The Man Who Made 51 Millionaires: How to Build a Business in Weeks with AI
A 98-minute interview with the founder of Stan on the investor rubric he scores his own company against, the churn number that nearly killed a $30 million business, and the 14 days in a London flat that produced its replacement.
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1 months ago
Duration
Format
Interview
sincere
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177.6K
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57 · 43
Big Idea
The argument in one line.
Score your own company the way an investor would, double down only on the customers who would be very disappointed to lose you, and when growth stalls, change the direction instead of the effort.
Who This Is For
Read if. Skip if.
READ IF YOU ARE…
A founder past the first customers who is bringing people in and losing them at the same rate and cannot see why.
A creator with a product or service who is unsure which customer segment to build around and keeps marketing to everyone.
Someone preparing to cold email an investor, a mentor, or a dream partner and wants to see a real email that worked.
A solo operator deciding what to systematize and what to keep doing by hand.
Anyone sitting on a product idea with seventeen features who needs permission to ship the ugly first version.
SKIP IF…
You want a tutorial on a specific AI tool. The AI here is context, not instruction.
You are looking for a step-by-step content playbook. The social media section is a few minutes of principles, not tactics.
You are not interested in founder psychology. A large part of the middle is an emotional conversation about burnout and identity.
TL;DR
The full version, fast.
A business runs on customers, so the only question that matters for growth is where ten times as many of your ideal customers already gather. Name that customer, test five or six messages against them, and follow the signal. Then measure product-market fit by asking how disappointed people would be to lose the product, not whether they like it, and build only for the ones who say very. Score your company on product, scalability, competitive advantage, and team the way a venture investor would. When Stan stalled at $30 million with ten months of runway, the fix was not working harder: 80 percent of churn came from customers who never made money because they never built an audience, so the founders spent 14 days building an AI content agent on LinkedIn that booked $200,000 on day one and $3 million within months.
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Sizzle of the whole episode: zero to $30 million, the Gary Vee email, the investor rubric, and the 14 days that built Stanley. Subscribe ask.
02:27 – 05:43
02 · Where to find 10x growth
Everything comes down to customers. Ask where ten times as many of them already hang out. Then name your ICP (Sally Jo, the busy mom), list her problems, and test five or six messages until one converts.
05:43 – 08:37
03 · Zillow, the first 10, and referrals
The Zestimate as a voyeurism hook into a bigger business. For your first ten customers, hustle and over-deliver until they are fans. Then align incentives: Stan pays 20 percent of lifetime subscription revenue to referrers.
08:37 – 11:05
04 · Three questions for product-market fit
Ask how disappointed users would be to lose the product (very, somewhat, not at all). Find the pattern among the very-disappointed, ask them what to improve, and ship features both top buckets want. Fit is 40 percent very disappointed. Mid-section sponsor sketch for Granola.
11:05 – 16:02
05 · Why you feel stuck
The bamboo model: a decade of roots before the shoot. Three failed ideas before Stan. The founder-to-CEO ceiling. Two questions for the stuck: ask your team where you get in the way, and ask founders one stage ahead what they spend time on. Then audit your calendar.
16:02 – 22:48
06 · The investor rubric
Four buckets from his VC days: product (prove it with retention and success data, not claims), scalability (does it run without you), competitive advantage (brand, network effects, scale, or in Stan's case caring more and moving faster), and team (what is your right to win).
22:48 – 26:29
07 · Leverage and a system for systems
Constantly ask what has the most leverage. A remarkable organization lets an unremarkable person get remarkable results. Systematize whatever a talented intern could do first, voice-note the process to an AI agent to produce the SOP, then inspect the output and fix the system.
26:29 – 29:59
08 · AI fear, vision, and brand pages in 2026
Terrified of AI, but the gap between promise and implementation is still wide. Build on what will not change about humans in ten years. Social media: give, give, give, mindful scrolling, copy the formats you love and combine them into your own.
29:59 – 35:13
09 · Cold emailing into Goldman Sachs at 19
Single mom, student loans, started college at 16. Studied free interview guides, mock-interviewed in the mirror, and cold emailed every shared connection including the Eagle Scout rolodex. 25 cold emails to get two or three replies, then warm intros compound. Goldman normalized thinking in billions.
35:13 – 38:02
10 · Stanford, COVID, and the first TikTok
Unhappy at Goldman, chased more credentials. Locked down at Stanford, a Gary Vee video prompted a give-first TikTok about landing a dream job that hit 35,000 views. Classmates mocked it. Being laughed at early is a signal there is something there.
38:02 – 41:16
11 · The first 100 customers and the grind
First product was his old Goldman resume sold as a $10 template. Built a second TikTok account to 20,000 followers in two months posting daily, qualified every follower, DMed hundreds, and converted two or three of every ten discovery calls. Months of back-to-back calls and rejection.
41:16 – 44:27
12 · Raising $5 million and bad growth
Raised on founder potential, an ugly deck, and 25 beta testers. Then 30,000 customers arrived fast and many loud short-term users churned in 30 to 60 days, draining attention from the real builders. Time and energy are zero sum.
44:27 – 46:54
13 · Landing Steven Bartlett
Over a year and 25-plus touch points: DMs, LinkedIn, his agent, his head of partnerships, his fund's application form. A mass email on Christmas Eve said applications were lost. He resubmitted. Two days later Bartlett messaged him directly.
46:54 – 52:06
14 · The plateau, the fear, and eating bitter
Stan flatlined at $30 million with ten months of runway as AI arrived. His response was to work harder. The fear was being exposed as a fraud. An emotional passage on chi ku, the self-flagellating inner voice, and realizing he had to become a CEO instead of the one fighting every fire.
52:06 – 57:19
15 · 80 percent churn and the 14 days in London
Only 6 percent of churn went to competitors. 80 percent left because they were not making money, and none of them made content. After his co-founder's wedding they spent two weeks in a London flat building an AI content agent. Day 14 booked $200,000. Months later, $3 million. Parts of the team dunked on it.
57:19 – 59:48
16 · How to know you have the right MVP
First-time founders build 17 features. Instead pick the minimum lovable experience and the narrowest test: LinkedIn, because text constrains variables. You should feel embarrassed showing the first demo. The first Stan was too ugly to check out on.
59:48 – 1:04:32
17 · Show and tell: the Gary Vee email and how Stanley sells itself
The actual cold email, line by line: a specific connection to his book, zero to $30 million in line two, 40 percent EBITDA margins, Goldman and Stanford dropout credibility, one clear ask. Then Stanley's outreach: it emails prospects personalized post ideas as proof before any pitch.
1:04:32 – 1:09:16
18 · Thank you
The host tears up about feeling less alone watching his content. He talks about the pressure of maintaining an identity of constant success and landing on two anchors: live by your values and always give your best.
1:09:16 – 1:15:31
19 · Breakdown: skill stacking and the skateboard
Host solo. Computer science plus Goldman plus VC plus TikTok formed the stack behind Stan. Exercise: list industries, roles, interests, the skills under each, and the one you are underusing. Then the skateboard principle: each version must get the customer somewhere.
1:15:31 – 1:22:12
20 · Breakdown: customer as co-founder, do things that don't scale
Clip from his vlog of a Stanley customer call where he mostly listens. The disappointment question over the like question. DoorDash founders delivering food themselves. Doing it yourself is only valuable if you extract the lessons; otherwise you are just busy.
1:22:12 – 1:25:47
21 · Breakdown: understand your audience, plus a sponsor shoutout
He understands creators because he is one and keeps posting to stay on their pulse. Read what customers say and what they do. Then the Rica cold brew shoutout with the producer.
1:25:47 – 1:30:31
22 · Breakdown: strategic partners and undeniable proof
Everyone's cash is the same; investors were chosen for audience, experience, and access. Proof changes by stage: resume and 25 beta testers for the first round, the business itself later. Ask what proof you have that you are not using.
1:30:31 – 1:38:06
23 · Breakdown: know when to pivot, and persistence
Three pivot signals: no momentum, diminishing returns, new information. Stan had the last two. Pivoting a still-successful company is harder because there is more to protect. Persistence closes: the finish line moves because you grow, so you may never feel you made it, and that is the point.
Atomic Insights
Lines worth screenshotting.
Your 10x growth channel is wherever ten times as many of your ideal customers already hang out, so find that place before touching your product.
Name your ideal customer, list her top problems, then test five or six messages against her and follow whichever one produces purchases.
Ask early customers how disappointed they would be to lose your product, not whether they like it. Pain is a better value signal than praise.
If 90 percent of early users do not love an MVP, that is normal. Build for the 10 percent who would be very disappointed and ignore the rest.
You have product-market fit when more than 40 percent of surveyed users say they would be very disappointed without the product.
Prioritize the features requested by both your very-disappointed and somewhat-disappointed users to pull the second group into the first.
For the first ten customers, out-deliver so hard they become fans, then let a referral incentive turn fans into your sales force. Stan pays 20 percent of lifetime subscription revenue to referrers.
Fast success is bamboo: a decade of roots nobody saw, then a shoot everyone calls overnight.
Your calendar is the honest record of your inputs. If 80 percent of a scaling CEO's time is hiring and 10 percent of yours is, you are not building what you say you want.
Score your company like an investor on four buckets: product quality, scalability, competitive advantage, and team's right to win.
The first thing to systematize is anything you would trust a talented high school intern to do. Leave what still feels like magic for later.
Build toward what will not change about human beings in ten years, not what AI might change in two months.
A warm introduction converts far better than a cold one, so the first few hundred cold emails exist to buy the relationships that make the rest warm.
Not all growth is good growth. Thirty thousand loud short-term customers churned within sixty days and distracted from the ones building real businesses.
Landing a major investor took more than 25 touch points over a year across DMs, agents, partnerships, and a resubmitted fund application on Christmas Eve.
Only 6 percent of Stan's churn went to a competitor. 80 percent left because they were not making money, and none of those were making content.
Pick the narrowest platform that can validate the whole idea. LinkedIn was chosen because text has fewer variables than video.
If your first demo does not make you cringe, you waited too long to show it.
Pessimists get to be right in the room and optimists get to build the company.
The best cold email opens with a specific connection, puts a hard traction number in line two, and ends with a one-line ask.
There is always a way to deliver value sooner. Stanley acquires customers by emailing personalized content ideas before anyone signs up.
Doing things that do not scale is product research, not just hustle. The value is what you learn, not that you did it yourself.
Proof only has to be strong enough to answer the biggest question the person still has about betting on you. Stan raised $5 million with 25 beta testers and an ugly deck.
Sometimes pivoting is persistence. You let go of the version of the dream that cannot survive, not the dream.
Takeaway
Growth is a customer problem, not an effort problem.
WHAT TO LEARN
Find where your ideal customer already gathers, build only for the ones who would hurt to lose you, and when the numbers stall, read them before you work harder.
02Where to find 10x growth
Ask where ten times as many of your ideal customers already hang out before you touch the product. That location is your growth channel.
Name one specific customer, write down her top problems, and aim every message and product at that sub-niche instead of the mass market.
Test five or six messages across your channels and follow whichever one produces purchases. The signal beats your hypothesis.
03Zillow, the first 10, and referrals
Hustle for the first ten customers, then over-deliver until they are fans. A referral incentive that pays on lifetime revenue turns fans into a sales force.
04Three questions for product-market fit
Measure fit by asking how disappointed users would be to lose the product. Liking is polite; disappointment is a value signal.
Treat 90 percent of early users not loving the MVP as normal. Find the pattern among the ones who would be very disappointed and build for them.
Ship the features that both very-disappointed and somewhat-disappointed users request first. You have fit at 40 percent very disappointed.
05Why you feel stuck
Fast success hides years of roots. Three failed ideas and a decade of pattern study came before the company that looked like an overnight hit.
When stuck, ask your team where you get in the way and ask founders one stage ahead what they spend time on. Then compare your calendar to theirs.
If you want a business that scales without you, your calendar should show mostly hiring, context-giving, and management, not micromanaged details.
06The investor rubric
Prove your product is better with retention, success rates, and price compared to the market, not with conviction.
Scalability means the business runs without you as the star contributor. Decide whether to systematize or to charge a premium while nothing else like it exists.
Name your competitive advantage explicitly: brand, network effects, scale, or caring more and moving faster than an incumbent that does not.
Answer why you specifically have the right to win this market. Lived experience with the problem is a real advantage.
07Leverage and a system for systems
Systematize whatever a talented intern could do today. Voice-note the full process, including every small decision, and let an AI agent turn it into an SOP.
When the output of a system is wrong, fix the system and the context you gave it before you blame the person.
08AI fear, vision, and brand pages in 2026
Build toward what will not change about human beings in ten years rather than guessing what AI changes next month.
Scroll your own feed on purpose, note which formats you resonate with, combine two proven ones, and find your own voice over the first twenty posts.
09Cold emailing into Goldman Sachs at 19
Cold email through any shared connection you can find, including unlikely ones like a shared scouting background. Twenty-five emails buys two or three replies.
Those first replies matter because warm introductions convert far better. The early cold volume exists to start a referral flywheel.
Working in rooms where huge numbers are normal raises what you believe is possible for yourself.
10Stanford, COVID, and the first TikTok
A give-first post built from your own story can outperform anything polished. His first TikTok took two hours and hit 35,000 views.
Being mocked for doing something early is often a signal there is an opportunity nobody else sees yet.
11The first 100 customers and the grind
Your first product can be something you already have. His was an old resume sold as a $10 template.
