Hermetic.Ai and RB2B with Jesse Stein - YouTube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KDIyrEzb8-8

Transcript: (00:00) okay so we were all just talking before the call we're g to try to do something fun today we're going to do the first survey then we're going to introduce Jesse then we're going to do the second survey the first survey is what your role the second survey is what your a range then we're going to pull somebody up and give them two minutes to pitch themselves to the entire show and the goal is to book a demo yeah lower my desk is anybody excited about that possibility does anybody even want to participate in that show me some (00:36) uh yes please yes please okay okay so John Let's Roll the first um let's roll the first survey either roll or ar yeah so we're going to roll this one for like 30 seconds let me know your roll and then um let's introduce the one and only Jesse Stein um let's let you introduce yourself tell us what you've done okay thank you thank you Adam thank you Pete for for having me thanks everyone for joining uh my name is Jesse Stein and I've been a tech entrepreneur for 25 years a bootstrapped tech entrepreneur for 25 years have been (01:26) lucky to build and sell uh three three things and then most of my businesses so I've had three three exits I founded sportsmemorabilia.com bought that as a raw domain name in 2006 and with an extraordinary team and two co-founders we built it into the biggest autograph store on the internet top 500 internet retailer and we sold it to Fanatics and then I've sold two other things uh I have built a number of lean bootstrapped cash flow businesses uh I do not have the mest touch I don't pretend to have the mest touch I've had plenty of things that (02:06) have blown up on the Launchpad still make mistakes today plenty of them and I'm super grateful and happy to be here hey it will become readily apparent to the audience uh how our our shared values as we um as we proceed with the show so okay John is now currently sharing the breakdown of the rules in the call now let's roll the second poll which will be ARR ranges while we're doing that can we get some hands up for people that want to do the book a demo challenge so what the book a demo challenge is to go over it again you're going to come up and basically pitch me Jesse and Pete we're (02:51) going to grill you for two minutes and in two minutes if somebody in the chat who is a a a uh participant in the show uh if somebody books a demo with you you win if not you got to work on your pitch dude right all right so Michael's the only one who wants to do this oh yeah so let's let's do a okay so okay to give you an idea those so so you know who you are talking to um this is the ARR range uh 25% pre- rev 31% 1 to 200k 177% 200k to 1 million 20% 1 to 5 million AR 4% 5 to 10 4% above 10 um soel uh okay we're gonna bring up Michael you ready oh yeah Michael we're bringing you (04:03) up are you ready Michael we will start doing this regularly so so come prepare next job is sitting there saying he ain't ready I'm ready right now let's go hey guys how's it going really happy to be here what's up Michael you got a camera or we gonna look at your name all day um if you give me a minute I can get a camera is that okay or uh or no camera fine is no camera fine I I mean it's I think it's just going to be yeah come back next week we'll pull job Gregory up oh just do do you want to do an elevator pitch can we give you 30 seconds right now sorry dude we we we'll have you next (04:51) week the rule is you got to have a camera because nobody wants to look at your name um Okay so I got a two-minute timer that is running starting what's up job how you doing it's pronounced job I'm great at him oh job oh man Zinger it's two minutes starting right now boom pitch all of us and the goal is to have somebody book a demo let's go founder Le growth the whole pitch is you as the founder are the preeminent expert on Earth on your specific problem space nobody has a obsessed about it more than you you know more than everybody else the problem is you just need to get the word out and (05:45) you've got a million freaking things to do you have no time to produce video content well just come to us we do a 30 minute conversation with you on Riverside remote podcast style we do lightning round questions for you no prep needed on your in we just have a regular conversation like you're talking to friends and in that conversation we can pull five to 10 short videos for you to post on LinkedIn find your tribe find your audience acquire customers build pipeline close business let's go so this is an agency is yeah how much does it cost well what do you need it what do (06:24) you need to pay yeah well you know if people are booking demos I just feel like I have to ask like what is it like you know five grand a month is it like you know five grand a month is usually what we do the idea is to get so we'll get people in easy onboarding to just try us and then once they see it and they're like holy [ __ ] the videos are actually really great the process is really great of getting them to talk and tell a story and hone the way that they're they're selling their hook um how to present an idea or tell a specific story like the way we live (06:53) interact