Digital Dropshipping: The New Way to Start A SaaS Business

my friend how much money do you make well my number one year in e-commerce was $10 million a year and last year I sold my company and the combin company raised $15 million at a $75 million valuation okay what do you do so primarily everyone knows me from my e-commerce background I started just like many other people I started in Drop Shipping um funny enough I started in Shopify in 2013 so oh my God the first time that I made my store was 2013 and the reason why was I read Tim Ferris book The 4H hour week and at that time he was an investor in Shopify he was one of the first Angel Investors and in that book he showcased that he got the life he wanted by building a supplement company and using Shopify so I said to myself that's my that's my chance that's my way of breaking into e-commerce and I thought to myself at the time if I could just make $100 a day I'd be all right if I could just learn how to make $100 online I could live any type of life I wanted um it took only took four years for me to really make shopy successful in 2017 okay so then I'm curious because you obviously you made a brand that did over $10 million yeah a single brand which is crazy but after that you moved on to no code software and you even went to venture backed route and so if you were motivated by the lifestyle with Shopify and then you accomplished that why' you decide to go into venture-backed software it was the reason why I stopped Drop Shipping to go into my brand I let go of Drop Shipping and I said I made enough money now I need to start a brand and it felt like a natural transitional I built the brand I know what I can do in e-commerce but in order for me to build really big Enterprise Value go for a billion dollar Mark in a way I wanted to like one up the relationship kind of thing I wanted to build something even bigger um I said to myself I can start a billion dollar software company I talented I have the skills I have the ability and I've built my network in e-commerce I have so many friends like Sebastian Georgie and many others who are inside e-commerce so I knew I could build a software company to service them and a transition was happening a transition from email to SMS was taking place there was all this new legislation taking place with tcpa compliance that SMS was going to be the way that 20 to 30% of Revenue was going to come in from shop by stores and I wanted to position myself in that in that environment I just felt I had to move I had to move on I had to take it to the next level and then I started spending the next three years building a sof company um there's a lot of trial and tribulations that I wish I could I wish someone would have told me so maybe we could dive into that about there's a lot of misconceptions about raising venture capital or bootstrapping a company or how to start a software company or how to use these new tools today that I had no experience in I was diving deep into a new industry with a big ego and and a good amount of money and falling flat on my face for the first couple years okay so let's explain that you you saw the opportunity that SMS was going to be the new form of marketing essentially or direct communication with your customers and so you had a thesis for this company yep did you raise right away no I didn't raise right away so my intention was I have enough money so I said I'm going to spend three years on this company I'm going to put half a million dollars in this company just theoretical like this how much I'm willing to spend before I stop this company and I'm going to go all in on it and I don't need I don't need to raise any money I could do this all myself Etc that was completely wrong because there's two types of software companies you could start one is a cash flow-based software company with the method of distribution and building it with very low costs almost like an MVP um and the second is you're going after a huge outcome a venture back Company by definition a venture back company is a company that can go 100x any grade VC only invests in opportunities that can do that and but here's the here's the Paradox you have to capture a market really quickly and so to capture a market really quickly well you either have to have some crazy level of distribution like a personal brand or something goes viral something crazy happens or you have to burn a lot of money on salespeople on acquiring customers and afford that long-term value and I thought I could do two both simultaneously and by the time I realized I should raise money I was getting out competed we had so many people come from behind attentive mobile raised almost close to a billion dollars in funding at a 10 billion dollar valuation you had clavio raise 400 million you had postcript raise 150 million you had a motive raise 50 you had all these companies raise so much money and then we go raise a million dollars because I'm talking to these top VCS and they tell me well these guys just raised all this money a couple months back why how can you beat them how can you be first place remember disproportionate impact goes to first and second place you don't know who finished fourth and fifth place in the 100 meter dash all the rewards go to the top people so if you're not the top you're in a really bad position if you raise money it's like a golden handcuffs position where you essentially bought yourself a uh a small salary position to kill yourself mhm like you literally have to work on this for two years yes but the money that's raised is just going to your salary it's going to yeah and didn't even take salary yeah what's crazy is I was working for free and the the other crazy part was the money you make in the company doesn't go to you because it's not getting distributed to you because there's investors and these investors have liquidation preferences that means that if you sell the company over this well they get their money first before you make any money so you spent basically too much time trying to figure out yourself too much money and then you realize you need a lot of capital because the incumbents are building SMS and they already have every Advantage now they have way more money to get more sales and and then once you rais you basically lock yourself into a business in a losing situation cuz you still rais I lock myself in at a losing position and ethically you couldn't just call it quits even though because you just raised money yep so that sounds like a rock Nightmare and rock heart a mental torment personally I don't think absolutely because you're so it's like a falling knife you're you're deep into a position subconsciously know it yeah you're deep into a position I mean think about this you spent now a year so much money you have all these employees relying on you you've already committed so much of yourself and to just quit like you know making that decision to quit is just not in my nature but the second part of that was um trying to swim upstream MH like you know you're in a losing battle and maybe you can emerge out victoriously which we managed to to do towards the end but I would urge you to put yourself in the right position from the beginning make the Right Moves In the Beginning you want to explain what those would be the Right Moves In the Beginning this is what I tell every single person that I meant to today is you're going to start your software company with less than $1,000 here's how you going to do it first thing you're going to do is you're going to mock up on figma just a basic wireframe you're going to go on upwork or dribble hire someone for a couple of hundred dollar to refine that design on figma make it clickable so it's a full prototype you can click through just like it would in production but remember it's just design you're going to make a simple landing page a headline a loom video walking through your figma prototype as it was real in production and you're going to start hitting up people to do conversations investors Partners people who could join your team start Gathering support spending no money until you validate your concept only once you validated your concept you've got some commitments or you raise money do you start building don't build if you this is your first go around do not build until you validated and got commitment first validate your premise validate what does the software stand for and what are people actually going to pay for before you dive deep oh I just need to build this amazing product I'm going to engineer it and then all the customers are just going to fly in doesn't happen it never happens that way I've seen a YouTuber that I watch he validated his idea just by making a landing page and offering $75 lifetime access yep if you purchase and all he did was the figma and it looked like a product yeah and then but he had not even started coding it yet and so just made a landing page sold it literally took made 75 grand yeah and then started making the product and it took him 3 months from that to launch once you got it validated so it's a Kickstarter model it's such an opposite way to think about it it's a Kickstarter