort to like have life your way I I don't really do that as much isn't there some story about like a billionaire who does the same thing nick uh but not with a pillow but with does that with a mattress right yeah what's the story I don't want to comment on it I have heard that somebody does has positioned a couple dozen mattresses around the world in major metropolitan areas and so that when he

goes to the hotel his Advanced team moves the mattress into the hotel room so he has the same exact sleep anywhere just to remove any number of variables possible uh Sam what does your Advanced team do I don't know how to reply to that my Advanced team I'm your Advanced team I love being Sam's Advanced team at events I love to get him the name for that you you Nick is my body guy so sometimes I like for example sometimes I'll get invited to speak someplace and I'll be like I'm only going to go like

for example we had one and I was like I'm only going to go if Neville and Nick will go with me because I don't want to go alone and I'm like Nick do you want to come with me he's like yeah can I be your body guy and I was like I just want you to come as my friend he's like well but can I be your body guy I'm like I don't know what a body guy is but yeah I guess like as long as yeah sure as long as like it's nothing that would

make my wife angry usually into that but I guess and so he's my body guy and he like he goes all right Sam so uh what that means is like uh so on Wednesday your schedule is this this and this we're going to go here here here and here and like I go to this talk and there's like 10 people in the crowd like no one came and he's like all right um we're going to do autographs and photographs over here so Nick uh Sam come with me and like I'm like dude Nick like this

like you're no no one wants to do any of this stuff he's like no no no we're gonna do this and then and then he'll be like uh he'll see someone walking by and he'll grab them and be like hey so is it true that you want to take a picture with Sam and he's like and and he's like I'm like is that what a body guy means a body guy is like the opposite of a bodyguard bodyguard keeps people away a body guy brings people to you that's great I love it he like created

this hype he's like a hype man and it was so funny I had the funniest embarrassing interaction the other day so I was when I went to that trip in San Diego I was wearing this hat this hat um right here and so I was standing waiting for like my tacos at the Taco Shack and this guy goes hey I don't want to bother you but like do you mind if I take a picture and I was like H sure man that's cool you know uh you've been listening for a while he's like no no

I just like I like your hat my friend has a company called West and I just wanted him to to see this and I was like I was like oh um yeah I I just assumed that you want me all you know what are you getting tacos do you want my tacos I had no way out of that that moment um by the way Nick cuther harmonica I got a riff on your idea your Geek Squad thing I think it's a simpler version of it which is every uh parent I know that's like kind of

like my parents age has this box in their house of just old home videos and so I think a even easier one versus like can I help you with your stuff is just to say hey do you guys have any like home videos from your kids uh because I can convert them into stuff that you can have you know on your computer on the internet so you'll never lose them they'll live forever can't even find a VHS player anymore so I can take if you just have that box I'll just take the box and I'll

do it for you and then you basically drive it to like you know CVS or Costco and they do the [ __ ] for you but like there's a gap there where most people don't they're not really aware of the problem or it's on their to-do list they'll never do it but if a kid showed up at their door dress nice million dollar smile and said I'd love to take care of that for you I'm doing that for people in the neighborhood I could take it from you right now just show me the closet where

it is and I'll go grab it I think that you can make you know an easy few thousand do um you know in a couple months of effort effort there which sounds like not that much but you know at different phrases of your life a few thousand dollars is all the money it's all you need right and and it gets you going knock knock ma'am can I ask you a question how much are your memories worth boom boom keep your memories safe yeah it's an easy it's an easy cell you use the Wolf of Wall

Street fair enough close like you watch all the YouTube videos about sales and you over you're complete Overkill going door too it's like Sam have you seen that that company that's doing these nap these nap bands me and Nick we're talking about this on the plane there's like if you haven't seen this on Twitter SE it's thisp band they have this like device that's like you gotta find it's called element or something like that it's uh to put you to S to send me my freeit shipping I I've been begging these guys to try it

because I'm a I'm a prolific Napper and napping is like part of my brand and uh I really how do you spell it e l e m i and and Sean and I can act out the skit that we're going to do as a promo video for you if you want I'm Deepu Chopra or a billionaire this is what they're doing right now it's a pre-released product but they're building insane hype on Twitter because they'll go to a famous person so Nick I'm the billionaire and you're the founder of el mind okay deepo I'm gonna

give you the new um El mind why don't you put this on and see if it'll set you to sleep just like this okay that's it m what's up everybody I'm Susie CEO of alamine this is deepo Chopra look at that little [ __ ] fell asleep in 5 minutes he's out like a light [ __ ] you can't even hear me what's up deep little [ __ ] free orders open now this isal strategy right now they take a famous person and they just knock them out so fast but almost to the point where

they're just drooling and it's like yo and she literally puts a picture of them sleeping it's like my worst nightmare it's like punked it's like a mix of eight sleep and Ashton ccher coming out the van it's amazing it's the best Market C I've seen in a while she does have that attitude she's like deepok troa got him the leader of the Free World right now but watch this boom out like a light [ __ ] yeah oh sleeping like a little baby little CEO needs nap [Laughter] time is this legit at all I think

