How He Made $1M in 60 Days [$52M Exit]

this is Marshall he did the thing that every entrepreneur dreams of doing exiting a bootstrap company yeah we sold it for 52 million got about 18 million cash and then another around 8 million seller note about a $26 million package and then I hung on to to equity as well but here's the crazy part he started it as a side business that he barely even worked on at first he literally tracked every hour he spent on it and viewed it as a game January to May 1st 2024 782 hours 782 hours total got the receipt

so second I can prove it so if you take his $26 million package divided by 782 hours it breaks down to $33,000 an hour which doesn't even include his Equity cut that is wild and assuming 8 hour work days that breaks down to spending only 97 days total on this business I use this as a way to see okay how little time can I spend on something you know things still happen without me yeah I looked at it almost like a game you know like how little could I could I do with this okay I'll

be honest I was a little intimidated walking into his huge house I kind of felt like I maybe was wasting his time he had just sold his business for a $52 million valuation but I couldn't have been more wrong he was the most genuine dude ever and I was blown away by how clearly he articulates different aspects of business today he's great at delegation but he didn't used to be everything is practice like you're not out of the gate good at delegating to other people or starting a company or marketing whatever like anything takes a

lot of reps and you get better over time and and I VI delegation the same way like I had a lot of false starts and oh love the idea of hiring an assistant they would do it like I don't know what to give this person you know like I went through the all that same stuff but here's the thing it wasn't always easy for Marshall a lot of his businesses were really hard until he found what he called certain cheat codes to play the business game on easy mode back when we running e-commerce stuff like

Top Line was growing and I was like why are we not making money like then when I shifted to like a different business I felt like I was on easy mode an influencer if they have their own business and they can promote it to their own audience it's like the biggest cheat code ever like another idea I think that someone could run with that I think is really interesting is it's just such a cheat code in my opinion if I was launching this business today I would so I flew out to Dallas to sit down

with him and learn his Frameworks for identifying really profitable businesses how he built and sold multiple successful companies the brand new business he's working on right now and all of his favorite cheat codes that he's learned along the way as always check out the link in the description for all the resources and tools that he mentions let's dive in Marshall thanks for having us man thanks for coming so let's Jump Right In in April of 2020 you did two things that would change your life forever what did you do yeah so it was Co right

you know it's all everything's locked down you know it's like I had an e-commerce business eventually that boom you everyone in e-commerce boom we didn't know what it was going to look like and I also had a bunch of shortterm rentals we're getting all these cancellations like I've got these businesses that I don't know if you know they're going to do well through this they're going to hurt the and I remember you know seeing stories of all these different startups that were started during downturns and recessions it just felt like we're going to hit a

recession and I was like okay you can either feel bad or you can you know buckle up and try to do something about it you know I just started listing out different ideas and different things so first you know I had this e-commerce business called peel we sold super thin iPhone cases is what we were known for and it was a mobile accessory brand and so it's like okay what can we do in this space that fits what's happening in the world right now and we came up with this product called touch tool and it

was made out of brass and it was basically a keychain tool to allow you to open doors and basically not touch surfaces and again this was before we knew you know it was transferred Airborne you know we thought it was touch and we ended up developing it I mean super fast it was I think six days from like idea to in manufacturing and taking pre-orders on the website and it it just went Bonkers it ended up doing a million dollars in sales over a 60-day span from like idea to the 60th day it just blew

my mind you know and so you know I think it was a a product for the times and it did really well we had the perfect timing it just like everyone's in a panic and need something you know and the other thing is I launched a business called at the time called Shephard we later renamed it to some.com we're essentially a head hunter agency to find overseas Talent from remote roles with primarily us companies so everything from assistance to people in operations find like whatever the role if you can find them uh overseas in a

remote role at the time in the Philippines and that business went on to to be a big acquisition for me and prior to that you're already in the eCommerce game you already were doing uh some real estate as well can you talk about the business peel and how you decided to start that and is that where your first like successful business came from yeah one of the early ones that made actual money for me was was peel and a couple other e-commerce things so it was essentially like the thinnest case you could possibly get help

with scratch protection a little bit of drop protection and so we were we were known for the original super thin case and started that I think in December 2012 so yeah that was at the time yeah I was like 8 to 9 years old by the time the touch tool thing happened so we had been around for a while and had you know established following and stuff yeah and and looking back at that like are there any lessons for somebody just getting started in their business journey to like pick something popular say an iPhone and

