End of the Creator Economy: Monetizing Influence and Impact (Billion Dollar Moves Podcast

So there's a lot of people that say they've tried and say they've tested new things and they're really just lazy and they really haven't done much. I think that people increase their personal risk for no need by starting businesses that they know nothing about or investing in things they know nothing about. So I think that you run into these opportunity cost problems when you're just flailing and you really shouldn't have started the business in the first place. Creators influences key opinion leaders. These are all buzzwords you would have heard in recent years. While many professionals have in the past belittled the creator economy. This is one trend I have always been bullish on. According to Goldman Sachs, the creator economy was worth about 250 billion in 2023 and is set to nearly double by 2027. And no, we are not just talking about makeup tutorials on TikTok, but also educational business content and other products delivered directly to communities through different mediums. And this is why I'm so excited for you to tune into my conversation today with Scott Clary, my podcast brother in the network who is living this very trend. An entrepreneur, investor, author and podcast today with a combined following of about two million will dive deep into Scott's journey. Why self sabotage is more common than you think? The importance of personal brand monetizing influence and the nuances of the creator economy. You don't want to miss this. I'm so sorry. That's good. This is a great start already starting with laughter. But look, you know, there's a meme going around that says an appointment with my friend these days takes like six months in advance and it sounds like, hey, are you available March 15, 2024 at five and that's how it was with this Scott. You have to do that. I feel because listen, when you get to a certain point and you're a highly ambitious person, if you're in a build stage of your life, you will put so much emphasis on achieving and creating things that are meaningful to you that you have to optimize your day for things that are going to move the needle. And it doesn't mean things are less important. It just means that you're very urgent, important focus. You have that little Eisenhower matrix in your life and you know exactly what you have to do and you have to optimize for that. For a period of your life, not have balance and overemphasize the things that are going to move the needle so that for the bulk of your life, when you have family, when you have kids, you can have some balance. I'm a firm believer in that. So right now my inbox is a little bit crazy. I'm actually very bad. I'm about a week out from answering emails that aren't really going to change my life in the next six to 12 months because I need to focus on the things that do. And I've fallen victim to shiny objects syndrome so many times in my life that I know that it can actually derail an entire career if you're not careful. So I've become very regimented and only focusing on things that really fit the right now if that makes sense. Yeah, absolutely. And saying that change is insidious, it happens gradually and quickly, but it's those little things compounded that you don't realize. And so really paying attention to what you're also not paying attention to matters. Correct. And I think that if we are reactive, meaning that we have an email and respond to it, we trick ourselves. Humans are great at tricking themselves into believing that they're productive and effective. And we're ultimately less productive and effective than we ever believe that we actually are. So if we adopt this mindset of reactivity to emails, to tasks, to projects, we will trick ourselves into believing that we're actually accomplishing things, but we're really not. So that coffee, that brand new venture, that shiny new idea, object person, it's rarely that beneficial. I'm not saying to block these things out entirely, but you really have to filter them because if you're very sad on what you want to accomplish, chances are you know exactly what you have to do to get there. And your brain will tell you that it doesn't want to do the hard work that it actually takes. So you will actually look for reasons that do not do that hard work, which will sell sabotage. Oh, this is already a good conversation, Scott. I love it. But before we do this, diving into the different angles of which we'll cover here today from sales, from brand, from private equity and growing real tangible, fundamental businesses in this tough environment. Let's start with the very beginning. I heard the old already. So you're a giveaway of your Canadian roots, personally. But son of a Canadian CIA officer and I believe someone who worked as a lab manager, how did this entrepreneurial bug hit you? Yeah, that's a good question. And I still have a hard time figuring it out. I don't think my parents know either. I think they sometimes are happy that I haven't screwed up my own life too much. They think that most of the decisions that I've made have been good. But I think that sometimes maybe it's because I'm the first born, I don't know. And I just wanted to go out on my own. I wanted to rebel. And if that rebellion led me down this, this interesting path, I was intellectually curious, which prompted me to move into tech, because I love just fidgeting with things as you'll hear most people in tech are kind of like this. So I started working in tech at a very young age. I mean, I say tech, but my first intro into tech was actually in Telco. And it was sales. And it was the most money you could make because there was a large commission component to it when I was just starting university finishing high school. And I was making and killing. And I was thinking to myself, well, I could either work in a bar and make cash tips or I could work in tech and make sales commission. And then there's like a potential future. I remember I think in year three, year four of college, I was basically working nine to five money to Friday and putting my classes at night or in the morning or on the weekends. So I could basically start my career off. And it worked out well. I moved up market, meaning that you go from consumer sales to small business to mid market to enterprise, kept making more money, more money, more money, more money, and then tried to figure out, okay, so where do I go next that I could have an even better opportunity. And I was sort of chasing a paycheck at that point. It was around a $10 million company. So it was still early stage, much smaller than the big company that I