Build a dedicated content account, post daily, qualify every follower against your ICP, and DM to book discovery calls. Expect two or three conversions per ten calls.
Expect the first year or two to feel like pushing a boulder uphill. The growth comes from iterating after each rejection.
12Raising $5 million and bad growth
Early investors bet on the founder and whatever traction exists. Customer traction matters more than resume or deck quality.
Loud short-term customers churn in weeks and drain attention from the ones building real businesses. Not all growth is good growth.
13Landing Steven Bartlett
Landing a major partner can take more than 25 touch points across every channel over a year. Resubmit the application even on Christmas Eve.
14The plateau, the fear, and eating bitter
When growth stalls, working harder is the default response and usually the wrong one. The job is to change identity from fire-fighter to CEO.
Fear of being exposed as a fraud drives the bulldoze instinct. Naming it is the first step to stepping out of it.
The inner voice that pushed you to the first milestone can keep pushing past the point where it serves you.
1580 percent churn and the 14 days in London
Read churn by reason, not by volume. Only 6 percent of Stan's churn went to competitors; 80 percent left because they were not making money.
Follow the churn reason to its root. Customers who were not earning had no audience because they were not making content, so the fix was a content tool.
Validate a big idea with a two-week build on the narrowest platform. LinkedIn was chosen because text has fewer variables than video.
Expect some of your own team to dunk on the pivot. Pessimists get to look smart in the room; optimists build the thing.
16How to know you have the right MVP
Resist building 17 features. Decide the one core value your customer will come back for and the minimum lovable version of it.
If your first demo does not embarrass you, you waited too long. The first version of Stan was too ugly for the founder to trust.
17Show and tell: the Gary Vee email and how Stanley sells itself
Open a cold email with a specific, researched connection, put a hard traction number in the second line, and end with one clear ask.
Write for a busy person who scans. Numbers like zero to $30 million are subconscious proof that the rest is worth reading.
Deliver value before the pitch. An AI agent that emails prospects personalized post ideas sells itself by showing instead of telling.
There is always a way to shorten time to value. Challenge the assumption that your product cannot show its worth up front.
19Breakdown: skill stacking and the skateboard
List the industries, roles, and interests in your past and the skills under each. Pick the one you are underusing right now.
Decide which skill your dream requires that your stack is missing, and what stack your next hire needs to bring.
Build a skateboard, not a wheel. Each version must get the customer somewhere on its own, and each one teaches you what to build next.
Ask what can be built in two weeks that tells you whether the much bigger idea is worth pursuing at all.
20Breakdown: customer as co-founder, do things that don't scale
Keep customers in the room while you build, consistently. Spend customer calls listening more than pitching.
Do the customer-facing unscalable work yourself first, and extract what you learn. Doing it without learning is just being busy.
21Breakdown: understand your audience, plus a sponsor shoutout
Understand your audience by staying one of them. Read what customers say and what their behavior shows, especially when the two disagree.
22Breakdown: strategic partners and undeniable proof
Choose strategic partners for audience, experience, and access, not just capital. Everyone's cash is the same.
Proof only needs to answer the biggest open question about betting on you. A resume plus 25 beta testers raised $5 million.
Look for proof you already have but have not packaged: a result never turned into a case study, a customer story never shared.
23Breakdown: know when to pivot, and persistence
Pivot when you see no momentum, diminishing returns, or new information. Pivoting a still-successful company is harder because there is more to protect.
Sometimes pivoting is persistence. You let go of the version of the dream that cannot survive, not the dream itself.
The finish line moves as you grow, so you may never feel like you made it. Persist long enough to meet the person who can dream bigger.
Glossary
Terms worth knowing.
ICP
Ideal customer persona. A single named, specific description of the person a business serves best, used to focus messaging and product decisions on one sub-niche instead of a mass market.
Product-market fit
The point where customers pull a product toward them rather than needing to be pushed. One common test is whether more than 40 percent of users say they would be very disappointed to lose it.
Churn
The rate at which paying customers cancel. A business can keep adding customers and still stop growing if churn matches new signups.
Runway
How many months a company can keep paying its bills at the current burn rate before the money runs out.
ARR
Annual recurring revenue. The yearly value of all active subscriptions, the standard growth metric for subscription software.
EBITDA margin
Earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation, and amortization, expressed as a percentage of revenue. A rough measure of operating profitability.
MVP
Minimum viable product. The smallest version of a product that still delivers the main outcome a customer wants, built to learn before investing in more.
Minimum lovable experience
The narrowest version of a product that a customer will not only tolerate but be impressed by. A stricter bar than viable.
Skateboard principle
An MVP approach where each version is a complete working vehicle (skateboard, scooter, bicycle, car) rather than one finished part of the final product.
Right to win
The specific reason a founder or team is uniquely positioned to succeed in a market, such as lived experience, audience, or skills competitors lack.
Network effects
A competitive advantage where a product becomes more valuable as more people use it, making it hard for a newcomer to pull users away.
Skill stacking
Combining seemingly unrelated skills from past roles into a combination that competitors cannot easily replicate.
Chi ku (eat bitter)
A Chinese expression for enduring hardship without complaint, often passed down as a point of pride in immigrant families.
“Where does my customer disproportionately hang out? If I want 10x growth, the input to that is finding 10x as many customers.”
Reframes a vague growth question as a location question in two sentences.→ TikTok hook↗ Tweet quote
08:00
“Show me the incentive and I'll show you the outcome. We're always in the business of creating win-wins.”
Munger line plus the application to the 20 percent lifetime referral.→ newsletter pull-quote↗ Tweet quote
09:05
“You ask them, how disappointed would you be if you no longer had access to this product? Because pain for human beings is a much better signal of how much they value something versus how much they say they like something.”
The single most reusable tactic in the episode, self-contained.→ IG reel cold open↗ Tweet quote
11:40
“It takes years, decades at times, for bamboo to actually spread its roots. And then over the course of days or weeks, it shoots up to some massive success.”
Visual metaphor, works with b-roll, addresses the comparison anxiety everyone feels.→ IG reel cold open↗ Tweet quote
15:20
“Look at your calendar because it's a function of what you're actually accomplishing. How could I possibly want the outcome of an at-scale business if my inputs are not aligned whatsoever with that outcome?”
Concrete self-audit with a built-in confrontation.→ TikTok hook↗ Tweet quote
20:30
“We just genuinely cared way more than the competition. No one else will ever beat us on that value because we are creators and entrepreneurs ourselves.”
Honest answer to why Stan won against 50 link-in-bio tools.→ newsletter pull-quote↗ Tweet quote
23:40
“The definition of a remarkable organization is that an unremarkable person can come in and achieve remarkable results.”
Tight aphorism, no setup needed.→ newsletter pull-quote↗ Tweet quote
36:30
“When you do something so early, people will make fun of you and laugh at you. But if you're right on the bet, you should see people shitting on you as a signal that there's probably something there.”
Contrarian and backed by the Stanford classmates story.→ TikTok hook↗ Tweet quote
39:00
“People severely underestimate how much effort and how hard it is to get your first 100 customers. Some people will send 10 cold emails and that's terrifying for them.”
Calls out the gap between what people think the grind is and what it was.→ IG reel cold open↗ Tweet quote
46:40
“Over the course of 30 plus touch points, which most people would give up on one, two, three, definitely five. That's what it took to land someone of the caliber of Steven to even have a first conversation.”
Hard number on persistence with a named payoff.→ TikTok hook↗ Tweet quote
47:30
“You realize 30 million in revenue, like, oh, you're set, John. No. It's so fragile. It could all disappear tomorrow.”
Punctures the number everyone fixates on.→ IG reel cold open↗ Tweet quote
52:40
“Only 6 percent of our total churn was leaving for another product. 80 percent of people churned from Stan because they're not making money.”
The diagnostic that drove the whole pivot, two numbers.→ newsletter pull-quote↗ Tweet quote
55:30
“For two weeks in a London flat, hacking away day in, day out, not showering, vibe coding all day, cold calling customers. On day 14 it booked us $200,000 in revenue.”
The title promise delivered as a story beat.→ TikTok hook↗ Tweet quote
56:40
“The pessimists get to be right in the moment and seem smart. The optimists are the ones who actually win and build.”
Clean contrast, lands after the team-pushback story.→ newsletter pull-quote↗ Tweet quote
58:50
“You should feel pretty embarrassed and cringy when you show your first demo to someone of your MVP. Like it should feel painful.”
“If I could pick one skill that changed my life for the better, it would be cold emailing. Because if you're good at it, it gets you into rooms that you have no business being in.”
The episode's thesis on skills, already used in the cold open.→ TikTok hook↗ Tweet quote
Topic Map
Where the conversation goes.
02:27 – 08:37denseCustomer acquisition and ICP
08:37 – 11:05denseProduct-market fit survey method
16:02 – 22:48denseInvestor rubric: product, scalability, moat, team
22:48 – 29:59steadyLeverage, systems, AI, and content principles
29:59 – 41:16denseOrigin story: Goldman, Stanford, TikTok, first customers
41:16 – 46:54steadyFundraising, bad growth, landing investors
46:54 – 59:48denseThe plateau, churn diagnosis, and the Stanley pivot
59:48 – 1:04:32denseCold email teardown and AI-driven outreach
1:04:32 – 1:09:16sparseEmotional close
1:09:16 – 1:38:06steadyHost breakdown: ten principles
The Script
Word for word.
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We went from zero to 30 million in just four years. And so I know for a fact, you give me a single human being on the planet that I can coach them and get them to build a six -figure business. I will bet my life on it.
If I were to start a brand today, this is what I would do. Me, John Hu, investment banker turned content creator and CEO of Stand, which has grown to over $40 million and is backed by Stephen Bartlett, the Harmosys, and Gary Vee. And today, he's going to reveal his money -making secrets.
So if I want to 10x my business, what do I do? One skill that changed my life for the better would be cold emailing. Because if you're good at it, it gets you in a room.
that you have no business being in. This is the actual cold email that I sent to Gary. And a playbook to scale your business so you can break through in any dream.
I want you to think about your own company like an investor and use an investor rubric. There are four key buckets. Number one is product.
Why is it 10x better than the competition? And then why it will continue to be better. The second piece is...
If you just do that, you will achieve remarkable results. When we make it one day, what do you think your favorite reflection on the experience will be? I'll be proud that I saw it in you.
I started San when I was at Stanford Business School. And I made video every single day. Post.
And then I would go back to back on customer calls. Okay, Evan. Most of them are rejection.
Trying so hard to figure out how do we make it. And then in between those customer calls, I would script videos, film those videos. And then I was trying to learn how to hire a team.
And then by the end of the day, you're like, I've done only calls today. I've actually built a business. Don't tell me, bro.
No! You want to be one of our first customers? I would love to.
Oh, I just raised $5 million. I might be making my dreams come true. I'm building the next billion dollar company.
Oh my God. We eventually get to our first million dollars in revenue and then our first $10 million in revenue and 30 ,000 customers. And then AI hits.
What we realized, well, wait a minute. Why don't we actually just... In 14 days, we built something that got from $0 to $200 ,000 in revenue.
And then just a couple of months later, we did $3 million. And this is what I did. On this channel, we don't just like to talk about dreams.
We'd like to help make them happen. And that is exactly what our project, What's Your Dream, is all about. Let us know in the comments what your dream is and what is one area that you need our help with right now.
And guess what? You might just hear from us. Oh, and don't forget to stick around to the end of the video because we do break down the entirety of John's dream into actionable steps for all of you guys.
We'll meet there. I'd say let's jump into the video, but I do have one guest who wants to speak. Thank you for subscribing.
Oh. Thank you for subscribing in the last video. And if you have not, please subscribe.
All right, let's get back to the video.
John, if someone wants to 10x their company, where do you see them generally overinvest their attention? And where do you think that they should be putting it instead? So everything.
in business comes down to one thing and one thing only for the most successful businesses, which is your customer. All of us get in our heads of how I can get to next birth. How can I do this thing?
How can I do that thing? but you have to realize what does a business run on? It runs on a bunch of customers or people who want something from you in some way.
And so I believe the right way for everyone here to answer the question and find their 10X Growth channel is to ask yourself, where does my customer disproportionately hang out? And then I would ask myself, what does my customer need, right? So for example, if you're a real estate agent and you target single moms who hang out at country clubs in this particular way, you want to just ask yourself, if I want 10X Growth, The input to that is finding 10x as many customers.
And so where are 10x as many customers hanging out? So maybe that's at the country club, maybe that's online, maybe that's in an email list, maybe that's in a subreddit or a community. It makes sense.
And then I think about it, I'm like, well, I'm not really prioritizing things like LinkedIn, which is really where our customer is. Super slept on, super slept on. Right.
I am curious, when it comes to that customer, what are different tactics that someone could use to make sure that they are speaking to the correct customer? Because I could say, okay, entrepreneurs, but then... I'm there and I'm not sure exactly which one specifically would be the best for my product.
Everything comes down to one specific term. which is your ICP or your avatar. The number one thing I would have you do to make sure you are doing the right thing or saying the right things is I would sit down with your team and I'd walk through and I'd give someone a name.
I would think about who is my ideal customer persona. So in this case, let's assume that I'm a physical therapist or I'm a fitness coach. And I specifically know that I can serve best my customer who is a busy mom who works a nine to five, is upper middle class.
And in that I can name her, let's say Sally Jo. What I'm going to be thinking about there is what are Sally Jo's top problems.