then pick you know the you're going to be the most this or you know the thinnest or the most durable like is that how you guys were thinking about it and looking back is that how you would encourage others to I like that framework you know like e-commerce stuff we just looked at like let's solve some simple problems with Simple Solutions like there was a a beding company uh sleeping I always think I'm saying like a gambling company linen bedding company and the thought was like making your bed is really annoying you know okay how

could you how could you solve that and obviously like the first thought is like a mechanical arm that like makes your bed for you and like that's that's way too complicated I'm not an engineer so our solution with that is an example was like well let's break down what making a bed is you have to kind of ret tuck in the sheet you have to realign the top sheet in duve cover well okay what if you cut the top sheet and the duvet to be the same size what if you had a really light connection

system for the top sheet and duvet cover that kept them together so that was like one of our first things we launched around Peele as well and so I I like of just kind of keeping t ABS on like what are little annoyances I have throughout the day that you kind of just live with and you kind of shrug off or like well you know if there was a solution for this I might actually like someone might pay money for this and so I for a long time for years I used to just keep a

log of like not like what's a problem cuz I think that is such a hard way to look at things cuz you don't feel like it's a problem cuz you're you're used to living with it where is there like friction in my life and I think that's even too strong of a word friction you know like a little annoyances friction or or personal frustration list I've heard of people I tell you had the the 5minute journal there maybe after people are done with their what they're grateful for they could do their anti-g gratitude of business

ideas and then with that list then it's you know scale back the again like this way of solving making your bed you know I think people think oh mechanical arm let's think of how the Jetson in future do this but we'll know like what's the simplest way to solve this and that'll make it easier for you to develop the product as a firsttime entrepreneur I mean at any level and I think it also makes the marketing a lot simpler it's really easy to pitch this thing when you have a really simple solution we used to

always think about it like what's a Gable solution like could we make a little 5-second clip you're like I get it you know in that little uh clip so like the cell phone case is just like you show a bulky one you show this you show the original it's like I get it you know it's like okay it looks way better it looks like your iPhone still and not slapped on rubber you know what I mean so so you touched on kind of being in the game for a while and you're able to that enabled

you to see an opportunity when Co came around and uh and move really quickly you also had were using within your own business you kind of just were looking for offshore like Scrappy Solutions where did that lead you literally my first business was a an architectural rendering business I used to want to be an architect I worked for a firm for a few years I loved you know when firms had someone internally that could either sketch or make a 3D model of what the project is going to look like and put on the sign or

whatever but not everyone had that so I found a group happened to be in the Philippines that you know could do the Artistry work I knew Architects and I went you know and sold that and so that was kind of my first foray into like Outsourcing you know was working with someone overseas they did the deliverables I basically sold it and you know built the brand around it so then when I had the e-commerce business you know we hired operations people we had a finance person in the Philippines you know was not afraid to do

that and had just always a remote team and it was always a mix of us and European and overseas talent I you know look at friends businesses we you know chat and compare numbers you know whatever and it's just like no one was really they they were very afraid to like hire over seas or they just flat out waren and I went over to the Philippines and hung out with Jer who eventually was my my co-founder uh he was doing operations work for Peele and he I remember him showing us around town he's like yeah

that Tower is MX customer support that one is stripe customer support shop fies in there and it was just like kind of eye opening of like okay like Fortune 500 is doing this they get it it's hard being a small business like you you know they're always beating small businesses out it's like why are none of my friends doing this so that was kind of the impetus of of that idea was like man like it's been an unlock for my own business it's helped improve margins like we've struggled with you know money at some points

and it just really helped having being lean so um the thought was like all right like I need to help other small businesses do this so that was the thought you know started hitting up friends and like hey I'm offering this service like we were kind of doing a little bit of Consulting in as well the time of like let me look at your business let me make some recommendations on where I think you should hire and for what roles but yeah kind of snowballed from my own experience and then hitting up friends and didn't

know what a head hunter was until uh I read that term in a book while starting the business and figured out the the pricing model that way but yeah it was you know good timing with Co and people being open to the idea of more remote work and it's kind of a perfect storm as well at the time yeah and then what did that business look like in Revenue the first couple of years you know we were at the time it was three to five grand ahead you know was like our finers fee uh when

we plac talent and so very quickly was you know five grand to 10 to 30 by the time I sold it we were doing I think around 15 million in Topline we had really high margins very very profitable business we dog fited the whole business 99% of the staff was in the Philippines or Latin America and it was me and and I think two other us guys so yeah it scaled super quickly it was all bootstrapped we never raised money yeah we were around 10 million IA when we sold and we were at eight on