model you validate your concept to the market first and then you tackle on engineering it because a product is just the moment of Time products are very easy to create nowadays with all these new tools their products are a diamond dozen the difficult part distribution Val value proposition branding team and who's behind it like who are your partners in the ecosystem your investors your Affiliates all those things matter infinitely more than the product the product is only important once you've nailed all those out dictating how big it can really go this is why I wanted to have you on the podcast because you found like the most modern way to run a software company and you are the one who's put us on to no code tools and so all every time I'm talking about no code we learn from George what is the correct most modern way to run a software company now first one I would start with what I call digital Drop Shipping or minias a mini SAS is a template a workflow within an existing software so think about a notion template right it's a just one link that you're selling think about a zap year workflow right think about a go high level snapshot think about a bubble template I want you to create one of those or simply buy an existing one refurbish It remake A different brand and digital drop ship you're essentially selling a software product it's a it's a piece of code that you're selling but you're not controlling the underlying software so you're not controlling notion you're not controlling go high level these are existing companies that you're creating a piece of code that you could sell one to one to thousands of people that's where I would start and I would get really good at developing out a simple funnel and learning the basics of traditional e-commerce now once you get a little bit under your belt the second way to go into the next chapter and a quote unquote a more true SAS is you can leverage these existing tools like bubble web uh web flow framer and figma the top way is you have to use a design resource kit Tailwind UI or my designer align UI develop a simple software couple of pages nothing crazy on figma make it a prototype hire someone on upwork to make that on Bubble then for your front website use framer or webflow to start driving traffic you can get all this done in under $3,000 there's no reason why any software should start with more than five grand honestly if I if I would start blue receipt over today it could be done it under 5K because remember I would validate the concept to see how much potential there is from the market before I spend all this time and money to actually engineer the full product and once you get customers in the door that mvp you have to be really clear that's why the landing page is so important because you clarify what the hell are people going to pay for that headline is 80% of the value prop so on revamp when you say create a newsletter in 30 seconds that right there is probably the most important part of your whole software so you guys are spending all this time I'm going to build a little intricate like I was I'm going to build a little intricacies of my software and design all this stuff and you come to realize 80% of the value is in the headline MH it's it's counter intive the one core value you provide to your customer the core value that people are truly going to pay for not more features not more features you have to get someone to purchase and expand you can't think about how do you how do you penetrate the body you penetrate the body with needle something very narrow very precise but once you're in oh you can expand as fast as you want so once you got that customer in your platform and he wants all these additional features okay land and expand but one key value proposition that people are dying to pay you for if you cannot nail that out no no 15,000 features are going to help you they're not if anything they going hurt you 100% because then it's too complicated to explain and and you don't even know what the software does when someone asks you what does your software do well it does this it has all these features you can't clarify in a 30 second Pitch yeah one core use case it solves a clear problem absolutely so let me tell you what today sponsor GPT trainer does GPT trainer lets you build your own custom chat GPT for your business this way you can embed it into your website in minutes with no coding and let it handle all of your customer support and answer questions it's going to collect all this data and of course provide you with the conversations so you can see what questions your customers are asking GPT trainer embeds on all of the popular websites including Shopify and a breeze GPT trainer is super easy to train all you have to do is hit source and then upload the files you want in its knowledge base and then from there you design the custom experience if you want to give it a try go to gpt-2 for 25% off the first purchase okay so I want to break down a little bit more what you just said so you said you're going to build the figma okay what if you can't use figma like or what if you are not physically capable it cost 200 $100 to get a person on upwork to remake your software on figma this is how you hire an upwork first thing you're going to do is the quality of your job description dictates the quality of your hires and how cheap it's going to be the less specific you are and imagine you go to an agency you say hey can you help me build the software Oh They'll they oh okay yeah yeah yeah we We'll add this to you oh it'll be 50 Grand but here's how we do it for 200 bucks you're going to screenshot all softwares you like just screenshot put it on figma and then you're going to go and just very basic just like type in uh just simple wireframe like the ugliest design I'm I'm probably the worst figma designer on Earth okay screenshots and like small little uh wireframe details okay then you're going to make a notion template and in that notion template you're going to describe what you need a clear job description you're going to call it a challenge a $200 challenge okay you're gonna make a little loom video at the end and you're going to say hey here's what the software is supposed to be I want you to just recreate my wireframe and create me components then make it clickable so I can click through on on figma Prototype you're going to launch that on upwork I am guaranteeing you it because we've just done this like two weeks ago to hire a new batch of designers between 200 and $500 you will get done a very good figma design complete before you hire them say please send me a five minute loom video of you just showing me your ability before I hire you I don't hire someone unless they show me like two to four minutes how they're designing they're going to people will show you their talents so quick never believe someone when they tell you oh it's gonna take me a week or two to to really show you how good I The Talented A+ people show you in a matter of five minutes so I asked everyone I hire please send me a 5minute loom video just showing you designing that's it just one little thing Bas it off that hire them for 200 bucks to make that first page and you can hire two three people because now you can have two three versions and then combine them together and get the best guy to to take all the ideas to make one perfect version that's how you would start it a landing page is so simple a webflow template I mean you can even use you know click you can use any there's a million landing page Builders so I'm not going to get to web flow is the best though yes but super simple I mean um a title a loom video book a call nothing else nothing else that's all that's needed for you to launch your software company okay so go more into the we kind of just went deep onto like no code software yeah but your digital Drop Shipping concept your no resour the templat if you had no money today and you were starting off what would you do my answer to that is digital drop shipping.com and it's this concept I had three years ago which was I saw that oh my God more and more value is being contained in digital products people are feeling more comfortable paying 50 bucks for a digital product the value of a notion template to be a planner or a resource kit on figma people are starting to understand the value of those things just like they would a physical product you know a physical product solves a paino it provides value in some kind of context that we're familiar with as as human beings but as technology has really grown and software has gotten so intertwined in people's lives that miniature software digital Drop Shipping products like a notion template a go high level snapshot are becoming really valuable and you make it one time and you could sell thousands of people instant delivery and it's the same process of selling a physical product with traditional Drop Shipping but instead of selling a physical product from China with all the shipping time and return policies and all this other things that are going on behind the scenes you own one thing and you sell it as many times as you want and it's instantly fulfilled