How Dan Koe Gained 5.4M Followers In 2 Hours/Day

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Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

Dan you have 1.3 million on YouTube, 800k on X, 1.7 on IG.

SPEAKER_01 0:04

What I like about how you do it is you do it all in like two hours a day. I'm already writing this newsletter. Why would I spend the same amount of time writing a YouTube script, especially understanding the nature of focus and how ideas come? If I did both of those things, the ideas and the quality of both would suffer.

SPEAKER_00 0:20

So your entire media team is just Is there anything else? I mean that's like honestly insanely impressive. Okay, so I want to talk about the system really you have for content, because it's not like you have a huge team. Like there we're kind of in an age where there's tons of media companies, and you've really been able to do this kind of like just with a very, very small team. So I want to talk about that, but first I want to ask you why did Elon Musk pay you 250 grand?

SPEAKER_01 0:48

Oh, I had an article that went way too viral for 170 million views, yeah. Yeah, likes were in almost 300k now. Yeah. But yeah, that was one I just had no idea what happened. And what's funny is people had been posting articles on Twitter more recently because people heard that it got an algorithm boost or something like that.

SPEAKER_04 1:10

Right.

SPEAKER_01 1:11

And so I'm like, okay, I'll just try reposting one of my recent Substack posts to there. It wasn't even an original one, it was off of my Substack, copy pasted directly and it just started flying, and then it f flew more over like the course of a week. And I had no idea what was going on, but I couldn't get on my phone without seeing commentary on it. And so my entire feed was just me and that.

SPEAKER_00 1:37

You know it's viral when conservative political commentators are like or the meme accounts too.

SPEAKER_01 1:42

Yeah, yeah. Yeah. No, I I like had my brief moment of feeling like I was one of those.

SPEAKER_00 1:48

You were the you were in the Epstein class. Yeah. I was yeah, you caught the elite level for a second. Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 1:54

The oddball out though, because you don't see content like that do that well. So it obviously got a bit of hate because the hook is how to fix your entire life in one day. It screams self-help. I thought it was a bit deeper inside of it. That's kind of my strategy, is like shallow then deep. But yeah, it attracted a fair amount of hate, fair amount of love, met some cool people, a lot of cool connections. But Elon Musk retweeted it and then they started the million dollar article challenge. Right. Everyone went up in flames because they're like, well, Dan should win this because he's the one who inspired the challenge. Then that boosted the article more, and I didn't end up winning the challenge, but they gave me like a participation. But you would have won. Yeah. Oh, and that would have a million.

SPEAKER_00 2:33

So they gave you the 250k participation show. Which is great.

SPEAKER_01 2:36

I'll take it.

SPEAKER_00 2:36

Did Elon reach out directly?

SPEAKER_01 2:38

No. Oh, okay. No, Nikita did. Nikita's a cool dude. He's like the product guy. Oh, okay. He's the one that everyone complains to when there's something wrong with Twitter.

SPEAKER_00 2:47

Gotcha. Yeah. Gotcha. So what was that like when that one is viral? I mean, you you mentioned you got a lot of hate, and I asked you about it before, and you were like, you didn't really like it.

SPEAKER_01 2:55

Oh, definitely not. I don't think anyone likes it. Like the typical creator story at any level is like when you see a hate comment, all of the positive comments just go out the window. Unless you like, then after that, you zoom out and you're like, oh, this is just one in a sea of many, and you kind of like force yourself to see a better perspective. But if there is some truth in the hate comment, then that like really hurts because now, especially with the article, yeah, that's posted. I can't edit it, and I can only redo it the next time. If I agree with the hate comment, yeah, there's no way for me to correct it. So, what was the hate you agreed with? Uh that mostly that the title was shallow.

SPEAKER_03 3:37

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 3:38

Where it's like how to fix your entire life in one day, oh nobody can do that in one day, but the whole like I wouldn't say gimmick, but the point behind the article is like this has the potential to at least change the direction of your life if it really hits for you. Um But the reason I didn't like that piece of hate was because I also think the same thing about other pieces of content that I see. Yeah. Where I'm like, oh, that's bullshit, it's just some like shallow self-help stuff.

SPEAKER_03 4:09

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 4:09

When it's like I study this deep philosophy.

SPEAKER_00 4:12

So let me ask you about that, because this is what I struggle with. I was actually gonna say this to later in the conversation, but like I, you know, I've scaled a $30 million year company. I've had three eight, I've had three eight figure multiple eight-figure companies before. So I know a lot about business and sales. And then so this year, I was really like getting into the content game. And I'm like, okay, I'm gonna get into it. I'm like paying this media guy, paying this YouTube guy, I'm paying this person for advice. And then like I have a great network, so everybody's giving me advice. And you learn this whole system of like, okay, well, you know, certain topics hit on YouTube, right? And I'm just using YouTube as an example, but it could be any social platform. Certain topics hit on YouTube, and then you gotta find the outliers, and okay, let's repackage this outlier and then let's make it on your own. And then the next thing I know, I'm making a video called How to Become Unrecognizable in Nine Minutes. I I don't, I I've never followed, I've never done that. Yeah, I don't care about that. I don't know anything about it. I'm like making the video, I'm like, why am I making this video? And you know, for me, it's like I feel like I have really deep down like good tactics and like a deep fit business philosophy to share, but I feel like it doesn't like when I put this artificial constraint of it's gotta be packaged in this YouTube way as an outlier or whatever, I feel like I can't fit the content into there and it just waters the content down. Does that make sense? It does. So I don't know, what's your advice?