I would guess if you interviewed Sally Jo, she'd say, you know, John, I really want to lose weight, but I don't have enough time. I'm super busy with my job, my relationship with my partner, and then also my kids. And so I don't have time.
And so then I'm thinking about all the messaging I'm creating and all of my products and services should meet her specific problems at that sub -niche level. So I'm not going, hey, at the mass market level, I'm going to help all of you guys lose weight. I'm saying, if you're a busy mom working a nine to five, I'm specifically going to make recipes for you that you can make in five minutes that are healthy that'll help you lose weight and then specifically give you a five minute exercise or a 15 minute exercise that you can do every single day in between when you're picking up your kids in the school line and when you get home.
That level of clarity and specificity basically niching down early on to find your ICP will give you significantly more conviction on what messaging you should hit up front. And then your job from there as someone who wants to scale a business is basically to go, okay, my hypothesis is if I market to Sally Jo that I will help her lose weight in five minutes, she will come in and she'll work with me.
Your job is to basically test that across five or six different messages, right? Whether it's on Facebook ads, whether it's in your content on social media, whether it's on a billboard. on the side of your town, whatever your distribution channel is, and then validate which one of these messages actually led to someone coming in purchasing.
And then what do you do? You just follow the signal. Are there any examples that come to mind of like a brand that has like nailed customer acquisition?
One of the cleverest ways that I've seen a business acquire customers is actually Zillow. Zillow was incredibly prescient around the fact that we are all voyeurs. We want to know what price that rich person's house is or that X.
partner of ours is, or that crazy person out there in Beverly Hills, how much their house is worth. So the way that they went about building their brand and acquiring customers was through this really clever idea of the Zestimate, which by the way, when they first started, it was like very broad. It was like this.
But what they used on the Zestimate was a way to meet human nature where it was at and play to this mass market play of like, hey, how much is my neighbor's house worth? And use that as a hook into their broader business. Because you come in for the Zestimate and you know Zillow, and then you realize, and then you have the product experience, you're realizing, oh, I'm looking at a map of all the houses out there.
Which then, it might not be that day, but a year later, five years later, when you're in the market for a house, where do you go? You go to the place where you saw the Zestimate. You go to the place where you saw a map of all the potential houses you could buy.
So I think it's one of the most clever tactics of how to acquire a customer by just meeting them where they're at and giving them a really fun thing. So I feel like acquiring customers just feels like you're just going this uphill battle. Is there anything that we could do to make that incline a little bit easier?
So for the first 10, you got to hustle. That's just purely you breaking out there and like figuring out a way to acquire those first 10 people. But then what one should do is one should seek to out deliver value for this first 10.
Like you want to do everything you can to make these first 10 people your biggest fans. Like truly for us, Stan, the first product we ever offered was Stan's store. It was a Lincoln bio that was significantly more supercharged with like all the ways that you can monetize.
I would personally build our first 10 customers their stance or I would help them make their digital product. I come up with all their marketing ideas. Like I'd be like, hey, like what if you did this video in this way?
And some of these first 100 people, I literally made them their first 100K myself or their first million over the course of six months. And the way I think for folks to think about how do you scale this or how do you gas this out is one of my favorite Charlie Munger quotes, which is show me the incentive and I'll show you the outcome.
AKA, we're always in the business of creating win -wins. If our customer is winning, therefore we win because it aligns incentives. And so in this particular case, once we had built this incredible fan base of people like, holy shit, John and Stan made us so much money.
What did we do? We offered a referrals incentive. So like, hey, if you want to share your Stan referral link, it's not just like a one -time fee in this case.
We want to do a line incentives even further. If you share a Stan subscription with other people and they subscribe, then you get 20 % of their lifetime recurring subscription for life. Like as long as they're subscribed, you also get the kickback.
So as you think about how do you build an organization that scales without you, one of the best ways to do that is to Think about what are the incentives you provide your different stakeholders and therefore what outcome will you get out of that? That's genius.
I feel like we're going to apply that. So, you know, I'm sure that one of the benefits of acquiring these customers, especially early on, is that they can help you build your product and improve your product. Yes.
How are you including potential customers as part of the process so that they can help you improve your product? So the golden goose of an early stage startup is to get to product market fit. What does that mean?
No one really knows, but they always say, you know it when you have it because you just... Feel the market pull. So I've got a set of three questions that will help you hit product market fit.
The first one is a very counterintuitive question. So once you get your first few customers, the number one thing you should ask them is not how much do you like the product? That's what the most people do.
You ask them, how disappointed would you be if you no longer had access to this product? Because pain for human beings is a much better signal of how much they value something. versus how much they say they like something.
And you just give them three options. Very disappointed, somewhat disappointed, and not disappointed at all. Sorry to interrupt here, but I have to go off of what John is saying because we would 10 out of 10 be disappointed if we didn't have this one tool for our business.
And that tool is Granola. Granola is an AI notepad. And I personally like to describe it as an encyclopedia of literally every meeting you've ever had in your business.
And I keep going on and on and on, blah, blah, blah. Is that good? Yeah.
Can we finish this later? Just so we can get to the meeting. Granola, what are the to -dos?
She doesn't even use her brain anymore. If she didn't have granola, we would never have follow -up emails. Yeah, so that's what it's for.
My battery is running low and I think it's causing me to lie. Go get your battery. Charger.
I'll get in a second. So there's three things that we had to discuss. You know how John talked about the systems and creating of the AI?
Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. What is one that we could easily offload? Granola.
Based off of our interview with John where he talks about systems, I want you to look through across all of our meetings and I want you to tell me all of the systems that we should create and where we really are falling short. You know you don't have to call it granola. Oh, this is great.
So we have the guest follow -up, follow -up email, SOP. Oh, so granola can roast people now. That's great.
And this episode is sponsored by... Oh, granola. Yeah.
Nice. Is that what your plan was this entire time? You don't have to do an ad read anymore, Tiff.
We literally pitched something completely different. We're not going to use this meeting. I invented a new color for my background.
It's greenola. Can we actually seriously just go back to the meeting? What do you want to do?
She's freezing again. Okay, guys, I'm down to 2%. I'll be right back.
No. You want to take it away? All right, guys, you know the deal.
Click the link in the description. One month off. Go check it out.
Like and subscribe. Like and subscribe. Come on.
What did I miss? Ask Granola.
Wait, what? Are you using this as the ad again? Hello?
Most people will see that 80 % of people or 90 % of people who don't like your product as discouragement. But you should recognize in an early stage MVP, most people aren't going to fuck with your product and love it because there's probably seven features, more features than needs or needs to be proven this way. For that 10 % of people who really, really love your product, you ask the next question.
which is what are the key patterns behind all the people who love our product the most? Because what you'll find, for example, with Stan, is we served a bunch of different kinds of creators. So there were lifestyle creators, people with like 5 million followers, there were comedians, there were artists, there were all these different people that we gave Stan to.
And so what we found was folks who specifically wanted to offer some sort of community subscription, some sort of course, some sort of coaching service, they were our best early customer. And so what did we do? We asked them as the third question, what should we improve that would make you love this even more?
And so they were like, hey, John, we specifically are making the most money by offering a course specific thing on this. So we want you to improve this in this way. And so in that process, what do you do?
You now iterate. So what you do is you take their feedback and you make the product better in those ways. And then you do something else that's clever, which is you also have that bucket of people said they were somewhat disappointed.
And you find the features that both your very disappointed people request. as well as your somewhat disappointed people requests. And you prioritize those and you build those first.
And so what do you do in that next cycle? You imagine this iteration cycle, the people who already love your product and you're getting immense value from it, love it even more. And then you're also grabbing a couple of these people from the somewhat disappointed category and bucket and delighting them too and moving them over to very disappointed.
And basically the rule of thumb is you have product market fit. At some point, if over 40 % of people that you survey say they would be very disappointed if they didn't have your product anymore. Really what is fascinating to me is I feel like we...
You're right. The inclination is to focus on the negative and to be like, oh, let me convert those people. But in reality, it's doubling down on the people who are, who understand what you're doing.
Double down on the winners, always. One of the things I had written down was, you know, you scaled Stan pretty quickly, right? You know, you went from zero to 30 million ARR.
And now with Stanley, you're growing pretty quickly as well. And I think a lot of founders, I mean, it's just me, look at that. And I'm just like.
man, I've been at this for years. What am I missing? If someone feels stuck right now, despite doing all the right things, what do you think are the common mistakes that they're making that are leading them to being in this position?
So the first mental model I'll give you that's going to give you so much release from this feeling of stress and frustration, like, fuck, why is everyone else making it? And it just seems so easy to them, but I'm stuck here. I think very often about bamboo.
Sounds really silly, right? But if you know anything about bamboo, It takes years, decades at times, depending on the strain, for bamboo to actually spread its roots.
And then over the course of days or weeks, it shoots up to some massive success. The reason why Stan scaled so quickly is because I had a decade plus of obsessing over business, working at Goldman Sachs and VC at a top firm. I had learned all the patterns of how to scale.
It's 10 years of studying and working and iterating. And also, by the way, I failed three multiple ideas before Stan. And so no one saw that.
What all of us are seeing oftentimes is like, you know, some 18 year old vibe coded a hundred K MRR app. And you're like, fuck, I'm so behind. I'm so cooked because of AI.
There are going to be some of those lucky cases of the geniuses, but most of the success stories you've seen, if you really dig into them, whether it's people building a business or it's a really famous artist who had an overnight success, they've been grinding for years. Even to use Stan as an example, you saw us have this meteoric rise.
And then I hit my ceiling of incompetence. I actually didn't. learn the skills and grow into the ways that I needed to at the time for about a year, year and a half to make the transition from a founder who's had a meteoric rise to a CEO that scales a true business.
And now you're seeing us evolve and adapt and learn how to get to the next level in a way that I think it's very human for all of us to recognize that you're gonna have these periods where you're going and you're struggling and the struggle is actually the human journey and it's you getting to pay your dues to then have this shoot.
And then you hit this next plateau. And whether or not you get to success is whether or not you can get through that struggle and then you shoot to the next level. In terms of where I see people getting most stuck is that they're not zooming out often enough.
You have to have these bursts of being deep in the problem, obsessing over the problem and trying to figure it out. And then you have to have the healthy awareness of when should I actually take a step out? Because by definition, if you're in the thing, you can't see the thing.
And there are times if you want to scale, especially when you get to the next level, you have to recognize what got me here won't get me there. And if I'm going to figure out what will get me there, I actually need to leave this circumstance and observe from the outside as a third party observer. And then you can observe and be like, in my case, oh.
I'm too in the thick of things. I'm too in the fires. I'm too in the fight or flight when actually now to go from 30 to hundreds of millions of revenue, I actually need to be a completely different kind of person.
I actually need to be a general that's actually coordinating all these different battalions and armies rather than being the one leading up the front lines here and then therefore not seeing the whole battlefield and the scale that I need to be playing at. So other than, okay, I have to remove myself, I have to change. Are there any specific tactical questions that this person could ask themselves while they're doing that?
Yes. And I would specifically have them ask not themselves, but other people. And what I mean by there's two questions that I would give you if you're feeling stuck.
Number one is I would be asking my team for very honest, candid feedback on where they think I'm getting in the way. They'll give you a pretty honest reflection if you have a good relationship with them. And in that, it's very difficult to take because you're the boss and you have to seem like you're in control and you have to feel like, you know, you're the one running stuff.
And then if you pair that within asking founders or entrepreneurs or people who are one stage ahead of you, what are the things you're spending your time thinking about and doing? You'll start to see patterns between, okay, this is the feedback I'm getting on how I could potentially improve. And then this is...
lived output experience of people that I look up to. So for example, when I was still learning how to upvote from founder to CEO, it was very much so I was too in the thick of things. But then I'd ask about these billion dollar founders who were scaling super well, like, what do you spend your time doing and thinking about?
None of them were telling me they were in the weeds of this, that, or that thing. At times they were, but actually what they're spending 80 % of their time doing was hiring and leading a team. And then when I evaluated myself, if you look at my calendar at the time, and this is what everyone should do is they should look at their calendar because it's a function of what you're actually accomplishing.
Only like 10, 20 % of my time was on hiring. And so how could I possibly want the outcome of an at -scale business if my inputs are not aligned whatsoever with that outcome that I want? The inputs that I was having here, all the usage of my time was on like micromanaging small details.
And yes. The thing came out perfect, but was it creating the outcome of scale that I wanted? No, the activities I would need to do instead would be hiring an awesome team, giving them the context, training them properly, managing them properly, because then they can get so much more scale than I could alone.
Speaking to those successful entrepreneurs or companies, I am curious, the ones that have successfully scaled, what patterns are you seeing? over and over again. So before I started a business, I was a venture capital investor.
And so I got to see hundreds of companies every year at the deepest of levels, at the board level, at the metrics level, at like the founder level of what were the patterns that led them to success. Because at the end of the day, as a venture capital investor, what are you trying to do? You're trying to make a ton of money off of making a couple bets.
And so you're really trying to find the patterns of what leads to the most successful companies. I want you to think about your own company like an investor. And so I actually think one of the best ways to think about evaluating your company to make sure it's successful is to use an investor rubric to value your company.
And so there are four key buckets. So number one is product. Okay, what is the quality of your product?
Why is it 10x better than the competition? Right? And when you first start, of course, it might not be 10x better, it might be one and a half x better, two x better.