the track to do 10 I guess when we sold but grew very very quickly um and there's obviously a few reasons for that we can get into but yeah and uh and how much did you end up selling it for yes we sold for 52 as a valuation I ended up selling to Nick Huber which was a a partner that came in later to help kind of promote the business he was a customer and he helped grow the business with his own audience and then you know basically saw the inside of the business I really

love this business we got an offer um from someone else to acquire it obviously had to tell all shareholders decided to turn it down and then Nick you know came in at the last minute was like well what if I bought it you know more all cash um at a slightly better valuation so that's kind of how that all came to be and so how much did you end up selling the business for yeah we sold it for 52 million and how much was did you take home I kept around 13 12% of the business

stayed on the board and then I sold got about1 million cash and then another around 8 million seller note so about a $26 million package and then I hung on to to equity as well and that was just a regular Tuesday for you what what did that feel like no yeah I always read about how people feel when the wire hits um it it's just weird you're like okay you know obviously big smile I'm like refreshing with my wife but yeah I just went and played pickle ball that evening and just like a the rest

of the day was kind of normal I just like you know that point you know what's coming and so you kind of almost already mentally celebrated I don't want to downplay it it was a really really awesome experience and that's you know what you always hope as an entrepreneur is have some big outcome and I had fun bought some toys you know but things eventually settle back down you come back to reality but yeah it's a lot of fun what would you say was there a certain point in time you remember when you imagine do

you feel successful today I feel financially free I guess is the way I would deem it you know I have kids I have a wife like there's other things that matter besides just money um but it feels good to like you know secure that outcome and you know as long as we're not stupid with money like we should be taken care of for the rest of our lives and it just feels good to kind of check that box off and you have been in the game for a while and at the end of the day

all we're talking about is resource allocation right are you allocating your time your budget budget your headcount towards the thing that drive the business you actually put together like an awesome delegation uh uh leap course I think like a few years back that I remember going through and you had a few screenshots maybe we'll show them on screen of like here's how I would do it in notion and like very tactical ways to walk through of like thinking about delegating what are some of like the few loow hanging fruit delegation things that you see most

entrepreneurs are not doing yeah I mean I think as a whole people don't delegate enough or just don't get started at all yeah the course you're mentioning was something we did for free that people can still find but if you're starting for the first time and you're you know trying to figure out what should I even delegate use your notes app get a piece of paper whatever just keep a log of what you do day-to-day like as you're you know working throughout today tomorrow and just log everything you do do I check stats at this

time do I go you know reply to comments on YouTube videos here or you know Twitter or whatever and then review that and I would bucket things into you know what's what's like a a thing that comes up ad hoc that is a what's a daily what's a weekly what's a monthly what's maybe there's some annual tasks as well and I would start to put together an sop which is a standard operating procedure basically open Loom record yourself doing the thing and walk through and literally verbally talk through what you're doing that will be your

your directions to give to someone else to now hopefully hand that off to someone you know obviously first time and review what they do but that's the basics of it all the way from hiring your first person all the way up to delegating management and how you think about things is like you just have to translate your knowledge to someone else and I just try to do that in the the least tedious way possible which is just record yourself doing it and so you know I think for a small company maybe you're a solar entrepreneur

or a larger business any size I like to think about things through departments like any like any big business you have marketing you have sales you have someone doing the deliverables or maybe it's delivering the product or the you know it's a software whatever if software it's you have developers you have a finance department and if it's just you that's that's fine it's five minutes out of your day here and I'm finance department but I like to think about it that way because as fast as you can I would think about getting someone fully dedicated

I'm hiring a customer support person I'm hiring a videographer I'm hiring a salesperson to plug into that role and like that's entrepreneurship at the end of the day is you can delegate these things you put people in places to do the work you can scale up via that you keep adding in those people eventually if you get large enough you can hire managers to manage those people and eventually you can hire a CEO to oversee the managers and all these departments and you sit on a board and like that's the ladder you know and it

starts with the basics of of handing off your knowledge to someone else to do the thing so you no longer have to do it and you can think about your business and have the time to think about tweaking and how how do we you know how are we going to grow what are we going to do here and that's that's the essence of the like working in your business versus working on I think everyone knows about totally and um I think you even had the idea too of like now perhaps you could actually record it

maybe you don't have somebody that you're going to give that to but that could help you maybe take that recording get it transcribed put it into Ai and like have it write the SOP for you or have it say like what am I missing here maybe that nowadays could be like Step Zero one just get it into an sop using AI then hire somebody to make it better yeah yeah for sure before AI like I actually like to have the person like the first person in that role whether it's an assistant or someone doing that

