YouSaid · the spoken record

Noah Kagan

lines on the record: 252
first: 2024-01-23
most recent: 2024-01-23
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

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“And every once in a while it works, right? And that ended up being a key determinant, I think, of my ability to build and scale and most importantly sustain this for 10 years.”
2024-01-23 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #717: Noah Kagan — How to Launch a Million-Dollar Business This Weekend · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It works, then that is a game changer. And then We have these backup plans. I'll give you another example How can you keep your life incredibly simple? Well, in the case of podcasting, in the beginning, I realized if I end up with tons of accounts payable, accounts receivable, invoices, net payment terms, etc, that will insert a lot of complexity into my life. So from the very beginning, I did something that a lot of folks said would never work, which was you prepay for all your ads. There's no you book and then you run it, and then you pay us 30 days later, and then that drags out because it's a holidays or maybe you don't reply to email, and then we're chasing you. There's none of that. You pay up front. That's it. And that is an example of let's try the easy thing first or the simple thing, the beneficial thing. If people say no, we can always go to net 30 because everyone does that. But let's try the unorthodox thing first in the sake of simple.”
2024-01-23 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #717: Noah Kagan — How to Launch a Million-Dollar Business This Weekend · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So, corollary. To the easy thing first, if you want to, okay, you really want to do the hard way. Okay, fine. What you really want to do is build the flashy website and do the thing and hire a bunch of influencers and have girls in bikinis prancing around with your energy drink, whatever. Okay, fine. Maybe you could start, though, with a blog post. Maybe you could start with an email. Maybe you could start with something that's very cheap, very fast, fast, fast, fast constraints. Are you hiding behind something big? Are you talking about the sexy photo shoot and the Super Bowl ad that you're never fucking going to do? Not because you couldn't do it, but because you're hiding behind the big thing and you're not trying the small thing. What is the easy thing that you can do first? Do that. And this comes up all the time in my business when I'm talking with employees, for instance, who have already embraced this by this point, but I'm like, we can do the hard thing. We can do the expensive thing. I'm not averse to it. But what is something fast or something cheap that we can do first?”
2024-01-23 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #717: Noah Kagan — How to Launch a Million-Dollar Business This Weekend · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The constraint of spending as little as possible will generally, this is very broad strokes, but in my experience and certainly in the experience of a lot of people who are building businesses, not mimicking the 1% of the 1% of the 1%, right? Like I can't get fit until I'm Tom Brady, which is generally not a great approach. But the people who are building real businesses, businesses that produce a lot of cash, very often test incredibly inexpensively. If you look at the origins of CrossFit, that's the case. I remember the very early super early days of CrossFit. This was not a let's put $30 million in and see what happens. It was prototype iterate, prototype, iterate, small group, second location, considering business models, et cetera. I mean, this is true in so many, so many, so many different places. Any other means of validation that you want to mention or an example of someone who used any one of those that comes to mind?”
2024-01-23 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #717: Noah Kagan — How to Launch a Million-Dollar Business This Weekend · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Ways in the same way that that 17 year old sent you a video, which was like, here's how these things suck. I wouldn't word it that way, but I'd say, we want you to convert as strongly as possible. We know our audience really well. This is how they're going to read your website. Here's what the flow looks like. These are two places where they're probably going to abandon the cart. Fix, fix, fix. Doesn't take that long because we've done it a million times, and then guess what? Then I have a sponsor who lasts like a year, two years, three years, and they spend millions of dollars instead of spending a lot on the upfront and then churning. It sounds like a lot, but it's actually not that much effort if you have the right team. So let's hop back into the weeds of entrepreneurship. That sounds bad. Onto the front lines. Validation. What are some other means of validating your idea to try to ensure that you're not deluding yourself anymore than is helpful?”