But you need to have a really clear understanding of why your product is significantly better than the rest of the market. And then also long term, why it will continue to be better. I have a question about that.
How do you actually qualify that it actually is the best. There is no better way to qualify whether your product is the best more than just showing the data, which is like, I can tell you right now, Tiff, believe me, this is a great product.
Or I can just show you, these are the survey results. This is our retention versus the rest of the market. It's 25 % higher.
This is our customer success rate. It's 25 % higher than all the legacy competition because it stands so much simpler and easier to use. And also, by the way, here's the price point.
It's significantly cheaper than the rest of the market too. So product. That's number one.
The second piece is scalability. Specifically what I mean by this big business buzzword of scalability, because people use this all the time. What I actually mean by that is it's one thing to make your first 100K or first million dollars as just like a star individual contributor.
And we're all able to do that, I think, now in the age of AI. It's another thing to build a truly repeatable and scalable business in an enterprise that goes on and works without you. And so there's all these different things you could be doing.
So in this context, it's like, should I build a system to like make customer support more efficient? Or is there actually just so much alpha to be captured in this market that I can charge an above average price for the next few years because there's nothing else like it in the market. So there's all these different variables that underlie the simple thing of like profit margin that are actually questions of like, how do I optimize my business?
So once you have product and scalability, then you should be thinking about the next level of the game, which is competitive advantage. People go to business school for two years to learn all about this. what are all the ways that my business can differentiate versus the competition?
At the end of the day, what I think most people don't recognize is we are in a competitive environment. Like competition will eat your business alive if you're not thinking about it. There's a term in Silicon Valley, they say only the paranoids will survive.
And there's a reason for that. Not the most healthy for your nervous system, but there's a reason. And so with competitive advantage, a couple of key things that you can be thinking about for yourself is why is someone going to consistently come back to my business versus other businesses?
Maybe it's brand, right? For Apple or Coca -Cola, there's like a very strong brand. knows that you exist and they have feelings towards you in some sort of way that leads to more brand loyalty.
Then you have something like network effects. So Facebook or Instagram is a great example. All of your friends are on it.
solve that cold start problem with the network is incredibly difficult for a new challenger app. Then there's other things like scale. Like at the end of the day, the reason why big corporations are taking over the world is because they have scale.
They have so many funds or they have so many resources to just beat out the competition in certain ways. Right. And so your job as this upstart entrepreneur is like, okay, what are the small ways that I can differentiate in my business versus the competition?
Right. And for you, what was that? If I were super honest on why Stan won, I should paint you the landscape first of how stupid it was for me to start Stan.
So I started Stan when I was at Stanford Business School. The context in which I started Stan was on its face, if you were a business school student, absolutely idiotic. True, there was so much competition, it was a red sea.
The career economy was the hottest thing possible. There were multiple companies that were billion dollar plus, had raised tons of money from these private equity firms. And there were 50 plus Lincoln BioSolutions.
And so I say that to say, if I were to give you the super honest answer of why we won, it would come down to two things. One, is we just genuinely cared way fucking more than the competition, right?
When you're competing with like some legacy boomer software solution that's private equity owned that doesn't actually give a fuck about your customers versus me just like in the thick of it. I'm in the zeitgeist. I'm just serving my friends.
Like I use the right language to market to our customer because I am our customer. I'm around our customer all the time versus like some nine to five person who clocks in and out and like it does a market study that takes three months. Like it sounds so silly, but we just genuinely out care our competition and no one else will ever beat us on that value because we are creators and entrepreneurs ourselves.
But then number two is just the quality of the talent and the speed at which we operate. That is phenomenal. And that's something that anyone at the end of the day, like they could be the competitive advantage.
I mean, it's why you see people like Alex Earl, like why it resonated so much is because she was someone. who struggled with acne and it you know completely made sense and for years we knew that she struggled with this she was very vulnerable and honest showing pictures of her acne which literally i saw and i like as someone who struggled with that i'm like i'm older than her and everything but i'm like man like i relate to this girl right and that's why i actually think founders are so special because they're this magnetic force that's irrational right from a business lens you're like can i count on the founder just be so exceptional And they've got a variable to them that's magic.
And investors therefore put a premium on that, right? Like the valuation of SpaceX or Tesla is not rational. But the market has assigned that Elon has some super force.
And so it's really, really special when you start a company up front, like you are the differentiation actually. And it feels really silly, like this human being that has this raw potential could be the thing. But truly, like I think we humans are the thing that really makes magic in a way that like AI for now can't.
So what's the last one? So I guess this sets us up really well for the last one, which is team. So at the end of the day, you're investing in human beings running an operation.
And so this variable especially is incredibly important at the early stages because especially at the seed stage, you're just betting on human beings because like their initial idea likely won't work out. Whether or not they have the resilience to pivot through and figure out the next big idea. Like I love Slack as an idea because they started out as a video game and then eventually turned into a $10 billion plus messaging application.
That was just the quality of the team, though. It was the quality of the founder and the quality of the people who built that with Stuart back in the day. And so the way that I would have a founder and entrepreneur evaluate whether or not they're running the right business is they would ask themselves, why am I uniquely disposed to win in this market?
And so to use Alex Nerville as an example, of course you should build an incredible acne skincare line that has a very high chance of success. Because she was so authentic to that journey, she's built an audience and a trust and reputation credibility around dealing with acne. And then she's therefore the customer has a lot of intuition how likely her product should succeed and actually help people in that.
And so asking yourself the term, what is my right to win? Is a really, really important question. And you'll see that actually translates to not only what I said before on competitive advantage, but also team here.
Like what is the team that I'm building? What are the skill sets of that team that will then lead me to have the right to win to outcompete the rest of the environment? That's so beautiful.
That's truly, like, truly so beautiful. I think one of the hardest parts, you know, of growing a business is that, like, every day, everything feels urgent. So I am curious, is there anything that helps you decide what's actually worth your time for growth?
I would just constantly be asking yourself, what can I be doing that has the most leverage? Where first you start out, you're doing literally everything, right? You're doing the sales, you're making the content, you're making the product, you're checking on everything.
Your job is once again to build those systems that allow you to automate out all of those things that are your lowest ROI value return and then constantly trailblaze new places where you can add more and more leverage to your business. That's just like that's the path of the founder is to constantly innovate in ways that adds more leverage to your business.
Speaking of systems, systems obviously are very important to like we've had oftentimes we've brought in people where I'm like, I can't tell. if it's the person or the system that's failing. And so I'm curious if you have a system for creating a good system.
I'd start first with a quote, which is the definition of a remarkable organization is that an unremarkable person can come in and achieve remarkable results. And that only comes from creating incredible systems. And so for your first question there of thinking, okay, is it the person or is it the underlying system?
Which I would argue the person coming in is part of that system at the end of the day. So you can always improve that variable by hiring someone better at that particular job. At the end of the day, I think the best founders and leaders and entrepreneurs take extreme ownership and they say, no matter what, something here could be improved.
The underlying system, the underlying way that I'm giving that person context that could also likely be improved. And so now to answer your question around, is there a system to figure out what's this? to systematize.
Our jobs as entrepreneurs looking to scale and build systems is to identify the places where there actually should be systems. But I think people too early on would be like, I need to systematize everything. So in my perspective, a large part of the creative process, you just need to break down what are the pieces of that that can be systematized right now versus what still feels like magic in a bottle.
Because what you should be doing is basically ask myself, what are the things that I can immediately trust a talented high school intern to do? So whether that's checking my inbox or doing X and Y thing or like picking up coffee as an extreme example, those are the opportunities to first automate and systematize. And what my process is from there is I just voice note.
to my AI agent, I'm like, hey, ask me all of the questions that you think you need to be able to truly systematize this process. And then I'm going to give it a voice note of context of like, I'm going to ramble. So this is how I get my copy.
I specifically love this specific copy. I go here. And what you should do is you should be aware of every single action decision you take.
So you're like, when I get to the counter, based off of how I'm feeling, I decide if I want a matcha latte or if I want an espresso. And then I always make sure to tip the waiter this because it's really important to me to have this connection. So you run through all of the pieces.
of how you do the action yourself. The AI agent's good enough to then be like, okay, this is how we systemize process. You create an SOP, right?
And then you just give that to either a person or an AI agent to do. And then what you should be doing is you just watch what the output is there. And then your job as the watcher of the system is to be like, okay, what is the result or the output that comes back to me?
If it's not right, let's say my matcha latte is cold today. What went wrong in that? Then you dig in.
It's like, oh, well, I assume that you would have a car. I had a car to drive to this coffee. You actually took an extra 30 minutes because you had to walk.
So I actually need to get you changed. transportation to actually do this job well. So if you do those well, what does that do?
It creates net more energy and space for you to do the thing that you're really creative at that's hard to systematize, but then also therefore build awareness around, okay, I'm doing this action much more often. How do I actually systematize these tiny little things of taste and creativity, what have you, that only I can do?
That actually makes me feel a lot better because it makes me feel like, okay, great, the magic in a bottle, I'm going to leave that for a later date. For now. Are you worried about AI?
I am terrified. But I also believe it won't replace us anytime soon. And our job is actually to integrate with it to survive long term.
At the end of the day, there is a massive gap right now between the promise that you see on AI and like, oh my God, it's going to destroy all the jobs and it's going to do all these crazy things. Because it will do that on a very normal use case, but completely falls apart in all these edge cases. And then the reality of actually implementing AI to be successful in your business.
There's a massive gap. It will get closed over the next few years, but like... All the AI tech bros are very incentivized to be like, AI is going to change your life and all this stuff.
But it completely falls apart as vaporware right now. How can you have vision for a company in a world where AI could just change everything that you've worked for in two months? Like, how do you know even when to pivot?
Jeff Bezos has a really great quote that I love. That is, if you ask me what's going to change in the next 10 years, I have no idea. I spend my time instead thinking about what's not going to change in the next 10 years.
And so in this context, we as human beings, what are we always going to want? We're going to want faster delivery and cheaper prices when it comes to Amazon. So as you think about what you should be building towards in your own vision for your own company is what are the principles about human beings that will likely not change in the next 10 years and build after that?
Moving on to social media, because I know you know so much about that. Unfortunately, yeah. So how do you grow a brand page in 2026?
So the way to win on social... is the way to win on anything in life, in my opinion, which is just to start from the framework of give, give, give. At the end of the day, if you think about yourself scrolling social media, you're just asking yourself, do I want to watch this video?
And then if you break that down from a first principles perspective, what does that actually mean? It's like, is this video interesting to me? Will it give me value in some way?
So whether that value is emotional value, so like a connection with a relationship with someone that you respect as an influencer or content creator, or it's like laughter, or there's like... a lot of what I do is just pure utility value. Like for me, my standard for a video is like, if someone watches this, will it genuinely make their life better?
Like is the knowledge I'm giving them or the value I'm giving them genuinely going to make their life better? At a foundational level, I'd start there. Then from there, the easiest thing to do if you want to get better at content is just to once again, scroll your feed.
And I like to call it mindful scrolling. So what you should be doing is you should be seeing what formats and what accounts are hitting that you personally really resonate with. Because that is likely a reflection of your values and your own style.
So for me back in the day was Casey Neistat, Emma Chamberlain. I love their blog styles. And then I really love, for example, like Gary V.
Hormozy, like teaching a ton of education. And so I took the established proven formats. of Casey Neistat's vlogs and Alex Hormozy's educational videos.
And what did I do? I just combined them because that was my particular taste and style. And so I copied like an artist, right?
I copied some things that really deeply inspired me as an artist. And then I made it my own. And what that allows you to do is it allows you to then go, okay, over time after I make my first 20 videos, starting to understand what is my unique style, what is my unique voice, what is my unique preference of how I want to express myself.
however if you want to create an enterprise or an organization or attract other people some version of what your art needs to do should capture the attention of other people you can go the route of like this is my hobby i don't care at all that my paintings are super ugly in my case the vlogs can be doing for yourself but if you're trying to put food on the table then objectively you're not doing a great job because you've got to build a business.
And so that's where the iteration experimentation is to learn what other people resonate with. It all stems back to what you're saying. It's just the intention behind it has to be incredibly authentic and real to the individual because I think then at that point it falls apart.
Yes. So let's rewind. I want to go before you've created Stan, before you went to Stanford Business.
I know that you cold called or cold emailed your way. Both, yeah. into Goldman Sachs, right?
Yeah. So can you tell me a little bit about how did you even get that opportunity? Yeah.
So I'll paint a picture for you first of what I was like as a kid, which is I grew up with a single mom just north of Charlotte, North Carolina. The environment we were around was very upper middle class. We were very not upper middle class.
We didn't have much. And I was in a world that no one really looked like us. And so I had two different cultural pressures pushing me to succeed in my career.
So one was just like, Asian -American pressure to, like, be successful in school and all that kind of stuff. But two was just, like, you're told by society, hey, if you get these dream jobs, that these, you know, societal standards of approval, you'll be happy, accepted, and validated in life.
I go into college. I study computer science and business. I take on student loans to pay for it, work a kitchen job, like, on top of school to pay off my loans.
And I am so hungry to make it. So I started college, actually, at 16. Not many people know this.
Which, by the way, like, imagine going to a fraternity party, like, thousands of people. You're 16. It's like, oh, my God, this is sick.
What? Anyways, so I'm 19 my junior year. So you're like, oh, if I just get a sick job on Wall Street, then I'll be, you know, I'll be successful and happy.