started out with. But I felt like this could be where I really make a mark. Did well that company funny enough at that particular telco also managing director that hired me left for sales force. And I was audacious enough. I'm trying to think how well there was at the time. Say like 2324, I think, like young, I was audacious enough to put together a PowerPoint for the founder CEO of this company and say I should take this person's spot. And the founder probably thought it was a little bit nuts being young. But I had accomplished a fair amount like the the deals that I was closing at previous telco, which was bell Canada, which is like a Verizon AT&T of Canada were larger than most of the deals that the existing sales team at the new smaller company were closing. Then he was like listen, this kid's very ambitious, but let me give him a shot. Move me into sales leadership role at that company. That company a year and a half later was acquired by private equity. And that sort of progression was me loving tech, me going into tech. And then finally me seeing an exit event and realizing that if I was on the cap table, I would have had a nice check. And that's where I started to understand the idea of not just tech and private industry, but equity and ownership. And this is what got me excited about owning things and working in startups and starting in a company from where it was very early on getting a piece of equity, helping it grow and then getting a nice payout when somebody bought it. And this was sort of what really was a pivotal moment in my life because before that point, I had no idea what private equity was or equity was or ownership was at all to any significant degree. And this is what really informed me sort of diving had first into how do I work in startup land? So fast forward to today, you had the bug and you realized, I mean, of course, the dots connect looking back, but it wasn't a swift process, right? Nothing in life truly is swift. But it was a gradual process to you getting to where you are today. This is probably your 10 or more after the realization. Do you feel like you're where you wanted to be? At this point, I've probably worked with about 50 or 60 different startups and various capacities from advisor, consultant, mentor. I've had equity positions in a few. A lot have made me no money. Some have made me some good money as is all, you know, that's sort of how it works in VC quite often. I've put my own money into companies. I put my own hours and sweat equity into companies. And I've had some success. And I think from the outside looking in, most people would say Scott's more or less killing it for his age. I'm very proud of what I've accomplished. However, as with all high performing individuals, they will always benchmark against somebody that's done better than them, which is why it's so important to enjoy the journey and that there is no finish line. I mean, I'm very happy with how my life has turned out so far. So if I may ask, as you're reflecting here, 10 years is a good chunk of time, right? You really look at the impact you've been able to meet, you know, some mistakes along the way. What is something that you've created in the last decade that you're most proud of? Every single company that I've built on the proud of, I would say that you have to be proud of your own work. And actually, that's really the mindset that made me want to start building and putting my name out there. It was because I wanted to build something that would outlive the company that I'm working in. And I think that also that mindset came from the fact that just thinking back, I was never founder CEO. I was always CRO, CMO, bolting myself onto someone else's idea and then helping them grow it. I think that for me, building something that is truly my own is very important. It's not important for everybody, but I love the idea of building something that I started from scratch, from zero, that did not exist. And then I molded it and then now it exists in this universe. And I think that's a really commendable thing. And it's something that nobody really has to do. But there is an immense amount of pride that comes with being able to do that to any significant degree. So yeah, I would say I have a badass podcast that I love. It's not the best in the world, but it's definitely not the worst. And it lets me speak to cool people like yourself and many others. It gives me a lot of satisfaction that I still get to do that. Scott, you're extremely modest, but of course you've got something like a two million sort of following across socials with the podcast and everything like that. So not too bad, not too bad for yourself, I would say. But you've got to venture making it absolutely. Yeah, like Joe Rogan, right? We need to be getting that 60 million deals. I'm waiting for that. You know, I am too. Let's go Spotify. Let's go. Let's go. Although we are very proud to be part of the hotspot podcast network together, grow together. But that is, I guess, gold standard in some way to really create that. In fact, we've gone to the point of talking about personal brand. And this is, I think, a topic that's important for entrepreneurs. Some of them have created brands that are truly one and the same with their startup, right? So the founder, CEO is front end center. Some of them have chosen not to. You've chosen to really do that and build your company's alongside your personal brand. What have you learned in this journey? If you talk to me a little bit about how nothing is ad hoc with you and everything has a systems thinking behind it, tell us a little bit about this thinking. I'll tell you what I did. Whether or not it's right or wrong is totally up to personal interpretation because I'm chasing a long tail in terms of effectiveness in my personal brand. What I mean by that is if a personal brand is attached to a founder CEO that's intrinsically tied to their product or service, they will get more. And by more, I mean more customers, more revenue, more focused niche down eyeballs, very much sooner for whatever it is they're trying to accomplish. So you can build a personal brand associated with your product or service. I think that makes a lot of sense for a founder and then it can morph over time. What I did is I said, I'm Scott. I want to build my thing. I don't want to build my personal brand as CRO of X company because that company is going to be acquired and I don't want my identity to be intrinsically tied to that company. I want it to be on my resume and I want to be proud of it. But I really want to build something that can outlive that company because I looked at the people like the Alex