I think it is legit I think it I would pay for this thing I want it I want it yeah this is this is insane there's no way this works right no I think it works yeah I'm a Believer well speaking of unique marketing strategies can I talk about what I did on Google reviews with my Google Maps photos well and by the way the Equinox lady came up on this element eleine thing I want to hear the Equinox story tell the Equinox story first cuz I hadn't heard that uh before until you texted me

last night but I have only heard you texted me so I don't I don't know the story great so first of all the moral of the story I'm just going to cut to it is that listeners next experiment that you need to be doing bring back blogging you need to fill the AIS and the AIS need to have data from the public web to scrape I've been saying this for a long time blogging needs to make a comeback take some of your best Tweets put them into your blogs if you need to you don't have

to create new content but just put the stuff you're sharing elsewhere into blogs a great example of that is my own monthly Recaps if you go to nickr news.com you go to the blog you click the monthly Recaps I take some of my best posts and I put it there on the blog on the public internet in order to scrape and you need to do this for a few reasons but one of the reasons is for nefarious purposes I wanted to find a list of all of the Equinox gyms in New York City that had

swimming pools very hard list to find and so I made my own list of all the equ o gyms with swimming pools it started to rank pretty quickly as the number one search result for other people searching for the same thing unfortunately my gym started to get very crowded and I would have to wait for the lanes to swim at my gym and I'm getting 50 100 visitors a day to this page and so I uh closed my gym swimming pool according to my blog for maintenance for a year so that I would have to

wait for less people and people would say hey they'd go there they'd say hey guys sorry this pool's closed for a year you know we're resurfacing the bottom pavement but these are some other nearby pools and yeah so that's jail listen Sean Google like nickr Equinox he has a PDF on his website download download my full list of Equinox uh gyms with pools and you could and and if you sign up we'll send you uh the pool links for each of the New York City quinox pools you know I got that lead magnet for the

friends newsletter brother I'm here lead magnet yeah you're going to be you're going to have just dozens of pool fans in New York who worship you wait literally that's my life a dozen here a dozen there all right so you SEO hacked your way into having your own Pool Time for free because you told everybody the pool's closed that's on them for not having better SEO cool yes yes I have a couple other stories like that what okay yeah give us give us a couple other I like these uh cool so you know gray area

oh dude the the gray area Perfect theme with your last name all right keep going the gray area I like it all right here's another reason that you should be blogging and writing about interesting things I noticed that that movie about Herbal Life the bill Amman movie was produced by this hedge fund guy named John fichthorn and I couldn't really find a lot about him and he wasn't ranking for a lot because some of these guys story is basically that Jon must have been Pro Herbal Life and Amman was anti- Herbal Life and so they

were having like a PR fight John was anti as well and was funding this movie to show Bill's sort of anti-tory some some reason or another John got involved I don't remember the gist of it but he was a hedge fun guy who was a producer of this movie and there wasn't a lot about him so I wrote an article about all the stuff I could find about him various news articles whatever I scraped it I put it all into a thing and literally like six months ago he called me up he's like hey is

this Nick Gray I was like yeah he's like uh this is John fitone you wrote an article about me I was like oh my God I'm so sorry like do you want me to remove it he's like no I just want to fix some things can you change some of these things that you got wrong and we ended up having like a 30 minute phone call he told me about his new strategies and ideas and all the things he's doing super cool connection that he doesn't know me from anybody but because I rank for him

he reached out and he wanted to help out that's that's one reason I've done this in other times if there's this art thing called the Normandy panels okay the SS Normandy was a French cruise ship that traveled the world in the 1930s basically to Proclaim to the world that France is awesome and it had some of the most amazing art deco Interiors I became captivated with the story of the ship um World War II broke out the ship was changed into a military craft and all the guts were ripped out and now show up in

private collections around the world I love this stuff nobody was really tracking these panels and so now I am the def facto resource for these panels on the internet just as a hobby project that I've maintained on my blog last week I literally got a call from a conservation expert at the Metropolitan Museum of Art asking me for advice about who they can talk to as they're thinking about these panels and how they're going to show and display them all of this is through publishing and living your life online these are little moments of when