And so I went through this process, basically, like I had no connections, truly. I was up against other kids whose dads and fraternity brothers were all on Wall Street, had decades of generations of being on Wall Street and working at these investment banks. I had nothing.
Every single night after class I would sit there and I would study all of these guides online This is way before the era of YouTube where there was like so much free information online There were like one or two specific guides out there was called Wall Street Oasis and mergers and inquisitions There were two different guides.
I couldn't afford paying for the guide. So I found like a free download somewhere Shout out to those websites. Sorry about that guys, but you guys really changed my life.
So hopefully that's helpful I just gave you a shout out here and I would study them back to back to back and I would sit there I would mock interview myself in the mirror tell my story and i would record myself to then look at okay how did i interview how could i improve my answer to what's your story as an example because i was so hungry to make it and i wanted that job on wall street and so at the same time i called everyone i could possibly find a shared connection with right so in this case like i was very lucky to go to unc chapel hill and there were enough alums on wall street that i had that connection but also for folks who don't have that connection there's all these different ways you can still find shared connections so for example some of the best connections i had i had no prior connection to no university connection to but I was an Eagle Scout growing up and I found the Rolodex of other Eagle Scouts on Wall Street.
My subject line to people was, hey, fellow Eagle Scout reaching out. I was like, hey, I just saw you worked on this big Amazon transaction. It's so cool.
I'd love to learn more about it. I'm also really interested in recruiting at your firm. I'd love to learn more about what it's like to work at Goldman or JP Morgan, what have you.
And so what do you do? You go on those conversations and you just try to ask the most thoughtful questions possible. You try to do your research beforehand.
And then at the end of it, if it goes well and you feel like there's a vibe. then you're like, hey, I really want to get to know you guys in the firm more. Is there anyone else that you think I should talk to?
And so then they'll actually make the next warm introduction. And what do you know about a warm introduction is it's significantly more likely to convert than a cold introduction. I can send like 25 cold emails and I get two or three people to respond.
But then after you send those couple hundred first cold emails to build your first relationships, then you can start to really compound a flywheel. Like now your relationships that you broke it up front, if you do a good job with those, will actually make your job a lot easier by making warm introductions for you. I flew up early for interviews.
Some of the firms invited me early. And every single bank that I interviewed at, I got either a final round for or an offer for. I got really, really lucky in a lot of ways, but I also worked my fucking ass off for it.
Basically, that kid was so dialed. He would go to class. He'd run back from class.
He'd just work. And he didn't work because someone was telling him to. He used to work because he was so hungry.
I was a machine. I fucking cranked. Some of my buddies and I still joke to this day when we reflect back on our first few years in banking and private, like we were machines.
We would work like 20 hours a day, just crank, crank, crank, crank, crank. And some part of us misses that. So with Goldman Sachs at the time, right?
I know that it was just one brief chapter in your life. Like, was there anything in particular that you felt like was a really big lesson that you took from specifically that industry or working there? Yeah.
I got really lucky being in a place like Goldman or my jobs afterwards in private equity because it normalized being hyper successful. Like I just walked into an environment where like people would just throw out numbers like $5 billion or $10 billion, like it was nothing.
But if you think about the benefit of that, it normalizes what you think is possible. And so the two things that Goldman really set me up for was the language and the knowledge of how the world works and how to play in these rooms of serious people. And two is it diluted me even further into thinking that building a company that helps millions of people is possible.
So I'm very grateful to the experience. It's given me so much and I wouldn't trade it for the log. Your journey didn't stop there in terms of you also then ended up going to Stanford, right?
And then it was at Stanford that something very, very crucial happens in your journey. Yes. Right?
I will say the reason why I went off to a job in private equity and then Stanford Business School was because I was so deeply unhappy at the time at Goldman. And I didn't know why. And I thought the answer was, oh, I'll just get another more successful job or like another Stanford approval.
If I just get this like other thing on the corporate career ladder, then I'll be happy and fulfilled. At Stanford, to paint a picture for everyone, it was deep COVID. So we were all stuck in our rooms.
And so we were lucky enough as first year MBA students to still go to campus. But we obviously couldn't spend much time on campus. We were stuck in our rooms.
And what were we all doing during that time? We were all doom scrolling TikTok. And there was this moment where I was like watching a video on my feed.
It was Gary Vee doing what Gary Vee does, which is just yelling at you to start posting and give, give, give, which by the way, he truly changed my life for the better with that statement. And so I asked myself with Gary Vee's frame of mind of give, give, give, what kind of content I can make. For me, it was like, okay.
As an underrepresented kid, how do you get your first stream job? Because that was literally just my story. It still is.
And so I just, you can scroll back to my original TikTok, by the way. I made it, it took me like two hours, by the way, to make it like for my first 45 second video because you're so bad at it up front. And like, you can see how much I'm sweating by the end.
But I made the video and I posted it and I truly thought nothing of it. And I remember a couple hours later, I was hanging out with some friends and I opened my phone and I started on the numbers, like 35 .3K views. And I was like, guys.
holy shit guys i just did something that video blew up and my next few videos i was lucky that they also blew up in a way though that at the time you got to remember i'm at stanford business school people are like super white shoe and they were so judgmental over tick tock this dancing app that i was doing because eventually the word got out like how do you see johnny's video like this and in those moments like i would get some snide remarks like when you do something so early aka you have the opportunity to capture the alpha to capture the vision that no one else sees people will make fun of you and laugh at you.
But if you're right on the bet, which it's your job as the founding entrepreneur to be right on the bet, you should actually see people making fun of you or people shitting on you or people hating what you're doing as a signal that there's probably something there. So I am curious though, okay? Because how does that then transpire into starting a company?
Well, you kind of fall into it. As in, I started doing these TikToks. I was like, holy shit.
I actually, for the first time in my life, and know that for a fact I'm helping people rather than like optimizing a P &L as a private equity investor. Instead, I see these hundreds of comments like, holy shit, John, like, thank you so much.
I got my first cold interview out of this. I got my first dream job out of this. Like I got real like human being effect.
Thank you. And then my business nerd mind is like, how do I make money for myself? So the very first person I just bumped for my own account.
By the way, the very first product I sold was just, I found my old junior year resume. that I used to get into Goldman. I just uploaded that, literally haven't changed a single thing, just uploaded it and sold that as like a $10 template for people who wanted it.
So how are you then acquiring customers at this time? People severely underestimate how much effort and how hard it is to get your first 100 customers. Some people will be like, okay, I'm going to send a couple cold emails and that's terrifying for them and they'll do 10 of them.
Not recognizing what I had to do to land our first 100 external customers for Stan. was I made a completely separate TikTok account. So I first recognized, okay, if you make content, then theoretically over time, people will inbound you.
And so you can still find it today on TikTok. It's coach underscore hoovy. And I made over the course of two months, a video every single day on the most cringy topics around like, how do you optimize your funnel?
How do you make money online? How do you like optimize your digital product? Like whatever it was.
And I built this account over the course of two months to 20K followers because I posting every single day, I was grinding it out. Every single time someone would follow me, I would look at their profile and I would. qualify whether or not they were an ICP for us.
I'd be like, does this person have a chance of being a great customer for us? Could we help them? And I'd follow them back.
I'd DM with them and I would just try to consult them. Like in the DMs, so many, we're talking to hundreds of people. And I'd try to figure out how could I help them?
I'd ask them different questions like, hey, like what problems do you have? Or like, what goals do you have? And I would do all that to just try to get them onto a call.
So I do a discovery call with them. And like of every 10 calls that I would have, I would have maybe two or three. And most people won't do all of that.
They won't eat the cringe and the pain across every step of that. And they won't do that sheer volume of work. How long did it take to actually like see some results where you actually were like, okay, like this feels good.
This was like months of grind. This is months of like really shitty days because I had dropped out of school. So I didn't have a community anymore.
I was starting on this fresh new idea. Just had an awesome co -founder, thank God though. But he was busy building a product on the technical side.
And so I'd wake up every day and be like, what the fuck did I do with my life? Is this going to work out? Ton of fear and anxiety around all of it.
And then I would go back to back on calls. Like I'd back to back on customer calls. And then in between those customer calls, I would strip videos.
And I'd like film those videos. I'd run to film those videos. I'd like edit them on my thumbs, like in between like calls.
And then I was like trying to learn how to hire a team. And then during my breaks, I listened to a podcast. And then by the end of the day, it's like seven or eight o 'clock.
And you're like, holy shit, I've done only calls today. I've actually built a business. I haven't done anything actually that I wanted to work on.
So you get a couple hours to do that. But all those calls, you think about like, most of them are rejections. So you feel shitty about yourself.
And you like door dash dinner because you don't have time to make food for yourself and just be a normal human being. I would scroll in bed too to like learn more about the industry. And then you just crank.
And I'm not reinforcing hustle culture. I'm sorry to give this example, but this is my reality and why we made it. It's like, people are like, no blue light before bed.
And like, if you looked in my apartment the first few years, it was completely pitch black until 11, 30, 12, one o 'clock in the morning. Blue light, just fucking me in front of a screen locked in. I'm not saying that you need to do that.
I hope you find a different pathway. But that was my reality. And that's how we got the business off the ground.
And so those days were really hard. But because they were so hard, I grew immensely. Because it's very rare that you can have growth without stress.
That's not how working out your muscles. Right. You need to assume that it's rolling a boulder uphill for the first year or two.
It is so hard. And the way that you will win is by doing shit that most people won't do. But through sheer persistence and iteration of improving after every rejection, after every cycle, after every no, we eventually get to our first million dollars in revenue and then our first $10 million revenue and 30 ,000 customers.
But that's how I got my first $30 piece of software. And then you got investment, right? and so there is a video where you like literally break down the actual deck that you like got this investment with so all that to say you raised five million dollars yes how much had you like grown stan at the time to get that five million i was very lucky it was a different time in the market well right now it's a very hot market in ai but it was a time in the market where you could raise off a very strong founder potential and a little bit of traction so if you look at that deck i didn't really have real full revenue yet myself i made enough money for my customers you had proof i had proof i had the resume that would make someone more inclined to bet on me right like colman sachs banker like these are things i work really hard for she was like i'm gonna make a bet on this kid because the rest of the business and she says it herself in that video the slide deck was really ugly
Like really, really, really ugly. And so for those folks who are like, well, that's unrelatable and unachievable, then you just need to figure out what is your concoction of variables that makes someone bet on you. So like maybe you don't have that resume because you're so early on in your career journey.
That's okay. That shit doesn't fucking matter. What matters more is customer attraction.
So just like focus on customer attraction. There is no better tell of whether or not your business is actually the business worth betting on rather than just hustling to make a great product and service that people love. People are like ripping off the shelves.
Whatever traction data you can show on that, that's what matters. And now, you know, a couple years later, serving 90 ,000 plus people, we just crossed $600 million for entrepreneurs and over 51 millionaires made.
And so, yeah, I posted a cringy dancing TikTok as a 26 -year -old guy in 2020. And now I get to run a business that gets to help 90 ,000 plus people. And all of those people who made fun of me before for making TikToks now ask me for jobs or to be best in my company all the time.
I love how that works. Totally. Can you walk me through?
those weeks when the 30, because you've got 30 ,000 new customers, right? You got there. Yes.
Can you walk me through what that growth phase felt like? Yeah. So not all growth is good growth.
It's, you can use a parallel of like cancer cells within someone's body, like in how that metastasizes to think about a broader metaphor for how you should build your business, which is we had so many folks come in because Stanstar was blowing up that it brings a lot of noise. What I mean by that, if you think about in the course of, you know, a couple months, if you bring on 30 ,000 people to your house, that's going to literally destroy your house, right?
And so you want to be making sure that you're bringing the right people into the house. As in, we had a lot of very loud customers who came in who were very short term, who, by the way, two months later or 30 days later, churn. because they never were in it for the long game.
What happens? It distracts you from the core people who are genuinely building real businesses that you're like so hyped to build for. Your time and energy is zero sum.
That's actually the greatest commodity of all time is your time and energy. Because you can, with your time and energy, build anything you want. How you allocate that time and energy, if you allocate it to bad growth or short -term growth or bad customers, you are fundamentally at a physics and time level until we solve quantum mechanics, trading that off for all the good you could be creating in the world.
And so in your life, especially as you get more and more successful, more and more noise will be more and more things that look like opportunities that pull you and distract you away from the thing that truly pays your bills and truly pays your soul. After all this, a very big milestone happens. And you not only get Gary Vee, Stephen Bartlett, but you also bring on the Hermoses as investors.
How did you actually make this dream happen? I'll tell you the story of how I landed Steven as an investor. Over the course of a year, I sent probably over 25 different touch points.
I thought about every possible channel I could hit Steven on. So the obvious answer is immediately send him a DM, connect on LinkedIn, send him a bunch of messages, send him a bunch of cold emails. That's where most people stop.
Then I'm like, okay, well, fuck. I really think this could be really successful for both of us. What else could we do?
And so I found his agent. I emailed his agent. I got an introduction to the agent, tried to get that connection, still nothing.
Then I was like, OK, well, he runs a podcast. We have a business that's doing a decent amount of cash flow. Why don't we actually just try to get in through like paying money to like get on their radar and like do a partnership?
And so I hit up his head of partnerships at the time. We had a conversation. Nothing happened from there.
Completely dead. He also had his VC fund, Fight Fund. And if you know anything about VC, they all have this like apply or submit your company on their website.