2024-01-23 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #717: Noah Kagan — How to Launch a Million-Dollar Business This Weekend · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Anyway, there are ways to do it if you don't test, but I generally test stuff. Let's say I test absolutely, I'm like, great fucking product. What is the additional 10%? The additional 10% is I will look at the website and I will say, how well does this convert? Because what is a nightmare scenario for me? Because one could say efficient, one could say lazy because they're similar. If someone has a great product and I put time into a great read and I put it in front of my audience and then their website doesn't converge and they blame it on me, that's way too much brain damage, way too much wasted effort. Now I have churn, right? They're like, well, your podcast didn't work. And they leave and then I have to find another podcast sponsor. So I might send my team to that sponsor, record a loom, and say, would love to have you as a sponsor, but we'd like you to make these following changes to the website, at least to a unique landing page to improve conversion. We'd like you to improve in the following seven.”
2024-01-23 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #717: Noah Kagan — How to Launch a Million-Dollar Business This Weekend · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So, one thing that I've done with a lot of my sponsors, not everybody because not everybody needs this, but what are the levers in a podcast? Well, let's just say the basic economic model for most podcasts, not all, is sponsorship. People are buying ads. Why are they buying ads? Because they want to sell products. What are some of the metrics that matter to someone trying to sell products? Let's assume for simplicity's sake that we're talking about direct response. Let's say we're talking about Apsumo. You're going to be tracking the numbers that you just mentioned. Traffic, conversion, average order size. Now let's say Apsumo came to Tim Ferrishell and decided we want a sponsor hypothetically. Let's say number one, I have to try the product. So I test every single product within reason. There's some like enterprise stuff in which case I'll do a bunch of polling and determine how my audience feels like 1 to 10 allowed how strongly would you recommend this to a friend do it off hours so the people who work at the company don't see it and can't spam it”
2024-01-23 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #717: Noah Kagan — How to Launch a Million-Dollar Business This Weekend · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And then how do you work backwards from that? You don't have to figure it out in advance, right? I decided, okay, part of the marketing positioning is how premium this podcast is. It is incredibly expensive. I mean, we're going to get into the weeds here, but talking about the 10%, what's the extra 10% that you can do, like in the case of me pitching the manufacturer or whatever?”
2024-01-23 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #717: Noah Kagan — How to Launch a Million-Dollar Business This Weekend · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Hard times, quit the podcast business. I'm like, you know what? I'm just going to do like one event a year. I know that that will work because I can pull different levers.”
2024-01-23 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #717: Noah Kagan — How to Launch a Million-Dollar Business This Weekend · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I spent so much fucking money on that event to over deliver, right? Like rented out a castle, had like flamenco dancers, fucking classical musicians. And plus, by the way, if you do an event in Napa, you're dealing with basically the cartel, not like mafia cartel, but coincidentally, everybody's going to charge $8 for a cup of coffee. You're not going to be able to negotiate anything, is my point. So this event ended up being so incredibly expensive, basically made nothing. But was a huge home run for people. I felt really good about it. I learned a ton was an incredible investment of time, right? So one could argue that was a waste of time. But I developed relationships with 100 people who I handpicked. I had speakers at the event and a lot of questions that informed the whole thing. And if I ever wanted to do another event, I would guess I would have at least 90% of those people who would immediately book a second, like OTK2, done. No problem. So if I ever fell in home,”
2024-01-23 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #717: Noah Kagan — How to Launch a Million-Dollar Business This Weekend · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Detailed brag. Don't make it 20 minutes, right? This is give one to two minutes real brag, then a give, something you're really good at or something you have access to where you feel you're world class. Where can you help people? Give a give. There's one give and then an ask like something you really need to help with or want help with could be anything. And everyone who's listening for every person, if they have a give you need, take a note. If they have an ask that you can help with, write it down. And that alone, I think, made the event hugely successful. To this day, I'd have to go back and check. But, I mean, literally this was, who knows, I don't know, 2012 or something, for at least five years, maybe still to this date, there was a Facebook group for those attendees that was active every week. And people still talk about it.”
2024-01-23 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #717: Noah Kagan — How to Launch a Million-Dollar Business This Weekend · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“They get up because people, especially at higher end events, are like, well, you know, I run a tech thing. Like, oh, I have an app. And it's like, oh, that guy's like the founder of Instagram. Come on. Give us a little bit more color. And that's not a real example. None of the founders of Instagram were there, but sometimes you end up in these scenarios where people for a lot of good reasons or not for bad reasons are being excessively humble. And then you really just don't have an idea of what the hell people are doing. And so I was like, get up and give a real brag.”