whenever that guy purchases your notion template you send one link out over email and the job is finished the delivery is finished and if the guy doesn't like it you know whatever your policy is your return policy it's one click to refund him when someone when my e-commerce company someone wanted to refund me what my options oh yeah send it back I want to return label H yeah return label um so now I'm going to pay for a return label I'm going to give them their money back and I'm going to have to do a restocking fee it was better for me to just say I'll just refund your money keep the product you lose the cost of the product as well with digital products there is none of those and it's an incredible blend of all the abilities you're you're learning in e-commerce and it's a it's a really great marriage of dabbling into software without really going hardcore to build the true software company just a miniature software company and getting all the experience that you're going to need to sell anything from e-commerce I mean the fundamentals of e-commerce are running ads product description images copywriting fulfillment customer service those fundamentals you're going to learn all of those and also you're going to learn all the fundamental of how do I really build some no code SAS and how do I get into this digital realm where the valuations are bigger where there is Enterprise Value where there is all these great things that you're hearing about I think it's a perfect blend of those two and it's been three years since I I kind of shared with you know my small audience and uh a couple people have really great success and now that I sold everything off and I'm able to kind of start my personal brand that's the direction I want to take for for those young talented entrepreneurs who are getting started and they could be successful in these other Realms but this is just the best way this is I think the best vehicle for them before they go into their bigger Ventures later on I want you to kind of give us more details on digital Drop Shipping like how does someone identify the product that's right for them because when you say Drop Shipping it kind of implies that they can just go on to an AliExpress and pick a product you kind of can you kind of can yeah you kind of can I call it digital Drop Shipping because the premise of job shipping is you find an existing product on Alibaba and you put a you take a generic product and you put you slap on a brand you slap on a label and you change the description you you essentially do the marketing well it's the same thing you're going to go on Etsy you're going to go on Tik Tok you're going to go on Twitter and you're going to see these people who are selling these digital products eslo for notion templates there are some people on YouTube that sell go high Lev snapshots for 150 bucks there are people on Etsy who sell ADHD notion templates okay you're going to buy them you're going to see what they're doing you're going to then take that and again if you're not a designer go on up work come up with a new brand name remake it a little bit Target maybe a different demographic and you're going to do the same process that you know and that you know and love from traditional e-commerce and you're going to sell a digital product instead so basically just find something that's working someone else is selling that you kind of have a little bit of knowledge on yes and then look at their resource make it your own way something not not you're not copying it but you're making it similar but adding your own touches to it changing it to your branding maybe adding a few other you're changing the value proposition you're changing the way that people are are viewing what this product provides in their life someone could take a notion template and frame it as productivity they could frame it as ADHD solver they could frame it for moms looking to organize their life they could frame it for business professionals looking to make double their their double their income the same product can solve multiple different use cases depending on the perception so it's like let's think like a like let's just use this as like a physical Journal so re a notion planner is the same thing yes but let's say a physical Journal I can make a physical journal with a pink cover and say this is for girls third graders third grade girls or I can make it a black hardcore one this is for high school boys AB same planner so you're saying the same thing applies for digital products yes and so you can find these digital products but then just totally remarket it Rebrand it and then run targeted Tik Tok ads or whatever to that demographic spot on okay what's the funnel so let's say it's a Tik Tok organic video so you don't have to pay anything you just make some content about this digital product what's you put a link in the bio what's the link in the bio to purchase this notion template yeah I mean you could just use like stand. shop and you if you don't even stand out stand. shop so it's like a very simple almost like a link tree it's like a mini Shopify so you can make it in 5 minutes now Shopify might take you a day or two you know there's a little bit more going on complexity going on but stand. shop and almost like a link tree five minutes guys five minutes and you can validate your concept we do we use super doso have you heard of that absolutely super doso you take a notion take your notion it's already on notion and just go on super doso click two buttons and it makes you a website and you have a website like to sell products absolutely and stripe just launched their stripe in bed so you can just copy their in bed link pop it in your notion and boom you got a website up it's the best way to just get reps in because you can make this digital product in a day or two super doso automatically connects it just set up a price connect your stripe account you're ready to sell a product put that link in your bio on Tik Tok and just start making videos showing people how it literally solves the problem they already have and you're just getting reps in of getting traffic to a landing page and it works like I don't know how describe it like you just make a video you post you look at the analytics like oh there's 15 people that bought this today yes and there's no way to do that that now if you want to get more professional you build a real personal brand around it you get more creative with your ads but in theory you just have to sell pick one product that you know people want and then just try different ways to get eyeballs on it and you can make 100 bucks a day dist distribution is more important than anything else guys distribution and and the way in which you're positioning the product to solve a value proposition for specific demographic does it make you mad that back in the day when you were Drop Shipping you had to run Facebook ads when now you can just make Tik Tok shorts Instagram real every generation has their pros and cons and I think when people say oh the Glory Days of the past and all this stuff every day is getting better in my opinion um and it you have to find the edges every single talented person I've mentored I've probably given over a thousand people one-on-one advice over my years and every single talented person who's made a good amount of money it's always because they found an edge and they took their foundation so they they have a general Foundation of substance right they have the basic premises of everything but what got them their breakthrough was finding an edge in the market when you look at Oliver it's finding an edge in the market like oh my God this is really growing right here scaling horizontally with all these Affiliates uh this product is really crushing for my shoutouts there's something that they found an edge in that they were able to double down on and catch that ride that wave of momentum finding edges in the edges are bigger than ever the waves are bigger than ever now you catch an edge today like like you can make a lot of money really quickly and you know there's pros and cons to every you have to just be adaptable to whatever the market is presenting you and find those edges those edges are difficult to discover because as soon as an edge comes it goes the market is somewhat efficient so if if something's really really good you know the Market's going to find it we can we learn smart contracts early yeah that was R and at the beginning of the bull run or whatever we could charge half a million for a smart contract no yeah now so scarce no trust and now it's 200s 200 bucks literally so it's like that was a span of a year yeah and so it's literally just like this value Arbitrage of you're early to an opportunity it's very interesting to think about but those are constantly happening they're constantly happening and you have to um be at the Forefront to to find these edges uh and once you find them most people find an edge they will only tell you about it after it's done they're never going to tell you about the edge in the middle finding an edge is always the marriage of two things a technology shift that makes it