But like no one, Chuck, like that is like. a joke like no one actually reads it it's like ah but you gotta like hit every detail if you really want something and so i submitted an application on his website of which of course i never heard back um but then three or four months later it was christmas eve day i remember checking my email and i get an email it's a mass blast email from flyfund that says sorry we've lost all of your applications if you wouldn't mind resubmitting one And it's Christmas Eve.
I'm like, you know, I'm with my mom. But some part of me is like, no, I'm going to, I'm going to fucking do this. I'm going to push through.
It's going to take a couple of minutes. It is what it is. Like, I'm just going to shoot my shot again.
It doesn't hurt. Like two days later. So the day after Christmas, I get a LinkedIn acceptance and a message back from Steven himself.
Like, just saw your application. What's at me at this number? And so probably over the course of 30 plus touch points, which most people would give up on one, two, three, definitely five.
Like over the course of a year, like really thinking through all the different angles and channels one could hit. And then the lucky one that I didn't think would hit paying off. Like that's what it took to land someone of the caliber of Steven to even like pay attention to me, to have a first conversation, not even to close the deal, but to just have a first conversation.
Thank you for sharing that. So since these incredible accomplishments, you continue to grow, you know, you're moving at this rapid pace. And I know that recently Stan has been going through this, you know, pretty, you know, interesting shift so everything's going well we're up into the right we land these huge investors we went from zero to 30 million in just a couple years with very little funding but then at 30 we we hit this skid mark of just like absolute plateau and what you realize 30 million in revenue at the time like oh like you're set john no it's so fragile it could all disappear tomorrow and it was with ai if we didn't make the evolution in the leap curve AI was about to kill our entire business.
We had just 10 months to live. And so I started working even harder as a response to that. It's like, that was my model in the world, right?
It's like, okay, shit, like we're slowing down. I need to speed up. And so I'm sitting there working through this and just truly grinding.
Just, I was like already in pain because I was feeling so bad about the business. There's so much pressure as well for like the business to survive. You got to make payroll for all these people.
You got to like make sure to do all these things. You're not actually going to fight or flight. And that's...
Exactly what I did was I just kept trying to bulldoze through. Mm -hmm. So.
Can I ask you what your greatest fear in that moment was?
All of my imposter syndrome was finally going to come true. Like, I was going to be exposed as this failure of a person who, like, built all this hype around a company that had gotten to be successful at some point, but, like, he wasn't good enough to get to the next level. And then, therefore, what does that say about you?
That you're a fraud or you're like imposter syndrome is true, that you actually never deserve to make this thing. And it was like, how embarrassing and humiliating would it be? Because this company could, with this massive oncoming wave of AI, could completely destroy your business.
And then you layer onto that your entire self -worth as an entrepreneur oftentimes is your business. You know, earlier on, we talked about that version of you. You mentioned that kid was very hungry.
In this moment, like when you're... processing the uncertainty of the company that you built, not sure if it's, you know, going to get to that next level that you promised everybody. It sounds like this version of you was a lot like that kid who was just pushing himself to get to that next level.
It feels like... That's correct. At the end of the day, I grew up with, like, very little.
Constantly worried about putting food on the table. So, of course, one of the top things I struggle with is this feeling of fight or flight. But I was so hungry.
I drilled so hard. Sorry, I'm getting emotional thinking about it. I want to like weep for how hard that kid worked.
Fuck, sorry.
Fuck.
There's a Chinese term that I think about really often called 吃苦. It means eat bitter. There's a lot of pride around eating bitter, around 吃苦.
Because when you come to this country with nothing, you have to eat a lot of shit, right? You have to go from being a PhD in whatever craft you are to like opening a restaurant or laundromat. And it's really hard.
And I think that model of the world and that philosophy of the world is passed down to us as first generation kids fairly often. And so the emotion you're seeing for me here is, I think a lot of grief. a lot of weeping and acceptance around, God, I ate a lot of shit.
I worked really hard. And I think if I'm super honest with myself and we're doing live therapy right now in front of everyone, I think some older, more mature part of me is weeping for the kid back then who worked so hard, who was in so much pain just trying to make it. But I'm realizing now as you ask me this question why I'm tearing up about it.
is I'm realizing how much I self -immolated, which is, there's one thing to work really hard. It's another thing, I'm realizing the voice in your head, how mean it is to yourself, like how hard it pressures you to work at a pace, to grow at an incredibly high pace. And that's what hurts now even, because I still know that that voice still is within me and still pushes me in many ways.
something about how mean that inner voice can be, but how much that thing served me deeply to get to these levels. Like I wouldn't have done that without the never satisfied, like self -flagellating voice inside my head that had that kid work that hard. That former model of the world of John was like, you were so hungry and you willed it into this world.
You fucking grinded and pushed. until you got the thing. You just bulldoze to it.
And I think that's a really important trait for all founders to want to make something in this world. There's a time and place. But the problem in that is you're still doing the things that got you there rather than the things that you need to do to get to the next level.
So I was still the one in the moment fighting the fires of like, you know, I'm going to be the one to close sales calls. I'm going to be the one to do this. I'm going to be the one to do that rather than realizing that.
I need to be a different person. I need to be a CEO rather than founder. I need to change my identity and zoom out one layer further and ask myself, okay, what are the highest level bottlenecks in this business and how can I solve them?
And what we realized is as we looked into the numbers, the fundamental numbers in the math of why our business has started to plateau was because our churn was too high. Specifically, as many people as we're bringing in, we're bringing tens of thousands of people, but also tens of thousands of people are starting to leave.
And so you ask yourself, okay, why are people churning? And what we saw is only 6 % of our total churn was leaving for another product. So you're like, okay, well, what is happening then with the rest of the pie chart?
Why are people leaving? And if you look into the numbers, 80 % of people churn from Stan because they're not making money. It makes complete sense.
I don't think you should pay for this if you're not making money. It's a bad use of your money. And then you're digging into the reasons why that is like, why aren't you making money?
And you look and none of them were making content. None of them had an audience. And so we started thinking about, okay, the real problem to solve is you got to build distribution for yourself.
You got to learn how to make money. You got to learn how to market stuff. You got to build your own audience.
And so at this point in time, like on a personal level, I know that I can for sure sit down with any single, you give me a single human being on the planet. I know for a fact that I can coach them and get them to a hundred thousand followers and a hundred thousand dollars made. I know for a fact, I will bet my life on it.
Because I just have the frameworks and the heuristics, and I've done it thousands of times now, where I know exactly how to do it, exactly how to blow up your following, exactly what content you should be making, how to iterate on that over time, and then how to convert that. But I'm just one human being. If you want to get to 100 million, I can't do that as a single person, as many people as I'd like to help.
And my team is the same. We can only help so many people that are super talented. And so Vitaly and I, my co -founder, are constantly thinking about it, just constantly obsessing over solving this problem.
And we debated it for a while. And it was actually funny enough, it was during his wedding. He had a wedding in Shanghai, got to be best man.
But the day before his wedding, we were thinking about what we should do with the business because AI was hitting this point of like, holy shit, like this is starting to get really good. Holy shit, we might have the unlock to actually helping the 80 % of people who weren't making money, who were therefore turning from the business, be significantly more successful.
And we knew that we had something. There was like, if someone figures out... how to build a tool that helps anyone tell their story and build distribution for themselves.
That's a really big business. And the main question we were trying to answer is, would this work? And so after his wedding, he like has a quick little honeymoon and we go off to London and we're basically like a startup again, right?
We go from having this $30 million business that... could just be wiped out by AI. And we're just back, me and my co -founder, for two weeks in a London flat, hacking away day in, day out, not showering, vibe coding all day, cold calling customers, cold calling people, desperately trying to get anyone to use this new product.
And we basically build this new AI agent that's starting to make really good content out of people's lives. People are really starting to love this product. They're like, holy shit, it really gets my voice and my style.
And we end that 14 -day journey shipping something that ultimately, on day 14, booked us $200 ,000 in revenue. And then just a couple of months later, we just hit 3 million in revenue.
And we brought it back to the team and people just shit on you in a way that I don't think either of us expected because we had spent so much time, months, thinking about how we could truly solve the success curve, where the winds were going with AI and all these macro trends. Where's the value to be created? And it's funny because In business school, you read all these things about how hard disruption theory is to solve for a legacy incumbent.
It's so hard to both create the innovating technology and then get your organization to actually do that thing with you. It's why so many companies get defeated by the up and coming startup because you can't pivot this large organization that's already doing something with a certain identity, a certain way of being. And having read that did not help at all for I think how painful the process was.
I can't describe the feeling. of how much we, certain people like fought us rather than constructively work on it with you. Like, how can we punch this up and make this successful?
Just dunking on you. And I think what you learn over time and what I now am really keen on when I think about hiring and team, the team that we build is it's very easy to sit in a meeting and list the 15 different reasons why something isn't going to work out. Because those people are often optimizing for seeming the most intelligent in the room.
It's so easy for any successful company. Think of Amazon, Facebook, like NVIDIA. By the way, they almost all went under multiple times.
But there were so many reasons in the early days you would shit on that company, like that company will never work. MySpace is already a thing. Dig is already a thing.
Facebook will never work. It's some idiot 18 -year -old kid. But the pessimists get to be right in the moment and seem smart.
The optimists are the ones who actually win and build. So much of that pushback now we realize had nothing to do with the company and the company's best interests and our customers' best interests. And I'm so grateful for the vast majority of my team that it was like, we have rallied behind this thing.
And we've now gotten and started to get to the other side of like, we're genuinely helping people like distribution mass. Like it's sick. It's basically your own like craft social media team.
Like we call it a million dollar content team in your pocket that's watching your entire life. So it's connected to your Google account or your Slack, your Notion, whatever you work into your granola notes. And then it's sourcing for you.
It's texting you ideas like, hey, John, I saw that this happened this day. Like, can you send me a voice note on this? Point being, we're trying to build the full suite now.
of how do we help you have an idea, get the distribution, and then monetize and convert it. But we're still really early in that journey. So can you just walk me through, how do you know if you have the right MVP and what it should be, especially if you have different alternatives as to going about it, if that makes sense?
So I can always feel the mark of a tenured, experienced, good founder versus a first -time founder and one of the key mistakes they make with an MVP. which is when you're a first -time founder, you have this vision of the 17 different features of how they all work together in this incredible experience that you want to build.
You're thinking about the grand old vision versus really presciently, incisively thinking through what is the core value prop that actually my customer will come back to every single time. And so the litmus test that one should use is one, there's a rational piece, and then two, there's a feeling piece. So the rational piece is what is the least amount of effort I can do to get the highest amount of ROI?
You have to decide what your customer's minimum lovable experience is in this. Like what will they actually put up with and be impressed by? So for example, we started on LinkedIn.
But to walk you through the logic of that, why LinkedIn? Why not Instagram where we were super native? Well, because LinkedIn is just tests.
So the number of variables are significantly constrained. And so you can validate, do people even want an AI content agent that gives them ideas? And by the way, what part of that do they actually want?
Do they want great ideas or do they want it to finish out the writing for them? What have you? Like there's all these questions you have to answer over time.
But in 14 days, we knew we could build something for specifically LinkedIn because the problem was so much simpler to solve that would broadly validate and also more importantly for folks to think about be an entry wedge into the larger product and platform they want to build. And then you take those first principles of, well, how do you make great content on LinkedIn?
And then you bring that to every single platform. You can't do 15 things well. You have to be disciplined up front, especially in today's market.
You have to be so disciplined on your niche and true edge and get that to be 10x better than the competition to then even give you the opportunity to execute on the rest of your business. Right. But that's the rational piece.
The feeling piece that I always go by is you should feel pretty embarrassed and cringy when you show your first demo to someone of your MVP. Like it should feel painful. Like I can literally feel right now because we do it all the time.
And I think I'm just desensitized to the feeling, but like I'm just cringing. Like I'm literally cringing. And so to give you an example, the very first version of Stan, I cannot tell you how ugly it was.
It was so fucking ugly. It was so, it was so ugly to the point that I myself as a customer would not have checked out on it because it looks so sketchy. It was so ugly.
You just kind of see how someone uses something and it's very rare, but every now and then you will create a product. or an MVP that the first or the fifth time you'll iterate on will actually be like, holy shit. And some small percentage of users, by the way, will start to use that.
And then your job is to take that smaller MVP to like a product that people love and becomes a multi -billion dollar product. For sure. This is actually the perfect time for us to do this show and tell.
We talked about earlier. Some emails that you sent out and you are so kind that you are sharing two of them one of them is to Gary Vee and the other one is to customers that you acquired and kind of like some Some tips that people can kind of keep in mind when they're trying to acquire customers So let's why don't we start with Gary Vee's email that actually let's do it got you in contact with him so this is the actual code email that I sent to Gary and I think what's really important for anyone to realize in how they write a good quote email, it's all about giving value to your recipient and being as short as possible and concise as possible.
And so you'll see here, I immediately open up with a connection to Gary. around how I've clearly done my research, which is I said, reading Jab, Jab, Jab, Right Hook fundamentally changed my life for the better, which is a book that he wrote that genuinely did change my life for the better. So I've attempted to immediately build connection with him.
And then the next two lines, I'm immediately trying to establish credibility, right? So I'm immediately trying to say, this is what I am. And this is why you should pay attention to us, aka we've grown from zero to $30 million in revenue out of launching onto my own TikTok account, which I then link if he wants to go look at.