Hermose's or the Gary V's or the pick influencer X. One thing they've done very well is they've built this personal brand around them and then strategically what they can do is then they can use it to launch product A, product B, product C. I'll give you another example. Love them or hate them. Grant Cardone now uses it to fundraise for real estate acquisition. So the point is if you build a personal brand around you, you build an audience that is so into you and not a specific product or service that you can later leverage it for whatever you'd like because you have this trusted community of individuals. So I think that's really what my focus was because I knew that I could build this company and this company was going to be acquired when I started podcasting and newsletter writing and posting. I was CRO of SaaS company that was acquired by a private company and I knew that that transaction would eventually happen if we kept on our growth trajectory. So I wanted this to outlive that and I knew later on in my life if I wanted to invest, if I wanted to build anything, I wanted an audience to tap into to help me do that without having to put millions in paid advertising. It's a pretty standard playbook for again. Look at Hermosi, he's doing it at a high level. He built his gym marketing company, gym launch to help gym owners get their companies off the ground, sold that and built a personal brand and invest in his personal brand to source private equity deals at this point. And now he has massive deal flow and I'm sure he has a massive amount of LPs that will also want to put money into his deal. So he's built this whole personal brand to facilitate an investment vehicle and I think that's really the best way to do it because then if he launches a new product or a new company tomorrow he can still do that and have these millions of eyeballs to tap into immediately and not have to build this thing from the ground up like many anonymous or quasi anonymous exited founders have to do because they built something sold it, a little bit of notoriety, great, but then they have to do it again. I rather have a trusted audience versus have to figure out ideal creative and ideal customer acquisition cost and lifetime value and which performance marketing strategy to use and which content marketing strategy to use. You have to do that stuff anyways and it's hard but I can reduce the friction and launching anything by having this community that already trust what I'm about. I forgot that you asked me about systems thinking. Systems thinking is important because I started this while I was still working. So you have a commitment to the actual company that you're building and you have to find a way to do this on the side. So I think of the best way to take content that I can deliver a message or I take content, put it into a medium by medium I mean podcast, short form video, long form video, newsletter, whatever it is, find a medium that I like to create and then use that medium to disperse my content everywhere. So for me, I was like I have to build a system that allows me to do this every single week. I'm never going to keep it up and I have to find a way to remove as much friction and time from this process as possible. So this is where my current strategy comes into play for my personal brand in particular but this kind of thought process of let's find a way to build something, build a process around it, build a system around it and then remove me personally from the day-to-day operations is how I look at almost everything I do now and I was forced to do that because I was working full-time while I was trying to build this thing. I'll speak to you very briefly about the content system that works for me and then I'll just speak about how I think about it through the projects I take on now but briefly the best content system is one where you can commit the least amount of your own personal time. So right now, this is evolved over time but this is essentially how I was thinking, you record a long form podcast and with that podcast, if the content in that pillar content, that long form pillar piece of audio video is on point and it resonates with the audience you're trying to reach, then in theory all derivative pieces of that content will also resonate, meaning that if I take that long form audio video, say 60 minutes and I turn that into a blog, turn that into tweets, turn that into quote images, turn that into short form 30 to 60 second, reels, TikToks, shorts, all that derivative content is also going to be speaking to the same audience because that pillar content is speaking to that audience that I want to attract and that audience day one was entrepreneurs, investors, everybody in the startup ecosystem because that's where I was playing and then you do that again and again and again and again and again over five years and you will have built an audience and my time commitment right now to this particular project is the time it takes for me to record a video or a podcast kind of like we're doing now and that's it and from that I will have 50 to 100 pieces of content per show which allows me to every single day put up 10 to 20 plus pieces of content across all platforms. So now that's running and then now what I can do is I can work on another company I can stand that up and find a good operator and build systems and SOPs that the operator can follow train that operator let that operator run a company and this is something that I'm actually working on now with a new company that I'm starting or for example if I'm going to be investing VC or private equity, both of these require the ability to do due diligence partner up with people that have backgrounds in VC or private equity that know how to do good deals for example it requires you to hire good operators to basically run your porcos so I know my strengths they know their strengths I come in as sort of marketing sales operations revenue advisory they're the ones that are actually cutting the deals they're the ones that are looking at the PNL they're the ones that are hiring operators and we have a great synergy so it allows me to basically contribute to a private equity firm and fund without spending 80 hours a week doing it so now I have that part of my business portfolio that's running with very little investment for me in terms of time so I think that's really important it's like it's partners it's systems and processes it's knowing your strengths and outsourcing your weaknesses as well one more quick point hopefully it's helpful to somebody you also have to understand that systems thinking it doesn't always mean that immediately it's