2024-01-23 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #717: Noah Kagan — How to Launch a Million-Dollar Business This Weekend · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Sometimes you have to buy your first customers or your first proof of concept. Like if you want marquee clients, sometimes you have to take a loss on that in time or money to make it happen. I really firmly believe that for a lot of things. Just like Reddit wanted to prove it's ad system worked. They want a case study. So what do they do? They give you free advertising. Brilliant. That's a good trade. So in a way, they bought their first case study. I'll share one more thing just because people who run events might find this helpful or even just like small groups, masterminds. There are bios for every person at the event and people had a bound book basically with everyone's short bios. And we took, I want to say probably two hours or roughly 100 people. Everybody in the room stood up and they got to do a brag, a give, and then an ask.”
2024-01-23 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #717: Noah Kagan — How to Launch a Million-Dollar Business This Weekend · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Don't need that guy at the event. No, thank you. And this is going somewhere. So I pre-sold the event. With a blog post and a Google form. That was it. Might have been woofu at the time. And then I was able to decide, by the way, at that point, do I really want to do this? I can still back out. I haven't taken any money. People have committed, like they're in. So thought about it. And then I was like, all right, now how do I work backwards from this cost and ensure this was going to be, I think, a three-day event, if I remember correctly? How can I ensure that I have the peace of mind of knowing I've delivered that value in the first few hours of the first day? And I was like, okay, how would I do that? This is a question I didn't have an answer at the time. I was like, well, I'll do something I've never done. I'm going to share my actual book proposals and marketing proposals and I'll redact a few things. But like otherwise, like as soon as we get there, that's one of the first things I'll do. I'll be like, here you go. Keys to the castle. Boom. Like you just made your money back. This is worth what you paid. The second thing I did, this is not relevant to the, well, it's going to get to the point because I was talking about buying.”
2024-01-23 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #717: Noah Kagan — How to Launch a Million-Dollar Business This Weekend · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I just did not want assholes. And one of the ways I vetted for that, I didn't want anyone going into debt to go to this event. I didn't want anyone jeopardizing their finances. I didn't want anyone taking out a second mortgage. I didn't want anyone. I didn't want to be responsible for anyone else's bad financial decisions if they were betting the farm on this. So I asked people to provide in their Google Form application. I was like, would you be willing to provide proof that you have, say, at least $100,000 in savings? If you're going to spend $15,000 on an event, and one guy replied and he was like, I don't think you need to be my financial nanny, but if you want to come onto the tarmac and look at my private jet too, you're welcome to do that. And I was like, thank you for disqualifying you.”
2024-01-23 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #717: Noah Kagan — How to Launch a Million-Dollar Business This Weekend · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It was effectively, as one would expect with the name, sharing everything that I'd done with my first few books. At this point, I guess it was my first two books. And it seems very quaint at the time because of how constrained it was. Now it would be like a million and one different tools, or at least that would be expected. But content marketing at the time, which was, it's more like a biathlon instead of like a quadruple decathlon, which it is now. There's so many different options. And I put together a blog post, which is the equivalent of like a sales page or an email. A million different forms this could take. And then there was an application process, which was legitimate. That wasn't bullshit. I wanted to make sure the composition was impeccable. I wanted the room to be not just diverse from an experiential perspective. I wanted a lot of people from different industries, different strengths, different weaknesses, different networks. I also wanted people who were fucking cool and low.”
2024-01-23 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #717: Noah Kagan — How to Launch a Million-Dollar Business This Weekend · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“When I did this event, I was curious. I always try to go, and I'm not saying this is the right move. I just like the mathematics and the lack of crowding in high end. I always like to go high end if I can. It provides a margin of safety that I think is, there are many reasons for it, but it provides a margin of safety that's very appealing from an economic perspective, right? The better your profit margins, the more room you have for making mistakes. And then I work backwards. So in this case, what I did was I was like, okay, can't remember exactly what I started, but I was like, well, could I make whatever the number, $5 million or whatever it was from one event? I can't remember. I'm making that number up. The math isn't going to actually compute. But I worked backwards and I was like, okay, if I'm going to do that, I'd gone to some high-end events that I'd paid for. And I was like, well, looks like I'm going to have to charge a lot. So it's going to have to be, let's just say, minimum 10 grand and then the sooner people purchase, the less expensive it is.”