And then from there, assuming I've hooked him in, then I'm doubling down on why potentially we're interesting, which is we've grown entirely through organic word of mouth while draining 40 % EBITDA margins. That's a very impressive number. From here, I also get my credibility.
It's like I built Stan as a former Goldman Baker slash Stanford MBA dropout turned TikTok creator. in order to solve my own pain points as a creator. And then you end the email basically with your ask, which is how could we work together?
In this case, the opportunity is very clear. Like you could actually come in as a top co -owner investor in our business and help us blow out distribution. And just a really simple ask in there of like, hey, you know, you've really inspired me from day one.
We'd love to work with you to get to help millions of more people. So let me know if you'd be down for a brief chat sometime. I've honestly, I constantly struggle with how to shorten my emails.
My emails never look this short. And this one literally, I'm like. amazed with how you were able to condense everything in a very also legible way that I can you can even just scan it and understand what you're reading yes good writing and good emails is all about legibility you should always optimize for someone super busy they're going to scan your email how do you make it as scannable as possible other than the hook like where does your mind does you go to the numbers immediately or do you feel like they're actually reading it like personally I index off of how I consume stuff, which is I also go to the numbers immediately.
Because you want actual data -validated traction in this case, right? So showing our growth from $0 to $30 million at ARR is like immediately a subconscious proof point. Okay, I should maybe spend some time reading the rest of this email.
Right, right. Amazing. No, this is really helpful.
This is an example of a customer email we'd send to acquire our first few customers for our new AI agent, Stanley. And what's really, really cool about AI is it can personalize to your customer. So before, people would send these mass -market email blasts that were just like...
really mediocre and really broad. So one of the clever ways we got our first few customers for Stanley, our new AI agent, was actually to show, not tell. As in, when you used to have to sell software or sell something, you'd have to tell them about how helpful something was.
So what we do instead is Stanley actually reaches out to our prospective customers. And because he's an AI content agent who's here to prove that he can help you make better content, he just sends a bunch of lists of ideas that are personalized to you and saying like, hey, John, these are the ideas that you could actually post this week.
If you want to actually chat through these or write these full scripts out, click here and use me, Stanley. And so you go from pitching, hey, you should use a Stanley AI agent that'll grow your following to, hey, this is real value that I'm receiving in my inbox. Like, holy shit, one of these free ideas is actually really good.
I want to use this right now. And then from there. you want to actually get more of these great ideas.
You're like, this has really proven its value. So you click in and start using the product. Right.
For someone who probably has a product that maybe it's a little bit harder for them to show the value up front like that, are there any other recommendations where they can still provide value even if it's not directly exemplary of their product? I know this is probably a hard question to answer, but... I would challenge that premise.
There's always some sort of way you can deliver the value sooner to your customer. there's always some sort of way and your job as a founder is to optimize the metric and minimize the time to value so that your customer gets in the door as soon as possible and gets value as soon as possible because you have to recognize that we're competing in the world of so much pulling for our attention right and so if you actually want to succeed i would challenge you that you need to find some sort of way to accelerate the value discovery of your product this is like actually very helpful you know to to see overall because i think that most times when we think about cold emails first of all i don't think that we spend enough time really understanding the science of what's going to like get people's attention for me the takeaway i'm taking from this is like really doubling down on that because it could lead you to like literally working with someone like gary b truly i genuinely believe that if i could pick one skill that's fun to really change my life for the better would be cold emailing because if you're good at it it means that it gets you into rooms that you have no business being in which i've been doing since i was 19 so
John, first and foremost, I just want to say thank you so much for being so vulnerable and open. But it's really rare in a space where, like, we're taught that, you know, resilience means brushing it off and not feeling anything and that it's okay. I feel like for me, like, just getting to just burn in all of your videos and all of your content, I literally never felt less alone in my entire life.
For most of my life, I would see people like the Hormoses, and I'm like, maybe I'm just, maybe I'm just, like, not as... tough as them or maybe I'm just like not I'm like not built like that and maybe that just it's okay it's just maybe not me and then I see you and I'm like oh I could do that yeah you know so sorry I'm getting emotional I just really appreciate it because it's I know that there's you know so many other people that are chasing their dreams with a lot more strength and hope and also pride in themselves because you're doing it 100 % authentically.
To thank you so much for saying that. All of the ways you felt, especially watching other people, and it's like, maybe I'm just not wired that way. Maybe I just don't have the killer instinct inside me anymore.
I often feel all the time too still. Because you're always comparing yourself to this success or that success, and you always discount your own. Before, I always had to be the one to lead.
I always had to be the one to drive. And when you go to following and you have all this... in all these investors and all this pressure and all this money involved and people think oh everything's so sweet there you feel this pressure to keep going and maintaining this illusion of an unlivable identity which is like perfection and constant success and i think where i'm at now is like dude now like i have to know like i have no idea what i'm doing i'm just freaking stuff out and i think where i find my solace and foundation is like at the end of the day I'm going to do two things.
One is I'm going to live by my values and I trust my values. And then two, I always know and everyone around me knows I will always, always give it my best. And if I just do two of both of those things, my belief is that like life will work out.
Well, thank you, Andrew. You would be very kind.
I paused there because you made me go back into younger me and I was thinking about would he be proud of that? And in some ways, I don't think he ever knew that this kind of life could exist. So.
That's really beautiful. I think that the life we dream for ourselves when we're younger sometimes, it's only a fraction of what we're capable of. Yeah, I agree.
I want to end this conversation the way we started it before recording and say what you say, which is let's have fun. Yeah. Thank you so much.
All right, guys, you know the drill. We're going to be diving into the anatomy of John's dream. We're going to be going over the principles that came up in his journey.
And because there are so many, we're going to be putting up a list of all of them. And we're just going to be touching on the few that we find the most important. And of course, if there are any that you want us to go deep on in a future video, let us know.
And one quick thing, we know that John didn't build this alone. He has a co -founder named Vitaly, who is actually integral to his story. But for all intents and purposes, we'll be focusing on the elements in John's journey specifically.
All right, let's dive in. So our first principle is skill stacking. Now, skill stacking is where seemingly unrelated skills not only connect, but they form a stack.
And that stack is what gives us leverage into succeeding. And we see this so clearly in John's story over and over and over. Stan grew incredibly quickly.
But as John pointed out, the skill set that it took to do that, that took years. Before John started Stand, he had already spent more than a decade obsessing over business. Working at Goldman Sachs taught him the language of business and how major decisions were made.
Then working in private equity and venture capital, that gave him the opportunity to study hundreds of companies and start recognizing the patterns behind why some of them actually scaled and why others did not. And prior to all of that, John studied computer science in college, which gave him the technical knowledge that would later become incredibly valuable when building and scaling Stan.
But then John also became a TikTok creator, which may have seemed like a completely different direction at the time. But in reality, that is the combination that gave him the edge. I mean, if you think about it, Stan in some capacity was an accumulation of all of John's skills.
Now, here's the part that I really want to point out, because I do not want skill stacking to become something that only makes us feel better about all the random things that we are doing. The point is to recognize that those experiences may be the resources you can use right now in your business. Your past is not only part of the story of how you got there.
It may contain something that you can use to move your dream forward right now. So here's an exercise that you can try. I want you to list the industries that you have worked in, the roles that you've held, and even the interests that you have pursued.
Under each one, write down the skills that you've gained. And that can include writing cold emails, all the way to public speaking. And I want you to ask yourself, which skill from your past are you currently underusing?
By the way, I asked Granola this after giving it all my skills, and wow. So this is what it said. You are good at interviewing people, but you may not be using that skill enough with your own team.
Asking better questions could help you understand what is actually behind a problem before deciding how to fix it. Crazy. I highly recommend granola, guys.
The next thing I want you to do is to ask yourself, what skill is missing from your stack that your dream requires? And lastly, for the next role that you plan to hire, what skill stack would that person need to have? Oh, and down below, we have included a downloadable worksheet where you can go through all of these questions yourself and hopefully start putting these principles into action.
All right. Moving on to our next principle, which is the skateboard principle. Now, the skateboard principle is a concept that was popularized by product coach Enrique Nieberg that says before you build a car, before you build the polished dream, you start with the smallest version that can actually get you to move.
So in a nutshell, if you have an idea, you don't want to rush to build a full thing. So let's say that you want to build a car. A lot of people would approach this by building one wheel and then another and then a steering wheel and then the doors and so on.
There's a problem with that. None of this works alone until everything works. Instead, what this framework asks us to do is to start by building a skateboard and then a scooter, then a bicycle, then a motorcycle, and then a car.
So basically, the skateboard is the MVP, which is minimum viable product. And each version after is simple. But each one can still get the customer from one place to another.
And the thing is, with every version, you get to learn what your customers need before you start building more. And we see this in the way that John built Stand. He said himself that the first version was ugly to the point where he was not even sure he would have trusted it himself as a customer.
But it still allowed him to test whether creators would use Stand to sell something through their link in bio. And this is where most... founders mess up and I am including myself in that pile and Roy as well because we have messed up on this before because we are perfectionists.
John talked about how so many of us begin by trying to build 17 different features into a product or offer several service lines all at once instead of trying to identify the main reason that someone would become obsessed with your product in the first place. Enough to come back because the skateboard is not just the easiest thing that you could build it still has to deliver the main outcome that your customer wants and so a wheel in theory might be easier to build than obviously a skateboard but a wheel alone is not going to be able to take you anywhere and so john describes this as creating the minimum lovable experience john applied the same approach that he used when first building stand He knew that they could not create an entire AI content platform in two weeks.
And so he narrowed it down to one specific problem, helping creators come up with better ideas for LinkedIn. There's this video where they documented these two weeks, which I highly recommend that you watch because you can literally see them make these decisions in real time. So they chose LinkedIn because it mainly relies on text.
Trying to analyze Instagram videos or long -form YouTube content would have introduced far too many variables for them to solve all at once. And I think that is the biggest takeaway from all of this. John didn't just ask, what can we finish in two weeks?
He asked, what can we build in two weeks that will tell us whether this much bigger idea is even worth pursuing? And by the way, this is not just applied to technology or to early startups who are just creating their MVP or their first version of their product. This applies to every single type of business owner at every single stage and every single level.
So ask yourself this. What is the main outcome your customer is coming to you for? What is the smallest version you could create that would still give them that outcome?
And what do you need to learn from that version before you build anything else? All right, moving on to our next principle, which is your customer is your co -founder. And this is to treat your customer not only as someone that you sell to, but as an active partner in building what you're creating.
So their feedback, their pain points, and even what they're not using are the most honest roadmap that your business will ever have. And in the anatomy of John's dream specifically, he has been doing this from the very beginning. I mean, if you look at the earliest days of Stan, John essentially became a coach to his first customers.
He personally helped them build their online stores and he helped them market what they were actually selling, which allowed him to understand who Stan could help the most and what those people actually needed from the product. And when he created Stanley, he did the same thing again. Within the first two weeks, they actually had people testing it.
While John was on calls watching how they used it and allowing that information to shape what they built next. And what really impressed me was seeing what this actually looked like while John was building Stanley. Now, I found this video of one of his vlogs where he takes us inside some of those early customer calls.
And I want you to pay attention to what's happening on the screen right now. What are the current pain points in your content creation process when it comes to LinkedIn specifically?
Usually, when someone is showing a customer a new product, they spend most of the call pitching it. They explain every single feature, they try to convince the person why it's so valuable, and then maybe at the end, they ask a few questions. But notice how much of this conversation John spends listening.
He's not only trying to sell Stanley, he's using the call to understand how the customer thinks. what they are struggling with. And he's trying to figure out whether the product is actually solving the right problem.
But I think the most valuable thing John gave us was a better way to get feedback because most of us will ask a customer, do you like the product? But the problem is that people may say yes because they want to be nice or they don't want to hurt your feelings. And even if they mean it, liking something does not necessarily mean that they need it.
And so instead, John asks, how disappointed would you be if you no longer could use his product? And I think that question says everything about how John builds. And the part that I loved is that when 90 % of people did not say that they would be extremely disappointed, especially at the beginning in the early stages, John doesn't immediately try to change the product for all of them.
He focuses on the 10 % who said that they would really miss it and continue building with those people because they were the clearest sign of who the product was actually for. Because if you're building something for other people, they should be in the room while you build it, not occasionally, consistently. And so we want to ask ourself, when was the last time that you actually spoke to your customers?
Are you spending more time pitching them or listening to them? And how could you include them earlier in what you are building? All right, moving on to our next principle, which is to do things that don't scale.
This principle comes from Paul Graham, and he is the co -founder of Y Combinator. And it's the belief that you need to be willing to do the things that feel small and inefficient because that's what actually gets something off the ground. And John did this from the very beginning.
Think about it. He started a coaching company specifically so that he could actually help these customers start their companies and market their products and actually Figure out what it was that they were going to do.
Now, technically, you'd think, well, that's not what the founder of a software company should be doing. You cannot personally build every customer's business if you want the company to grow. But I think that is exactly why this is so valuable in the beginning.
Because John wasn't onboarding customers. He was learning up close what they were struggling with, what they needed help with, and what Stan would eventually need to do for them. Not to mention...
He was creating raving fans. And this isn't the first time that we have seen this on this channel. Several of the founders that we have spoken to personally handled customer service, shipping, manufacturing, not because they had to, but because it was the best way for them to learn how to improve the product and customer experience.