I've done that that have paid off for me in the long game it's important to know this didn't happen overnight this is a long-term investment Nick there was a guy who I did a podcast with a couple days ago Sam couldn't make it and it's it's a guy named gu Spear and he's a he's a kind of well-known value investor he's a disciple of Warren Buffett and Charlie Munger he ended up meeting Warren Buffett and all this stuff and one of the things that came out of it that I didn't realize is he he read

the the book persuasion uh by Robert Chini or whatever I forgot what the exact title is I think it's pers influence influence sorry and I guess the context is he had a fund and he was investing kind of friends and family money he's like dude I'll never get Beyond friends and family money if like I don't learn how to do sales and marketing I have no idea how to do that but like let me go try to read a couple books so he reads this book and he reads about the guy who was the number

one car salesman in the world he says this guy broke the Guinness Book of World Record sold the most cars more than anybody else and they went and they studied him and they said what what are you doing differently what is your influence what is your persuasion technique and he used to send out thousands of handwritten notes to anybody he would meet he would send a letter and the letter was very simple he would write their name and he would write I like you and um and he's like you know people like to be liked

that's it it just said dear Sean I like you from I don't know the exact that's what the book says I don't know if there was more to it now he reads this and he's like he's like I don't know much he's like I'm not great at many things he's like but when I do hear something that like might help me he's like I'm desperate enough where I just throw my all into it the one good thing about me is I don't have go in so he's like I decided all right I'm not leaving work

any day until I've written at least three notes he's like first one he wrote was like you know Sam I like you he's like oh my God I can't send this this just feels so weird so he's like okay I'll change that to thank you he's like I can always say thank you he's like thank you for blah blah blah he's like I could always find something to thank them for and U so he started writing three thank you notes a day and he started writing that and he started upping the volume and then he

tell tells a story about how that led to ultimately him actually meeting Warren Buffett he's like you know it's not that everything you know turned into some transactional thing is it but I didn't even want that he's like it's not even that I actually genuinely felt it in the moment he's like I forced myself to do it but then I started to kind of feel it like as I went because I'd have to think what am I thankful for and if you keep asking yourself what am I thankful for in this person you'll start to

actually appreciate them more it started to work and what H happened was he went to the annual meeting of this guy Mish PAB and monish was a famous investor he's been on the Pod he wrote him a letter afterwards that just said Thank you for having me at the event um and by the way he didn't invite him he just said Thank you for having me at the event I had a great time and that was it and monish called him the next day and he goes um hey I don't know he's like I'm monish

he's like oh wow how'd you get my number he's like he's like well I looked you up because you you know I've been having these meetings for for years and you're the only guy who's ever wrote me a thank you note afterwards and so I just I just had to get to know you would you like to get lunch tomorrow so they get lunch and at the lunch says you know this lunch is great Warren Buffett has a charity lunch and I think we should bid on it uh would you come in with me like

you know whatever amount you're comfortable with I'll cover the rest I'll cover you know four fifths of it three fours of it you cover whatever your share is but I want to go to it with you oh so guy spear was up more upand coming with than Manish yes exactly Manish had like a he had like a at the time like a $80 million net worth guy was much smaller than a single digit millions and um so guy was like I I think I could put in like 150k 200k 250k okay Max please and uh

and so they they bid on it they won and then they end up eating Warren Buffett now the story comes full cirker while we're doing the podcast he could reaches back and he goes is this on video and he pulls out a letter that Warren Buffett sent him just saying guy thanks for coming to the event you know um you know blah blah blah and he's like Warren he's like with his assistant sends out these holiday cards every year to thousands thousands of people and he's like he's like Warren Gets this principle of basically everything

you publish out there whether it's a directed thank you note or Nick in your case these blog posts that you publishing to the world is a invitation for Serendipity you don't really know what's going to come out of it but if you do enough of it in the long term like you will far out kick your coverage you will get a huge return on this investment um plus it just feels good to everybody involved doing it you'll feel good doing it they feel good that's such a good story that's a great story the surface area

of serendipity and they talk about that in a lot of different things right that's why we we you don't get lucky you put yourself in the opportunity to become lucky right you uh you want to hear another fun fact about Nick I he's the only person who has host parties and literally five of his ex-girlfriends will be there at the same time and they all love each other and they get along perfectly I want to host a girlfriend conference I want to host a conference for all my ex-girlfriends because I really do think that they

would get along and they're such incredible amazing people it might be the worst idea ever but but I do I think you should 100% do that just I think there's no doubt this idea I see no potential issues yeah think I think this is this is going to go wonderfully I I think that's I think that's perfect I think you've nailed it home run Nick can you talk can you give us the five minute crash course on how to throw a party um you know what is the I haven't read your book yet I'm sorry