2024-01-23 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #717: Noah Kagan — How to Launch a Million-Dollar Business This Weekend · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It goes on and on, too. Now that you're talking about it Certainly, the podcast of no business model for ages. I mean, I don't think I had any sponsors until I'd have to go back and look, but episode 30, 40, 50, I can't remember. And rewinding the clock, though, you mentioned something in passing that most folks are not going to recognize, and that was opening the kimono, OTK. So this event that I put together.”
2024-01-23 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #717: Noah Kagan — How to Launch a Million-Dollar Business This Weekend · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And they are willing to do what? They're willing to say that to other founders. And then it builds and it builds and it builds. And people have gotten, I mean, this is not going to work right now, folks. Let's be aware I'm in the process of streamlining everything. But as one example, like Charlie Hone who worked with me for years, he did that by sending me basically the equivalent of the term paper that I did for my first job. He would hear me or rather not hear me because the podcast didn't exist, but he read my blog posts and he got a pretty good idea of the things that would be helpful to me. And he just did them. He just went out and put in like tens of hours, maybe more into these various projects and he'd be like, just wanted to send this to you. I thought it'd be helpful. And that's it. And eventually after two or three of those, I'm like, okay, this is actually very helpful. This guy's very proactive, very detail-oriented. Let's have a conversation. So it's just to say sometimes the best bargain that you have is doing something for free.”
2024-01-23 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #717: Noah Kagan — How to Launch a Million-Dollar Business This Weekend · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Everything to iterate, iterate, iterate, never got paid a dollar, right? I spent my own money on travel, all free. If I look at My investments in the startup world. I, in the beginning, would do anything I could to co-invest with someone to get a tiny amount of money into the company. And I mean, just a few thousand dollars. And then I would proceed to do like $100,000 of work in terms of being like the most valuable, low-cost person on their entire cap table. I wanted them to be like, wow. Okay, this guy owns nothing of the company and he's materially impacted the value of this company, including the value of my own shares as a founder. And then what happens is I get those people who are like, Tun's fucking awesome. Yeah.”
2024-01-23 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #717: Noah Kagan — How to Launch a Million-Dollar Business This Weekend · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I want to triple underscore the free work piece because there's a lot of righteous indignation online about this. Crops up a lot with spec work on behalf of artists and things like that where it's like, I'll never work for free. Like people are being exploited, blah, blah, blah. And there are cases where that's true. Everything I have done has been built on free work. If I look at all of my biggest wins, I can't think of a single exception in the sense that first job out of college, why did I get that? Because a guest speaker who was the CEO, a young guy came in, talked to our class. I wrote my entire term paper on that business because I wanted to do a free competitive analysis and show how valuable I could be to the business, right? I wrote my entire term paper on that. Free work, right? If I look at four-hour work week, had that come about guest lectures twice a year, tons of prep took it super seriously, got feedback.”
2024-01-23 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #717: Noah Kagan — How to Launch a Million-Dollar Business This Weekend · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“There are with most things there are always more opportunities. It's easier for me on the business side to see this, right? So for instance, I got out of a very long, for me, a relationship, you know, a five plus year relationship about a year ago. So in just say the dating world, which has changed a lot in six years and is very bizarre on a whole lot of levels for the same reason that content creators and creation have become very different. I mean, a lot of the same factors are at play, gamification, volume, paradox of choice and all sorts of things. sort of gamification of FOMO, right? I mean, there's a lot that goes into the similarities. But on the business side, just because I've spent so much time looking at that and I've had so much feedback from people who have read the first book and I've seen so many hundreds of businesses and like, guys, there are opportunities everywhere.”