economically feasible to do something and a demographic shift so the blend of these two things the marriage of those two things and a great example is the new AI wave and a new demographic so the new AI wave gbg3 came out three years ago it's crazy it's old it's pretty old when it first came out like oh my God it's here but it wasn't economically feasible right so a technology can smartphones were before the iPhone but it wasn't economically feasible to have something valuable than a comparable in the market so now the cost of GPT 4 in the next couple months is going to drop dramatically here's here's the way we find the edge gbd4 is much better at continual prompting so gp3 gpt3 could get pretty close on small um actions but now gbd4 can really go deeper and the cost is dropping by tenfold and so the the marriage of that with the coming business professionals so business professionals who are spending 40 50 hours a week on their job are beginning to start using these tools to become more productive 30 40 50% more productive and wrapping putting a bow on it kind of like that mini mini Drop Shipping thing to make them more valuable I think is g to be a huge Edge every single white collar worker will need to use AI tools it's not it's non-negotiable it's like do you know someone who does not use Google you don't know someone like that anymore and so you have to they have to use these tools and so how do we find narrow um self-contain things like oh this does really well at um taking your existing PowerPoint and reformatting it there's some specific variable that gb4 is going to unlock to make high-end White Collar work much much simpler it's the whole micro SAS idea and with AI there's a huge opportunity to finding like literally just this one streamlined order of these multiple tools that solves one super specific problem even if it's just a managerial or follow process it's like you have to living it to identify it but if you figure out the first one to take these AI apis very linearly combining four processes in a row you could easily make 100K a month in a little micro sass like that yeah and and again you're going to notice that oh my God there's a lot of like similar products in the space but then one kind of emerges and like why does that one why does that one emerge again it's a combination of their branding their positioning and their initial Spike of distribution they found the perfect order it's it's just a blend of these variables coming together in a symphony I mean what makes a good song What Makes what makes anything good it's a combination of multiple variables that just blend together harmoniously I'll give you a great example of someone I'm advising right now I think he' actually love me promoting his product I don't think uh it's called Rojo and it's an appointment setting bot for go high level so he made this app inside go high level what is go high level for everybody just real quick go high level is a tool that you use to capture leads so SMS and email essentially it's a blue receipt for agencies so for service based businesses um it's not designed for e-commerce it's designed for service based businesses okay and so you're capturing information SMS email and now what he built was a chat GPT raer that appointment sets means it has conversations with people just like an appointment setter does and it moves them down the PIP line and it says oh this guy's ready to book a call gets him to book a call so it's it's essentially an appointment setting bot but specifically inside a go high level's platform specifically inside go high Lev platform who use go high level for agency owners to give to their clients so he goes he doesn't go after clients he goes after agency owners who have clients underneath his top his top one is Frank Kern Frank Kern has 400 people that he's helping MH so Frank Kern alone is making him over 15K Mr so he's basically giving business owners a product to then sell to their clients yes and so it's like much higher leverage and it's super sticky way less churn every single person he gets on starts to compound because they're they're going after the tail end and and the software is expanding based on how many people they're servicing so he doesn't need to go after every single one of those clients and those people are turning off so quickly he finds a couple of people who are really dense hubs captures them they go to everyone else the tools available make it so that your idea is very close to execution the better your idea the closer it this to execution because these tools execute now we've transitioned from the model of Google where it was um queries so you have an idea you query it and then Google gives you information but you then have to go execute today you're it's like flipped you're the Google you're finding information you're orchestrating information and these AI tools are executing you want to be an orchestrator you want to have Clarity on the processes that something the way in which something operates under because these tools are getting so good they're going to be executing better than any human and what's missing is orchestration and how the quality of your idea distribution branding Affiliates Partnerships investors all those things matter so much more than product yeah it's like you need to find the right sequence to solve the right problem in the most streamlined way possible yep and so like with AI these are all very new apis and so there's a lot of possibility but it's like really dialing on one specific problem it's kind of like your Shopify with the black mask example you said like you understood looking at the outside I see a product I know I need to sell it but there's a lot of steps in between that need to be perfectly ordered and that's the opportunity right now it's perfectly ordering AI tools and these no if you guys are learning this stuff you have all the pieces okay I maybe I know how to do figma I know how to hire someone I know a little bit about Bubble I know about how to make a landing page I know how to contact people I know how to make content but what you guys are missing what I was missing was how the hell does it look when it's complete and I think you know Brett's doing a great job of showing here is how the puzzle look when it looks when it's complete and now you have a frame of reference to model after to say okay those are the variables that I need to look at when deciding if I should pursue this idea and how well it's going to work and those variables like I mentioned is how how well are people excited about your product how well can you communicate the value proposition how willing are people able to pay and then how fast are they able to get that reward from your software how valuable is that piece of action for that software I described for Rojo it was very valuable because now they replaced all their appointment Setters and now they have a tool they could sell so all those people he he convinced to use the product once they saw that click oh my God this is texting on my behalf this sending a voice mem on my behalf they Now understand how they can sell it he found his ambassadors that's the key you made them something that they can make money from you made them a product to sell Bingo digital Drop Shipping digital drop ship so what are you working on now what's like what what is your main thing that you yeah are working towards well so now I my mission statement is to discover educate and partner with top young talent in business design engineering and I've been postponing personal brand for the better half of seven years the first time I wanted to take it seriously was when I made $2 million Drop Shipping in 2017 I launched a little Shopify course called Shopify Mastery for one day I said 20 people can buy it I want to see I know I can sell the the crap out of it but I wasn't confident in how many people can really get success and when I sold those 20 people my expectation was so high I said oh my God I need to make these guys you know 20 40K a month on Shopify or this is a failure and I got a little bit disillusioned because I said man I can sell a lot of these programs but there just isn't that many really talented people for me to just show how you know show this opportunity is very difficult it took me four years to finally make Shopify work MH and I made Shopify work from one uh mentorship it was a two-day event in the beginning of 2017 a two-day event that put it all together it put the puzzle in front of me I knew how the puzzle looked when it was completed I had all the pieces remember I learned all the pieces on how shop fight works from suppliers to advertising to building a store everything but I didn't know what it looked like when the whole thing was complete I had all the pieces but imagine you're you're building a jiga POS you got all the pieces but got to put an order you don't know what the picture looks like you can't visualize what the whole thing looks like and I learned from these guys Mac and Mike in beginning of 2017 they made a million dollars a month selling black masks so black charcoal masks for pores and when they showed me how the