SPEAKER_01 5:34

Yeah. Uh there's two things there. One, you can take the perspective of that's just the game, yeah, and you are okay with it. So, because with something so broad and clickable as like how to become unrecognizable in 90 days, like you can fit, we'll use sales as an example, as like, okay, step one is learn sales. Why? Like, why does it fit within the become unrecognizable? It's not like a physical transformation, but it's like in 90 days you'll be able to achieve this outcome, and many people want that outcome. And if sales is the uh thing that they hadn't thought about before in order to reach that outcome, then it can do really well, and that builds a very unique authority for you because nobody else is creating the how to become unrecognized unrecognizable and 90-day content with that as like the mechanism to do so. Yeah, so that's one thing is like you can be okay with packaging it in a way that gets clicks and then knowing that what you're providing is actually something real when most people aren't doing that, but then your content could be perceived as by uh respected people as like, oh, he's just a part of this crowd when you know that you're not, and until they actually go and watch it, they're not they're gonna be able to do that.

SPEAKER_00 6:55

Yeah, it almost is like a dissociated brand feeling for me. So, like what I'm kind of trying to decide of is like, do I just water down the like do I just make the the packaging and the titling like more direct and then just talk about what I actually want to talk about, which is like really the stuff that I can uniquely bring to the world and just sacrifice that while it won't be as clickbaity-y, I can probably better compound an audience over time. Yeah, or do you just do you just dive into the clickbait?

SPEAKER_01 7:24

There's two things there. The first is that the creative challenge that can be very fun for you is figuring out how to package into something that is compelling without it's like you have all of these constraints of I don't want to be lumped in with this crowd, I don't want to choose the clickbait title, but I know that there's some way of crafting this title that will make it do better than it would have done. Yeah, that's probably the route you would want to go. But on the other end, it's like us and the way that we perceive things comes from the lens of like we've done this for so long that it's normal to us. The person who sees the this is like a terrible example of the how to become unrecognizable, the the person who like really wants to watch that is a human being who probably isn't stupid or yeah, yeah, yeah. Like they they get a lot of value out of that, and that shows in the views. Um, so that's like another layer of looking at it, is it can do it can still have the same impact, but it may alienate a certain type of people that you are trying to reach. So there's those two things I think the best.

SPEAKER_00 8:41

What I'm hearing from you is it's still okay to essentially start with like, okay, I have this framework, I have this idea I really want to talk about, and sure I can repackage it so it's not ultra tactical and it can be consumable on YouTube or whatever, and it's not two in the weeds. But I can actually start with the content and then find out the packaging from there using those best practices. Because you know, if you ask the YouTube people about that, that's black that's black.

SPEAKER_01 9:05

I I always do the title last. Okay. And sometimes it will be. Well, you have way more followers than me, so I'm gonna say well, the the other thing is like I my system is super simple. Like, I try not to overcomplicate it. I just think that I'm very good at like now, after a long time of studying this stuff, of just coming up with a title that will do better than most.

SPEAKER_03 9:25

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 9:25

But to add on to that point, the way I do it is I know I have content that I know will work, and I can pull that out of my back pocket whatever I want. And then there's concepts that I really want to talk about, and I don't know if they'll do well. So, like growth content and experimental content, right? I kind of alternate those two. And if I'm not growing because I've been talking about what I want to talk about for too long, then I need to do one of those videos that will just work. And then the way YouTube works is if a video goes viral, then all of your not all of them, a lot of your other videos kind of increase by 10 to 50,000 views. So those people are still seeing those videos. Right. So it can be strategic where even if the videos don't hit, you know you can pop out one of the growth videos, the growth angles, and those will still get a ton of views after the fact. And then if you were promoting products or services, then that still gets a lot of traffic.

SPEAKER_00 10:24

Okay, well, let's dive into because what I like about how you do it is you do it all in like two hours a day. Yeah. And so explain that whole system of kind of how you start with the main thing and then everything kind of proliferates from there. Yes.

SPEAKER_01 10:40

I keep it as simple as humanly possible. Right. Where I started on social media as a writer. I didn't know I was a writer at first. I just started on Twitter, and I'm like, I'm writing a lot, I'm gonna call myself a writer, and then fell in love with that actual process. But I started with tweets and then I went to a newsletter just because those things are very accessible. I was kind of I wasn't afraid of the camera, I was afraid of the editing and all the work that I had to do after it because that would take up a lot of my time.

SPEAKER_04 11:09

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 11:10

So had the tweets, had the newsletter, and then the block I had for going to more channels was like I have to create unique content for every channel, for Instagram, for TikTok, for all of these things. But then I just thought, like, why not just post the same thing to all platforms? Like, is that really gonna cause people to be like, oh, you're repeating yourself too much, or why are you posting the same thing? I've never dare you. I've never gotten that comment of how dare how dare you repurpose it. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, like just straight up copy paste, not even like repurpose with a different angle to optimize it for LinkedIn over Twitter. Um, but I've never I've gotten the comment of like, oh, you're repeating yourself, but that can be solved with the best things deserve to be repeated. Like you're gonna repeat yourself. Sure. The second thing, or the thing that I haven't been asked about is like, why do you repost every channel? People just don't care, and people have the platforms that they prefer. So once I realize that, I'm like, okay, can I take this a bit further? I'm already writing this newsletter. Why would I spend the same amount of time writing a YouTube script and especially understanding the nature of focus and how ideas come. If I did both of those things, the ideas and the quality of both would suffer. So it's like write one really good piece, use that as a script or kind of soft outline. Now that I have a video, an audio version, post that to the podcast, and now I'm on all platforms. So the entire system is I write one to two posts a day, short form, one newsletter or long form piece a week, and then once a day copy paste the best tweet to a Figma template so it's an image so I can post on Instagram. And I skimp on this a good amount, but when I'm in the flow and decide to do it, I'll just read the best tweets to the screen or to my camera and add a bit of commentary, and now I have a reel and a short and a TikTok. With YouTube, I just sit down one day out of the week, I have my newsletter pulled up, I'll read directly the parts that I like don't want to mess up if I think they're super deep or clever.