And the thing that I am noticing is that if you are going to do something that doesn't scale, the best areas to do it are in personally interacting with your customer. That is how you get to know them. There is this story from DoorDash that I think explains this really well.
And so before DoorDash had an app, the founders launched with a very, very basic website and they had a phone number. That was it. And when someone placed an order, they would actually call the restaurant and then they would pick up the food and they would deliver it themselves.
By doing these deliveries on their own, they were able to speak directly to the restaurants. And they were able to talk to the customers while also experiencing every single part of the process themselves. This allowed them to see where the orders were getting delayed or where a delivery became difficult and what both sides needed before they tried to build the system to handle all of it.
We're often so disempowered by the fact that We don't have the money or we don't have the resources to hire someone for customer service or we don't have them for onboarding or sales or whatever it may be. But in the beginning, having to do some of that yourself can actually become a huge advantage because you are learning things about your customer that would otherwise be very difficult.
And I think that is what John's unscalable work gave him. It may have looked more like consulting than building a software company, but it also was product research.
Now, I want to be clear because this principle is not about never delegating. There are things that you should absolutely hand off. But the things that are at the heart of what you're building, the things that directly touch your customer, you need to do those yourself first.
Enough so that you can lead. Now, if you're in the early days of building something, you might be listening to this and thinking, well, I already have to do everything myself. I have no choice.
And if that's you, I really feel for you right now. But I want to challenge that for a second because there's a difference between doing it yourself because you have to and doing it with absolute intention. The value is not simply that you are doing everything yourself.
The value is in what you are learning while you do those unscalable things. What your customers keep asking for, where the process keeps breaking, where it's working, and what you now know that you would have missed if someone else were handling it. Because if you were just doing everything yourself and you're not extracting those lessons, I hate to say this, but you were just busy.
And busy is not the same thing as building. So ask yourself, one, what are you currently trying to automate or delegate before you fully understand how it should work? Number two, what is the one unscalable task you can take on for the next few months that would give you the most insight into your customer or audience?
Which brings me to our next principle, which is to understand your audience. Now, this means going beyond knowing who your customer is to understanding why they do what they do, their psychology. And going off of our previous principle of doing things that don't scale or having your customer as your co -founder, one of the biggest reasons that you do those things is so that you can actually understand your audience.
One of the things I want to point out in John's story is that the main reason he understands his audience so well is because he is his audience. John has been asked why he continues creating content instead of just focusing all of his attention on the company. And his answer is because it keeps him on the pulse of his customers.
He's not building for creators from a distance. He's creating. seeing how the platforms are changing and experiencing many of the same problems that his customers are experiencing because he is one of them.
So how do we actually apply this principle? Well, there are two places that you need to look to actually understand your audience. The first is what your customers tell you through your conversations and your surveys and your feedback in the comments, even the questions they keep asking you over and over and over again.
And then there is what they show you through their actions. What are they buying? What are they continuing to use?
Where are they dropping off? Because sometimes someone will tell you that they love what you've created, but their behavior is telling you something completely different. So you need to understand them.
This will become super important later because John's understanding of why creators were struggling helped him recognize the larger problems Stanley and AI could solve. And speaking of problems, there is a very big problem that we have solved recently in this office, mainly because of one brand. You guessed it, ladies and gentlemen, it is Roy Drumroll.
Rika!
Guys, on this channel, we have a tradition where we like to shout out one of your dreams. And on this episode, we are celebrating Rika. I would like to bring in our Rika connoisseur.
Roy, will you please come down to the stage? Why? Come, come.
Please pull him a seat. Producer. I am the producer.
All right, Roy. Tell us about Rika. It is the reason Anatomy of a Dream exists.
It stopped me from going to the typical energy drinks. they make single origin mexican cold brew using coffee beans sourced from the volcanic volcanic volcanic highlands of chiapas mexico and each can contains 250 milligrams of natural caffeine and has rich flavor notes of dark chocolate okay see that's what's that's what i love about it That's why you like it because you like chocolate so much.
If you guys are interested in checking Rika out, go to RikaColebrew .com or go to their Instagram, which we're going to put right here. And if you are interested in being in a dream shadow for a future video, comment. No, don't comment.
Well, go to our website. There's a link. Anatomyofadream .com forward slash shout out or go to the description down below.
You can click it. Cheers, Rika. Cheers, Tiffany.
I'm going to clap and you're going to disappear.
Is that how that works? Our next principle is strategic partners. A strategic partner is someone that you partner with in your business who has capital, an existing system, an audience, experience, or access to something that would be very difficult for you to acquire on your own.
And for John, this came in the form of investors. Investors like Gary Vee, Alex and Layla Hormozy, Stephen Bartlett. But the thing is that John was not only trying to get the biggest check possible.
If you watch his vlogs, he talks about how at the end of the day, everyone's cash is the same. What made these people strategically valuable was everything that they brought with the money. Now, their audiences were clearly aligned with the exact creators and entrepreneurs that Stan was built to serve.
But they had experience building businesses. They understood how to grow audiences. And they understood monetizing attention, which is literally what Stan helps its customers do.
And so when you're looking for a strategic partner, the biggest mistake that we can make is to only focus on the capital that they can give us. We really want to look at the experience and the audience and the access, potentially even the credibility that they're bringing with it, and whether that leverage is actually aligned with what we're trying to build.
But before someone is willing to attach all of their resources to your dream, they need a reason to believe it's going to work. Strategic partners, they like certainty and you have to give them that certainty through proof, which brings us to our next principle, which is undeniable proof. Now, undeniable proof is the evidence that makes someone feel more certain that you can deliver on what you're actually promising.
And this was obviously a huge part of John's story. So when he first raised his first five million, this was before we got like all of the big, you know, well -known investors like Gary Vee and Stephen Bartlett and stuff. Stan had actually been operating for only around like two months.
The thing is, the reason he was even able to get this investor was because John had a resume that made someone more willing to bet on him, along with some beta testers and some early paying customers that show that there was at least some demand for the idea. But later, when John was then trying to get the attention of people like Gary Vee and Stephen Bartlett and Hermoses, he was no longer asking them to take a chance on his potential alone because he could point to the growth in the results that Stan had already created.
And I think this shows us that undeniable proof can change depending on where we are in our journey. In the beginning, it may come from our past. John's experience at Goldman Sachs was super useful.
His experience in venture capital and as a creator didn't only give a good inkling that Stan would succeed, but it gave investors evidence that he understood business, that he understood the customer. He was someone who may actually be able to figure this out no matter what. But as Stan grew, the strongest proof was no longer John's resume.
It was the business itself. I think increasingly we live in a world where we are expected to create some sort of proof ourselves before we are given the larger opportunity. I honestly think that nowadays you may actually have to show that there is an audience for your idea before someone funds it.
Create the first version of the product before someone agrees to distribute it. or produce a result for the few customers before the dream client is willing to hire you. And that doesn't mean that you need thousands of customers or millions of followers before anyone will take you seriously.
John had 25 beta testers when he raised his first round. That's nothing. The proof only needs to be strong enough to answer the biggest question someone still has about betting on you.
And I think there are a few places that this proof can come from. Recently, I've been speaking with a lot of founders who are really struggling with this. They struggle because they feel like they can't make that first product or they haven't been able to get that audience.
And they just want to go straight to manufacturing the product, put in this really big order. And they haven't even, first of all, built the skateboard to see if it actually is a viable product that people want to buy. But also they're wanting the investor to help invest so that they can get the manufacturing deal.
And so the question is not only do I have proof, it's do I have the right proof? for the opportunity I'm asking for. Because sometimes the proof already exists, but we're not using it.
Maybe there's a result that we never turned into a case study, or a customer story that we never shared, or an experience from our past that we have not connected to what we are building now. And if the proof does not exist yet, the next question is, what is the smallest way that I could start creating it? Maybe it's working with the first few customers, building the skateboard version of the idea, growing a small but relevant audience, or creating the result for yourself first.
So ask yourself this. What am I currently asking people to believe about me or my business? What proof do I already have that I am not fully using?
And what proof do I still need to create to make the right person feel confident betting on me? All right, so our next principle is to know when to quit slash pivot. Now, you might remember John mentioning that Stan had reached around 30 million in revenue, but that was also when the company started to hit a plateau.
They were bringing in tens of thousands of customers, but they were losing around the same amount. And eventually, they reached a point where they only had around 10 months of runway. And I think his initial reaction is probably how a lot of us would respond.
If the company is slowing down, then I need to speed up. I need to work harder. I need to push more and basically bulldoze my way through this problem.
But I think that is something that a lot of us need to hear. Working harder cannot solve every problem. Sometimes a problem is not how much effort you are putting into the current direction.
It's that the direction itself needs to change. Now, there are three ways to know when it may be time to pivot. Number one is you have no momentum.
Number two is you are seeing diminishing returns. And number three is you have new information. And in John's case, it was honestly really a combination between diminishing returns and having new information.
Now, the diminishing returns were that they were continuing to acquire these customers without actually growing. And you may remember John explaining that when they looked underneath the numbers, they realized that around 80 % of people were leaving Stan, were not making money because they had not built an audience or they didn't learn how to consistently create content.
That was the new information. And this is where our understand your audience principle becomes so freaking important. Because John understood creators, he was able to recognize that the problem was not only in helping and giving a platform to creators to sell their product.
He understood that in order for them to sell their product, they needed to create content. And that ultimately, creating the content was the hardest part. And while AI was threatening to completely change the business they had already built, John and Vitaly realized that it also gave them a new way to solve the larger problem.
And so instead of giving creators a place to sell something, they could also help them create content and tell their stories and build the audience they needed in order to make those sales. which ultimately would keep them on Stan. And this is when John spoke about zooming out, how sometimes we have to take a moment to actually back away from the problem so that we can actually see it clearly.
And I think we can see that this was by no means an easy decision for John, for him to pivot the company. I think it's so easy for us to hear that Stan was making around $30 million and we get distracted by the number. I mean, I'm totally guilty of it.
But John didn't only have a $30 million business. He had a $30 million business that he could lose. The stakes were actually so much higher because he was not pivoting away from something that had already failed.
He was taking a risk with a company that was still successful on paper, that supported an entire team, and had taken years for him to build. And in some ways, I think that makes the decision to pivot even harder because there is now so much more to protect. But despite the resistance they faced, John and his co -founder knew they had to stop trying to force what had worked before and pivot towards what their customers needed now.
Which brings us to our last principle, which is persistence. And I think it's interesting that this principle comes directly after knowing when to quit slash pivot because at first, they almost feel like they contradict each other. We think persistence means holding on.
Well, pivoting means letting go. But sometimes pivoting is persistence because you are not giving up on the dream. You're letting go of the version of it that may no longer be able to survive.
As I said earlier, when the company started slowing down, John's first instinct was to work harder. It was to bulldoze his way through the problem. Because for a long time, that was the version of persistence that had worked for him.
Persistence is written all over John's story. When you look at all of the principles that we just spoke about, the skill stacking, doing things that don't scale, finding strategic partners, none of those things would have happened without persistence. But interestingly enough, I've been struggling with persistence a lot lately.
When I first spoke about this principle on this channel, I was in a season where I was close to giving up. And at the time, the way I looked at persistence was... This is getting through a season where I don't really know if any of this is going to work and I just have to be persistent.
And ultimately what I thought persistence really was, was what you do in an era of failure. But what I didn't expect was that persistence would become difficult in a completely different way once we started seeing some signs of growth. Literally at the beginning of this year, we were like 2 ,000 subscribers and now we're almost at 60 ,000.
We're still facing a lot of the same constraints. And if I'm being super honest, some of those problems have just gotten a lot bigger because now there's more to maintain and more that we are afraid to lose. I mean, if you really saw the behind the scenes, guys, like I really hate to admit it because I really don't like promoting hustle culture, but it's just the truth.
That's exactly what John described. I mean, it's like us and a laptop and our computers literally day in, day out. It is literally 2 .30 in the morning right now as we're filming this.
Like it is nonstop. And I'm at a point where it's just like, when does all of this persistence finally... Pay off.
But then when I look at the anatomy of John's dream, I realize something.
I don't think I'll ever make it. But I promise it's a good thing.
Because even after all the success that John built, even after reaching every milestone that would give most of us a reason to believe that he had made it, he still needed persistence. because his dream didn't end there. The finish line moved because John continued to grow.
We tell ourselves, when I reach this number, when I get this opportunity, or I accomplish this next thing, I will finally feel like I have made it. But when we get there, we can suddenly see something that we were not capable of seeing when we started.
John's younger self probably couldn't have imagined Stan. He could only see the life that the person he was back then knew how to imagine.
And maybe that's also true for me. A few years ago, my end -all be -all dream was to be a director. Podcasts were my hobby that I did on the drive to work.
I could have never predicted this. So maybe the life I'm chasing right now is only a fraction of the life this could eventually become. And so maybe I will never make it.
Not because I will never accomplish the dream, but because the person who reaches it will be able to dream beyond anything that I can imagine right now in this moment. So if you're in a season right now where you keep wondering when all of this will pay off, there's only one way to find out. To persist.
Persist long enough to meet the future you.
To witness what they build. And to see just how far they take the anatomy of your dream.
Alright guys, I will see you in the next one.
The Hook
The bait, then the rug-pull.
The number in the title is a payout stat: Stan has sent more than $600 million to creators, and 51 of them crossed seven figures. What the interview is really about is the year after that, when the same company stalled at $30 million, had ten months of cash, and its founder had to stop being the hardest worker in the building.
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