watch my video and you write the written directions and then I'm going to read your directions and that will tell me did I miss something did you miss something and then go do the thing and obviously we'll review you know how that went and and all that you got to obviously you can't just hand it off and be done but yeah I like that from like a checks and balances standpoint of like did you you know cuz we all think we explain something how we know it but like how like it's translated and how someone

internalizes it can be different there can be gaps so I think that's a good way to to catch that along the way do you have any weird tracking uh behaviors or weird habits that that you like to do on the internet yeah yeah one thing I have done for probably seven to 10 years is I track my time even though I don't build my time out hourly or anything so I use uh Harvest just kind of sits in the taskbar of my Mac and from just like really high level I've broken things up into at

one point I had a few different companies I was involved in and it was just that it was just company name company name company name answering emails doing Finance tasks things like that I kind of just grouped them high level I wasn't trying to get super granular and as I like swap between you know working on Shephard today and now I'm going to switch to peel for 2 hours or whatever I would just you know toggle the timer and and I've done that for years and years and years and the reason why I did it

is because I wanted to look back and see like it started from like a how much time am I really spending on this like if this is the priority I want the time that I'm spending across everything to reflect that I think we're terrible estimators as humans and so it's just a habit that's stuck and uh yeah I've it's unlocked or it's uncovered a lot of interesting findings for me um and then on the delegation side when I decided I wanted to get better at delegation I use this as a way to see okay how

little time can I spend on something you know things still happen without me was a measure I use for it yeah I love that so much because like even the order of which we just talked about first was like yeah you know batch out your things on Tuesdays and then you know then you switch rolls on and you put that on your calendar for Wednesdays you do something else but in reality people just move if it's just you on the invite you move that around it's like not an actual look back this actually is a

look back where you are clicking start work you do the thing stop work and that enables you to like see patterns that you otherwise would have never seen yeah I looked at it almost like a game you know like how little could I could I do with this the other thing too is like everything is practice like you just you're not out of the gate good at delegating to other people or starting a company or marketing whatever like anything takes a lot of reps and you get better over time and and I VI delegation the

same way like I had a lot of false starts and oh love the idea of hiring an assistant it would do like I don't know what to give this person you know like I went through all that same stuff and I was actually reading in your 200 18 yearly review you said uh that you hired an assistant and you had this kind of aha moment and said you would always up to that point uh ultimately find it too cumbersome to explain how to do everything and then cancel hiring like cheap virtual assistant $8 an hour

this time however I went super premium and hired someone three hours per day for $37 an hour what would your recommendation be for an entrepreneur step one do this kind of time audit and see where you would want help step two Go premium with your virtual assistant I think if you can I like like if you have a lot of tasks that are ideally in a perfect world you have a big chunk of your time is spent on something where you can hire someone dedicated for that however if you're more peac meal and I'm spending

you know two hours a day on bookkeeping and an hour on social media moderation and you know an hour of this and that maybe hiring a a more broad just kind of generalist assistant executive assistant is maybe better for you at that stage so when I wrote that that was 2018 that was prior to starting Shephard later somewhere um so I went back actually um and hired a uh a Filipino has been my assistant for the last three or four years at the time it definitely helped for me to go super premium you know State

side with someone but I just again over time figuring stuff out I I went back to uh overseas uh but inside of that one thing I think is really interesting about hiring overseas is the gap between like a junior and like a senior level person is $1,000 I mean give or take right could be 500 bucks could be a th000 bucks a month in salary State Side Junior to like senior anything is hundreds of thousands of dollars a year right and so I think if you're going overseas you're going to latiner whatever I definitely like

spending a little bit more and hiring premium getting someone with mid to senior level experience you can get someone so much better for just a little bit more money and you're going to have a way better outcome for yourself it reminds me one of the things that we do at at epso is like we'll have a lot of outside advisors at like very top companies and um and so you could buy just you know a handful of hours from them each month you know for certain leadership roles in the company and so it's like that's

to me the equivalent of like first kind of start out this Ultra Premium just for a few hours just to see what great looks like and then use that to be okay now we could go higher and kind of do the thing it's it's almost kind of what you did of like you didn't really know how that delegating stuff worked so you you hired and you paid up for a little bit and then you figured out oh okay let me make this like let me kind of operationalize this and and figure out the way to

do it for most things I like to pull someone in fulltime again because they're it's a lot cheaper overseas and if I feel like you know I'm just shy I'm like I only need like 30 hours of work you can find there's a lot of tasks that are like you know what if I had someone that has an extra 10 hours like you can find those repeatable tasks too like whenever you're finished with all my stuff I want you to research future guests for the show you know in your case or where it's like there

are things if you've freed your day you're like okay I've got some free time give those things to your assistant as well um and I think those are great things to fill in you know that gap of like do I need someone full-time and if you have someone full-time you're going to get a better outcome as well because they're dedicated to you and you alone versus hey I need you for 3 hours but I need you for 3 hours now not like well I got another client or you know whatever it is right so yeah