2024-01-23 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #717: Noah Kagan — How to Launch a Million-Dollar Business This Weekend · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Low risk. All of my best investments. And when I've deviated from that, so the same criteria that I used for entrepreneurship, for content, the same criteria I should use in investing, at least early stage stuff, all the same stuff. Are there other people who come to mind who either worked off of the blog post or that you've interacted with personally, who read early versions of the book outside of Jake where you're like, you know what, this is a good example of another person who's put it into practice?”
2024-01-23 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #717: Noah Kagan — How to Launch a Million-Dollar Business This Weekend · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“No one would have predicted or prescribed that as a successful format. Nobody, zero. And yet it developed this enormous call audience and has allowed him to do a million things. Now that would be a lot harder. Why? Because it's less human driven and more algorithm driven. So I'm like, huh, okay. Maybe it's time for me to choose an easier game. I don't like hard games. I mean, sometimes I like to push it if I'm doing some board game or maybe trying to ski right within the bounds of my capabilities. But in terms of big life games, I'm not looking to suffer. I'm not looking to crawl on my knees on broken glass for 100 miles to make some really complicated business model where I'm like, no, I want until I find something that seems simple, until I find something where I'm like, hmm, maybe this doesn't need to be the hardest thing in the world. I keep looking. All of my best investments have been kind of obvious.”
2024-01-23 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #717: Noah Kagan — How to Launch a Million-Dollar Business This Weekend · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Either tools of Titans or tribe mentors, but it's called the Law of Category, and they talk about, for instance, the invention of Light Beer or being the first light beer of X, right? And the first low-cost airline. I mean, these are things that came out of nowhere. And how can you create a category of one where you're not trying to be the best? You have decided and positioned yourself to be the only, whatever that is. And I think of there are so many examples. And part of how I assess playing fields also is I'm like, how hard is it right now to create a category of one? And I look at, for instance, some of the early innings in podcasting. And you had people who broke all the rules and became mega successes. Hardcore history, for instance, with Dan Carlin. My favorite podcast still to this day. His episodes, I think they come out, are they historically like once every six to nine months, maybe six to 12 months, one episode. And they're four to five hours long. They're effectively audiobooks on history.”
2024-01-23 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #717: Noah Kagan — How to Launch a Million-Dollar Business This Weekend · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So many opportunities out there, and I'll just say from meeting, let's just call it unmet needs or finding niche opportunities that other people don't see. There are a couple of resources I'll mention. And I return to these things all the time. These are things that I reread, and I'm probably going to reread all of these again. These are just almost like mantras. I'm trying to train myself to recognize and think of these things. One would be Blue Ocean Strategy. I mentioned it before. Excellent book. Excellent, excellent book. How can you be a category of one? Another one I've mentioned a million times, and I mentioned a million times because I'll read it a million times, 1,000 true fans by Kevin Kelly. And then within the 22 immutable laws of marketing, there's one chapter called the Law of Category. And it gives old examples. So don't get the for the internet because it was written in like 97 or something. Get the old version. And I think I may have even excerpted it for.”
2024-01-23 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #717: Noah Kagan — How to Launch a Million-Dollar Business This Weekend · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“X, Y, and Z. Maybe I should stick to my bread and butter. Okay. Well, that was worth an experiment and I capped my downside. So I learned. Great. Good feedback. And for all those reasons, I would say that I'm less reactive than I used to be. But the truth is, like you told this.”
2024-01-23 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #717: Noah Kagan — How to Launch a Million-Dollar Business This Weekend · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I feel like that ship has already sailed 2014. And I think I also have learned to have a less extreme response to what we might consider rejection because number one, if you're going to be a good resource allocator, if you are easily offended or get easily spun out, you're going to be exhausted a lot of the time. I also frame so much in the form of experiments They're not pass fail. This is feedback, right? So I do so many things as two-week experiments, one month experiments, three month experiments that applies to my podcast. That applies to everything in the business world that I do. That applies to my style of investing. Like, all right, I'm going to experiment with blah, blah, blah. And then I get my face ripped off. And I'm like, hmm, okay, good feedback. Maybe I'm not so good at it.”