whole thing looked I was like oh my God I could do that two months later I made my first $100,000 a month end of that year I made a million dollars a month Drop Shipping before I launched the brand I built the bigger brand and I'm like ah okay I'll build a software company I want a billion dollar company and and really I said in order for me to to do that especially if I don't want have funding right I have to think of a different way I think I to think outside the box on how to accomplish that and I thought the best route would be to create this most incredible product but I soon realized that yeah people were using my product but then all the top customers remember there's only about a thousand top customers that clavio has that gives them 80% of the total value of their company a thousand clients prod produces 80% of the value of cavia which is a 101 billion company those clients were so valuable that all these companies like attentive mobile and clavio we paying people $500 gift cards to just do a 15minute demo call and then saying we'll give you 90 days for free we'll TR we'll have our account executive transfer everything over to ours and we'll compete on break even pricing for the next year just to get you inside our platform and to use you as a case study and you realize oh my God for the people that I need on my platform I'm getting destroyed by all these people who raise so much money I can't afford I can't afford to spend 18 months payback period on day one to acquire this customer and the other people the small businesses the smbs those are really bad clients those are really bad customers they churn really high um they're they complain very often and you can't really use them as case study to propel your brand forward unless of people a viral Tik Tok Affiliates or your personal brand I mean you're in a you're in a tough spot personal brand is the only business that unlocks all the moves what do I mean by that when I'm building a software company or I'm building an e-commerce brand or all this I'm unlocking Moves In One Direction whereas personal brand it's almost like it builds inward it unlocks all these directions and so now someone can present me an opportunity and say George I have an amazing software company can you help me and accelerate me and all this stuff and I could take all my experience all my ability all my connections all my distribution methods and validate it in 20 minutes and then I can let that driver go and he he does really well we can go pour gas on an existing fire another guy comes to me with an e-commerce brand he spends six months developing this product he getting ready to launch it but it didn't go so well George what do you think about it I'm like oh my God this is great but the launch strategy was bad this was bad let me connect you with this guy boom boom boom I could orchestrate and utilize the ability of people and their opportunity in a way that I can't if I just go down One path because if I go down One path I narrow myself out and I can't utilize the breath of my ability but in order to use the breath of my ability I have to build myself as a valuable asset in and of myself because now I could take if I don't have a big following but if you look at who follows me and you're in the industry it's a who's who of top level people it's the craziest level of density in the industry um but I'm not able to really harness that energy harness that power because I haven't built George yet so how can I provide value to Jordan Welsh how can I provide value to Sebastian Georgia how can I provide value to you how can I provide value to Zayn to Umar to on to all these people I can't maybe I can in for one small Direction one e-commerce company for this one guy right here maybe with personal brand I can give value in all these different directions because simply being around me is exchanging value think about this if you're around someone this guy is worth a billion dollars next to you value is just difficult to flow on to you like he's not let me send you 100 Grand in your account but if around someone with a lot of following and you just having me on your podcast with an existing following 340,000 subscribers you're you're in a way like depositing money in my account it's transferring over value in a way that's just not possible with simply money or simply opportunity and if I could be this Beacon of my cup overflows right the value just comes in from within me well then every time I round someone I could just you know Jesus whatever that quote is is is essentially your couple overflows meaning by you building yourself and you your value starts to leak on to others I think that's the number one thing that I could do now and I've just been postponing it for so long uh because I had this idea that I first needed to gain the experience and wisdom to teach and I didn't have the understanding at an earlier age that it might have been better to just document you know that documentation instead of like you know results oriented Looking Back Now it's like a catch 22 I mean should you have should I have just documented or we never know because all we know is how do we know them my my idea of waiting until I was old and wise to to start wasn't the best idea it could be the best idea if what I do in the future enables this idea to to come through fruition so I can I think the best two comparisons here is alexos versus Iman iman's goated like he documented exact like his jour when he was how he figured it out and now he's teaching people of that same demographic how to do what he did and he documented it so you cannot he has the authority and he's the only person that should be teaching that demographic because he was that demographic just a few years ago yep and then Alex orosy complete opposite no personal brand until he sold for 60 plus million and now he's coming out here not selling anybody anything and just you can't dispute any of his knowledge because he just did it but both complete opposite approaches I just think with personal brand has to be authentic to your story I agree with that I agree with that and really I didn't know what my story was besides what I've done MH you know and it took me a little while to people would always say like George you've been the same as you've always been I would agree with that statement but I felt like I needed external things to validate who I am you always you know you meet someone and it's great to you know just you know be around them as friends but like what do you do what are you like what are you basing your identity off of and I always based off my identity from my my e-commerce company or my software company and now to just say well what are you doing I'm like I'm building George I'm building the brand of George and authentic is an important word relatable is an important word but there there are tried and true things that are just Universal that you have to employ in order to communicate your message to the world you know employing the idea of Duality and polarity right I was just like you you IM like I was just like you I had no knowledge and I was broke and all this stuff to now I'm this person showing the full spectrum of who you are that that polarity the better your polarity the bigger you can go another great example is Alex Earl so she had when I started following her she had under 50K subscribers on Tik Tok and the moment she started blowing up was when she started posting how bad her acne was why because now people oh she's relatable this word relatable is interesting because to me it means that she's shown a side of her that the average person thinks they're better than but they know that her her top is much better than them so it's like this duality of she's showing something of her that oh my God even I'm better than her at this meaning she's showing something so vulnerable like oh Ty Lop saying I only have $47 in my bank account or Iman like I came up from abusive household or all this people have these origin stories and they want to communicate that they were in a worse position than you you the average person they were worse then and now they're here they're trying to create this polar they're trying to stretch out this polarity as much as they possibly can and that creates this level of density density comes from the variation like the the roller coaster ride of Alex always does this which like I'm a hot mess I'm I'm so messy and sloppy and and you guys are seeing my Fina she's communicating relatable relatable in this word simply to from my perspective means that she's trying to portray herself as something even worse than an average person like oh my God even the average person is cleaner than her even the average person had less acne than her that's how I see it it's a fine line of being like the author a lot of people want to be like the authority and so they try to feel like they put themselves above Their audience be like look at me I'm all successful you should want to live like me or if you actually take the opposite approach show that you're successful but also show that I'm also exactly like you and we're in this together it's a much more