I definitely recommend getting someone full-time and uh a pattern that I noticed when I research your story is your your threshold for quality and like early on you you were an architect first first and so you have this eye for design your your your house here is immaculate but maybe that's ahe ahead a little bit but like when you I forget I think either Noah or or Sam par mentioned once of like oh anything that Marshall touches he does it great I'm curious how you think about that for yourself in terms of like quality versus

just shipping something I really care about design like in I love interior design my wife iner designer I used to I wasn't an architect but I I wanted to be one I worked for a firm for a while there's like a read often quote that everyone always quotes it's like if you weren't embarrassed by your first version you launch too late I think that's terrible advice obviously he's way more successful than I am but for my own experience I think I mean it's like Back to Basics like First Impressions matter there's a really high bar

for Quality these days and and everything and you can't just slap together some offer and throw it up we're making these little solutions for for for problems and like I think presentation what the website looks like customer experience all the things matter just cuz I value it and it's I think really helped you know in our own branding and everything yeah and it seems that you have a way of like working with really really great quality people too in each sort of business venture you've been around like you've been able to either Source top talent

or partner with people with top talent where do you think that that comes from and do you think that part of that um stems from working with someone like Andrew Wilkinson like early on in your career yeah I uh worked for Andrew probably what year was that 2013 um for a few years we did like a joint venture together uh and then I worked inside of metalab software and you know got to see slack it designed and I had no part in that but you know was the next room over and saw it being worked

on you know stuff like that to me it comes back to like you were asking me like what books I recommend and like you know sure I've I've read a bunch but I really put the most value that I've received in being on Twitter for me like I just I got on Twitter you know I don't know 2008 2009 something like that and you I I we in Dallas like I I grew up here I never ended up in Silicon Valley but it was my connection I started following a bunch of Silicon Valley people and

interacting with them and reading their thoughts and it's like you know this is this is someone's like collection of thoughts after the fact versus you know following people that talk about what they're working on what they're thinking about it's it's now and for the time and there's value in both but yeah I put the most value in that because just interacting with all these people like you I wasn't in physically in that place but I could hang out with them on the Internet and you know I started talking about my own stuff I'm working on

I think it's as simple as like make cool things share them with the world like talk about it like unashamedly talk about what you're working on and I think really interesting things happened serendipitous interactions I met Andrew through Twitter I met um my last co-founder in the e-commerce business like I can SCE it all back to Twitter met Nick Huber from Twitter he became a partner ended up buying my business and it's just and like whether today maybe it's LinkedIn for you maybe it's YouTube whatever but like hanging out it's like the biggest unlock I

think like so many good things can happen from it looking back at your journey it seems like you you did it all right I'm sure at the time it didn't always feel like that would you encourage like entrepreneurs watching this to be like carve out just a little bit more time to not just you know be on the ground working but like share your real frustration share your real wins share that publicly on LinkedIn or Twitter or like have like an accountability group or uh something like that or what yeah I mean you got to

find what works for you right like I think I'm in like a CEO group um and that's almost like group therapy for CEOs Almost Is What It Feels Like that's Hampton yeah Hampton yeah I think it it all can be can be valuable and I think to like build an audience today at least in like the B2B space it's best if like you've already done something interesting and then you can talk about that but yeah I mean I think going on the journey and following along with uh other interesting people and interacting with them just

organically you know hanging out with people and interacting with them I think yeah interesting things come from that Marshall you just exited your company what's next yeah so I sold it in um the end of April 2024 we're in December now the plan was just like I no plans just like take time off I've never uh had a sabatical or anything like that I've always been like the you know lead guy CEO whatever founder um so it was nice to just like take a breather I sold Peele U prior and I sold lewig and it

was just like I'm G to have nothing on my plate for a while but you know my wife laughs she's like I gave you six months um before you get the itch and sure enough I'm getting the itch now so still kind of tinkering around but I think a guy I used to work with him and I are going to start I guess I would call it like a operational Consulting agency like with what we learned on Shepard like we had really high margins primarily an overseas team and you know my opinion still operated super