I bought it but I haven't read it yet what many how many copies have you sold by the way 20,000 maybe 21,000 it's pretty good that's great pretty good right each one here's the thing about a party book by the way nobody wakes up and says you know what I need today is a book about how to host a party they want books about how to get rich they want books how to lose money how to blah blah blah nobody says they want a party book and so that's been an uphill battle so I'm very

very proud of that self-published sales figure and but I I understand you have something called the Nick method I don't know what the Nick method is what is the Nick method for hosting a party so the Nick method to host a party will absolutely level up I'm going to do harmonic on this because if you do this one thing you will level up your events to be so much better and the reason is that the bar is so low for a successful event think when somebody invites you to like a company happy hour you're just

people standing around at an open bar it's like bad that's that's the old way and the future can change if we Bend our will to make it do that you can do that with the Nick method when you host events n c k like my name the n stands for name tags fill out the name tags first name only big block letters the name tags I like are the qualek 300s I also like the Avery 54 24s the qual 300s come in six different colors and you guys may know those they discontinu the 54 26s

which was really sad actually it's the Vintage you should you should completely make up the model numbers by the way and just see if anyone ever finds out and be like I've been waiting I have an envelope for the it's a golden ticket it's like for the first person that realized that I was completely making up the model numbers of these name tags you are my fellow nerd I may have got those model numbers wrong why do the name tags matter because I went to a party with of yours and at first I was like

okay this is second grade this is cheesy but then it was kind of useful obviously because I don't remember a lot of people's names but it seems like there's more to it than that what is the like what's the why behind the why the why behind the why is it's like a sports Jersey to show everybody that we're on the same team have you ever walked into an event it's the first time you've gone to something and you figure that it's me walking into something else everybody else must know each other they must all be

friends already I Am The Outsider when you have name tags you show that you are all on the same team this is not a party of clicks we're all here together by the way if you host meetups you absolutely have to do name tags when you host at a bar or another public spot so you know who is there for the Meetup have you ever gone to a Meetup and it's at like a beer garden and you're like well who's here for the Meetup like oh these people it's like great I guess I'll just figure

it out on my own Amateur hour all right and name tags I'm in I buy yeah and his name tags I stands for intros or ice breakers when I wrote the book I called them icebreakers but there's such a cringe reaction to the idea of icebreakers on that word so now I call them intros and this can be in small groups it can be your whole group together but what's the first thing that everybody asks when they meet you what's your name what do you do for work we're going to get that out of the

way by having everybody say it real quick I think it is important by the way to say what people do especially for listeners of this pod because you never know who's looking for a job who wants to network who's working on growing their business but those rounds of intros give you an excuse It's a conversational crutch for your guests to go up and start new conversations your role as the host great way to do that like is there a better and worse way to do those intros or icebreakers my man of course dude I've done

more ice I I live and breathe icebreakers you have come to the right spot uh welcome to Nick Gray's party Icebreaker therapy because I've spent a lot of my life doing ice breakers um here's the deal there's do you know uh do you know Stefan from SNL's Weekend Update like you are Stefan right now that is you that is you I'm so passionate about ice Burgers because I've seen so many bad ones you know an example of a bad one is all right everybody team meeting let's go around and say one fun fact about yourself

that's a terrible Icebreaker so much of my work involves making people that have social anxiety or consider themselves introverts to feel more welcome and I know that some of them are going to hate this idea of intros but ideally what they like is to be able to know what to expect and minimal surprises and so a green level Icebreaker or intro at the beginning of an event when there's no social Rapport when people new and a little uncomfortable is just an easy one that doesn't take time the exact question that I have most people do

is hey everybody real quick let's just do a round of intros you got to say the why the why is that there's a lot of interesting people here and I really want you to go meet somebody new so we're going to have you say your name say what you do for work or how you spend your day and then tell me one of your favorite things one of your go-to things that you like to eat for breakfast now that's a bit of a red Hain because I actually don't want to know their breakfast I want

to know what they do for work but we take away the attention we make them think about the breakfast the breakfast one works because it's easy it's subjective people don't judge you for it and it's not hard you don't get locked up in your head a bad example would be hey everybody let's go around name what do you do for work and tell me your favorite Business book favorite is definitive it is your absolute favorite people are going to judge me oh my God favorite what's my favorite what's my favorite so we start with a

very easy one so you could do the breakfast if you want to make it a little edgier you could ask people and say your favorite Vice or say what was one of your first online screen names and why did you choose it or what was one of your first jobs that you ever got paid cash money for now those are beginner level ones I want to tell you an advanced one but I want to check with you guys can I keep going yes yes keep going as you continue the event about an hour later you