you're going to get much more loyal fans yeah and and how well you can communicate your your trials and tribulations I mean everyone loves a a hero's journey comes with ordeals and it comes with um structuring a way that the ordeal really made you a better person like IM struggle like when he posted that hey guys I was battling a bolt of a bout of suicide I don't know did you see this post on Instagram well so he posted in 2021 like last year I had this B of depression and he really created another density in his audience because he was able to communicate something very vulnerable and show how you emerged out of it but it wasn't so negative that people were like oh man I kind of suck like Logan Paul has some some ordal that people don't like and are using against him and so how do you communic get a great ordeal story that makes you better that amplifies your ability um and it just makes you more favorable to the audience I mean another part is just you know perception is reality and so I can be friends with someone I can I can even have a relationship with someone for years but you never really know who that person is maybe until something really good or really bad happens and so it could just be very difficult to what is truth truth is just very it's authentic and Truth these are things that there's some objective reality to them but the perception in which you view it from could change and so I mean we can dive into some like political conflicts today and other stuff but the truth is just very malleable that's what I realized is that the idea that there's some objective reality that's that everyone sees in the exact same way um I just haven't seen it I've seen that the truth perception is reality perception is reality for people and the way in which they're viewing their lens of perception dictates how they see someone every time you go on social media someone's trying to impr imprint a view on you absolutely everyone's trying to tell you that their business is the best business model everyone's trying to tell you their way of living is the right way of living and they all got them from somebody else very interesting what I'd say to that is every human being is self-interested but the best position you want to be in is where both of your self-interests are aligned when two parties have are both self-interested but they come together into one cohesive alignment that there's a win-win situ situation from that's the best position so when someone's pitching you like this is the best idea this is the best business model all this stuff in a way they're all right in a way they're all right every opportunity has its pros and cons every opportunity could work really well depending on who you are your skill set your position all these different variables and so knowing yourself and knowing your own self-interests and deciding which person do you best align with everyone's self-interested I mean this isn't the this is a a fact of human beings I don't think that's something we should and in fact I think that's the best strategy it'd be kind of weird if um help helping someone with like absolutely nothing for the other person it's it's kind of weird if you think about it like what is the person G you want to have kind of a transparency in like here's how I gain so when people are like I'm giving away this for free because yes I'm capturing you on my email list and I'm going to provide you value because hopefully later on you like me enough to purchase my later products or I'm going to give you a Shopify free uh free store because I'm a Shopify affiliate and I'm making money on the back end Jordan bound has 400,000 people in his Shopify course and he tells them why am I giving you this for free that I spend $100,000 to produce because I make money from Affiliates and I only make money from Affiliates if you guys use them and are successful with them there's a perfect alignment together and so just finding those people who you resonate with that are aligned with your self-interest and that coordinate with the uniqueness about who you are your ability your skill set and more importantly where the hell do you want to go everyone wants to go a specifically slightly different direction and if you could can clarify to yourself the destination you want to get to the answers of how to get there the the turn BYT directions are not that difficult the more difficult part is most people don't know where the hell they want to go well said I think this is going to be I'm kind of turning the conversation here but McKenzie is like one of the biggest Consulting companies Consulting companies in the world and I don't think people understand how important Consulting is and I think like I cannot express how much we've learned from you and how like you've changed the direction of what we're doing and put us onto this so I appreciate you but I I think that's very important and a very admirable mission to like be like specifically trying to find these people who are trying to figure out that order and since you've gone through all of it you're just pointing them and saying skip this skip this reposition this launch this way and so if you want to comment on that do you have something to say yeah my my mission is again penetrating the body like very narrow so my mission statement is I'm looking to find talented ambitious young male entrepreneurs in business and Engineering it's a little bit different from maybe a mission statement from Alex MOSI which is provide business content for the masses or Iman which is he has such a big audience now that he's providing reforming the education system because I'm more I'm a smaller person I can uh say more specific things that might not resonate with a million people but might resonate with the 5,000 absolute Killers you went into the depth with blue receipts like I cannot explain it painful it was painful yeah so but though you have all those lessons is what I'm saying yeah I think I've I have a good breath of success and failure and and not only that but I've also mentored so many people throughout the five six years you've compiled the best yeah I've I have I think a a great breath of understanding now and when I'm mentoring some new people that I'm partnering with I see their talent so quickly and I'm like oh my God I could just help align this person to go down the right direction and his talent and his ability is going to decide how big he gets and I really can't control that so much I can't move your hand or decide your level of talent but what I can do is I can position you in the right direction encourage you give you the support and and and system you need to be successful and all I have to do is just find the right drivers find the right talented people who can showcase the the value of my direction and the the quality of an educator is the quality of a students so the better you pick your students the the better you pick um the things you're you're teaching the better you can showcase because there's only so much you could do um to help people there's only so much you could do a lot of it is dictated on just their natural ability their natural talents that's going to Showcase so when I give like Sebastian advice or Jordan Welsh advice I mean how much credit can I take yeah maybe I steered them in the right direction but they were already super talented they were already super had these abilities but I also know here's another really important thing many talented people who went down wrong directions and they went super fast down the wrong direction so direction is more important than ability but ability will ultimately decide how big you end up becoming because a lot of people a lot of talented people go down the right direction so you're competing against those people too so if they have find ability proven ability and then they come to you with a crossroad do I go down that's the perfect person that's the perfect person and you just being able to point them left or right and if you point them in the correct direction they make millions of dollars or an extra $100,000 it if I find the person at the right Crossroad it's just so important I mean if someone can take me at like there's about six to seven Crossroads over the last 5 to seven years if I just took a left turn instead of a right turn you know a lot of amazing things could happen in those positions you know there's not a lot of critical moments in life but there's some and those some are very important very important I'll tell you a couple of ones that I went down the wrong path on when I was building the e-commerce brand uh a bad idea I had was that I asked myself this question which was would Gucci or Louis Vuitton sell on Amazon and the answer was no right the answer is no but I conflated that idea with that oh well then Lu won't sell on Amazon whoa whoa hold on that's like a that was a bug in the system if you would have asked me today if you would if some if George would have asked me younger George today like why do you think Lux shouldn't sell on Amazon if I would Reas myself the question be like oh my God no that was stupid that was a bug in the system it was