going to be easy like when I build something new or I build a new company I'm doing all the things day one so I'm not outsourcing it until I figured it out myself which is why I'll take on one big project at a time and then once I figure it out that's when you hand it off to somebody that can run with the learnings and the lessons that you've discovered if you've itemized them properly and say SOPs or whatnot but I think it's important to do the things first so that you at least go to good handle on it and then your mindset is always building it to remove yourself from it as much as possible and this is I think something that's very important in any venture you take on side hustle if you're investing in companies you don't want to become an investor operator if you don't have the expertise even if you're trying to build a startup I mean a lot of founders they just build themselves jobs and they don't build it to sell or they don't build systems that allow an actual chief of staff or COO or CEO to come in and replace them and a good litmus test is can you take yourself away from that for three months six months and will it blow up or not and if not then you've built yourself an actual company versus a job and then that's a really good thing to take note of. The biggest question I guess this brings to mind is what is one thing that you feel you alone bring to the table and then what do you outsource and how do you think about that in a company construct where you know building a startup as you said it is all consuming especially in the earlier stages. In every company including the last one where I was not the first sales hire but the first sales leadership hire what it actually comes down to is identifying on paper your ideal customer profile so who is the industry and type of company that you're trying to target and then identifying the buyer persona within that customer profile so figuring out who the decision maker is this is from a sales perspective and marketing perspective once you've identified those and you've gone through the various iterations of what those could be and you've identified what a good possible fit is for your product or service then I day one and setting up the tools and systems writing the subject lines for the emails figuring out the content buckets for social and I am figuring out all the different things that we have to do and I'm either doing it myself to see what a first version of that is or if I don't have the skills that to do it say there's graphic design or coding required then I'm immediately hiring somebody for cheap usually as like a you know an hourly worker to try and create this first version of what that strategy is and then basically pressing go and posting and sending the campaign and jumping on the calls with the customers I mean it's literally like you do it all yourself and then you record what works and what doesn't so that's across every single activity that you do this is especially important and startup when you're reaching out to customers especially for enterprise B2B you set up campaigns to go outbound on LinkedIn so what are the messages that get people to connect with you what are the messages that get people to reply to you once you've connected with them you're setting up outbound campaigns via email so again like what's the subject line what's the copy what's the call to action once the people reply you're jumping on discovery calls and you're figuring out what questions bring out the information that's crucial to understand your customer on those discovery calls you're itemizing basically the list of questions that you find most resonate with your potential target customer and then once you have that discovery called and you jump on a demo call and you're building out the pitch deck for your product or service you're building out the data bank of stories and analogies and you can tell that potential customer while you're discussing your product or service with them that really illustrates how you've solved pain points for companies that are similar to theirs with this story that story this anecdote you're doing all this stuff for yourself and you're just codifying it and that is your initial sales playbook yeah I mean it sounds simple but people forget that this is what's required how many times I've gone into a company where there's a transition issue and then everything is in someone's head it really matters so the doing it and the documentation that's why most startups fail because what happens is you have a founder who's hyper evangelistic about the product or service they love their product because they're founder of course and with that energy they can close a few deals and then like how do I scale the sales operation how do I scale my revenue let me go hire a CRO and they find a CRO that's worked for a company that's maybe over $10 million and they already had systems in place where the CRO came from and chief revenue officer and then the person comes in and they don't want to roll up their sleeves and get dirty so then they're just trying to hire someone immediately and there are no systems or processes and the CROs has a little bit of strategy but they're really just trying to figure it out on the fly while they have their sales reps going out and reaching out to customers I think that this is also a really good lesson it's so important to hire somebody that is built a company at the stage at your company's at and not hired somebody who's just worked in a large company before to come in and try and build process from the ground up because somebody this worked in Fortune 500 Fortune 1000 even like $50 million and up revenue company is going to totally that screw it up on a 0 to 1 and even a 1 to 10 so if you are hiring a revenue leader and this is we're talking about this from a founder entrepreneur perspective you have a large investor community and you have private equity in VC if you are an LPGP in a venture firm or a venture studio or a private equity firm if you are hiring operators the only thing that matters is they've done the thing that you're looking for them to do in ideally a similar industry but if not at least a similar revenue size of that company so if you are hiring a CRO do not go for the top of market if you have a $1 million company and you want to scale it to $10 million find somebody that just did that like I've never really seen an instance where they don't screw your company up I believe that religiously it's so true it's a lesson that one of our unicorn founders I mean he sold his company for something like 780 million Jack Smith actually put forward as one of his biggest learnings don't