want to do one more advanced round of intros and this is what I call a value additive intro value additive means that everybody's answer adds to the benefit of the room and so for Sam for example who lives in Connecticut now say that he was hosting this in Westchester you would say hey everybody we're going to do our last round of ice breakers your question is going to be what is one of your Westchester Pro tips or life hacks or little secrets what's a small business you support a dog park you like a hiking trail

you enjoy what's the best coffee shop in town tell us one great thing in town that you like and want to shine a light on okay so that's one example one more example if you don't want to focus on your town would be hey everybody we're going to do a last round of intros and I want you to share a great piece of media that you have consumed recently what's a movie you watched a documentary a podcast like my first million like And subscribe Gentleman's Agreement uh what are some of those things that you liked

and you want to share okay and then you go around the room and you do that why does this work it works because every answer gives somebody value oh I've been meaning to go to that restaurant oh my first million I love those guys oh I I heard about that book I want to check it out and you do it towards the end of your event so at the end people get all these new ideas they've met all these new people and they leave with a feeling of value they leave feeling that they're better than

when they showed up that's what a good party is you did something at a party I went to of yours where I don't know you were like lurking around or you were hopping from combo to combo but then when you brought every back together you go James will you tell people that amazing uh email trick that you did that uh really improved your your open rates and the guy said something that was like so useful to me that I was like that one thing alone made this party worth going to because it's like you had

eyes and ears around the room so you could pluck the best kind of like Pro tip that you heard and you had two or three people go um and you just had them share with the whole group in that moment uh I thought that was pretty awesome that's an advanced tip and the main thing I want your listeners to know is that I found that interesting people want to meet people that are doing interesting things and the fastest way to become interesting was for me to host my own events so we talked before about those

business ideas that you don't need a lot of capital for hosting events is kind of the same way you can do it with very little money each party should cost you less than $100 these strategies start from beginner to advance and I've helped hundreds of people to host their very first party using this method you should be going through life collecting the interesting people that you meet and why is this helpful well it helped me launch a multi-million dollar business called Museum Hack That was launched on the back of the network that I built up

from hosting all of these events I hear from a lot of people oh my God I'm going to do a startup party I'm going to do a launch party for my new app I was like awesome perfect how many events have you hosted or when was the last event you hosted oh oh I've never hosted anything I'm like bro you have a cold list like nobody knows you like no offense but like in real life nobody knows you nobody cared this is not going to be a successful launch party you need to start building up

and hosting these little events by the way the perfect size for a happy hour in my opinion is about 15 to 22 people I could talk forever about this but a small plug I wrote a book called the two-hour cocktail party that is really more like a workbook or a step-by-step guide that helps you actually do it and by the way if you want to go through a cohort or something you give me $100 at the end of hosting the party I'll give you the $100 back that's how it works but host might change your

life the book made you like the king of the introverts because I had so many introverted friends um who like read the book and they started hosting nickr parties and I would be like walking around Austin at like seven o'clock at night and in Austin all the bars are outdoor bars and I would see I would I swear to God there was this one one mile walk through East Austin of like where all the bars are and I would see multiple Nick Ray parties happening harm Monica is all throughout downtown Austin Jo is the night

they would be in a circle and they would we I call them we would call them name tag Nick so they always had uh Nick's name tags and they would be in a circle and I could see the person in the middle pointing exactly like tells you to do in the book I swear to God on one one mile walk I saw uh three I saw one at Lazarus one at whistlers and one this other bar it it was three Nick Ray parties it was insane it's like you were the introverts uh uh king for

a handful of months when I would in in Austin so many of people were doing it the reason we're doing this is that people are hungry for in-person events we're all digitally saturated we want that human connection and I found that you can add value to people by introducing them to other interesting people if you're looking for a business idea if you're looking to raise your status in the world you have to start by adding value and hosting a party introducing the interesting people you know that is a way that you can add value dude

you have so many stories we we probably should wrap up in a minute but you got like so many freaking stories I I just want I want you just to like rattle off stories I just like hearing all the most interesting things that happen even without explaining for the completionist can you just say what the C and the k stand for in the Nick method the Nick method n i c k n is name tags I is intros C stands for cocktails or mocktails only do not do a dinner party I talk about why dinner

parties are a recipe for failure for new firsttime hosts and K stands for kick them out at the end this is only a two-hour Gathering you want to keep it tight you want people to leave when they're wanting more leave when they're wanting more end it when it's going great just like this podcast thanks for watching bye-bye [Music]