2024-01-23 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #717: Noah Kagan — How to Launch a Million-Dollar Business This Weekend · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Here's what I would say it's in this particular case, it is a very specific form of informed optimism. I'm not default optimistic. I look for hedging against worst case scenarios and so on. I mean, you have some of that too, right? With cutting costs and looking at these things. But in this particular case, I've just seen so many examples of successes where you would never predict a success. Starbucks gets turned down by everyone. They're like another coffee company. Too crowded, no way. There are so many examples. When I started my podcast, I was told it was too crowded. In 2014, very smart people. I'm not going to name, but they said, you could do it.”
2024-01-23 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #717: Noah Kagan — How to Launch a Million-Dollar Business This Weekend · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I'm not this bright-eyed bushy-tailed bunny that just hops around seeing gold everywhere and the best in people at all moments. That's not me, but I would say just based on my lived experience. Their opportunities everywhere. There's so many million dollar and multi-million dollar opportunities out there. Like they're everywhere. And for that reason, when I get turned down, that's within the entrepreneurial context. I'm just like, you know, that's fine. Maybe I got saved for myself on this one. And that's happened tons of times. Like, I don't get into a deal, and it's a disaster, unmitigated disaster. I'm like, wow, okay, glad life saved me from that.”
2024-01-23 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #717: Noah Kagan — How to Launch a Million-Dollar Business This Weekend · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And that is based on experience. And I would say generally I tilt pretty pessimistic and that I have like a dim view of human nature, like very hobby. And like I.”
2024-01-23 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #717: Noah Kagan — How to Launch a Million-Dollar Business This Weekend · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And if you are, as I always try to, and this comes back to the question you asked that I didn't really answer directly, if you're looking to find something that is rarely seen or recognized or to meet an unmet need, you have some time. So I think those opportunities are everywhere. So my feeling is if I get rejected, and I'm sure there are examples I can't think of them offhand, but there are a lot of fish in the sea. The guest doesn't want to be on the podcast. They're too busy or whatever, fine. They're going to be 20 other people who will be as good, if not better, possibly if there's an opportunity and the door closes because who knows? There's an investment and blah, blah, blah, blah for X, Y, Z, different reasons. I want to make the deal happen, but they can't make it happen or I get rejected as a strong word, right? But for whatever reason, I can't be part of that deal. My assumption is there are plenty of deals. There are plenty of fat pitches out there.”
2024-01-23 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #717: Noah Kagan — How to Launch a Million-Dollar Business This Weekend · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It depends on the type of rejection, and rejection comes in all sorts of forms, right? It could be silence, it could be light, like polite decline, or it could be something stronger. This relates back to my pausing around a lot of next steps for myself where I'm like, if you're rushing, it's probably because you have a scarcity perspective on something.”
2024-01-23 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #717: Noah Kagan — How to Launch a Million-Dollar Business This Weekend · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That worked. It really worked. And that approach, that light approach has worked over and over and over again. I mean, it took me two or three years to get Jamie Fox on the podcast. That was a long time. And then it was at the time, you know, podcast of the year. It took time. That's cool.”
2024-01-23 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #717: Noah Kagan — How to Launch a Million-Dollar Business This Weekend · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Right, and then at some point, not in front of the group, by the way, but like, I like buy drinks for folks. Let me buy you guys a round of drinks. I feel like I'm crashing your party. And then if somebody really expressed interest, I would say, you know, zero pressure. I know you, I'm sure you got a lot going on, but if you're interested, I could send you an early copy of the book. You're not going to want to read the whole thing. It'll take too long, but I could just highlight 10 pages that you might be able to use immediately because it has templates for this thing that you just mentioned. And they're like, cool. And I'll be like, yeah, I'm like, I'm not expecting to promote it. I'm not expecting anything. I just want to expose people to this stuff. And you have to mean it, right? You can't then follow up 100 times and make a prick about it.”
2024-01-23 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #717: Noah Kagan — How to Launch a Million-Dollar Business This Weekend · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, yeah, yeah. Well, and if it's a group of like six to eight people, chances are at least one person, even if they're just being polite, will be like, well, what's the story? What's the book? And then I would just pay attention to who was interested, right? Who was opting in? Yeah.”