get blindsided by the brand names because that's what everyone yeah a lot of people do right and and unfortunately unfortunately you think about the profile of a founder a lot of founders are rebels right so they left a certain institution and so they feel like because they don't have that brand name although they're the one building the thing it's necessary to hire that brand name from the outside but it often always turns out sideways if you go online and you sort of like Google this particular thesis that I have it's resonated across yeah tons of different leaders Mark Robert first CRO of HubSpot he scaled HubSpot from garage to I can't remember when he left but I think it was post IPO when they were already unicorn billion dollar valuation point is he was with them for a long period of time and out of that entire time he said publicly his biggest mistake was hiring an enterprise sales rep from big fortune 500 to be their first sales rep so that was by far out of everything he's done consider this growing a garage startup to billion dollar unicorn status it was hiring somebody that was from a big company to be their first salesperson he was so excited about a recounts the story you so excited about when he did it he thought how did I close this person from pick how sold name company and they're going to kill it they did nothing right they expected all the support and they expected all these processes in place and they expected everything and anything to be given to them are provided and they were just going to be sort of like the mouthpiece there was going to wine and dine the customers obviously not the case at all and the startup has anybody who's done it knows so very very valuable lesson please do not forget it it'll screw up your companies it'll screw up your portfolio companies it'll screw up your baby if you're a founder so don't do it yeah so I love this tangent that we're on and we'll come back to the personal brand a little bit but what are the other mistakes you've talked to the co-founder of Netflix right marked Randolph to marketing guru Seth Godin on your podcast success story what are the other big mistakes that you've seen in your work and through the interviews that you've had it's a good question what are some massive mistakes that people often do yeah and don't talk about too much let me explain why I think people are successful because they avoid this mistake because it's a mistake that I think a lot of us make and I've made it and everybody who I've interviewed has made it although when they have made it it has not led to the results that they're known for what I mean by this is I think people give up too early because they let self-doubt and imposter syndrome creep in and from everybody that I've spoken to anybody that's successful has just stayed at that thing for an unreasonable amount of time while incorporating learnings why this is so important to discuss is because I am of the firm belief that if you are a smart person and you are a capable person you build feedback loops into the things that you are building to understand what's working and what isn't and you find a way to keep at it for an unreasonable amount of time I do believe that you will be successful I am a firm believer because I just think about like you just mentioned like Mark Randolph for example who was a co-founder of Netflix I don't remember the amount of time but he was building Netflix and iterating through tons of screw ups for like years like years and years and years and years and years before it became what we know it to be today so I mean at any point the biggest failure he would have made would have been to just stop doing it because it wasn't working outside of that there is no failure because look at what he's built he's even taken some massive risks one in particular was when I'm trying to think back and I might butcher this story but he took a massive risk and basically like at one point shut down Canada if I'm not mistaken he wanted to focus on what he knew best and if I am telling the story wrong I'm very sorry Mark it's been a long time to use both on the podcast but there was a decision to not expand or to shut down there was significant portion of the revenue to hyper focus on something that they knew best in the short term it could have been a failure because you shut off this huge pipeline of potential revenue but in the long term ultimately like we're good like Mark and Netflix are both good so that's why I don't like to say that those are failures those are sort of just like important decisions that yield these learning moments this is a very important question right it was actually the title of my episode with the CEO of Coursera Jeff Majin Kolda who was also the CEO of financial engines like he worked with Bill Sharp you know the Sharp ratio and he was at financial engines I want to say for like 18 years for a good amount of time and for many entrepreneurs this is real right there will be times where there will be near deaths of the startup and it is your choice to continue or not but there's also a question on opportunity cost how do you decide to pivot how do you think about opportunity cost of continuing to do that thing versus the other options that they're out there I was getting tough okay this is what you signed up for Scott I know I thought I signed up for so let me think of the best advice that I would give somebody about opportunity cost I think that you should move away from something if you are trying new versions of marketing or building that thing and you are not seeing traction this is what's so difficult the reason why it's difficult to give advice is because every person's version of trying is different so there's a lot of people that say they've tried and say they've tested new things and they're really just lazy and they really haven't done much and it's like their version of trying is like changing an ad creative and they're like oh it doesn't work whatever and that's not trying something new but for example say you have a consumer product I think to reduce the risk of opportunity cost first you have to do any sort of business in a smart way meaning that you reduce your personal risk as much as possible so I'm looking at it from a founder entrepreneur lens but let's also from an investor lens how do you reduce your personal risk as much as possible you build or invest in something that you know I think that people increase their personal risk for no need by starting businesses that they know nothing about or investing in things they know nothing about so right away if you reduce your personal risk and I think that if you combine those two