well put a a little amount of you know work into the business delegated a ton of it like I look at other businesses and I think there's a lot of opportunity to improve margin to improve just process so I think the idea from just like a high level will be to kind of start like a Consulting agency um using that as maybe uh a Launchpad to kind of find other opportunities you know like we'll charge something you know for our time hopefully we don't have to do that very long and we'll use that to kind

of look for other opportunities um to build other services around so very kind of broad idea but that's kind of the high level of how we look at it and I'm sure you had tons of other like maybe ideas or other things that you could do including just doing nothing for a little bit which we're not sure if you're able to do or not but uh like did you have any like way of thinking through okay how do I want to be spending my time where do I see the biggest opportunity like any way that

you thought through it or like oh actually this just makes sense and it's a good opportunity yeah it's funny it's started from like a what could I just do individually to like fill some time and you know it's like all right maybe Consulting I've never done Consulting before could be fun but I you know it's like I always look at how something could evolve and and I view it as like a really great way to either like look at like other like I love B2B that you know I started in consumer and then you know

moved to B2B which is Shepherd obviously and you can charge more like you're dealing with professionals not consumers like I just like that space when we were starting peel like backing up um we had a bunch of different ideas me and my co-founder his name was John I like you know what let's start like a holding company and just make like a studio essentially so we started Peele we started the that Lin embedding company I mentioned we had a notebook company a bunch of e-commerce stuff um and dabbled in some software but to me it's

like use the same team build a bunch of different stuff I'm a big fan of like throwing stuff against the wall just like get it out there still the high polish you know is what I care about and and I think you end up finding hopefully you find a winner out of that and that's kind of what happened with us with Peele was like the big winner so I kind of view it the same way as like using that model as like a I think we'll find something something there we we'll uncover a nugget but

another like another idea I think that someone could run with that I I think is really interesting is using that same like Studio model but with the full intention of basically Building Products um around an influencer and so I think you can take one of two paths an influencer if they have their own business and they can promote it to their own audience it's like the biggest cheat code ever you know it's like free marketing you have the thing you you have the audience hungry for different Services you just need to fulfill and you have

free marketing like it's just such a cheat code in my opinion so I've had the idea where like you can do that model and either take one of two paths go out and find a influencer that like you know has a good audience uh is sick of like doing paid you know ads or partnership deals or brand deals or whatever and they're like you know I like the idea of owning a business I just don't know where to start and you be that guy and like okay what is your audience what are they after what

kind of thing and like an example is I don't know an interior design you know influencer maybe a rug company you know something like that like is a good fit for the audience and then craft the whole thing around them and they need to be on board to pitch it properly and it not just be a you know this week's post is sponsored by my company but more so like talk about it organically and genuinely and like they're going to be excited about it right you want to build something like that I think the other

approach that would work the other one is like build that thing with the sole intention of finding one or a couple influencers to partner with and if you can get it off the ground first and get some traction and then bring it to someone I think you could retain more Equity versus is probably going to have to give up more Equity if you start it with that person from the get-go but I I just think that's like a huge cheat code if you're going to start something like if I was going to start another e-commerce

business I would all right let me find someone that I would fit that idea if I have an idea for something versus let's go get some Facebook ads and hope to grow this thing you know yeah um yeah I like that model a lot I think there's a lot of different ideas and services you could build around different people and you've you've clearly seen the before and after not having that having to acquire customers afterwards having that obviously you're going to do the paid stuff and stuff as well but getting people to use and promote

the your product in a way that's organic is really hard and doing that at scale is is harder I I ran the the influencer team for appsumo a couple years back it was very very clear I could not even before I even looked at our air table of like what was working what wasn't working it was very clear one thing did they actually use the product and like it or were they just saying you know sponsored by sort thing yeah I think to your point it's such a pivotal part of like pairing the right person

of course with the Right audience but also that they actually use and love the product yeah yeah I mean that's that's one of the big ways we grew the business is Nick Huber um was a customer was probably two years into the business he found us organically uh I think hired like 10 people through US reached out to me he's like hey I don't know if you know who who I am got this big audience I'm a customer like I'm super happy it's been kind of transformational for my business our margins are improved and we

did a a uh just an affiliate deal initially he's like I I could talk about you you know to my audience super happy we were cutting him affiliate checks you know 20 grand a month kind of stuff he was driving a ton of business and eventually that about a year later we did that into we converted that into like an equity deal and him and I figured something out but that experience is what gave me the idea for this kind thing is just like it is it was such a huge unlock where it's like he