just some wires getting crossed in my head that made a wrong decision and because I didn't sell on Amazon it didn't allow me to scale up horizontally for all the auxiliary products for iPhone accessories cables regular cases all these different types of products that I couldn't run ads to I can't run Facebook ads to a charging cable for 15 bucks there's not enough margin but I can grow a brand on Amazon and I can leverage the distribution of Amazon to sell those products and still get 30 40% gross margin because of the brand value and the residual effect like enur and Balon and that was a that was a tremendously bad idea so there's a lot of critical moments that it seem futile like it seemed like oh I would have made that decision anyway like would you have you know it's like they're very subjective like you probably made the decision like oh if would Gucci or Louis Vuitton do this I want to be like them so no so it's the story that you like confirmed in your mind and so then you're like this is 100% right decision it's a no-brainer but then if you really sat down and critically thought or had one outside opinion they're like you're not Gucci bro like it's like it's a phone case or something like that like yep you need to completely reframe the way you're considering that because you feel like you made the right decision because you had this false confirmation yes and that's dangerous and that's where a fresh pair of eyes is invaluable for a company so I want to now ask you what do you think is the best order or even the best Creator stack and so for example let's say my Creator stack is YouTube brand YouTube channel to newsletter to info to a no code SAS that's what we're doing that's my Creator stack so this so we're talking about a Creator stack for someone looking to build their personal brand for someone just wanting to find success like I know everyone's going to be subjective and different and everyone has different path spas on their skill set but what do you think is the most powerful Creator stack or the right approach and the order to go about it a square could be a rectangle but a rectangle can't be a square YouTube can broaden out to every other social media but every other social media cannot Braden out into YouTube so your Twitter doesn't necessarily mean that your YouTube's going to grow and your Tik Tok doesn't mean that your you know your other platforms are going to grow but if you build your YouTube you document your story it can go into all these other social medias really effectively and the density you're going to build from it is incomparable to anything else long firm content so they can really get a threedimensional understanding of who you are is has no comparable now the second part to that is as you build up your personal brand and you leverage it out into different social medias depending on on what you're trying to sell different platforms sell different products better I would urge you if you actually want to make money you have to figure out your way towards something High ticket High ticket is your ticket to a lifestyle that you want because it's like when you're trying to build a a brand like a e-commerce company you got to be a really talented person I mean you got to because it's a fast boss coming and you you got to be able to hit that fast ball but High ticket um even even affiliate High ticket it's like hitting a boou ball there are people today with I think $15 an hour skill sets that are being Affiliates for other people's programs and making an exuberant amount of money all because they're able to leverage High ticket so every piece of content although it might not get so many views well one sale could mean a th000 bucks and a th000 bucks means a heck of a lot especially that's in your pocket as opposed to a $1,000 revenue on Shopify that doesn't mean so much and so although it's great that going into all these different Realms like e-commerce and and software and all these things it's it's it's it's great I mean there's there's a lot of great variables to it but going after something High ticket building towards something High ticket is the Surefire way that you'll be successful I mean if you go high ticket it's it's like hitting a boou ball it's the surface area for for you to hit if you do YouTube and something High ticket or even affiliate High ticket promotion you can't lose I mean it's virtually impossible to lose if you actually do it just doing it ensures Victory whereas just doing a software company just doing a soft I mean an e-commerce brand does not ensure Victory it does not high ticket is your gateway towards the lifestyle you truly want and you got to be a killer you got to be talented to really make a big lifestyle happen from e-commerce or a software would you not say that the per I feel like a personal brand or e-commerce or software I feel like this might even be is it EAS how comparable is the difficulty of a personal brand compared to an e-com store so an Ecommerce store although you can get some success relatively quickly um it's hard to make it fund your whole big lifestyle right um whereas with the personal brand it has this compounding nature to it that just chugs along that ensures Victory because the the Shopify stores you might have some outliers like some Killers who boom they crush it but you look at the you look at the true distribution it's kind of like I want I don't want to call it network marketing but you just look at the distribution of people who are actually successful to live the kind of life that they're saying they that they're living and I'm telling you that it's for an average person when you look at a normal distribution of people if I want to ensure victory for a normal distribution of people the only way I can truly do that is youtube personal brand or some way personal brand using Tik Tok and building towards High ticket distribution either as an affiliate or their own type of product that ensures Victory what would an example of a high ticket be when in this example yeah so there's a lot of these uh people affili marketers on on Instagram and and Tik Tok and they're they're all having standout shop in their bio and they're promoting a $2,000 product uh from someone else that's teaching them how to do affiliate marketing or how to sell a Shopify brand or how to do all these different types of things and they're just presenting the opportunity and they're just building themselves as a vehicle of entertainment and presentation and and communicating to a certain demographic like maybe I can't communicate to 40-Year-Old Susan but someone else can and that is just the surfire way to have a have an income that we can really rely on that everyone will be successful if they if they do it if you say if I do something will I be successful and this is the only thing that that I can guarantee you with Shopify your software if you execute if you just do it you know still a lot of other things you have to find an edge in the market you have to find the right product at the right time you have to have all these fun mental abilities um and even if you do make it work a lot of these things crash and burn so it's hard for me to guarantee success to the masses but yeah if you can if you could find if you're talented and you find an edge in e-commerce or software yeah you can you could definitely do bigger than the beginnings of a personal brand so yeah initially if you're talented you can Spike up on those other things but if I'm looking for the general masses I'm giving them something that's what I'd recommend but if I'm telling the killers I'd tell The Killers to document the process of them doing an e-commerce or or a software company or an agency interesting so it's almost like I I view it as there's two options you have ventured backed SAS where you have to raise money and then you have the investor who's kind of like your boss in a way he's not your boss but he is in a way like you are locked into that business you have to see this thing through versus personal brand to info product then bootstrap that Ecom store or that that's the best route that's that ensures victory that is my thesis and I think people forget that like the goal is to make money like with especially with this whole like glorification of raising money like people will literally brag that they just raised $2 million and I'm like that sounds horrible why are you celebrating like that sounds stressful like yes congratulations you convince people to give you money and you're have a good idea if you don't know the whole scenario yeah for the vast majority of those times uh it's golden handcuffs and there are not that many scenario where there's a lot more dead bodies than there are survivors let's just say that Venture Capital by definition is betting on a number on a roulette wheel mhm and you just want 60 bets so you hear about the one that you that won but it was one out of 30 odds right you hear about those survivors no one talks about the dead dead bodies it's a lot more dead bodies and yeah maybe you could be the one you could be the winner sure there of course but for everyone watching something