things I would say that your potential for actual success is actually the inverse of what most people consider to be entrepreneurial success rates so most people think it's like a 90% failure rate plus I would say that if you come from an industry and you know the pain points that your industry has and you know how to bring a product or service to market better than anyone else in your industry and you already are where that the market's there and also this is speaking to investors as well investing in businesses I would say that your success chances are probably closer to 90% because you've done all the work and you've done all the research and you have such depth understanding of what you're trying to solve that if you do something slightly better than everyone else in your industry it's there's a really good chance it's going to work out so I think that you run into these opportunity cost problems when you're just flailing and you really shouldn't have started the business in the first place and you haven't validated the market and you don't have the experience and you don't know the and then all of a sudden it's like how many things can I actually test before something's actually going to work out when in reality you should have built a business in your niche or your industry or invested in a business in your niche or your industry that you actually understand which would really just shave like 10 years off of your learning process I know that's not directly answering how do you know when to sort of back out but I'm hoping that if people adopt this mindset I think that they will be more likely to win in a shorter time horizons they don't have to back out yeah love that so going back to the personal brand thing this has actually come out because we have a lot of founders on who've had really successful exits right but the day after the exit they come on the show and they tell me in confidence frankly they're completely depressed right because they put their identity into the startup into the work that they're doing and they were the face some of them you know they get a little bit older so for example I'm thinking VVU so she's a huge celebrity entrepreneur in Asia particularly with the Muslim community where she's all about modest fashion right and it literally was centered on her as the brand and when anything went wrong like she got attacked right and now she's hitting I want to say she's just hit 35 she's thinking about the next chapter of her life and whether she still wants to be out there right doing a tech talk about how to put makeup on and not be the brand so how do you think about all these considerations in more conservative countries the more self-promote if you are the more you self-promote the less likable you are so you need to be a little bit more humble in the way that you approach things and even there's this whole concept of authentic leadership this is only starting to change now but there's this whole concept of face value right how can you it's a leader of the world be you know crying in a time of a crisis like that's not the leader that we look up to so there's different versions of leadership that I do want to make sure we take into consideration as well for folks to think about correct so if you are going to put yourself out there I do believe that you have to have thick skin some people I'm sure as a personality quirk they don't enjoy being in the public eye for an individual that is slightly comfortable putting a toe in and testing the waters I think if you do it enough you'll get more comfortable doing it from my experience when I come from a place of conviction and if I feel like I'm acting morally and I feel like what I'm creating adds value as long as I see more people benefiting from it and not hating me then I will continue to do because I get lots of hate but I get more people significantly more people not a 50 50 split thank God significantly more people saying Scott this newsletter you wrote really changed my life or I love this episode and the positive is so thoughtful and the negative is more like you post too much or this is a stupid idea there's not a lot of thought and there's not a lot of there's not a lot of depth to the negative so for me I just focus on the positive and I focus on the people that I'm helping and I think that is going to sound cliche but you are like mission driven purpose driven like I actually believe this is why I love educational content I actually believe that most people's purpose on earth is to help other people and elevate other people I feel like that is naturally what we're put on earth to do if you are quote unquote a good person I don't know what that really means but if you're trying to help people teach people whatever even if there are commercial incentives which they're always are of course we're not ignorant but if you can still make money while helping people I think that most people can lean into that and I feel like when you're actually helping people and the product you're serving which is whether or not it's a widget or it's an or it's information if you feel like that's bettering their life you start to pay less attention to the negative because you feel in your mind that you're a net positive influence on the world I think that what really impacts you is when you're selling garbage to be quite honest that's when the negativity can get to you because you don't even feel confident in what you're putting out there now the other piece of your question is an interesting point and it's not a lens that I look through often because you said in other parts of the world fame is not looked at potentially the same way as it is in the US I feel as though humans will always have an affinity for another human I truly believe that and I think that maybe you're not as audacious and loud on social media in other parts of the world as you are in the US if I heard from a founder of a company about a problem or a positive thing versus a company announcement I feel like it is human nature to take that message both good and bad in a more meaningful way from a human versus a company I can't imagine that if a CEO or an influencer or somebody is putting content out into the world in other parts of the world where you mentioned this like ability index I would more resonate with a faceless company I have a hard time understanding that maybe that's because I'm so removed from other cultures but I feel like human interaction is what drives the influencer creator economy it drives alternative media and there could be cultural nuances that maybe have not allowed that type of economy to flourish to the same degree but I feel like it's a natural evolution of how humans want to communicate and the barrier to entry to communicate and to market that way is becoming lower and lower with the advent of the internet. And I think it boils down to what you said in the first piece of your answer which is authenticity in which if it comes from a place of mission but you're not selling yourself it's not fiend for fiend sake but to come from a place of business why I'm doing it and really being clear on your why I think so very interesting conversation let's take it back a little bit to private equity and venture capital and investing you are a GP at Celestial Group which was started I believe in 2021 which is all about acquiring cash flowing businesses talk to us a little bit about your thinking as an investor here what can we look forward to and how are you seeking to build the different investment vehicles that you're part of today. So my story is an operator that turned into an investor and like most operators especially in the tech space you immediately look at venture capital as the option and I speak a lot about de-risking and investing in things that I know and I think that I mean this is probably going to sound silly to your audience because everybody in your audience is probably private equity or private equity adjacent or in you know some degree but for a lot of the outside looking in and in the tech space people jump into VCE because it was sexy and cool but it's super high risk it's super high risk and everything that I just said about investing in what you know and de-risking it's my personal operating thesis that's how I look at investing and private equity was interesting to me because it made a lot of sense you have controlling in person the company there's a P&L there's history there's cash flow there's things that are working there's things that are not there's team in place that already knows what they're doing and it's really just me injecting a little bit of my sales marketing operational experience to take them from where they are now to where they can be that's really the way that I see it with VCE especially with the checks that I would write I would be angel pre-seed I'm not a good series BCD kind of person there's a lot of people that are that but that's not me and I think with VCE at that level yeah you can get a hundred X but also there's like a really good chance they don't have product market fit and I've worked with a whole bunch of startups again as investor and advisor and mentor and various capacities with various types of incubators and I think that VCE is really just rolling the dice even if you apply all your sales and marketing and operational knowledge to a great product you don't even know if there's product market fit there especially at that stage so in my mind it was like private equity makes a lot more sense from a risk perspective what we were working on with Celesteal is not just private equity but we were focused on bringing in more women altes and educating women on what private equity and investing is because women are massively underserved look at a finance YouTube channel or an investing YouTube channel I'm sure it's like 80 to 90% mostly male audience my two co-founders at Celesteal were also women this is very important to them and I think it was a very noble cause to to get behind because if we're gonna do business acquisitions if we're gonna make money why not also at the same time bring people on the cap table that perhaps did not know about these opportunities or didn't have access to these opportunities I'll give you the stories to why this sort of came to be so Camilla one of the partners she had a good exit and she thought that after the exit you know people would be reaching out with investment opportunities and she'd be in the right rooms and be able to take a look at the next Airbnb or the next Googles of the world and it was like crickets so even even an exited woman entrepreneur founder still didn't have access that she thought she should have that her peers that were men did have so for her was like an eye opening moment she's like I need to build a vehicle that gives women access to these types of deals and creates wealth and cash flow in their life and this is what really led her to build out slasio and this is a mission that really resonated with me because I fully agree so tell us about the thesis here and is there a particular vertical I mean love the mission obviously something that I believe in about greatly where my personal mission is really in making sure that women continue to succeed built billion dollar businesses and then continue to reinvest right that's part of what needs to change it because what you're talking about is again to the point that you made about affinity people include those in the room naturally not by malicious intent but by people who look like that make them feel comfortable right so if we don't have enough women what do you think the result is going to be exactly what Kamala went through what is the thesis here strategies to focus on high margin digital businesses so digital services courses some CPG but ultimately online businesses and the reason being is because we know how to sort of pour fuel onto the fire for online businesses things that already have customer base recurring revenue setup they have a good LTV and perhaps the founder isn't the best marketer for whatever reason and they've sort of hit a cap so what we do is we'll take a business that is doing okay and it's within the one to ten million dollar range is what we're looking at right now and it's all online businesses so we take a business that's doing okay we'll negotiate a great deal on the business so we're trying to get like a 1x to 2x on the business in terms of acquisition and then we build a media company around that business so what I mean by that is performance is going okay but it's not great meaning you don't have a two to one or three to one LTV to cap ratio lifetime value to cap ratio usually if you have a really strong online business you have a three to one LTV to cap that's a great benchmark meaning that for every dollar you spend on your acquisition cost you get three dollars out of your customer a lot of econ companies especially on the first sale they're barely breaking a one to one and what we do is we turn it into a media company and if you look at sort of the framework that I've used for my personal brand we deploy that same content marketing strategy podcast social newsletter in that particular company's vertical and basically overwhelm the market with content that will lead back to this actual particular online company this creates a ton of trust this creates social proof this generates traffic it reduces your customer acquisition cost and there's also that trust factor that will increase your lifetime value because the customers will no longer turn as quickly and ultimately it's a very copy and paste strategy for any company that has this automatic order fulfillment so it makes me think of like the classic greens model I absolutely love how they've done what do some companies make a mistake on it you see some things blowing up and some don't especially in the consumer space which is very competitive the major mistake the consumer companies make will be the founder thinking there's a market for the product when there really isn't it sounds so simple but they don't validate product market fit and then they just order millions and millions and millions of dollar even hundreds of thousands of dollars if they raise the money in product and then they can't move it so I think validating the market is important as well and you can look for various ways there's a variety of ways to do that and if you build a strong enough brand and you're strategic with how you leverage influencer marketing and paid acquisition you can make a dent in that market but what a lot of consumer products try and do is they try and bring something novel and this is sort of like the blue ocean problem where they think they're going to introduce something that doesn't exist yet and they don't do enough market research or they don't validate it and then what happens is there is no market need or there's too much education required and nobody really wants to buy the product so blue ocean could be a huge opportunity or a huge detriment to your business or a very simple thing they screw up is they just focus on the initial sale and they focus on trying to optimize a funnel for an initial sale and they don't focus on churn meaning customers leaving them and they don't focus on lifetime value or recurring revenue or subscription I can't remember who said this but basically if you have a consumer goods company that is profitable on the first sale meaning I run a Facebook ad somebody goes to my website and they buy my product or my service or my chocolate bar or my course or whatever it is if you're profitable on the first sale it's almost like you have a unicorn because with iOS update and the lack of targeting options it's very hard to get so granular on your performance marketing that you are profitable on your first sale for a lot of products or services especially cheaper products or services it will cost you more to acquire that first customer than they actually pay you which is why it's so important to focus on the churn and the lifetime value of that customer through subscription or however you want to do it that would probably the biggest thing individual screw up so I think it's just important to understand that you really do have to focus on the long-term customer which will make your business a success versus a short-term customer yeah absolutely love that so long-term game is all that we've been talking about last question here before we go to the rapid fire what is your long-term game call it five to ten years down the road if we're having the same conversation on a fun afternoon where we both have time what would we be talking about so I love what I'm building with my podcasts with my little community I want to continue growing that I think that's such a valuable resource and I don't even think I understood how valuable that is when I first started building it so I want to keep building that out I absolutely love the incredible people that I get to speak with and connect with so I think that's something that like I'm so focused on that becoming this source of truth for people that are looking to upscale personally and professionally that I do feel like I will do this to the day I die let's see how bigger gets one thing that I've noticed that I do have the ability to do is to connect people with other individuals that can change your life I think that's a huge sort of gift that I've been given because I have access to these incredible people so I'm trying to find ways to build communities that will bring in some of the incredible people for my podcast and give maybe emerging entrepreneurs or investors or individuals that have had some success but I trying to take it to the next level access to some of the people that I've built relationships with I see like the sort of the audience that I've built in the relationships that I've built as a gift and I kind of want to share that back in some ways and I think that that's really you know doubling down and tripling down on the things that I'm doing right now is really what I enjoy and I don't really see myself doing too much else outside of more investment more community building or audience building or relationships I mean I can kind of do this for forever so I love it yeah well that really is a great sign of living your Dharma I just had Sunil Gupta on I don't know if you've had him on I just listen to it before we jump on did you love it I love it I absolutely loved it yeah so you are living your Dharma you you are in your essence the answer to what could you be doing for the rest of your life and that's what it is so good for you Scott okay rapid fire so quick ones worst advice you've been given worst advice I mean the worst advice I've been given is take a nine to five you'll be safe it'll be a safe job why are you trying to build something on your own the best advice trust yourself this was a sentence from a lot of people but Anthony Scaremochi actually funny enough one of my first guests he told me like if he could go back to Brooklyn with nothing no money in his bank account just like a you know a t-shirt on he trusted himself to build everything he's built again any amount of times he had to restart and that was like this unwavering trust in yourself I think it was so powerful oh wow and what a note to end on Scott thank you so much for this wonderful hour of jamming and showing us how trusting yourself like you have has created the impact that you have Scott thank you for your leadership for your time and we are looking for what two more billion dollar moves from you I appreciate you thank you so much and thanks so much for tuning in this week you can subscribe wherever you get your podcasts and follow our socials on serogen global to get the latest on the show it would really help me out too if you enjoyed this to rate and review our show on apple podcast and share your favorite episodes with friend i'm serogen spallings and you've been listening to bill and dollar moves