could pitch us really well to Nick's credit he's a good pitchman to begin with but like being a customer first and really using and loving the product and obviously you have to deliver and have a good service and you know all those things that matter but I wish I could plot it on on a graphy but like yeah it just really exploded the business and then about a year later we did another deal with sha pu from the my first million podcast similar deal and he you know used us liked us and talked about and

again it it ramped growth again and um yeah it was awesome it was it was great I I I want to find more influencers and build stuff around them like that it was it was pretty it just worked really well what's uh what's just like a maybe just a quick brainstorm of like a tactical approach to to figure something out like that if someone's watching this and thinking like oh well I don't have the product but I could probably reach out to these you know 50 influencers or these like 5 to 10 influencers figure out

what their favorite products are or like own a Niche first and then match that with Brands like how would you approach either side of that with the brand or with the influencer yeah so I guess two ways I would go about it like if I was launching this business today I would use my story with Shephard uh to try to get on a bunch of podcasts and and pull in influencers and you know them you know hear my story it's like oh I want that too how about somebody right if you don't have that I

would take the other route that we talked about which is go get the thing off the ground like go you know do the Facebook ads whatever like get the idea e-commerce thing whatever it is that you eventually intend to like partner with someone get it off the ground get some traction build something that you know you can show to an influencer and be like look at this like you know do you want to get involved um because you don't have the reputation to go off of you just have the brand and you know make it

look good and have high bar of quality and everything and get them excited about it and it's like look like we've done this organic with your audience like we could you know obviously you're going to have to negotiate and do a good deal it works for both of you but I think that's the only way to make that work because otherwise they're probably getting hit up honestly all the time and they just don't know who to like work with and I don't know like everyone how do I trust this person versus that and so it's

just like make something awesome and then go find someone to to partner and Pitch it to yeah well I guess I was thinking of like maybe if you don't know the product yet and you know that you want to have some sort of product maybe in like the business niche yeah C okay reach out maybe Nick's too big now but whoever the up and coming sort are I guess some of the stuff that I I think about is like uh price and just like the size the you know the Tam um like you know uh

the big YouTuber always Logan Paul it's like they have the energy energy drink company low price point Mass Appeal you need like a huge influencer that's just kind of like the cocacola of YouTubers which is like the the brothers that's a good fit for that versus like we were super Niche but we had a high price point you don't need a lot of customers to make the numbers work and so I would think about it that way um you know and I think just like category obviously like if Sheard had the opportunity to work with

you know like Logan Paul just it wouldn't have made sense like you got to have the right fit the stuff that I think it makes sense is like I've got a a gamer neighbor that is a big big uh twitch streamer similar story he's doing brand deals stuff like that um doesn't have equity in any of these things I think like a like a potato chip company um could do really well for someone like that or like a snack brand or like a you know they like Monster Energy wants to do deals with them what

else is in that space you know so I would think about it that way um is economics still matter and like can you do it on a subscription basis can you do you know can it be high margin are you g to have enough customers from that person from a high level I'd think about matching audience to the products and price point and size and all these things need to make sense in doing research for this I dug up some of your early writing and you have an awesome blog by the way and one of

the things I found like years ago you were talking about that profit first book in concept and then like now everyone's kind of talking about it how did you first discover that and um and what other cool things have you found Mike mallwitz yeah I the way I discovered that I follow that guy for a long time I tried to have a iPhone app Business way back in the day and I went out and flew out to his office and like pitched him to like sponsor this silly uh promo thing that I had going on

and like met him and yeah this is like 15 years ago so I followed his work for a long time he's written probably six books now but yeah I think just like the core of that book around knowing what profit you want to ink out and then working backwards from that I'm just like okay I want to have a 30% profit margin business or 30 grand or whatever it is and then having your your expenses and looking at your expenses through that lens of like well got slash that to make that happen I think that's

really powerful I just think as a whole Founders don't pay themselves enough you should pay yourself really well if you can like don't just I get the idea of investing in the business but if there's money I think Founders should pay themselves more than they are on average right now and it's going to do a lot of things like it's going to give you that breathing room to like continue and run the marathon with this thing like I would not stick with things if they don't pay well like that's the end of the day like

it's fun it's a game it's entrepreneurship is super exciting but like you got to make money Founders need to focus on having better profit margins like I I think a lot of people accept horribly low margins like I came from Ecom like Ecom has really low margins on average having to like struggle through that then when I shifted to like a different business I felt like I was on easy mode cuz it was just like Ecom can be a struggle sometimes but yeah I think people don't look at at margin enough and really pay attention