they could do everyone should do no matter how talented you are document your journey there's just no substitute and you know it's a it's just absolutely necessary yeah it doesn't need to be high production you don't need all these lights you don't need these nice mics just be authentic to where you're at and just say hey I'm making this so you guys can see what I'm learning I'm going to share as I go that's how I view my YouTube Chann even even documenting you going to work in your your journey just getting the ball rolling in a direction and quickly opportunities are going to start flying to you that you would never otherwise get it's literally like how I think of my channel it's just I learned about Ai No code SAS so I immediately make a video on Ai No Cod sass that's my plan yes and then we do it for a year and now we've rolled out our Ai No Cod SAS and then I'm going to share how it goes like I'm not going to sugar coat it but if I'm excited about a new opportunity myself I just go share with people because it's not taking anything away from me and I'm also helping these people with what I just learned so it's like I go learn it I talk about it I go learn it I talk about it I have the I had the opposite approach I learn something and I go tell a couple of one toone people but then it lives and dies there so a lot of you guys maybe listening you have a good idea and you go tell your buddy no no no go tell the world and then you can point back to that as proof that you know what the [ __ ] you're talking about and you start building yourself everything you have you start building yourself up even if the idea is bad you start you document the Journey of how you discovered whether or not this idea was good or how you thought about doing it that Acres value that starts building yourself up nothing else is comparable the personal brand is the square the square can be a be any rectangle it could be any business but all those other businesses can't be can't be the personal brand can't be this can't be all these other things so explain your approach to your personal brand since you're really just starting to launch it big this year so when I'm starting my personal brand I have to think who who is George what's his unique position in the market and what is his Edge no one really cares about George right now so I have to figure out well how do I present some form of content that goes after my ideal Market which is talented young male entrepreneurs but also leverages all the existing value that I've provided to hundreds of really top-end people in the space and so my penetration point was I was going to make long form documentaries breaking down people's businesses so breaking down Luke belmar's business breaking down Iman gad's business uh breaking down Umar AR business and through this long form content I can showcase behind the scenes of how the magic trick is done so not entertainment like what they would show you but I would show you how are they actually doing this what does their funnel look like breaking down how they're presenting their personal brand how they're doing their education how they're selling people how much they sold all this behind the scenes stuff then do podcasts on the side and as my personal brand grows will then have my initial offer which is going to be digital Drop Shipping and then digital Drop Shipping branches off into two forms one form is the e-commerce side of digital Drop Shipping and the second is the agency side the agency side of of digital Drop Shipping is that you're going to sell a front end product once again but on the back end you're going to sell your agency services so you're going to capture people in the front end from your go high level snapshot but then in the background in the back end you're going to sell them your agency service to have a done for you you know appointment setting setup so it's like a frontend acquisition model too MH so that's the two ways brand sh and it would be hyperfocused go ahead sorry how much are you selling that digital product for on the front end yeah so on the for for these people that I'm teaching it would be ranging between 25 and 150 why no why no higher you could do higher but 300 or I just don't think there's um a broad enough way you can do front acquisition on a higher end more than $300 is very difficult to sell someone without a call or without a lot of warm so I'm talking about cold cold ads it's very difficult now if you have a warm audience yeah you could definitely sell for three four 500 bucks I would definitely agree with that but if you're running ads and you're just kind of utilizing cold traffic it's very difficult anything above 150 you just get in the realm of you need to do a call you need to do warm leads interesting okay that's have you looked at the productized agency model at all oh absolutely interesting every everyone's going that direction because you know that one guy really showcased yeah and he made a million dollars off his course he productized you you know yeah it's great he showcased that hey we're we're leveraging all this Mr into our agency model he just kind of put a different spin on it and he showed people that you can do this with with any type of agency and I think it's A Hard Sell honestly to be honest with you I think unless you have really warm leads it could be difficult to pitch someone on a month a monthly contract like that when they might just have a a small project basis they want to do but maybe those aren't even the clients you want to work with to begin with his demographic is YC backed companies so it's like yeah employ he's built that track record and he's able to leverage that track record and those warm leads from the brand he's built to then sell you on here's here's what I'm doing here's the best opportunity to do it on so once again the person the personal brand and him documenting his process not only gave him all the clients but gave him the ability to sell the product which makes them just as much as the services okay last thing I always like to ask people is their Tex stack and their funnel the main Tex stack I use every single day is notion figma Google Calendar Google Docs WhatsApp Instagram every tool is free I really don't use any no paid tool is an end all be all those tools are free and they're so powerful ful it's it's the person behind using it and how well you can orchestrate the ideas for what you want to accomplish and then what is the funnel you're rocking right now the funnel I'm rocking is do you think George is cool that's the only funnel it's you you view what I'm saying you view my look you view my story and you say yeah that's a guy I want to be friends with I want to connect with that's my funnel it's do you like George MH and if I can build a good enough traction on many people liking George well like I told you guys earlier we can go into any realm and many people hit me up to you know partner with me one-on-one and Mentor with them and I that that's what I love the most which is finding just exceptional young Talent like a kid who hit me up two days ago that I'm working with 17 years old making $20,000 a month with a car detailing business and he has so well spoken such immense potential and just finding really great talent like that and helping them you know I'm 29 now so if I could have someone like me truly being a mentor at that young age and guiding me down the right direction uh that would be really phenomenal so if I could provide that service to to those talented kids that's really what I want to focus on there's a lot of talented kids watching this right now so where can they find you brother the best way to find me is Instagram send me a DM or YouTube now that I'm producing a couple pieces of content what are the handles George twet so George S oi TZ will be a LinkedIn the bio probably uh yeah just send me a DM and that's probably the best way okay brother I love your approach it's super simplified and we're using the most modern technology to make it very accessible for the everyday person like the actual software approach just a workable figma then a bubble actual building it and then web to sell it and then the there no need to over complicate it you can start over complicating when you start breaking things breaking things means you have so many customers paying you so much money that they want all these additional features that's the hard part yeah until you get there I wouldn't worry so much okay brother you gave us the path I appreciate you coming on thank George

Channel: Brett Malinowski

Views: 60,066

Keywords: my first million, the hustle, saas business model, software as a service, what is saas, how to start a software company, digital dropshipping, ecommerce, shopify dropshipping, no code saas, no code software, bubble, make, ai software, go high level, ai automations, best business to start in 204, affiliate marketing, how to start a software business, work from home, dropship software, how to sell a digital product, how to make a course, sell notion templates, course platform

Id: C0BX_ffNSg4

Length: 72min 1sec (4321 seconds)

Published: Mon Dec 11 2023