SPEAKER_03 13:26

Yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_01 13:26

And then my editor will put like a tech screen or b-roll over that portion so they people don't see me looking down.

SPEAKER_03 13:32

Yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_01 13:33

And then other parts I'll like look at the camera and say it how I would say it. And usually more things will come to mind and then I'll riff for a bit, and that makes it different from the newsletter because most of the time I'm just like yelling at the camera about my opinion, and it tends to work. And so now I have this entire ecosystem of content where the last piece of that is in the newsletter. I'll promote something about halfway through and at the end. So that could be a link to the paid substack, a link to a course, a link to any commerce, whatever. When I read that to the camera, the promotion is already listed there, and all I have to say is link in the description, and then people go. And from what I've heard, people really appreciate like the just soft, hey, let me know this thing exists, and I'll go to the description if I want it, rather than like a dedicated section for a long promotion. Yeah, and that's the system. It's nice.

SPEAKER_00 14:36

So basically, newsletter, you're basically newsletter centric, and then from that comes the YouTube video, and probably even from the newsletter can inspire some of the tweets. I forgot that right, and then the tweets go into essentially Instagram, LinkedIn, whatever else, yeah, and then voila, you're on everything. If you're looking for a mastermind to take your business to 10 million a year plus, then you want to check out our eight-figure border mastermind. So after doing 100 million in total cash collected for my own companies, I've created a mastermind where I really pull back the curtain and show you exactly how I've done it. So I not only share with you what's working for us across marketing, sales, fulfillment, operations, finance for all of our different companies, at the same time, you can network with some of the top people in the industry and also listen to world-class speakers like Patrick Bit David, Dean Grassiosi, Neil Patel, and Tom Bailu, and many, many others. So if you're interested, check out the link in the description and get more info. What do you feel like? Do you have because what I've noticed, especially like a platform like Instagram, I've noticed it's more of like a business card. And a lot of times people grow their Instagram through stuff they do outside of Instagram. Yeah. Like I know guys with huge Instagrams, but they're really their top of funnel is their massive event guys. Like they're on like the event circuit. There's other people who they're massive YouTube guys, and it kind of overflows down into Instagram. Which do you think is it Twitter? Is it YouTube for you? Is like your top of funnel that most people find out about you? YouTube, honestly. You would say, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So that's interesting. So and do you send the YouTube out to your newsletter too?

SPEAKER_01 16:05

No.

SPEAKER_00 16:06

I so all those views are just organic.

SPEAKER_01 16:08

When I when I post the YouTube video, I'll like post it to Twitter and my story. And one little tip there, because I see a lot of people do this wrong, is when you promote a link, be it in on Instagram or in your story, like the hook still has to be there. Everyone complains about Twitter or other platforms like throttling links or promotions, but all they say is like, I just posted a video, go check it out. It's like for me, you gotta sell them. I rewrite a tweet. Like I don't even like say, here's a video, watch it. I have like a straight up hook as if I'm writing a Twitter thread with a colon and the link right there. And my me promoting my newsletters or my YouTube videos gets about like half the engagement as my normal posts, but when other people do it, they get like 50, 10 to 50 likes, depending on their following, and it's like a fraction of their normal engagement, and it could just be solved by treating it as every other piece of content.

SPEAKER_00 17:09

Nice. So your entire media team is just an editor. Is there anything else? I mean, that's like honestly insanely impressive. Yeah, well because like again, like I I went to an event and came away thinking I needed like an a hundred thousand dollar a month media team from zero, you know?

SPEAKER_01 17:26

There there's definitely perks to it. I haven't done it, so I can't say if I'd be more effective if I did that. You're doing pretty well. Yeah. Well, that's the other thing is just keeping it again as simple as possible. My editor and I will try to do more complex, like video essay style videos with animations and more thought-out B-roll and less text screens and all of that stuff. And when we do that, some of them do well, but the ones we put the most effort into do the worst. And so when that happens, I'm just like, dude, just go back to like the cuts and the tech screens, like minimal b-roll. Just people are probably listening to this on a walk or in their car and they don't care what it looked like.

SPEAKER_00 18:07

I was making fun of one the other day, and I said that I don't think I've ever seen a YouTube comment on any video that's like, man, I wish you could add more animations in B-roll and editing to this video. Yeah, like I don't think anybody ever thinks that. They just I think what really matters is just the content. Yeah, you know, not that animations are b-roll or bad or whatever, but they have to enhance the message. Yeah, and I think a lot of editors just edit for the sake of editing.

SPEAKER_01 18:31

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 18:32

If that makes sense.