2024-01-23 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #717: Noah Kagan — How to Launch a Million-Dollar Business This Weekend · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Your story, like, who are you again? And I would say, oh, I'm here because the only thing I can really control with my first book, I'm really nervous about it is looking at digital stuff because the publisher is doing everything else. Then I'd stop. I wouldn't give them a full pitch. If it ended up being the right audience or if they had any interest, they'd be like, well, what's your fucking book about? And I'm like, well, it's about”
2024-01-23 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #717: Noah Kagan — How to Launch a Million-Dollar Business This Weekend · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Now, what does that say? Because there's sort of a subtext to this. What that says is if this guy meets up with me, I'm not going to browbeat the shit out of him. I'm not going to follow up 20 times after he said no. So he's like, the risk of meeting with this guy is low because he had a light touch in the beginning. Now, there's a time to be forceful, right? There are times to be more forceful, but I do find that the carrot works better than the stick, or a better way to put it is just like a gentle touch works much more often than a heavy touch. This was also true with the bloggers. If a bunch of bloggers or people I thought might be bloggers were having drinks at like an after party at South Bai, I would wander up and I would just say, oh, hey guys, I know you don't know me. Is it okay if I just join you guys by myself? And they'd be like, okay, sure. And then I'd ask questions. I'd ask questions. Eventually, somebody'd be like.”
2024-01-23 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #717: Noah Kagan — How to Launch a Million-Dollar Business This Weekend · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Forceful. And in the same way that if someone's like, I'm a hugger and they invade your space and you back up, don't cause that instinctive defensive response in somebody who reads your email. So even in the very beginning, and I still do this because believe it or not, I get rejected. It still happens, right? But in the case of, say, the manufacturer, there was no presumption. It was like, I really appreciate you taking the time. This might not be of any value. And if that doesn't work for you, I totally understand.”
2024-01-23 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #717: Noah Kagan — How to Launch a Million-Dollar Business This Weekend · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I flipped through a magazine and my attention stopped for a period of time on an ad, I would take out the ad and I'd put it in a thriving binder and I would study the ads. I'd be like, why? Why did this affect me? And then I would copy it. And to give an example just to a fine tune, how many emails have you received where someone's like, blah, blah, blah, blah? I'd love to pick your brand and meet for coffee. How about next Tuesday at 2 p.m. And you're like, that's pretty presumptuous. Maybe that works, right? It's a little...”
2024-01-23 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #717: Noah Kagan — How to Launch a Million-Dollar Business This Weekend · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Exactly. And another little tweak, because it's not like the story, I think, that's appealing for a lot of people to hear, which is not what we're saying, is I did 100x more than the next guy. That's not what I did. I did like 10% more with some degree of focus. The details matter. And keep in mind, I'm copying people too, right? I had a three-ring binder, which I treated as my swipe file. Whenever I bought something, and at that time magazines were a big deal. That's changed, of course, but like print advertising and stuff was the game that I was interested in. Anytime I was about to buy something or I bought something.”
2024-01-23 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #717: Noah Kagan — How to Launch a Million-Dollar Business This Weekend · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I'm already in the black, no matter what the outcome of the advertisement. And this is the kind of stuff most entrepreneurs are going to have to do on some level, something like that.”
2024-01-23 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #717: Noah Kagan — How to Launch a Million-Dollar Business This Weekend · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“After you have put out the cash for the advertising, you might not know what you're selling for months. It could take a really, really long time. And so what I did when I started getting more ambitious, because I started with small ads, of course. And then once I got to kind of full page ads, I would go to, say, distributors and I would say I would love to feature you exclusively in this particular ad, but for that to work, I would just need you to pre-order X amount of inventory. So they buy X amount of inventory. Let's say that's $10,000. And I would also say like it's $10,000, but the rate card for this full page is like 40 grand. And they'd be like, okay, well, seems reasonable, especially since we're going to make a profit on the product. Then I would buy the ad space as a remnant. So I would negotiate last minute. I would get that for like five grand. So what has happened? If I had them pre-order, let's say 10K, I paid five.”
2024-01-23 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #717: Noah Kagan — How to Launch a Million-Dollar Business This Weekend · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“But it all hinged on the very beginning the pre sales. And also I was buying, I mean, negotiating at that time. You want to talk about a real pain in the ass, magazine advertisements. Feedback loop is really slow.”