to their p&l like off camera we were talking about like back when we were running the e-commerce stuff like Top Line was growing and I was just like why are we not making money like you know this is like why like I didn't really you know the books were kind of just like I phoned in you know I talked to our accountant once a quarter I read profit first and I got interested in Personal Finance on you know my side of things and then you know goes back to the business and I really invested in

educating myself on like how to understand a pns and a balance sheet and I think that was really really important on my journey to like be able to improve the economics of a business because like you have to understand the numbers and like we were talking about it's like I think it's as simple as uh rearranging your chart of accounts to like how you think about your business and grouping expense categories how you think about it and is this a fixed cost or a variable cost and moving things around and when I did that and

kind of like made the p&l my own I was able to then like okay we're spending way too much on this or you know maybe we actually should earmark 10 grand a month to like test out these marketing experiments cuz it's it comes back to the classic like what gets measured gets managed and you know I think you have to educate yourself on it for yeah to be able to tweak it mentioned one of your like early on year in review blog post has the the actor process of writing helped illuminate any other areas uh

for you of whether it's like personal or business yeah I mean we were talking about copyrighting off camera like I'm not a copywriter but like I think I'm good enough to write like a really good headline and it's just to me it's like offer like what is the offer is it super compelling like I spend a lot of time um the headline that's on the some.com homepage still the same one that we started with I'm sure eventually it'll get tweaked but there's just so many good benefits of writing like to me the way I view

Twitter as well as like crafting a really good hook is like a really micro way to test your copyrighting skills of like all you have an interesting story or thread to write the first line like are you going to engage people or not you know like where we started with um you know April 2020 I did two things that changed my life it was this and that like I rewrote that hook a million times on that thread and and that uh touch tool thread did really well and and I you know I put it back

to like having a good hook and obviously the story needs to to be compelling but YouTube thumbnails like all this stuff like that is like the skill today in my opinion is yeah having a really compelling offer and and a really great hook and I think uh you know your opener to a blog post things like that like I always try to make it something that's like juicy and compelling and writing tweet threads a newsletter blogs like whatever like that's how you get your reps in like that's how you get that practice and there's only

so many landing pages you can make and yeah I think that's where you can get your practice in yeah you you mentioned that you're a member of Hampton what have you learned in that like CEO group that that's been like profound for you of anything I joke with my wife that like so they pair you off with groups of I think you and seven others so a group of eight plus a moderator or they call it like a facilitator and you once a month call and you know we kind of all go around and talk

about what's going on in our business and like entrepreneurship is a game of your own psychology like where it was really eye openening to like get in there and like really dive into you know other people's it's all like you know you can't talk about what happens in that call or whatever and you can disclose everything business and it stays between you and your your group um and it's like a therapy session it's like we all struggle you know um you know impacts home life or you know impacts like you know all the same things

and so it's just like really uh comforting in a weird way to know that like okay like we're all kind of struggling with the same stuff yeah I just think there's a lot of like peace that comes with that of like okay like I'm not I'm not crazy these things are stressful you know it's like we're talking about successes but like there's a lot of hard things along the way and I've gone through all my own hardships and it's just kind of refreshing to connect with other entrepreneurs and know that like they've also either are

going through you know hard things and you help each other through that and yeah I mean bad things happen you got you know it's how you react to them and I just think that yeah gave me a lot of like peace in a weird way of just like this is kind of normal this is like part of the game um yeah yeah so really anybody for at any level just find people going through your same struggles and you know share wins share losses sort of thing yeah what you know whether it's something super formal like

that or you know just you and a another buddy starting a company or your co-founder it's the value of a co-founder in my opinion is like go through the the together um but yeah however you find your group I think it's really important to to be able to open up and share what's going on because yeah it's way more common than I think we all think if you're in your own little bubble last thing you're getting ready to move to North Carolina what what are you most excited about oh man trees I you guys are

in Austin so you got more trees but we're in Dallas and there's just like a lack of of trees out here and my wife and I after all this it was like you know we could be anywhere like what matters to us and we started searching around and kind of did a nationwide search and fell in love with this area in North Carolina and yeah found a lot we bought and just looking forward to like kind of Designing our life you know picking where we want to be so I'm excited about that awesome man any

final words of wisdom uh challenge or nugget or anything you want to leave the viewers with um I mean if I can be helpful like my email address is um Marshall nedw want.com just marshall2 Ls I'm happy to um help where I can got a lot of free time currently so feel free to reach out but yeah happy to help if I can okay I don't do you actually want people all these people emailing you me yeah okay yeah like if I get 20 if I get 30 it's not a big deal yeah okay um

all right well he said it's okay also check out the newsletter it's really good uh awesome thanks thanks appreciate it yeah