SPEAKER_01 18:32

Yeah, there's perks to it. I think it has to match the personality where um you're in the fitness space, you know, Greg Duset. Yeah, of course. Like, I I don't watch him for information, it's more for entertainment because now he has very entertaining the Gen Z editor, and all he talks about is like drama, and it's just the stupidest edits possible, but it adds that layer of humor to it where I know I'm consuming like the stupidest conversation.

SPEAKER_00 18:57

You're getting dumber.

SPEAKER_01 18:57

Yeah, oh absolutely. But then I balance it out with like some long lecture, like Harvard lecture.

SPEAKER_00 19:03

What is what does your info diet actually look like? Because I feel like you get into very, very deep philosophical stuff.

SPEAKER_01 19:10

Yes. Uh it started with lectures from like Jordan Peterson, where those are pretty popular, but then I kind of just dove into more long YouTube videos. Like when I'm scrolling my timeline, if it isn't over an hour, then I won't watch it. Most of the time, or I'd say two or three years ago, I binge watched uh actualize.org. His all of his stuff. He's some people love him, some people hate him. He goes very deep, he goes very shallow. He's I personally think it's like the greatest body of philosophical work that's ever been. Nice. Which is a big statement, but I firmly stand by that if you watch a lot of his content and not just pick one and then cherry pick what he said out of it. But that was like transformative for me. I'm I'm definitely not on the same level as he is mentally, but a lot of what he said brought this awareness to my mind that these things exist and there is a a deeper way of thinking about things and connecting the dots, and a lot of the videos that he put out like still make an appearance in my content, like the concepts in them. So when people see them, uh I'll see them comment like someone's been watching a lot of actualize.org and I'll like that because I know they're in my group.

SPEAKER_00 20:35

They get it, yeah.

SPEAKER_01 20:35

Yeah. Um that was the main thing where that was just so much that I have so much to work with. And then on the business side, this is gonna sound weird, but I I really don't watch that much business content. I've started watching more hormosey recently, but a lot of my like what I've learned in business has come from like a few books and then just doing the thing and following what works, or like doubling down on what works.

SPEAKER_00 21:08

Yeah, I I get that. Well, speaking of business, how do you think about monetization for creators? I mean, I know you're doing obviously you have your Substack, you have Eden, and we'll get to that in a second. But just in general, I mean, how would you I'm sure you've thought about it a lot. You have a lot, a lot of traffic. So how would you think about it? Because from a guy like me, when when all you have is hammers, everything looks like a nail. So the way I think about it is purely just sales team, very expensive thing that's B2B, or probably a SAS that has like really good recurring revenue and stick, that's my that's my hammer. You know? But I'm curious how you think about it.

SPEAKER_01 21:43

As one person, uh you're you were kind of limited in the past. Now you can vibe code something very niche. You can't vibe code something massive at this point, but you can vibe code a very specific app that solves a specific problem all of the Marketing and direct response stuff that we know. Like you can build something that makes a lot of money. I haven't done that, so I can only say so much. But that's probably a good option to go explore is just play around with code, learn it a bit.

SPEAKER_00 22:12

You know what I think is like so I'm heavy into this info and coaching industry because that's my client base. And over the years, like when I years before I got started, it was all about like selling a one to two K course off like an auto webinar. And then from there, the ad cost got too high and it was too competitive, and a lot of those products got commoditized. So then it was all about adding support, more premium, high-ticket coaching because it allowed you to essentially monetize and have better economics.

SPEAKER_04 22:39

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 22:39

And now that is really shifting into nobody wants like coaching. A lot of people want, and unless they like maybe like if I'm sure if you offer coaching, they would do it because you have a following. But like if I'm just running an ad, you don't know who I am, it's hard to it's hard to sell, just coach with me. Yeah. So now it's shifting into a lot of done for you and B2B services, like actual services, is really what's working in our industry. And I think that'll keep working, and that'll probably turn into more AI-enabled B B2B services. But I think one of the big opportunities to kind of uh go with what you were saying is I think there will be a lot of like vibe-coded or light-coded one to three K. They'll sell almost like in the same monetization as courses. Yeah. So it'll be like 1K or 2K off of a webinar. Or it'll be like a series of ascension funnels, but they'll be like little mini SASs all the way through. And it's something that anybody can do. And I think that'll be the next wave of internet marketing.

SPEAKER_01 23:39

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 23:39

I thought of that literally as I was lying in bed last night.

SPEAKER_01 23:42

No, I I made a video of it. The thumbnail is uh info products are dead, which I don't believe. I I feel like info will always if it's specific to a person and it's your way of doing things, then AI you well it's curated in the way that makes sense to you, right?

SPEAKER_00 23:59

But I think what is different and is it's dead if nobody knows who you are. And it's pure info. Yeah right? It's very hard to run an ad to a course and and make those numbers work. I'm not saying nobody will buy, but to make those numbers work. But if you launched a course on your content system, yeah, your audience, your audience would buy. But that's because they already have trust in you and they just want to know, okay, great, I could ask AI, but like I just want to know what Dan's one, two, three, four, five steps are.

SPEAKER_01 24:26

Yeah, yeah, yeah. So the the the gist of that video was I think almost everything related to info is just gonna transcend to like micro SAS. Yeah. And people doing the same thing. So if you were selling like a dating program, you literally just create a chat GPT wrapper with a system prompt that is the course that would teach people how to text girls or create a coach that people can type into like ChatGPT that's specialized for that thing. Of course, it can evolve beyond just like a chat interface and be like a dashboard or something of that nature. But one thing I've had a lot of success with without building a SAS is just giving out prompts because I love creating like really in-depth prompts that I can give along with my videos or content in general. Because if I'm talking about the nine stages of ego development and how to think um from a higher level, that's all info. But then the implementation can be as simple as like this really good prompt that asks people clarifying questions to get a feel for who they are, understand their situation, and then it spits out here's what your level of thinking is, here's where you are, here's the steps you can take forward. And people just eat that up. So if you can wrap that in a nice UI just by getting good at prompt engineering and telling it to go and build something, like that's something you could do overnight and see really good results.

SPEAKER_00 25:54

Do you know who Neil Patel is? Yeah. So he has like a $150 million a year enterprise level agency. So this is really interesting, but I also think this is gonna be another big thing that's uh uh something he's already been doing, but it'll be an ongoing wave. And so what he used to do, or what he still does, to my knowledge, is he would buy SaaS companies, he would just make the SaaS free. Now, granted, he's doing $150 million a year, make the SaaS free, offered as a lead magnet, and then have his outbound sales team just upsell them in the enterprise services. Yes. And so I even thought about doing this for us is like I could there's like a lot of call review softwares where like let's say you know you're it's like an interface essentially, and then the AI is trained based on my sales content or recordings that are good or what have you. You can upload your calls and then it grades them in real time, or your sales team's calls, grades them in real time against what my sales training is. I could just, I don't need to make money from that, yeah, but I could offer that for free and then have my outbound team or a low-ticket product and have my outbound team essentially call those people and then upsell them into yeah, hey, like we noticed the grades on your sales reps are three out of ten. Yeah, do you want better sales reps?

SPEAKER_02 27:00

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 27:01

And I think there'll be a lot more stuff like that, which I actually think is pretty exciting because it's like at least it's you people are probably at least more likely to use it, yeah. You know, and I think people will learn more just through going through that stuff.

SPEAKER_01 27:13

Yeah. The I think the obvious objection here is like, oh, well, can't people just create a custom GPT? Like in Chat GPT, it's the same thing. You upload your files to it, you add a system prompt, people chat with it, you're good to go. You can create anything from that, and people are already using that as a lead magnet. But it's the same thing with info products not really being dead, is that most people just don't know what to search or what to build.

SPEAKER_03 27:37

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 27:37

And when they watch someone on YouTube, they're the the person in the YouTube video, if they're following a general storytelling structure, are identifying a problem or making them aware of a problem in their life that their solution can help them with. Therefore, in the context of them watching the video, that's the only place they can get the thing. So if you have the custom GPT with a nice UI that you vibe coded, that's just as valuable as someone going into cust going in to create a custom GPT, but they wouldn't have done that otherwise without you, and you're now the one sparking behavior change.

SPEAKER_00 28:10

Yeah, exactly.

SPEAKER_01 28:11

And they're associating that authority with you, and now they're in in your funnel.

SPEAKER_00 28:16

But you know, I think it's so powerful too. I had a mentor, this was back when I first started, and he was saying when you want to produce content or produce information, you don't want to teach people something. What you want to do is change their behavior. Yeah. Because if they change the if you change their behavior, like it could be as simple as like maybe you say something and it's in regards to somebody's morning routine. Yeah. And let's say they pick up a tactic out of your advice about a morning routine or something. In a weird way, it's anchored to where every time they're doing that, it's reminding them of you. Yes. And I think even with some of this uh like AI coded type of lead magnets, you could essentially do the same thing. Like we've thought about like coding our uh we have really good tracking sheets for sales teams. And even like also, if you have a big sales team, paying out commissions is like a it's just a whole pain in the butt. So if I just gave that away and now you're using my tracking sheets or you're using my commission software to pay your sales team, well, every single time you're paying your sales guy and you're like, man, I just wish you would close more, you might think of less. So I think that's an interesting thing to think about is like the behavior change element of it.

SPEAKER_01 29:19

Yeah. I mean, I still wake up every morning and get sunlight in my eyes because Andrew Huberman. Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 29:25

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_01 29:26

Uh every time I hear the word.

SPEAKER_00 29:30

But that advice has been around a long time. I don't know how he owned that category, but everybody says that about Andrew Huberman.

SPEAKER_01 29:36

Yeah. Same thing. Every time I hear the word habits, James Clear pops into my head just because he owns that category. It's like hard to there's definitely a formula for how to spark behavior change. And that usually comes in the form of storytelling, because it is like teaching people how to do something, but it's following the like problem, make them very aware of the problem, and then unique way of giving them the solution so that they're interested enough to try it. Because I could people could watch my video on uh having a morning routine, but unless I have like that one unique thing that I personally found and experimented with and was like, I'm gonna keep this in my routine because it provides this benefit that no one else has ever talked about before. Maybe some people have, but it's the first time they're hearing it. Then when they try it, they associate it with me. And I call that concept time under attention. So, like, if you think of short form social media, they're probably spending 20 to 20 seconds to a minute with you once they scroll on your post. If they watch a YouTube video, they're obviously spending a lot longer. If they watch podcasts, a lot longer. If they read an article, same amount of time. If they read a book from you, and you have like so many opportunities to spark that behavior change, then that kind of locks them in. So the book, in my eyes, or in and why I wrote two books is for that reason, is even if they didn't sell that much, it would like solidify me in the minds of the people whose lives I impacted.

SPEAKER_00 31:10

Yeah, that makes sense. Um, so one of the things I learned from you was creating the ultimate guide instead of like a lot of people prompt AI differently to try to find, let's say, yeah, yeah, like the YouTube hooks or the Instagram hooks, but you had a different way of doing that. Can you talk a little bit about that?

SPEAKER_01 31:27

Yes.

SPEAKER_00 31:28

Remind me of the ultimate, like the so it's like you would upload a lot of stuff into the AI, and then instead of being like, hey, this is what good looks like, can you make something like this? You have a prompt essentially, right? And it creates the guide, and then does that make sense?

SPEAKER_01 31:43

Yes. So the way that I like to think about using AI when I'm trying to accomplish something is that if you've used AI ever in your life, you know that if you just tell it to do something, it's gonna get mediocre results if you know what you're doing and you know what good looks like. So for something like writing tweets, if I ask AI to write tweets, just like it's garbage. Yeah. For my level standard, it's like I'm never ever gonna post this. So I need to teach it how I write tweets. But if someone doesn't know how to write tweets, they can still use that same way of thinking to get a lot better results than they would have just going about it blindly. So, in order to teach the AI about writing tweets, you need to find an expert that you trust and you like their methods of doing. Let's say you find a YouTube video from Matt Gray, who talks about I don't think he has one on writing tweets. Imagine I had a video on writing tweets. Someone takes that video, transcribes it, puts it into AI, and says, Hey, break this down into an ultimate guide, because there's a lot of stuff in the video that you don't really want there, and you want to narrow down the context. Look that over, read it. Now you've learned a bit. Then I take a meta prompt, which is a prompt that creates prompts, and I'll send that to a separate AI chat, and then it'll ask me, like, okay, I got it. What kind of prompt do you want to create? And I'll say, I want to create a prompt that helps me write tweets. We're gonna do this in two phases. The first phase is gonna be context gathering. I always add that to my prompts, which is pretty much get all the information from you from me that you need to write a good tweet. That could be content pillars, that could be the actual ideas, that could be sources of inspiration, so on and so forth. Phase two is you're gonna use this ultimate guide that I created and the examples that I provide to structure the ideas that you got in the context gathering phase and output those as potential tweets.

SPEAKER_03 33:45

Right.

SPEAKER_01 33:46

And then along with that message, I send the ultimate guide. So it has that, and then I'll copy paste maybe ten tweets, high-performing tweets that I know will just do well because I'm trying to pull the structure from them. So I'll go to people's Twitters, you can uh use an extension like Super X or Tweet Hunter X, and that'll just show their top tweets. And then you find one that you like, copy paste it into there. Once you have 10, send the prompt, you'll be surprised with the results. And you can also skip the part of gathering information and just go straight to the source. So you can take those 10 high-performing tweets and just be like, hey, I want you to break down exactly why these work, the hooks, the psychological tactics they use to get capture attention, why they get so much engagement, and turn it into an ultimate guide. Then you send them at a prompt, say, I want to create a prompt that writes tweets, give them, give it that ultimate guide, and now spits out a prompt that when you send, asks you questions for ideas and then leads to a lot better tweets that you would have made.

SPEAKER_00 34:55

And and the way that I'm gonna use it is is essentially taking that and then using something like Eden, there you go, to be able to come up with like, hey, what are good ideas for even tweets or short form content, etc. So pivoting to that, so out of all ways you could have monetized your audience, you chose a software company. After a lot. After a lot of the course phase, yes. Yeah, okay, after the course phase. So what drove you to that? Like, what was the big reason you wanted to start that?

SPEAKER_01 35:25

There's a bit, okay. So my part of my philosophy for life is that I have to wake up and have an interesting challenge or meaningful challenge to pursue. When I kind of like observe society and how it works, and I I always feel bad saying this, but if you go to Walmart and you're walking, like I don't really want to live those same lives as them. Yeah, the airport especially. It's like people just don't seem happy, they don't seem energetic, they don't seem interested in something. There's not that like fire in the belly. Like I want that.

SPEAKER_03 36:05

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 36:05

And so that led to me thinking about it a bit more and seeing that okay, when you get a job, especially at the age of 18, 20, however old, you tend to have these tasks that are like require you to learn and acquire skill up until a certain point, and then it becomes really repetitive. But since you're kind of dependent on the paycheck and you're at the age where you have so many responsibilities, the thought of doing something different really doesn't cross your mind, and you're not since you're in this repetitive line of work, you're not really thinking about that, anyways. You're not continuously exposing yourself to something novel. The same thing goes for the school system in many cases, where you kind of learn up until a specific point, and then it hits this curve where you're like, I'm not really interested in this anymore. Exactly. And a lot of people like us will go and self-educate because we have that desire to learn more, pursue our own goals, acquire a certain set of skills. And so with entrepreneurship, I kind of figured, okay, well, that's the path of being able to continuously set higher goals, not for the sake of like achieving some form of status, even though that's definitely at play, it's human nature, but because I know that's such a meaningful way to live. The challenge requires me to learn, learning requires me to grow, growth feels very good, even if there were a lot of painful points along the way. So that's kind of the philosophy that starts this off. That's why I got into being a creator to choose those things, but then there came a point where I'm like, I may only be able to go so far as one person, as a small team with an editor, uh, with the whole course model. And so I need to do something bigger. I need to like increase the cap of how much challenge I can take on because that's gonna determine how much I can grow, right, and therefore how much fulfillment I can have in my life. So that's the reason behind the software is because it seemed like this big scary thing, especially when aiming so big, that like I was kind of scared to do it at first. Yeah, but I knew that the progression was there.

SPEAKER_00 38:26

What's funny about what you said is like I I completely agree, and and for leading you to that decision, I think it's uh it that makes sense. That line of thinking, it I would say most people need to think that way. For a lot of people who are already doing a lot of revenue, one of the hardest things, I've fucked this up a million times, is like let's say I'm already like I'll give you the example. I just wrote a whole thing, I'm gonna share it at our event next week. But I was at the pinnacle of pretty much our company's success. We were doing 4 million a month, 3.9 to be exact, but we were doing 3.9 million a month. And so we're pacing 50 million a year and profits at an all-time high. And like I felt like I climbed all the mountains in my business, right? And it's like, okay, like marketing, direct response, okay, I get that. I get the sales, I get you know the fulfillment aspect, upsell retention, like we got all that down. And I felt like I needed another challenge or another way to uh be able to scale up my skill sets. And what I did is essentially instead of just doubling down on just doing more of what's working, I just started a bunch of new stuff. Like we started a whole co, I took on eight clients, and I consolidated down to one, then I took a medical company of three million a month. And honestly, what ended up happening is I just did one of these, just a big loop.

SPEAKER_02 39:42

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 39:42

And now I'm back in the phase where it's like, okay, actually the hard thing is, and I think this is what I didn't realize. So it still aligns with what you're saying, but the hard thing is just being disciplined and okay, doubling down on what's working, and also taking something from let's say 40 or 50 million a year to 100 million, it is going to be new challenges. Yeah, right. They just aren't like the dopamine uh type of challenges that you get from starting something new. Yeah. If that makes sense. It does. I'm sure I'll hit that when I get there. Well, so but you could have started anything, right? Yeah, why? I mean, I I know Eden is tough, right? And obviously it's a it's a big goal you're striving for. Was there anything that like that you see something in the market or what have you that made you want to actually create this specific product?

SPEAKER_01 40:29

There's a lot, and that's kind of the why it's so hard, is because it's hard to like pick a direction and stay with it. The direct no, the direction is actually there, but with a software, it's like you can build any feature you want. So it's like deciding what to build is the most important part, and being able to just focus on that and not get excited when Claude releases a new model that opens up a bunch of opportunities, and now we're building uh this form of agent, which we are, but the it wasn't really an opportun it was an opportunity that I saw, but it was in my own workflow. Like as a creator, uh especially a writing-based creator, there I I just found myself using so many different apps for use cases that they weren't supposed to be used for. Like I use Todoist for jotting down ideas, I use uh or I use to-doist for jotting down ideas, I use Claude for ideating, I use uh Notion for writing, I've switched around writing apps so many different times. I have my videos in Google Drive, I have all of these different things, and over time I kind of just realized like these are all within the creative workflow. Like there is a process or a system here that makes a lot of sense, and I don't think people have exactly figured out what that's going to be with AI just yet. And when I say that, I I want to highlight the word creative because there's a very big difference between the meaningless work, which in the context of business it's has meaning, it has a purpose, you need to do it, but meaningless work that can just be done by an agent and you don't really care about the output. And then there's the meaningful or creative work where it's like, I don't really want the AI to do all of this. And when I see the output, I'm like, that kind of sucks. Like it needs to be a lot better.

SPEAKER_03 42:16

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 42:17

And so we're trying to build a solution to that that isn't so specific that it just alienates every single user. So the way that we went about it was building a drive as the base because you need all of your content in one place, and when we looked at the market there, there's Google Drive, there's Dropbox, not that we want to compete with them directly, but they they're honestly not the best. Right. And we can do a lot better, especially making it AI native. So anything you upload is transcribed, indexed, AI can reference it. But then where's the other pieces of the process? Where's the AI that has access to all of those things without being an MCP connector that can't really do anything like efficiently enough inside of it? You can connect Claude to Google Drive, but it's still like clunky and hard to work with and hard to see everything and pull things in. Um and then the agentic stuff, like just having the drive as the base enables so much with the AI, the AI that people don't really read.

SPEAKER_03 43:26

Yeah, that's true.

SPEAKER_01 43:27

The part where the meaningful work comes in is something like the canvas feature, where it's hard to explain, it's a canvas where you can drag anything from your workspace onto it and you can connect certain parts to an AI chat. So I imagine I have this canvas, newsletter and outline at the top, a bunch of YouTube videos over here for research that I know some of the ideas I want to talk about are in those, and I can chat with those videos to get those ideas out. There's more stuff for my workspace that I know are just gonna play a role. And then my short form content over here, so I can plug my newsletter into certain prompts to have it spit out ideas. And so there I'm writing my newsletter here. I have my outline here, it's a lot more intentional, a lot more crafted. Um, and that's where most of my creative work is done. And then the meaning list work, for lack of a better term, can just be done by like, hey, here's a folder of all my previous change logs, documentation, blog posts, whatever. I want here's the here's all of the GitHub changes that went in this week, create a new change log and get it ready to send to the list, and then boom, I can upload that ready to go. So it's still I think it's shaping up a lot, but the past six months have just been really refining. Like, how do we get this process really good without uh falling for the scope creep that could come because there's just so much you can do with all of that? Like, how do you fit it tightly into one beautiful thing that people want to use?

SPEAKER_00 45:07

So, and then obviously, this is gonna require you as you're scaling this to go beyond a couple person team, right? Oh, so what do you think for you personally has been the biggest challenges that you're dealing with now or that you foresee dealing with that you know, as you go from 10 people to 20 people and so on and so forth, because that's a new thing for you as well. Yeah, and it's very different than the creative flow, right?

SPEAKER_01 45:32

Where absolutely yeah, yeah. No, I've struggled I've already struggled with that a lot because we have we initially had like eight or nine developers, and that was in the Cortex days, so Cortex turned into Eden, long story, whatever. Um, when we switched the company, the dev team kind of downsized. Uh, so now we have about five developers and uh myself, support agent, and like a generalist that helps around, kind of like an assistant. And that's kind of it. And I feel very blessed right now because the way that that team materialized was kind of just by luck. I don't have any type of content I can create on how to hire, on how to do any of this, and um everyone on the team right now is very high agency, very good people, they're extremely good at what they do, but I'm just waiting for the moment where we have to hire, and we the way that I think about it, and with everything that I've done in my life, we're going to study how to hire, and we're gonna learn from people on how to hire, but then we're still gonna have to go through the same mistakes that everyone makes in order for us to really learn it. Yeah, so I'm prepared for that. I'm dreading it, but I know that eventually I'll learn how to do it.

SPEAKER_00 47:00

Well, yeah, it'll be interesting to see how your it affects your content flow, right? Oh, it's already affected. There's a reason why the best content that I make is on a Saturday.

SPEAKER_03 47:09

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 47:09

Is because I don't have a hundred inbound messages a day, which even if I have the discipline to not look at it or just turn my phone off. Yeah. You still know it's there, which is I think what gets at you a little bit. You're like, I know I'm gonna have this thing. Or like, you know, the worst thing is when you have like I I block off all my time. I'll have a couple meetings in the morning, then I block off really everything, and then I'll have like one or two meetings to end the day off. But even those one or two meetings at the end of the day off, it's like it's like this big weight on you. You know, there's like a meme about it or whatever. It's like have you seen it? I think I've seen it yet. I I I don't remember it, but it's like me when there's like one meeting on the calendar, you're just like, oh my god, how do I get out of this?

SPEAKER_01 47:50

You have it, you have the entire day's free, but there's one meeting at the end of the day.

SPEAKER_00 47:53

Yeah, yeah. So there's a reason why, like for me, I mean, it's crazy. Sometimes on Saturdays, I'll get what feels like a week's worth of con it's not literally a week's worth of content, but I'll get like a week's worth of creative work done. Yeah, it feels like at least, in like two hours. Yeah. And I think it's just because you know nobody's gonna fuck with you. Yeah, which is which is the best. And how did you find your CTO? Was that through your content? Or because that's the toughest hire for a software company.

SPEAKER_01 48:20

So we have right now it's CEO, CPO, which is Matt. We we just really call ourselves the co-founders at this point, right? But the CTO, Ari, is a friend of Matt's. So the way the initial team materialized was I was on a Zoom call with Dakota Roberts, and he was teaching a ghostwriting cohort, and they wanted me on as like a guest speaker to talk about my writing process. Uh, Matt was on the call. I mentioned that I was building an app, Cortex, that at that point we were like we had a developer from Upwork and had no idea what we were doing at all. And so Matt unmuted his mic, and he's like, Wait, what kind of app are you building? And I told him a bit about it. Dakota was kind of like, guys, let's not take up the call, get each other's information, and talk afterwards. So we did that, talked to each other for a bit. I told him what I was doing. He could tell that I seemed disinterested at first because that's kind of the default mode when people are trying to like, hey, I want to help with this. Um, but he eventually said, like, you need to burn everything you're doing to the ground because it's just not gonna work. Here's why. And that immediately convinced me, and I'm like, Do you want to help with this? Like, let's do this because you sound like you know what you're doing, and I frankly know that I don't know what I'm doing.

SPEAKER_03 49:41

Right.

SPEAKER_01 49:42

And so he came on, and then he had a few buddies from university. One of them, I don't even think Ari was his direct friend, but a friend of a friend brought Ari on, and Ari's just like one of the most cracked developers. I haven't seen many, but I just know that he is like cream of the crop in that case, because everything he does is just insane. Um but that's how he he initially wasn't the CTO, but after a while, our first rule that kind of became solidified for hiring developers, it's our only role rule, is like they have to get as close as possible to matching the personality traits of Ari. Like if we don't see those in him, in the applicant, then it's kind of like, yeah, we need to think about this a bit. So he's kind of the just pillar of it. And so, of course, after a bit and him clearly proving himself across multiple domains, we yeah.

SPEAKER_00 50:41

I call that the you know it's so funny. I call that the finding your gold standard. Yeah, and so because I teach a lot of people and also recruit for them on especially hiring their first rep so they can get off the phone. And one of the biggest issues with them is that they don't know what good looks like, yeah, right, because they've just never done it. And so a lot of times, like the hardest thing is finding that first person or the first couple of people, and then you understand what good looks like, and then you can take those personality traits, and then it's just you want to replicate that with all your hiring, which makes it's funny. It's like going from zero to one in a sales team is a lot harder than going from one to four, given everything else is going to scale. That makes sense, right? So uh that being said, they know where to find you. Dancoe, probably YouTube, X, all the all the social platforms. Thanks for doing it, man.

SPEAKER_01 51:27

Of course, cool, fun.