2024-01-23 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #717: Noah Kagan — How to Launch a Million-Dollar Business This Weekend · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Then I had to negotiate everything, right? Because I would go to these contract manufacturers and they're like, well, our minimum order size is this. And in my head, I'm like impossible. That's never going to work. And then they're like, in our minimum term of commitment is this. I was like, also impossible. So I had to sell the vision. And at that time, I was able to, because I'd learned through cold calling off hours, get a hold of the president of this manufacturer, got him on the phone at one point. And I was just like, I know at some point somebody gave you a break. I'm not asking for anything other than can I drive to you at any time and just tell you about my vision for this business. And if we are able to find a way to work together, which I would like to, I promise you that I will work with you exclusively as a manufacturer as we grow the business. Went down, and I think he was maybe just amused more than anything else. He's like, okay, sure. Like after all was said and done. And then I used him for years, right? And that's how the deal got done.”
2024-01-23 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #717: Noah Kagan — How to Launch a Million-Dollar Business This Weekend · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Basic math to figure out if the economics would work. Nothing fancy though. It's like, how much do I think I could manufacture this for? What are some of the basic costs of sourcing? Landed on a retail price. And at this point, nothing has been made. Nothing's been manufactured. There's no product to ship. And I just went to coworkers who are friends. And it wasn't exactly guilty, but these people at that point didn't really need this necessarily. Like it could be of benefit, but I was like, hey, I want to try this out. Like, would you be willing to just prepay for one of these so that I can try to do a first manufacturing run? And they're like, yeah, sure. Why not? 50 bucks or something at the time. And that gave me just the bare minimum of capital to start having conversations.”
2024-01-23 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #717: Noah Kagan — How to Launch a Million-Dollar Business This Weekend · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And then pivoted, and that's when the whole thing took off. But that's not the takeaway that I was going to share. What I was going to share is at the very earliest stages, I had a website up, which a co-worker at work at Trusan had put together for next to nothing, right? Because we were always scheming and we were always just like going out to lunch and bullshitting. We were friends. So I paid him, but I couldn't pay him much. And he was like, it's fine. And he put together a website for me. I had not manufactured anything. I had done quite a bit of.”
2024-01-23 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #717: Noah Kagan — How to Launch a Million-Dollar Business This Weekend · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Back, it's fun taking the trip down memory lane for Brainquigen way back in the day, the sports nutrition company. And I see sports nutrition because turns out Americans did not want to be smarter at all. So selling something for improving cognition at that point didn't work at all. But I got reports back. This is when very high touch from athletes, especially NCAA athletes, who bought it for studying. They're like, yeah, I don't really care about studying though, but it improved my time off the blocks for my track event. It helped me with this, helped me with that. And being the idiot that I was, I ignored that for ages. I was like, no, this is brain quickening, right? In my own head. So I kept pounding my head against a brick wall. It didn't work. And eventually I was like, well, wait a second. They're using this for sports. The only reason I spent so much money on my supplementation as a percentage of my income is because I cared about sports performance, really.”
2024-01-23 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #717: Noah Kagan — How to Launch a Million-Dollar Business This Weekend · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So early on, I don't know if I've talked about this at all. When I had decided that bloggers were the path, at least that was the hypothesis worth testing for launching the four-hour work week. I went to a bunch of their blogs and I left comments, and my comments were like blog posts unto themselves. I mean, they were, they took forever, right? But I put it.”
2024-01-23 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #717: Noah Kagan — How to Launch a Million-Dollar Business This Weekend · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You have a lot of really valuable input. And even though we've been talking about the word scale is kind of a four-letter word in one of the very first episodes of Masters of Scale that Reid Hoffman did, he interviewed Brian Chesky of Airbnb. And it's a great episode. And one of the key tenets in the beginning for Airbnb was do things that don't scale. And those things tended to be highly manual, helping people take photographs of their places. And what they learned then led to a lot of what we've seen.”
2024-01-23 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #717: Noah Kagan — How to Launch a Million-Dollar Business This Weekend · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT