Luke Lintz - Founder & CEO of HighKey Enterprises | Failed Dropshipper To Millionaire Marketing Mogul

Welcome to SuccessStory, the most useful podcast in the world. I'm your host, Scott DeClairey. The SuccessStory podcast is part of the HubSpot podcast network and the BlueWire podcast network. The HubSpot podcast network has incredible podcasts like my first million. My first million is hosted by Sam Parr and Sean Purry. They feature famous guests. They discuss how companies made their first million and then some. They brainstorm new business ideas based on the hottest trends and opportunities in the marketplace. Here are some of the topics you talk about. If you like any of these, you will love the show. Three profitable business ideas that you should start in 2022. Drunk business ideas that can make you millions asking the founder of Grammarly how he built a 13 billion dollar company or SaaS companies that anybody can start. If these topics are up your alley, go check out my first million. Listen to it wherever you listen to your podcasts. Today, my guest is Luke Lins. He is the founder and CEO of high key enterprises. He's a serial entrepreneur. He stepped out of an economics class at 16 to start his first e-commerce business. 90 days later, he sold his entire inventory at a 375% ROI. He'll walk you through exactly what he did and he'll also walk you through some of the lessons that he learned and some of the things that didn't go so well when he first got into drop shipping and entrepreneurship. Now he's built high key enterprises from the ground up. What they focus on is they focus on helping people build their personal brand, also helping businesses build their personal brand online. Some of the strategies that he's used for his clients. He's used on himself, which is what's so incredible because how many people talk about being a great social media agency or a personal brand building agency or whatnot and they can't even do it for their own accounts. But he's a master following over one million on his own social media accounts. He's worked with and partnered with some of the largest celebrities in the world, including 21 Savage Cardi B69. What do we go into? Okay, so we spoke about his origin story, going into drop shipping very early on. Some of the wins and the losses and highs and the lows that he learned getting into entrepreneurship at a very, very young age. We spoke about building a digital agency from the ground up, how he differentiates high key because the space in digital agency is so noisy. There's a million and one digital agencies that you're competing with if you try and start one. We spoke about personal brand, how he built his personal brand, how he builds brands for businesses and for clients without spending money on ads. We spoke about the three key elements of personal brand. We spoke about niching down at the beginning of your business journey and the importance of niching down. We spoke about how to get press publications. We spoke about the importance of money, connections, relationships, that how that all ties in to your personal branding, press strategy. We spoke about the win-win-win formula tied to social media giveaways and some of the celebrities and influencers that he worked with. We spoke about his foray into crypto decentralized social media or deso and how he's bringing web three into a traditional marketing environment to create an incredible community. Lastly, we spoke about some of the lessons that he's learned building a business which are just great entrepreneurial lessons but also he's done it with his two brothers and that adds a whole other level of complexity. We spoke about building the business with his brothers and some of the positives and negatives that you get when you build business with family. So let's jump right into it. This is Luke Lints. He is the founder and CEO of high-key enterprises. Born and raised in Winnipeg, 20 years there. Okay, all right. So, okay, Canadian boy from Winnipeg, when did you? Okay, so what's the first version? Because right now you do a lot of stuff. You were throwing a party last Friday. You started an NFT project. You built your own so I don't need I don't want to call it marketing agency. I don't know what you actually call what you do. It's an agency of some sort. You're doing stuff but what did you start with? Like how did you get into building your own business? How did you get into working with your brothers? All that. Yeah, so I was in I was in grade 10 at high school. Okay, and I started with an e-commerce company. I called high-key technology and so we sold a wireless earbuds before any other wireless earbuds company. AirPods were now at Samsung Galaxy Gear Icon. None of them. We basically thought of the idea of wireless earbuds because we were Jim Rose and we were like, damn, we hate when the courts get ripped out. So we had that problem and so we were finding the solution. So we found wireless earbuds on Alibaba. Only one pair of wireless earbuds at the time purchased them, did a bulk order, figured out a name, high-key, slapped our logo on a bulk order of like a hundred of them, and then just started selling them through Instagram through different types of content like marketing. We had no idea what we were doing. I was in grade 10 at high school. My brother was in his first year of university, my older brother, first year of university in business, and so we had no idea what we were doing. We were just testing different stuff. It just like we got really lucky because we had a winning product just right off the bat and we struck gold and we made $60,000 in sales in the first like four months over. Yeah, no idea what you're doing. No idea. Yeah, $60,000 and like we were doing Shopify store with just wireless earbuds on them and it like it kind of hit and so we were like, wow, we could run this up and so we just kept doing more marketing, kept testing what was working. We were doing mainly like Instagram meme pages. So we were making content of ourselves with like product placing the earbuds in it and then making and then posting that content on meme pages like Instagram pages with like million plus followers. And then we got to a point where we ran up the business to seven figures in sales with knowing nothing. And was it just did you hire out or was this just like you and your brothers and you're just managing this drop shipping store, you found some meme accounts, you're throwing stuff up on there and you're selling. So seven figures a lot of volume for like not having anybody. Just pure drop shipping. So that must have been like customer service headaches sometimes and shit like that. Yeah, it was it was myself, my older brother and then one of the business partner that we had at the time and one or other business partner handled all the customer service so all the emails and stuff. I handled, I taught myself video editing and graphic design. So I used Adobe Photoshop, Adobe Premiere edited all the content because we were like our entire source of income was through content marketing, only thing. We didn't run any direct advertising was like just through content on Instagram. We grew to seven figures, just content on Instagram back in 2016, 2017. Yeah, and then oh my god, dude, we made some crazy mistakes with that business like wild mistakes. So okay, so why did you why did you kill that business? Yeah. It's like okay, because everyone who's listening is like, oh, that's going great. Like these like these kids kind of got a little lucky, probably a little less lucky over time. These are the figures should out to learn and whatnot. So at some point, I'm sure you figured out like what content resonates, how to run a proper store like you know how to scale it now, scale it seven figures. Congratulations. That's a lot more than what I was doing in high school. So why did you kill it? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So we were doing really good. We brought on consulting like we started bringing on like really good people in the industry at Facebook ads and they were consulting us about how to create a better website and everything and everything was scaling up. But then we made a major error where we had wireless earbuds that was making seven figures in revenue, unbelievable product. And it was because it was winning because it was before Apple Airpods, Samsung Galaxy like and everybody wanted wireless earbuds. And so we didn't really draw that correlation because now we were hitting a time where Apple AirPods just came out and huge buds went around that in the entire wireless earbuds game and brought traction away from us. So there was that component of things and then there was also the component of things where we were always long-term thinkers. And so we were thinking of this could be a very long-term brand, but we need to branch out just from wireless earbuds. So people don't see us as just a wireless earbuds brand. It diversifies. Exactly. And then so we created a few other products. We created a really cool portable speaker that was so dope. The quality was off the charts and we paid like, it was like wholesale us buying bulk $40 per speaker and drop shipping at this point. You're good. Not doing drop shipping anymore and we'll get into that. And then so we ordered we bulk ordered backpacks, charging backpacks that we completely designed. I fully designed them. Like I taught myself design work and how it communicate with the suppliers design. We went through seven prototypes and we brought it to a charging backpack and this thing was sick. Like I loved wrapping it. And we have these backpacks to this day. And we basically were so involved in this backpack and so committed to it because of how much time we spent to it. We didn't do any product market research. So we didn't like test the product at all in the marketplace. Why did you spend on it? Dude, dude. So I see where this is going and it sounds like it's a fucking nightmare. I explained this story so many times and like it hurts me every single time because like if we just had a business mentor at the time and we asked them like one simple question, like if we asked them one simple question, we've all been avoided. But we didn't have anybody at the time. And so what it was is basically we were coming up on Christmas time, which was our biggest year. We would make biggest time of the year. We would make 60% of our entire yearly sales in Black Friday to Cyber Monday. And so we were coming up on Christmas time and we were like, listen, we need to make sure we have enough inventory so that we don't sell out. And so it was our greedy mind talking being like we don't want to sell out so we can maximize ourselves. When in reality, looking back, we should have just sold out and it would have been sick, it would have created more demand. And so I was doing calculations like kind of like out of nowhere, like a thin air because they had no business like knowledge in terms of like doing like research estimate how much we would need in terms of like at that's a good time. And so we bought 2,000 backpacks because like that was the minimum order quality they gave us because it was like a prototype and we took a loan for it because our cash flow wasn't at there at the time. And so we took a loan from our dad actually. And dude, it was really bad. It was really bad. We went into Christmas time, sold only 100 backpacks, which was like still pretty good like 100 backpacks. So it would have been good if you didn't have 2,000 backpacks. It would have been good if we didn't have 2,000. And then it just kept downward spiraling into more airs. Basically we bought the 2,000 backpacks. We didn't account for fright in shipping, which is the shipping from China, bulk inventory of 2,000 to the US turned out to be like $50,000 of shipping costs, didn't account for fright out shipping, which is shipping from the US to each individual customer, which was like $20 per backpack. We've lost hundreds of thousands of dollars on that one backpack mistake. And yeah. But most people can say, yes, I think that yeah, of course, a business mentor, somebody who would have sort of point you in the right direction, like there's like 20 red flags that even if you were just telling me this story before you did it, I'd be like, we'll check this, check this, check that. But okay, so that's fine. But you still, now you're in the hole, but you still had a winning formula. So it's not like the first e-commerce, the first iteration of your e-commerce store didn't work. Like it was working. So why didn't you go back to that model? Like how did you deal with this $100 plus $1,000 in debt? Yeah. So it's amazing that you brought that up because it was the aspect of us having a winning model. And so basically after us being in debt and and looking like basically like outside and being like, how do we get out of the hole here? What it was is that we weren't necessarily good at dropshipping. We weren't necessarily good at like selling products. But what we knew we were for sure good at is bringing revenue and building a brand because like that's how all of our sales came in was through content marketing, building a brand on Instagram, building a brand on social media, and then marketing. And so what we decided was it was it was during the summer of like summer of 2018 where we were like, let's let's turn this into a marketing agency, build a marketing agency, start selling services to other product-based businesses and brands. And so we were thinking about that. And then the only other thing was like, how do we get customers for that? That makes it okay. So I want to just before you go into that because that's sort of like the first version of what you were doing pre-NFTs, correct? Exactly. Yeah. So just a point. Any lessons from taking money from your parents? Because I'm just curious what the dynamic was at that point in your family. Dude, never, never, ever, ever, ever take money from your parents. That was stressful. Oh, dude, we were living with our dad at the time. I was living with my dad and like I've never been inherently good at communicating with people, especially people who are close to me. Something that I struggled with always, especially about like very stressful matters. And so we were living with our dad. I wasn't communicating with him with how our business was actually doing. And like that, we were like big time in the hole. And I owed money to him. And I was trying to figure out a way that I wasn't a proven way to get out of the hole. And so like there were so many dynamics that was by far the most stressful time in my entire life. How did you okay? So what was so obviously you're not, it's tough starting a business when you're not in the good mental space either. Because already you're coming from like a very stressed out place. So every decision you're making in the back of your mind, you're only thinking like how the fuck do I repay my dad? Like how the fuck are you like that? So okay, so you figured it out though, obviously. So what was the first version? What was the first version of the marketing agency? How did you, because that's something that you've never done either? Yeah, so so the first version was me just bringing it up to my brother, bringing up the idea of it. And it was just that idea stage for like about three months where like it was tossing around that idea, being like, being like, I think that this could be a way that we could make it back and like that we could actually grow something huge from this, but us not having a plan there at all because we've never, we've never done that. And then it just so happened that we were out for, we were out for lunch one day with our with our mom, myself and my two brothers. And there's this person right behind us in our home town of Winnipeg. And he's talking about real estate. And he's just talking with his, so it seemed to be his business partner across the table, talking about just bashing his current marketing team. Being like, this is horrible. The content is horrible. I've been spending so much of my own time on this. And my mom overheard that when he walks up to leave the room, my mom says, excuse me sir, I heard that you were talking about marketing. And then he's like, yes, I was. And then my mom's like, my sons are actually unbelievable marketers. And she knew because we talked with our mom about like us wanting to possibly money with the e-commerce company and how you were working with like Instagram accounts. Yeah. And possibly getting into an agency. So she had that in the back of her mind. And then his name was Stefan, Stefan Arneo. And he was, he leaned down at us and he's like, how old are you? And I'm like, I'm 18 and he's like, how old are you to my older brother? And he's like, he's like, I'm 21. He's like, perfect. He writes down his number. He writes down his number on a postcard. He hands it to me. He's like, give me a call here. And he gave me exact time. It was like, give me a call at 4 p.m. CST and woo me. That's what he said. And then he left. That's all he said. And he wrote down his name and number. And so afterwards, we were like, well, what? Like we searched him up on social media. And he looked like a complete scam, complete scam. He had, he had an Instagram page said real estate in the bio. And then like he had pictures of like pizza and like just like girls that he was with like random stuff. And we're like, this is a for sure scam on Google. There was nothing. And so I, I gave him a call. And I'm like, we want to set up an in-person meeting. And so we set up an in-person meeting. We went to his office and we were, we were at the office and he had an entire team and we were like, wow, this could be real. So what did you do for him? That was your first client. Yeah. I set up a huge proposal, massive proposal. We said we would take over everything. Every single social media platform, all content, I would film it, edit it myself. I would do everything. And it was 5,000 a month. And he's like, listen, guys, I'll give you a try for two months. He's like, if it does well, then we'll keep going. Over two months, we crushed it. Literally absolutely slammed it. Like he, he got 10,000 followers on Instagram. Naturally, just by the type of content we were getting him to film. We were making him go way outside his comfort zone, doing viral content. And then after two months, he paid us $10,000. And he was right with his word. And then he's like, I want to partner with you guys. And I want to, I want to bring all of my clients who are high level. He was a real estate investing coach. And so he was, he had a ton of real estate investors. And so he was able to bring that to us. And you just, you just copied and pasted that playbook like that, that content marketing playbook. Cause you're like, I think the people are, are used to that kind of style of content now. Like you have to put yourself out there and whatnot. You have to be creating viral stuff. You have to be going on video and whatnot. So probably this after you're doing when you started working with him, but a lot of agencies are be, we're not forward thinking in their marketing. And they kind of just sucked, especially people in the real estate industry super legacy. So you were sort of modernizing them and bringing them up to speed with how like marketing should be and how now businesses try and act on social. Exactly. Like there's so much content going out on a daily basis, like every single second that amount of content that's going on. So you really have to do some creative stuff to like set yourself apart. Okay. So you started building that agency was okay. Was that high key? Was that so that was so we had high key technology. Okay. Which was the e-commerce company. And then we were like, let's just keep rolling with the high key brands. So yeah. So we separated into high key agency, which was the specifically social media management for clients. Okay. And so we partnered with Stefan, Stefan Arneo on that. And we partnered up. And then he sent us like a few clients right off the bat. And then and then things just start rolling after that. Like I started getting more clients still still social media agency work at that point. Yeah. Okay. Cool. All social media management, like doing management on Instagram, Facebook, LinkedIn, and then TikTok went started coming around to YouTube. But that's still hard to scale with just how many people are you working with right now? So right after we signed our second client on high key agency, that's when we hired our first ever employee. And so he was a good employee that hired and he came into the business and treated like it was his own for a while. And just a question on that. Like when you started doing this, what was the strategy that you actually use for social back then? Is it still applicable now or has to change? Yeah. Stuff's definitely changed. But like the main stuff is just like capturing the attention of a user. So like it never really changes inherently. It just like changes platforms. And then different platforms are used for different things. And then they'll always keep changing. And so like there's there's things with every single platform like YouTube, like you have about like five to 10 seconds to hook the audience. Your thumbnail needs to be absolutely amazing eye catching needs to relate to the content. The title, it's very SEO based. And so the title and the description needs to needs to be good for like SEO optimisation for people to search it. Instagram is like very fast pace. IG reels are unreal. It's still picture based. So it's still like, so you gotta hope people in and whatnot and get people. Well, it's also because like I've noticed it and you probably know this because you're in social, but we're talking outside about like my content strategy and just and then I'm sitting down and I'm like, this guy knows I'm just telling you my content strategy. It's like, yeah, okay. All right. Let's let's move on. Like I already know this shit. But no, for all the for all the new features that like platforms launch, like they give massive organic reach to. Yeah. So you can nail like we were talking and I was like, Oh, I got to figure out like YouTube shorts and Snapchat spotlights and reels and because they give massive organic reach, which is half the reason why it's so damn hard to grow on Instagram now because you're organic reach when you're starting a brand new account is like nothing big time. Yeah. Yeah. And that's why like that's why I wish I went a bit harder on TikTok when it was like really popping. And it's just going, it's still popping right now. But it's like steadily decreasing like it is without everything as as more content gets published on the platform. I don't want to do it. Exactly. Yeah. But like those types of things are unbelievable to capitalize on. And that's like how we started our first business with the e-commerce space is we capitalized on Instagram because the the natural engagement was unreal. We had 10,000. I was just showing my my buddies the other night is like we scrolled all the way down the at high keyco Instagram feed and we had like 10 to like 20,000 Instagram followers at the time gained like two million view videos on our Instagram account. Exactly like TikTok is now. Yeah. And with like our own faces. And so like we have so many followers on the account that like we're with us since the OG days of like watching us like progress to this. So you also like I know you go on to new platforms because I saw like I saw you on Bitcoin. Yeah. So you jump on the new social engine and you're like you're trying to figure that out like you're still obviously like very much with it and you're still trying to but you don't do do you still do like the day-to-day social management for agency. No. No. No. I ex did that about I ex that quickly. Very quickly. Why? Because I want to I always want to get to a point of like scaling a business. And so like it's hard to scale. Yeah. Very hard to scale. And so like I actually realized a huge count of mind is like I'm really good at hiring people. Really good. I'm really good at seeing like value propositions in people that like or like their skill sets even if they don't see it in themselves. And so I I found that like after I hired our first three employees at high-key agency I'm like I'm better than this even at social media management. So I just need to find people that are better than me at social media management. And we have that now like I've a unbelievable team of social media managers better than me. And like I get on our weekly calls we we have two times a week about all of our social media management clients. And they bring up ideas that I couldn't even think about on for different by the way actually that I actually didn't mean like do you specifically still do the work for people I meant like are you still in the like the content creation game because I know that you do other stuff now because now you work with like celebrities and influencers you do some sort of like give away thing as well. Yeah. And I think you you do PR as well because you get a whole gamut of shit. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Content is a forever game. Yeah. I always want to be in the content. And so like I go through like and and I want to get to a point of being consistent. But like I go through like bits and periods of like doing more content than normal. Like my Instagram page is like I don't really post that much business stuff on like my main feed. I just like keeping it like looking cool. Yeah. And then I make videos every once in a while for a business account high key agency. And then we fly to every single celebrity practically every single celebrity that we film like are giveaway collaborations with. And that's that's content that goes up on high key. Okay. So I want to understand. I want to understand how you work with celebrities. And I also want to understand how you built your personal brand because I'm assuming what you do for your clients that like you just take the playbook this word for you and then you're using it on your clients. Yeah. So what is what is the celebrity play? What is the giveaway play? How does that work? Why do you go into that? Because that's something that I've seen some people do but I don't quite understand it from like a marketing perspective. And yeah, like walk through that piece. This is cool. We're like literally going through like the timeline. Yeah. Of like everything. I find it interesting because like what I'm trying to do is like ever you've done a couple businesses. I'm trying to figure out like why you've gone into each one, how you've made it successful. And sort of like lessons to pull out of that particular business because I know people that are going to listen to this that are trying to start like a social agency. So like from day one, like what are things you want to get into while you're trying to hire the right people, you're trying to figure out a scale yourself. Like don't do all the work yourself. Maybe try and find retainer clients is another thing you mentioned as opposed to people that just go into like freelancing work and they just literally want to start a business but they just started another job, right? So that's what I like pulling out the different stages because you've done so many different things and then we'll eventually get to NFTs and all that. So the biggest thing of starring up an agency for me is and I think for everybody who's starring up an agency is having an all-star client. So having a client that you can show all other potential clients. And so what we did is the person we partnered up with Stephan Arneal, we used him as our all-star client. So we over-delivered so much on his services. Like even though he was a partner, he was still paying for services for his personal but he was paying like seven thousand a month for us handling everything which is like really, really cheap when you get into like where if he had in-house people, he would need minimum like three in-house people to handle all of his stuff. Like content, every single social media platform scripting management, all of that, outreach, all of that. And so we just way over-delivered on his stuff and every client who we got on the phone with, which was mainly in the real estate space, is we would send them his profile and we'd be like, do you want your page to look like this? And it was always like yes. And then the only other thing rebuttal was like price. And then I just had to convey the value and the price to them. And so that was the main thing is setting up the all-star client. But then we got to a stage where we were growing him so much. And our our personal's were at like a thousand followers, no content on it. And I was getting rebuttals on sales calls being like, if you believe in this so much, why aren't you doing this for yourself? Yeah. And I it was like a switch switch in my head. And I'm like, whoa. And practically since that since that time and since that like idea and like that that brain switch is like every single service we have ever sold since then. We've tested on ourselves beforehand. Okay. And so that that's when we started working on our personal brands, which come back to working with our personal brands is we started working on personal brands with growth management content. And so like we were we were practicing what we were preaching basically. Okay. Cool. So you started building up your personal brand. You're practicing what you're preaching. That's a smart sales strategy, of course. But and that's funny because a lot a lot of people actually focus on that. You see people that like sell very expensive 7K for all inclusive is like cheap. Yeah. Yeah. Like 10, 20. I've worked with the 5K for some like super extensive marketing plans. So 7K is relatively cheap. But if you don't, you know, if you look at an agency and you're like, yo, we're going to run your social and they have like 200 followers on their Instagram. You're like, really what can you do for me? Why haven't you done it for yourself? Anyways, okay. So the whole celebrity giveaway thing, what is that? How the how did you think of this particular business model? Because that's not something you copied and pasted. Like just like another agency. So so after after we ran the agency for a bit, it was self-sustaining. Really good. We had our team. Yeah. Yeah. We had about we had about six employees, six employees at the time about 10 contractors. There were pretty much full time working on like all of our clients. We were bringing all on monthly retainers to clients. And so we were bringing in revenue and we didn't have to worry about money anymore practically. We still had the loan that we had to pay off. We're just still burdened. But like we knew we were on the track to finally getting there. And stuff started being in that upward spiral instead of the downward spiral. And we got connected with other people in the industry that we've been connected with like all the way through even the e-commerce days of when we were selling like products. And these one guys were doing these giveaways. They were doing very very small giveaways like 10,000 follower giveaways, 5,000 follower giveaways with people like Supreme Patti like really really like mid mid level influencers. And we were like interesting because a lot of our clients are having the problem that Instagram engagement levels are inherently going down. Yeah. Natural following is going down even though that they still have to be playing out content. And so like a constant concern of them and they were like we had a few clients that were like we're leaving unless you guys can get us followers because you were because you were so good at it. It almost like bit you in the ass because then as Instagram and there's more creators and Instagram reach is going down. So even though you're operating at the same level, people are like I'm not getting the results that I saw a year and a half ago. So like figure it out. Yeah and it's really hard if you're doing a service based business to be charging people the same price with them getting like slightly less results like they're trying to like constantly scale. And it's hard to scale against like a decreasing platform. And so that's what we were handling with Instagram. And so that's when we got famed out about giveaways. We're like it was practically the only way to grow scalable growth on Instagram. Significant growth within Instagram's terms of service. People obviously know you can go on panels on Google and like buy 10,000 fake followers. Bullshit it would destroy your Instagram account and like Instagram accounts get disabled all the time from this. But these loop giveaways they're like called like loop giveaways. Basically a celebrity or influencer promotes a giveaway. They say guys I'm giving out like cash or I'm giving out this car and they actually give away those prizes. And then they say all you have to do to enter is go over to this Instagram account and follow everybody that they're following. And so they go over to a host account which like in when we first started like in the giveaway space there were no hosts account like people had no brand associated with it. And it was like miscellaneous pages like just being like a random giveaway one one one like go into this and follow everybody that they follow and it looks sketchy. But it got the job done and it got 10,000 followers for our clients and they were more than happy they stayed with us and then they started paying for the giveaways. And what we realized is we start we could start reselling these people who are already running these giveaways we could resell spots for them and like create a whole new revenue stream other than just the social media management that we're doing. And so we started reselling giveaways and like they were going like very fast people everybody. But the secret in this is like actually getting the celebrity on board because for sure I can tell I can sell somebody like oh I'll get you 10,000 20,000 50,000 fall. That's not a hard sell. Yeah. But like how do you get like a I don't know like a tiger or something like that like how do you get somebody like that. So before when we were first skiing going there was there was no celebrities in this it was only like influencers. So it's mid-level influencers and they were getting paid like $5,000, $10,000 to do a giveaway which was easy for them. The pitch was hey do you want five to $10,000 for one Instagram post that you leave up for seven days and you're giving away stuff to your audience and they're like it's a no-brainer yes. And so like that's that was an easy pitch for mid-level influencers. But then once we started selling we started selling like 20 sponsorship spots to give away and we were like yo we could run these giveaways ourselves and do exactly what we do best which is brand these giveaways. And so we started up an Instagram channel called at highkey clout which was our giveaway channel. We we pegged that our giveaway channel we called it highkey clout because highkey our main name and then clout because people were able to get clout in the easiest way possible by sponsoring our giveaways. And so we started we ran our first giveaway and we were like let's do this like out of the water let's run this like crazy and we we put together 10 10 influencers where it's it was never like really done before there was like a couple of really big giveaways before but we put together 10 influencers and we ran a massive giveaway they gave away like $20,000 and it was huge like bad baby was a part of it and we just got connected them through our past connections and we paid a ton of money but we also made a ton of money we made we we we paid out like $150,000 to all the all the like material influencers and then made about a hundred grand profit uh from like the the giveaway sponsorship and then that's how people are actually that's how somebody can actually grow because then you get like massive influxes of real people because you're getting exposure across somebody's 5 million 10 million person audience exactly yeah and so after we did that first giveaway we had a fair amount of capital from that NR agency and we were able to start making some huge pitches so we made pitches to everybody we possibly could we started doing an outreach campaigns to managers that we were connected with and we we it just wasn't upwards the snowball like yeah yeah we we did giveaways with Kevin Hart Snoop Dogg the baby little baby Bella Thorn and it was it's an unbelievable business model because everybody wins in it and we also gained these connections with these ALS celebrities I just want to take a second and thank the sponsor of today's episode HubSpot now as a leader you're always on the lookout for more ways to arm yourself with knowledge the books the seminars and most importantly the podcast that help you make the best possible decision for you your company your customers because when you know more you can apply more and you can grow with HubSpot CRM platform you can store track manage and report on all the tasks and activities that make up your relationships with customers with a bird's eye view over all your customer interactions HubSpot and powers your decision making like never before so you can give your business and your customers all the good you've got learn how to make your business grow better at HubSpot.com so the only thing that I want to challenge you on is how is this a defensible business model so how do you differentiate versus someone else who just listens to this and is like I want to go into this now yeah so the different the competitive edge that we had is the brand okay and so our Instagram account and it's what we do back to it takes back to why you're building a personal brand is so important exactly okay and so the Instagram page that we have at Hikey Cloud it's verified on Instagram so every single person who's entering the giveaways able to go to that host a page show that we're legitimate also we have over one million followers you can scroll back all the way to 2018 showing our first giveaway campaign we've given away over 1.5 million dollars just on that one Instagram page 1.5 million dollars like verified given away in cash prizes like ps5s and iMacs and then also cars there you go okay so then as you okay so this was when was this this time period for the actual like the giveaway that was sort of like the next version of the Hikey agency this was up until just recently right and then you started to go into NFTs so giveaways giveaways start picking up like for us where we start doing our own giveaways in 2019 okay and then all the way up until now and we're going to be doing giveaways for the rest of our lives for sure and and tell me to understand something else as well because it's something that I was trying to figure out if I wanted to actually take part in a giveaway yeah so how do I how do I know which giveaways work for me meaning if I go with like a Cardi B for example how do I know that her audience works with me versus if I went with like obviously there's not a ton of like business influencers that are like a Cardi B there probably have that level of reach but still that would be a better audience I know it's a really it's a really common question that we get with practically every single sponsor that we have that's like new to the giveaway space and it's it's this comparison that's like best best for it like it's the only way to build scalable Instagram followers only way on Instagram so like if you're trying to grow your Instagram this is the only way give us and okay give us give give me give us give us give us give us a listing number so when when you spend X amount of dollars I'm trying to compare it to other marketing so if somebody was like oh I'm a marketer I run for example maybe I run ads yeah try and get influence uh to get followers get followers yeah so there's like a there's a dollar per follower or whatever it is or maybe two dollars per follower if you there's one book called I think a million followers where he tries to like run ads and like all these like other countries around the world that are like a lower cpm and he gets like 20 cents per follower whatever yeah so what's like the actual dollar value per follower yeah so we ran Facebook ads to get followers without a giveaway associate just with like for example you like cutting up your content on your podcast delivering it to an audience that you're looking for in the US which was obviously be really targeted and you'd be paying about like two to three dollars per follower but it'd be like really targeted business people and it would it's not like inherently like extremely scalable because two to three dollars could fluctuate a ton because there's no real way to like target for followers and there's very like yeah and if you think about yourself like just scrolling through Instagram and stuff like how often would you see a direct advertisement brought you by Facebook to follow yeah or like go to their page and follow it's weird it's a it's a it's a so like Twitter does it yeah Twitter actually has like a paid to follow yeah but Instagram you have to just run like a super compelling ad that would make somebody like want to just tough exactly and so you're paying like two to three dollars practically minimum for a very targeted follower and so like the the the negotiation and like the counter argument of the giveaways in terms of scalable growth is you're able to gain hundreds of thousands of followers on a monthly basis and it's around 10 cents of all okay and yeah and so even if even if some of them aren't your your perfect audience it still is yeah incredibly cheap so you're hoping that if like say 50 percent or even like less than that if 50 percent of your target audience then you have you have volume which I guess helps with like your your cloud and just like your your social proof because you have the volume there but then maybe like 40 or 30 percent of them are actually like people that would buy your service or engage with your content or some shit exactly and a lot of our clients are especially of the giveaways yeah a lot of our clients are the giveaways are people who do high ticket sales so for example like we've a lot of plastic surgeon clients we're like yeah yeah yeah like the number one plastic surgeons across the US like millions of millions of followers and the reason for that is it's just a numbers game like they do one plastic surgery and it's like $20,000 so for example we have a we have a Nicki Minaj giveaway coming up it got postponed but it's going live on Thursday March 24th and that's like around $10,000 to get in or 10 cents per full or a kind of 75,000 to 100,000 followers so they're getting the plastic surgeons and we have a ton on on on this giveaway list it's 75,000 to 100,000 followers and they just need to get one client out of 75,000 to 100,000 followers directly coming from Nicki Minaj and they're in the profit and so like those are like the ideal clients and those are the clients that like are recurring because they do make that they consistently make that and they buy into every single one of our giveaways because of that and that starts to make sense yeah and then besides that besides that the people who other than those high ticket sales a huge portion of clients specifically for the giveaways are people who are just trying to initially grow their brand like they have a thousand followers and they need to get over like that 10,000 or 100,000 followers marked just for brand legitimacy so like it's like they need to get over for brand legitimacy and then if they get sales on the back end from it it's like a bonus by yeah no that's smart it's an interesting it's an interesting strategy because I'm I'm wrestling with the concept of doing it myself and I'm trying to figure out because I'm like I'm at like 840,000 or something but I don't have a high ticket offer so for me it's like when does this start actually like being like positive ROI for me and not to figure that I don't know how did you get up to it was just an insane amount of content yeah so I'm like three to four pieces per day I ran ads I ran ads but they were very expensive so I stopped so yeah I turned myself into a content marketing machine and that was pretty much it that was that was how I grew and I'm doing that for a long time now so but I also that's the that's the idea away and it's either it's either time or money so I get I get also I have an edge because I get celebrities on my page right so I get notable names and I get when somebody comes on the show that has it could be it doesn't matter and how I'm running followers if I put that content out then they're reposting it against so I'm getting access to some celebrities audiences already that normally most people can't get tagged and be reposted on whoever's audience right like doesn't really happen for most people tap the reason why I love podcasts is because it works right you put out a piece and you tag the person who you interviewed and they either will actually ask you for that piece and post it on their channel in like an actual in-feed post or they'll just read you they'll put it on the stories and then that's across all their social so I could like you know you tag them on Twitter they'll retweet it you put them on LinkedIn they'll repost or be shared on their timeline and it's a great pitch like yeah you're going up to them giving value basically what not only am I saying you're getting access to the audience that I have I'm also saying that I'm going to basically be like an outsourced content marketing team for you with all the stuff we put together so I'm going to get like out of this probably like 30 different clips so sick yeah exactly so my editor is going to like edit it all out we're going to time stamp all the different questions that I asked and each one of those is going to be like you know with either like 45 second to like two minute clip yeah and that's going to be like 30 pieces of content that that person can use on their website it can use on your Instagram you can use it forever doesn't matter I don't even care if I'm in it usually they include me in it but like at the end of the day like if if I keep doing that as a service it's zero extra effort to make some already doing it for my own channel yeah but also it's going to get me exposure to their audience so but I mean that's like very different than most people have access to most people don't have that access unless you start a podcast and you do have incredible people that come on the show most people don't just get retweeted or like or share to a story of celebrity right so but that's what you pay though unless you pay them exactly that but that was like my marketing mind out work and I'm like how do I grow my own personal brand it's like I need people who are like super impressive to talk about me and this is how I'm doing it it's so dope yeah yeah 100% but the strategy makes a lot of sense and the and the cost per follower is like incredibly cheap yeah it's super super cheap yeah it doesn't get any cheaper so when I ran ads when I ran ads for followers I would run ads like anywhere like outside of North America in North America so most most expensive market on ads like US like two to three bucks a follower Canada Australia is like maybe a buck a follower yeah and then like Philippines Pakistan anything outside of that is like between 20 to 50 cents a follower still they're not targeted either yeah you can target a little bit you can target like their interest and their language and whatnot but it's still yeah the cost is still expensive so it's like if I could get 10,000 followers from the human eyes that's probably still more targeted than if I'm running a campaign and targeting some country in the world that's outside the US going to be like 20 to 30 cents for followers but it's still like not easy to do exactly there's no direct ads that you can run it will push people to directly follow you it has to be like the choice on their on their behalf so the ad has to be super fucking compelling to make sure that they actually do that yeah and you got to run like an engagement campaign yeah yeah well you just try yeah and like and forget about the testing phase which also is just super expensive where you test like the creative and the copy and the targeting and you make sure that all that resonates so yeah it's a it's smart very smart okay so this is what okay so this is and you've you've run these on yourself I'm assuming as well like you've run we put ourselves in every single giveaway yeah that's how we've ran that's how we got from the thousand followers that we were at to over a million followers okay so talk to me about community building and why I say that is because that's what you're doing now so I when I look at your brand I see you as a great community builder I see you as all the stuff you put out the parties that you hold the NFT that you drop all that seems to be I don't know if you did this purposefully but it seems to be about community building because at the end of the day that's what's going to basically make that business take off so did you do this purposefully when you wanted to drop an NFT were you like I want to create community I want to create access I want to create events or was that something that you you almost did just because you enjoyed doing that like you seem to like like love partying and shit so it's like I want to create a project that sort of like helps me like sort of double down on what my brand is already about yeah so for NFT projects specifically it's 100% about community yeah the entire NFT community it is like each project is like how valuable you can you can build a community and like how much value you can bring to that community it's with every single like top project like the Bordeic yacht club yeah which is like one of the top broad NFT projects like out there is it is what is because of the community that they built it's like amongst Celeb owners and very very rich people that people want to buy into it solely to get into that community and get access into that community and so like yeah that was like top of mind in terms of what we were doing with like so our NFT project it's called like fraternity apes party for ad apes yeah so we were waiting to launch an NFT project because we wanted a utility component to the project and because we're in a landscape now we're only NFT succeed if they have a utility aspect so for a long time they like there was like there was like hype at the beginning and then you see like even like the search terms on Google like they're drastically declining so we were talking before about like all the all the crypto projects have failed there was no business fundamentals no utility so now when you launch something like you have to figure that out so what is okay so how did you figure out utility how would you like this is how I want to create utility for fraternity apes yeah so it came because back in 2021 we got the opportunity to throw a massive party because we had a sponsor we had some of our clients in Miami at the time and it just lined up where we were doing two giveaway campaigns back to back we were we were filming with Rick Ross and we were filming with low baby on the same weekend and so we were like on top of the world and we were like let's do a crazy party like let's do a crazy event and so we set some things up and we had a we had a yacht event at the start and then I am yeah and yeah a yacht event at the start where we tied up three yachts together three 75 foot yachts and then we went we went to a mansion the next day and through a crazy mansion party and we were able to do that because one of our clients who's like such a good friend and like we do tons of investing with him like in real estate his name is Robbie Clark this guy's a savage I was talking to you about him too yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah I'll line that up if you want and he's great he owns like 300 million plus in real estate right now I can't uh trying to bring it up to a billion by the end of this year and so he helped us out with sponsoring the entire event the first event and we thought that would be cool because we had the opportunity where it was over a huge event it was the it was the Floyd May weather and and Logan fight and so everybody was in Miami and so we were able to reach out to all of our celebs friends all of our influencers and be like yo we're throwing these crazy parties like I come through if you're if you're okay to post on your Instagram and stuff and like I won't want to do anything and so on the yacht we had like little baby and blue face were there and we had a great time and then at the mansion it was it was blue face came to perform rich the kid came to perform and then like a bunch of like random select just because this is because you've been doing this and you've been like building out these connections in this network for all the actual works you're doing with high key previous to the NFT line exactly yeah it was the humiliation of all the connections that we built up for it yeah it's very smart you know what there's something to be said like this is like you know you did it one way to build this incredible network and look at what that allows you to do yeah that's that's an awesome network to have when you want to do anything now you have this like group of celebrities you can tap into the same shit with like actually building a podcast like you just find you have to find ways to like to orchestrate like connections so like how do you orchestrate connections well these people that are operating at this level like a celebrity or like some like an incredible business person who who's achieved so much success like you have to provide value to them in some way and like if you want to like I don't know like hockey stick growth curve like exponentially grow your career like find a way to provide value for like the most influential people in in the world and like you'll find yourself in a pretty damn good spot but it's it's like I think that you have to think like that when you're trying to build a brand start a side has like how do you not just cater to like the average client but how do you cater to the people that are the most successful what they're doing because there's more than just closing a client you want to client with a network with the relationships like with things that can provide like auxiliary value outside of just like the retainer or the dollars that they're paying you 100% yeah there's been clients that like over the years we I've done so much free work without without taking a single dollar because I know that just building the relationship and having that relationship there like with them referring over clients or like just talking about us to like a high level group of people and then like the business that brings in the long term is unbelievable yeah yeah like in reality like the the the time that we've been in the business space has been very very small compared to our entire time horizon and so like if I can already see a justification like building relationships and like what that does in terms of like revenue and and bringing in like natural business and bringing business like from friends and stuff yeah it's like it's the way to win in the long term 100 okay so okay so NFT project understand utility so what is what is what is the utility that comes from Trinity Apes yeah and also and also why did you go into NFTs so what why do you believe in Web 3 NFTs crypto all that yeah so with the NFT spaces we were we were heavily in the crypto space already so like when we go into NFTs we had a we had about 90% of our net worth in crypto really yeah you're all diversified like you're all in all yeah dude we're so young that like I always risk is like yeah like I thought about everything like when we first start up our business in when I was like 18 and like all my friends were going to college of high school and like I already had the business is I'm like damn like I could feel miserably like yeah absolutely miserably till 25 and as long as I had a ton of knowledge like real world applicable knowledge from it by just like grinding and like learning about I could fail miserably go bankrupt 25 I could I would be more set than the people who went to college for business and so that is so that we have a whole conversation about why traditional schooling is yeah not setting people up yeah where they don't need to be yeah and so that was my mindset of that we're like I could just miserably fail and so like that was the that was the same mindset with like I'm going all in and risking everything if I see a huge opportunity because I can I still have that time horizon like I'm 22 right now and so I could still miserably fail for I could still miserably fail for like four years and like we're at a point with our business where it's like it's not possible to fail like we have things set up where it we have so many streams of income that are coming in so it's that we're like even with our investments like with crypto crypto could go as zero which like is impossible but like crypto could go as zero theoretically and we would still be good with like our revenue and stuff so that's also even when you went into crypto like I found you on big cloud like you were figuring out like you were figuring out like the the intersection of like crypto plus social you're putting out like a ton of like memes on crypto as well like and it was just like you just like dive into new stuff like really effectively I think that's probably always been I don't even know if you're like aware of this but I think that's how you've always exceeded you just dive headfirst in the shit without like and not even like not even like not even stressing about it like you just thought like who starts like mastering bitcloud through like crypto memes and you built out like a huge brand there like it's just jumping into stuff before you're ready before there before there's a playbook for it that's literally been everything you've done yeah and for anybody who's listening who doesn't know about bitcloud it was previously bitcloud which was like back in March 2021 and then it switched to D so because they went through a rebrand because they had a ton of like really bad stuff that came right right at the forefront of it yeah but now it stands for decentralized social media which is way better it's literally on Coinbase now D so that money signed D so and then they they did that because people conceptualized bitcloud as just a one application like Instagram whereas like competing with like Twitter so it was like the decentralized version of Twitter and was competing with it but they switched it to D so because it's a layer one blockchain yeah that decentralized social media platforms can build on talking you're gonna build applications on that okay exactly and there's already tons of applications built on it it's nowhere near where it's where we believe that's going to be and like we we know the people who who created who founded it and we're heavy believers just in the aspect of decentralized social media so much like we've been headfirst in social media for the past six years six seven years and we think that decentralized social media is the next step even though it might not be here yet like we know that that's 100% the next step and yeah giving people ownership back in their content giving people ownership of the platform giving people control of like no advertisement being on the platform like so many different aspects of like being able to invest into peoples the craziest thing in our mind is being able to invest into profiles yeah so it's like brings a gambling component it brings a component of like long-term value like being like for example like you being on like a platform that's on D so and like I'm like I'm just on this podcast I'm like damn like I really believe in this podcast and like this is like fast forward to the future when D so it's like the main thing and I'm like wow I really believe in this I'm going to put money into your social social profile yeah and because I believe in it and passive income being made just by you delivering well that's the thing about like like with NFTs with with D so and even like the first version of BitCloud is about like how do you unlock all these opportunities for creators how do you unlock because for the longest time creators were getting screwed by social because they were socials making so much money off of the eyeballs that were looking at these creators and like yeah maybe YouTube pays them a little bit but outside of that creators really gets screwed so this is like you give creators the opportunity to not only do incredible work but now actually get paid for it exactly you can actually put their dollars where they want to put their dollars versus putting you know their dollars towards like you know Google or Facebook or whatever it is right so very cool okay so that's why that's why you're doubling down on NFTs you started your own project so talk to me about fraternity aids what what is it what are you trying to do with it what are you trying to accomplish what's the community you're trying to build for sure yeah so we started fraternity apes like building it out in 2021 so we were already heavily invested in the crypto space already like already doubled down on like D so which is decentralized social media and we were like now it's time to launch our own NFT project especially during this time we've also done marketing for other NFT projects and so like we we showed our capabilities of what we could do with like building communities building a Twitter audience building a discord audience building these massive projects that like a majority of them sold out and some did well some didn't and so that's what we had like as like our backbone and then we thought we were thinking about like different utility aspects that we had and it was just like all the value propositions that we had so basically we we could give people access to celebrity events that we had in the future because like we throw them at massive mansions and so there's more than enough room and everybody wants to meet a celebrity and talk with the celebrity at mansion and so we we give access to celebrity parties that's what one thing we can we we thought about hosting zoom meetings and masterminds and discord AMAs basically like huge meetings with like holders where we could express like different things about how to grow business all the mistakes that we made and then do interactive AMAs which are like ask me anything where people could ask about like their problems and anything that they're struggling with in business just like how we made the backpack mistake who knows one of our holders could be coming on to one of those stages and asking me about asking me about specific situation I say one thing that changes their entire trajectory and so that that's another thing offering consulting and and and that and then building an extremely extremely strong community and and like all the things that we're going to come from in the future like they get they get access so all of our holders get access to our entire brand and so like whenever we whenever we partner up with the new celebrity like we're partnering up with Nicki Minaj that's going on live in a couple of days partnering up with Cardi B next month that's in direct association because we're high keys the backbone of fraternity apes was it is it hard to like now that NFTs so there's like kind of like a hyper on NFTs you had like stuff like people selling stuff for like like X millions of dollars like it's insane now that it started to decline do you have problems marketing NFT projects do you feel like you have to like regain trust in people or are people still on that bandwagon for sure people are very skeptical about projects especially like whales and stuff and you have to really win them over and they usually don't see it don't believe it until they see it type of thing and so like that's what happened with our project too like it didn't go as successful as like we hope for but like we're going to be winning over people in the long term just like how some projects just like spurred up and like either either like don't sell out or like sell out very fast and then drop in value a ton like people are going to be seeing like the value that we constantly deliver over the long term and then get into it after after they see that and where do you think like we're so NFTs went up went down where do you think the actual like future of NFTs are going to rest in terms of like community creator economy what what purpose do you think they're going to serve so the basis of NFTs is like basically the thing that's behind it is the smart contract we're like it's a digital contract that auto fulfills and it's coded into the contract that it auto fulfills on a specific certain requirements and so I think that smart contracts are going to be everywhere in the future and it it might be Ethereum it might be a different blockchain Ethereum has a ton of kinks that they need to figure out to to be able to lower gas fees and all of that but I think that smart contracts will be everywhere and used amongst all things like the most major thing and industry that I'll break through is into real estate and like there's tons of barriers they'll have to go through and like in crypto time it's going to be like so long and it could be like five years it could be 10 years but it will come where yeah where people will be all to in China by a piece of land in Canada without a lawyer or anything like that with a smart contract and like if you're in the NFT space and if you bought NFTs before you can see like how unbelievably easy it is if you understand crypto and understand like the basics of crypto it is very easy and like the thought of that being in a physical realm of like say real estate is really cool because like I've been in real estate investing as well and the amount of paperwork and the amount of lawyers the amount of fees that go on with that is is disgusting it like makes my makes my stomach turn on to it turns to how much time and money that goes into it and so like that could be saved that could be yeah like we revolutionary I agree I think it's a matter of trust and time because crypto is not new it's just a matter of getting people to try to to build out utility and to build up mechanisms that make it more easy than dealing with a lawyer or dealing with intermediary right like I think that's just I think it's going to be a long game for crypto but I think that if you start building out projects that actually provide utility like what you're doing right now and then people start to see projects where they're like if oh I want to get into this I don't just want to buy in for like the investment opportunity I want to buy in for the actual utility and then it's going to and that's going to create some sort of I don't know some some trust in the industry because for a long time people created projects and businesses without utility and that's what's screwed over all the trust for sure it's okay okay so where do you want to take this next like what do you want to go into now I want to do we've been doing this for like about like an hour hour and a bit now I want to do it over an hour yeah I think I want to do a couple I always do rapid fire at the end to close these out too but what's next for you like what's next for high key what's your you know what's your goal in the next three five years what do you want to accomplish yes the next three five years is we really think then the next three five years D so in particular is going to take off and if it takes off we'll be billionaires the amount of money that we have invested in that and the percentage ownership that we have in that so and you buy let's see this in three five years yeah at this age as well yeah yeah we put a lot of eggs in that basket and yeah it's so many ages but yeah it's so like that's one thing that we heavily believe in and we're working on but it's not distracting us from our main business is our main source of income this currently over the next three five years we want to be doing giveaways yeah for sure it might change platforms like Instagram is lessening in terms of like the value that's that's coming through it and so it might change through another platform if like our clients are more interested in TikTok and might change that giveaways will always stay a thing we want to be investing more money into crypto all of our all of our products what do you go what what is outside of obviously your own NFT project but what are the ones that you look at right now yeah we mainly store all of our money into into Bitcoin Ethereum into like the main ones outside of like projects that we go heavy into like D so in our own NFT project yeah when it's all said and done in 150 years from now when you're dead and gone what do you want people to say about you how do you want to be remembered man I've never even thought about that just because of how how young I am because like I usually interview people that are like three times your age man I honestly I don't really care I'm just trying to have a I'm just and I've thought about this and I don't really care how people think about me when I'm gone because I'm gone and I this gets into like a huge other topic well like what you think happens like after life like religious beliefs and stuff but I mainly just want to have a damn good time while I'm here I want to constantly be less than my stress I want to be improving myself and I just want to do good and like make sure I'm building relationships and having fun time with good people yeah okay do a couple rapid fire um first thing that I'm just curious about I don't always ask everyone this but how's it working with your brothers benefits drawbacks working with your family so sick uh the number one thing is that it's uh I feel like kicking me out of the room see like an honest answer yeah my little brother brothers in the room right now but the number one thing the number one thing for sure it's always been I I've been in with in business with my little brother for like two and a half years now with my older brother for six to seven years since we started the number one thing is trust and like we've been through we've been through two business partnership breakups for people who are outside of the brotherhood and uh and now it's just the brothers that own high key like we're the only percentage owners of high key and it's the trust thing it's that you you trust them with everything and like you there's there's nothing that could like come in between us and like that's different for some families but like we've been through like a lot of hardship when we were younger and like we we fought through it together and like uh yeah we gone through that and so that that made us pretty strong together um some things are some drawbacks or like the communication aspect to it and like a personal relationship I find this all the time like I talked about how I have a horrible communication problem but like we really talk about anything personal like nothing personal yeah yeah and it just just gets that point because like we're talking about things that are like hundred thousand dollar topics and so like uh we see it as like they just gets complicated that way and so we're gonna have to work on that over time yeah for sure yeah that's an interesting point uh I've never worked with my brother on anything but yeah yeah that's your brother in business he's going to law he's going to law so he's younger than me yeah he's always 25 so eventually he will be yeah so I'm waiting for him to write a law school then I'll hire him for something I'm as a warrior yeah exactly 100% if you're your own family you can't represent you what are they good for right um okay so uh any regrets or biggest failures that you've had in your career dude no I single regret and that's like the number one thing that I like I'm I'm pushing for like in every single goal that I set it and the reason we through the parties the reason we start up an NFT project even though it's an NFT bear market right now is because I don't want to have a single regret in my life I don't want to be at 80 90 years old looking back on my life and being like damn I regret doing that and like I knew I would regretted not launching our own NFT project if we did that and uh the tons of other things I knew I would would regret not going all in on D so no matter how it plays out I'm fine with losing that money if you have convictions on that you have incredible convictions on how it's going to play yeah yeah yeah which is I think you know what though like you have to have that yeah yeah to be successful yeah you're doing it in a very new industry but anybody who's had success in anything they always go like triple down on ideas that everybody else thinks is a little bit crazy yeah so I mean what if it's D so if it's like if it's a if it's your own company you're starting the ground doesn't in any industry like you have to be like a little bit like obsessed obsessed insane yeah yeah oh you should see my older brother it's only only thing he talks about is D so good no that's probably why you're gonna be successful at it like obviously you're riding industry ways which is outside of your control but like if industry goes well you're gonna be at the forefront of that yeah right um one person who's had a major impact on you there's obviously been many but pick one who was that what they did it's a Stephan Arneo so yeah he he was the person who was our first business partner and he taught me uh he taught me a lot of what I know today uh even though he didn't do necessarily bring a huge amount of value to high key agency like he brought a lot of value up front and then he had to focus on his other business but I was always with him and like I was with him on a daily basis and he became my like best friend and uh I was with him so much he taught me uh sales negotiation uh he taught me uh hiring techniques everything management techniques a lot of stuff where like I could come up to him with a ton of different questions uh and he would always either have the answer or like give me thought provoking uh questions to challenge you on stuff yeah and it's unfortunate because like uh he actually he he actually passed away yeah yeah yeah he passed away he had cancer and very young age he he was he was like 32 and so that that that was really hard for me because like he was like he was by far like other than my brothers like by far my best friend at the time I hung out with him like every single day called him and he taught me yeah he was definitely yeah so true to Stephan Arneo for this one glad to have you that's uh I'm sorry yeah um a book podcast something that's impacted you thinking grow rich 100 percent I read that book and I I did so much crazy stuff after that in terms of like I did a I did a dream board where like uh I I always go like bigger go bigger go home strategy so like I I create a visualization of everything that I wanted in the future like for the next like 10 to 25 years and then I got uh I paid one of my buddies uh who's a friend of mine a thousand dollars and he he he painted an an eight by four foot uh like mural of it basically and then like I got that on my computer screen uh I have it I have it ran on my phone and stuff and like thing and grow rich like really breaks down about like visualizing and breaking down your goals and like your ambitions and really unreal literally teaches you how did how to do goal setting and yeah no that's that's a good book I've heard a couple of people recommend that as well um if you uh the question the question I always ask but this is irrelevant to you so we're gonna take it back a little bit younger question is if you could tell your 20 year old self one thing but I mean like that doesn't apply so like if you could tell your younger self one thing what would that be uh it would probably be something around the backpack mistake that we did so it'd be like something around like uh don't be greedy uh uh always do uh always do product market research before launching something new uh I'd say those two things yeah yeah good lesson but like I say that as lessons but like and this is why I don't regret anything is because like if that backpack mistake never happened we will potentially still have been selling products up until this day and so yeah and so that was the sole reason that backpack mistake and I was going in debt was the sole reason why I had the luxury of no other opportunities no other options but besides do anything possible to get that money back which ended up us going into an agency which became like very successful and like thankfully like able to able to come out of the dirt stop doing the e-commerce so yeah that's why I don't live uh so like lessons learned but ultimately everything also happens for a reason exactly like and like the key takeaway is it you know if you if something screws up like it's only really a screw up if you don't learn from it yeah right and obviously you did and you improved and you're good yeah and then last question what a success mean to you well that's a good question success uh I don't think that I'm I'm successful right now and I think success means to me is because uh success is like a couple of different things for me it's getting to a level of where you never think about money anymore and so like the level where you swipe your credit card at anything you you literally do not think about it and so like that's with anything that you buy any dinner that you go to no matter how bougie it is and and swiping the card and not not not even thinking about it so that's one level and then there's the the happiness level which I do think I'm successful and because like I'm an all around happy person I've always been like very happy even when we were in the dirt I was happy um and so that that's one aspect happiness uh the money and then also uh uh uh no stress and so like that's one thing that I'm I'm constantly working on because I I definitely have stress and everybody has a certain level of stress so how do you do to stress that's almost impossible yeah but like it's true it's true it's impossible to give you a completely of stress and like you probably have tons of stress yeah yeah you want to you because like even if even if say you had like like literally unlimited money and say you had like all the happiness in the world I think that that's a tough thing to get rid of because that's more of uh am I trying to always push myself to be better and if you if you do believe you can always be better which most high performing people do believe it I don't know how you wouldn't have any stress you can almost just like learn to accept that you are on a journey versus like trying to ever hit like the end result and that's exactly what I was going to get into is that it's not about taking away the stress it's about getting better at handling the stress and like I've heard tons of people to talk about this like tons of very very high level people about like the stress never goes away the stress constantly keeps increasing it's just how about you handle it how well you handle it yeah and so like that's the aspect of it about about being able to handle the stress of like higher level problems and then like constantly gain to that very smart okay and then most importantly where do people connect with you what all the social website all that's yeah yeah anybody can connect with me through uh Instagram mainly at Luke Lentz L-U-K-E-L-I-N-T-Z uh check out check us out on D so check out D so I would do some research on that check our NFT project fraternity apes party I guess there's links will probably be in the bio yeah yeah uh uh you got anything you want to link will do for carnivores will do all the social in the show no it's cool cool I appreciate you having me on man