and Coach them through telling us a story um that's kind of a bit of the magic but then yeah eventually it's five a month to do 30 minutes every week and we just show up every Friday at like 8 in the morning and wrap is it is it only video or are you providing text with it as well like we upsell video is the main idea because we think it's just untapped on LinkedIn you're trying to do it everybody wants to be LinkedIn wants to become either Tik Tok or Instagram um people think it's going to be the future B Toc is leading the way here B2B is (07:25) gonna follow but no like the upsell is like we'll do everything for you because once you start you know everybody's using dript in Riverside you have the raw content from the the founder who has the goods once you do that over time you just take the transcript and with little AI you can make um blogs longer form articles your email newsletter longer form video so it's kind of like the whole content we basically it's the Dave Gart Playbook we're just stealing his idea we're turning you the founder into a Content Factory okay now for the (07:59) moment of fate does anybody in the chat want a demo for what's your company called job uh ant eer media inter media ant eater like little little anal ant eater media does anybody want to talk to ant eater media about founder Le growth we got 75% Founders here is anybody trying to tap into LinkedIn up their video game do we'll give it 10 seconds yes wait Mun do you want a demo okay Christopher J is saying uh need some Roi 5K what's the upside Book of Job turn interesting though okay well I could do that I think uh I think Christopher is uh is is interested he (08:44) wants some Roi I can do tomorrow look like it looks like we got you uh you know W is like with all due respect and this is coming from Europe I think 5K USD is quite a lot because interview itself can done with anyone but I would like a demo there you go all right okay so you won our first we we got several demos out of our first live uh live startup grilling um we'll do one every week we want to facilitate everyone's business growth here that is the goal um dude your name what what hey thanks Adam yeah yeah so so you could just talk to them in the chat when you um you know (09:22) when you pop off dude thanks a lot for for coming on uh believe it or not I believe in founder Le growth yeah you thought you might yeah I'm like a a huge I'm a huge advocate of the general area of study that you're spending time in and uh I you know I think there is so much untapped potential if it all sort of lines up so keep helping people with it uh you know scream about those playbooks when you get them because that's really what people want and uh good luck man thank you yeah thank you all right (10:00) um sweet well El's okay let's go back to Jesse I'm excited about having Jesse on the show because when I was talking to Pete before the show about what we're going to talk about um Jesse has this incredible uh idea for what you should Chase when you're starting a company and uh I'm going to let him reveal feel what that is through telling his entrepreneurial Journey story so dude can we turn it over to you and just talk about the uh the Journey of Sportsmen reil.com absolutely absolutely thanks again guys (10:43) for for having me hello everybody so and for those of you who join in the last 10 minutes my name is Jesse Stein I've been a a tech entrepreneur for 25 years uh right out of Wharton business school in the late 90s uh started doing Tech stuff and just right place right time beginning of the commercial internet built uh an interactive agency in 2000 and then sold it in 2005 to portfolio company of insight partners and then I'll get right to the sports memorabilia.com experience and the most important thing for me by far because you know you guys can get (11:22) your money back but you can't get your time back and you guys are investing your time in this thing and so my objective is just to get you as many actionable insights and hacks and strategies as possible to help you guys grow your businesses so sold the interactive agency and then I got totally fascinated with domain names Internet domain names big like category defining one-word domains that had no synonym retention. (11:55) comom is an example of like an extraordinary name and you guys have written that to the Wheels fall fell off and I'm sure that it's given you so much more value than you than you paid for it so I started Square Time Square real estate brother that's what these 100% Time Square real estate beachfront real estate whatever your metaphor is so I I bought I spent in 2006 2007 2008 I spent about a million bucks on domain names so I bought hot total raw domain names with no businesses on them just the name so hobbies.com was like 00 Grand (12:30) boating.com yting [Music] docomomo memorabilia.com and bought that noticed that the memorabilia Market was basically eBay and a vast majority of it was fake and so we thought that if we could become the de facto authoritative authentic standard for memorabilia then we could make an impact so launch that and by far the most important thing we did which I think you guys can maybe map onto your own experience is just find a cheap acquisition channel so in the way that Adam and Pete and collectively they found you obviously LinkedIn with a lot of effort right a (13:28) lot of effort an incredible team for us it was SEO so this is back in the day right but you know the the challenge to you all especially in an era where meta ads aren't working as well is to find that cheap acquisition Channel because your CAC like and the other caveat too is find a product with 70% plus gross margins so Sportsman combined those two and there's a force multiplier there if you've got 70% plus gross margins and a cheap way of acquiring customers then the only missing variable in that equation is LTV and just making sure that right you take care of customers (14:11) and that you have you know fairly large ticket you can hold on to them and keep churn low if you're a subscription business but with Sportsman we were really good at SEO and even to this day what we're talking about nearly nearly 20 years later the site ranks for virtually any common number one for virtually any combination of player team memorabilia autograph signed you name it so the the first pillar of of success for Sportsman was cheap sustainable acquisition Channel then the other thing that I'd love you guys to explore which (14:50) is more relevant now than ever is web scraping so I don't know how many of you use web scraping I'm sure most of you have heard of web scraping but a very small percentage of people actually use it at scale and so what like what is web scraping and I'll show you how we used it at Sportsman to get an unfair advantage over all of our competitors but web scraping is is I mean Google is the biggest web scraper in the world by far right it's just basically going to websites scraping the data copying the data and and putting that data somewhere in a database organizing it and then using it for (15:29) whole variety of reasons so the way we used it at Sportsman is we would do deals with hundreds and eventually thousands of small memorabilia stores around the United States so for example the be memorabilia store in Chicago that had like the biggest selection of Michael Jordan memorabilia and White Sox memorabilia and and cubs memorabilia and Blackhawks memorabilia right and we would do a deal with them and then we would set a web scraper to grab all their products off of their website and then upload them onto Sportsman and if you do that with 100 memorabilia stores (16:06) all of a sudden you have by far the biggest selection of anyone on the web and so we ended up with about 300,000 products on the site and then the cool thing is all your inventory is real time so that store in Chicago sells you know a Michael Jordan autograph Gatorade dunkshot photo and it goes off of their site in real time it goes off of our site too so all the in and similarly if they get a brand new piece in then it goes on our site and the Diabolical shortcut there was we would scrape the data in real time and then that memorabilia store would get you know a (16:43) Michael Jordan autographed Wings piece let's say that would go up on our side immediately and because we were a hundred times more visible on the search engines than that little memorabilia store we would often sell it first so that was the second huge shortcut the third one was cro which everybody should do at some point uh you conversion rate optimization right optimizing for website conversions is the cheapest fastest easiest way to make more money as an entrepreneur if you're an entrepreneur that has a website or (17:20) landing pages to optimize my favorite tool for that over the last 15 years V vwo visual website Optimizer vwo I'm I'm a fan of that one over optimizely in the other tools so visual website Optimizer just optimize every element of your site your landing pages and optimize one variable at a time so do AB testing do not I do not recommend multivariate testing multivariate testing takes a long time start with your homepage and your work your way down to the checkout page because obviously the homepage is where a majority of the traffic is okay (17:58) let's see uh fourth pillar would be obsessing over cash flow from the beginning and I know like 63% yeah yeah yeah so this is really this is something that I've noticed a lot of entrepreneurs get wrong they confuse profit with cash flow or even worse they confuse growth and and growing Topline revenue and somehow some way it's going to end up as cash and it often often doesn't and so like your you know you have these three like report cards for your business right you have your balance sheet you have your pnl (18:37) your profit and loss or your income statement then you have your cash flow statement and the balance sheet is kind of like you know your world atlas it kind of shows you your assets and your liabilities and gives you like a a big scope of a snapshot in time of where everything is and how your business is okay and then your p&l right is going to is going to zoom in a little bit more to kind of a street level map but remember you can be profitable but but whether or not that actually comes out as cash flow (19:08) which is by far the most important thing for us you know bootstrapped entrepreneurs cash flow Reigns Supreme and profit may never turn into cash flow it depends on right how quickly you get paid accounts receivable it depends on how quickly you pay people accounts payable so the mission is Right push out payables without annoying people people accelerate receivables but also you know it depends on how much inventory you have if you're a business that that takes on inventory whether you're servicing debt so there's a lot of like mechanics in so profit on on the p&l is (19:44) a theory about how the business is doing cash flow is a fact cash flow is a fact about the health of the business so from the very beginning with sports ma we completely obsessed over cash flow and then the last thing which is among the most important I think all five of these pillars like are really really important but the last one I cannot emphasize enough which is cultivate your strategic Partnerships which could include potential acquirers could include you know podcast hosts journalists amplifiers you name it cultivate them (20:25) from the very very beginning sorry oh it's a okay is everything okay everything's great somebody just asked for uh where the recording was going to be and you know [ __ ] YouTube you you like go to YouTube and it starts playing the video on your audio uh that's what happened uh yeah finish your thought there was a great question is your background real oh if you guys have the next five hours I'll tell you about all the [ __ ] that hasn't worked out so like I I do not pretend to have the midest touch um I don't seem to get any wiser with age (21:01) I'm I have no ego around anything because I've been humbled uh a lot uh but I have but also with with you know the mistakes I've made you trial and error is a slowboat so you guys can can learn from me you know it's like you don't want to get um one year of experience in 20 years you want to get 20 years of experience in a year and my experience like to to talk to people and learn from people who have been there done that is is really crazy so that that last pillar is this is super important and you can leverage GPT now to do this very easily is like when you (21:37) start a business whether it's a a coaching business a SAS business a whatever business you're you're you're starting you want to generate what I call the dream 100 amplifiers and all that is is you're figuring out who are the folks who uh somehow are influ ERS in some way and so what I do is I go to crunchbase.com my hack for this is I go to crunchbase. (22:07) com and I look at anyone who's been funded in my space and I look at and then I find who are the CEOs of those companies who are the who are the cxos of those of those companies heads of growth cro and so forth and then who are the VCS that funded them and then I want to look at all the Acquisitions in the space who are the who are the bankers that were involved involved in those Acquisitions who are the acquirers and who are the acquires so you kind of like get this and then you add to that podcasters you add to that all the (22:39) various people who could stand up on a Mountaintop grab a bullhorn and yell really loud about your business right and you put them all and you want to start cultivating relationships with them and in the case of sportsmemorabilia.com we cultivated relationships with the folks that ended up eventually acquiring us and like get Acquired and I've been lucky to exit three three businesses is of course the financials need to pan out you need to have a really hygienic data room it helps to have a great Banker an accountant and attorney and all that but (23:12) the most important thing is comfort is just trust right and Adam is uh virtuosic at building trust and the best way and like take take a page from Adam's book and I'm not just blowing smoke because I'm on his podcast he is amazing at adding value to other people and I felt it from the very beginning of our friendship I thought it was actually like maybe there's an angle he's he's working or whatever he's he is just like dude let me help you out hey man hey Adam what tell me what your AV setup is on your desk like you know and I was (23:48) expecting him to like write a little he sent me the whole spreadsheet of everything you know the microphone the this the that you know he sends gifts he's just and you're kind of expecting okay what is what does he want in return it's not jab jab jab right hook it's just add value add value help assist of course it comes back to him in Spades but that's kind of what you want to do you want to take the atom Playbook and map it onto your amplifiers the potential acquires of your business potential strategic Partners so if you're in the hospitality business it (24:20) might be a good idea to get to know the folks at Open Table and resi and so forth but here's the caveat you got to get get to know them way in advance so when it came time in 2013 to get Sports M acquired Michael Rubin who had just acquired Fanatics and he was in the captain seat of Fanatics he had heard great things about us from multiple of our Dream 100 who we had been cultivating for years and he was so comfortable that the first meeting was almost like it was just in the flow uh and of course it doesn't mean that (24:55) you're going to get the exact price you want it doesn't but you know what it greases the skids and the the process was really smooth we got exactly the price we wanted and it was incredible and being a bootstrapped entrepreneur for me beyond anything allows me to design my own lifestyle which I think is by far the most important thing it doesn't mean I work the five hour work week is total misnomer I work very very hard but I'm super grateful you know and bootstrapping is hard takes time and you have to make do with duct tape and twine a lot but I'm really grateful in the (25:32) lifestyle design that it allows me so that like the long that was the long and short of the Sportsman story it's a beautiful story uh two things came to mind when you were talking number one my first business we actually sold to one of our customers who like I met at a trade show before he was a customer five years before you know and they were like looking to buy a bunch of small email newsletter apps and like roll it into their you know thing that they were doing and uh it was the only one they looked at and it was the only one they ended up buying and there was like it (26:03) was just very straightforward to get the deal done because they knew who I was and they knew the type of businesses that I run and they knew exactly what they were buying and three years later everybody's still there it's crazy um so yeah question about scraping can does an example come to mind of how a SAS company would use a web scraper absolutely so oh my God there's so many so here's what I encourage you to do go to this is one of my best kept secrets go to bot.com actually bot b t s ER here uh b t (26:50) S.C Doo I'm sorry bster doio that's it okay I'm looking at it and it's in insane like I mean for example like you can scrape thousands of LinkedIn posts by not scraping LinkedIn you can use bster to scrape Google and through Google you can scrape those posts you can scrape Google Maps at just staggering scale through them uh there's so when you go to bster doio you can check out uh tons and tons and tons of different uh types of scrapers and you can literally configure them and then if you reach out to my buddy Dennis who's the founder and CEO who's a fantastic (27:35) person I've been working with for years we crashed their site what is this are you serious lster IO yeah unless I got that wrong no it's definitely everybody went there at once and it's oh yeah I'm sorry Dennis that is [ __ ] hilarious that's sweet he'll love that actually I love that well go there later go there later but bster is great and whatever you can dream up so for SAS company you could scrape a list of potential customers right my favorite my favorite place to grab customer lists is builtwith oh built with.com yeah that's that's the only builtwith is the only reason I'm standing here today (28:23) dude I mean yeah you and I have probably been using built with for forever for literally forever and by the way other it is the mo probably the most epic bootstrap story I've ever [ __ ] heard in my life yeah I don't know if he's got employs now but like he was a oneman show at 15 million ARR yeah with like no costs he might have like two or three support reps now and like be in the mid 20s but like the the number like SOS was saying one time he was trying to like either buy some data from him or possibly acquire the company and the guy was like (29:04) dude Santos can we talk tomorrow I just like smoked way too much weed today and I like sandas is like but like you gave me the API thing can I pay you he's like just don't worry about it like just send the cash whenever you want to I don't really care hey Fred uh Phantom Busters good for for scraping I've used Phantom Buster I've used they're they're all I wouldn't say they're monetized but they're all very similar what you want to do is you want to get an account on Phantom Buster get an account on bster (29:36) and then you want to browse their selection of scrapers and then you want to sit there like with a notebook and you w to you know remove yourself from any distractions and think for like a half hour about how would we use scrapers to add Rocket Fuel to our business and the same way that builtwith has added rocket fuel to Adam and my businesses scrapers are magical they definitely require more work uh sometimes octopus yeah octopus is uh good oh octop parse okay yeah I do not recommend octopus CRM anymore just because it's an automated LinkedIn tool (30:15) and that can get you into trouble yeah it get you in trouble so um mikola I want to throw you some props data I was definitely on my radar but man it's hard to buy that thing you know like that that was just it there was like a mid-market Enterprise sales motion and like the builtwith guy was just like yeah give me $295 cancel whenever you want if you want to come back and use it later which we always did always we like pay the 495 one month you know go do your thing for three months and then come back and pay it again when you need a new list um yeah that was why uh we (30:50) didn't use M as uh brain child or growth child or whatever you want to call it uming thing that like I've found so a lot where a lot of sales and marketing people will get data usually a built with or Zoom info Apollo let's take Zoom info and Apollo as an example number one there have so many records that like the update refresh takes quite a bit of time when you scrape you get real-time data whenever that scraper went through the web and number two a lot of the data points that some of those bigger contact (31:25) databases have or assumptions based off of other data points which may even be outdated or incorrect so when you scrape you get like this very real time Jesse said it can be a little harder but like you do get a real time read on actually what's going on and um depending on what you're scraping for it's yeah it can just it can make all the difference um cool I want to get into something I I'm literally picturing Jesse like trying to connect the bankers and the podcasters like the Charlie Day meme like it's always fny where he's been you he's got the raccoon eyes and right um (32:01) but a lot of these worlds like I've noticed they're just so small so when you talk about Adam's um you know not knowing when like that reciprocity is going to come back and it just sort of comes back in like karmart or space or like this other unconnectable thing like I've been shocked at how small these worlds are so just remember that as you're interacting with people and I think that that really sums up your kind of your point Jesse but I wanted to get into something around like so you started you're you're on four right now (32:30) that seems to be successful um maybe another exit um I want to get into like idea generation so you Adam even myself most of the ideas you have do not become the ones that you pursue there's way more ideas floating around in your brain than you actually can execute on or develop a plan on or whatever it might be so you know some of these people are very early on so as they're going through maybe they have a little bit of Revenue you and are searching for some confirmation or validation but like as you've gone through your business Jesse and maybe the wrinkle cream business is a good idea a good example of this but (33:07) how have you gone about the idea uh sort of validation like okay I'm at Sephora I see that there's this expensive wrinkle cream by the way few people have said you look young and I want everyone to know this man started a wrinkle cream business so yeah it's all the wrinkle cream it's all the wrinkle cream uh but yeah let I'd love to hear about some idea generation validation and kind of those early steps to knowing how to when to push the gas on a certain idea yeah I definitely don't have the the the magic formula but it usually for me comes from a need like wrinkle cream (33:44) or something where I was flabbergasted my wife was buying a uh this is in 2004 and she was buying you know one of these creams it's Sephora for 50 bucks or whatever and I was just shocked that the whole store was filled with them so and so I could see that the Tam the total addressable Market was huge and those are kind of the two the third requirement for me says like a need huge Tam and then 70% plus gross margins if the 70% plus gross margins are there man you better you better have some serious distribution Partners or some way of s or or you know some funding source (34:25) that's Ironclad because it's it's difficult to make it out there and so the wrinkle cream had more like 85 87% gross margins and I found out as I was developing my own product called derap SP which we ended up selling $50 million of online that you can't spend more than $4 Dollar on a wrinkle cream L'Oreal Revlon all those all those things that you see out there there's no Lam mer nothing costs more than four bucks so we we we did it for four charged 90 and did it on continuity and the average person stayed on for 1.6 months and we used Affiliates this was in 2007 2008 2009 (35:06) used Affiliates to um to push it out sold 50 million bucks of it and then sold it to a porn Kingpin in 2009 he flew in on his Challenger 604 wore sunglasses throughout our meetings we met him on a Monday and he wired the money on Wednesday and started flying around the country and like meeting with all these uh big keepers of internet traffic and then and then like scaling the business that was a story that was a story with Derma SP the ideation there incredible the other actually the one the one thing I will say that is um (35:45) among the most important uh axioms for a bootstrapped entrepreneur and something I need to continuously remind myself of which which relates back Pete to your question of like the ID ation piece so and this is something that a vast majority of entrepreneurs ignore and they ignore it because they're smart a lot of bootstrapped entrepreneurs are very clever and very smart and so they tend to smart people are curious and curious people tend to Lurch toward the shiny and the new and they tend to pick up shiny pennies and so what happens is the (36:24) Axiom is discover what works and do more of what works that's it that's it and uh it is incredible how many entrepreneurs myself- included will like find something that works inside their business and then they see another shiny penny that's related to it and it feels good to do it but it's but it's not the thing that worked so you might find that like you know reaching out to people in your network and then you're starting to close them and that's like that's working but what do you do you say Ah that's not enough this is super interesting too and you move on to the next one and the next one and this was u (37:03) memorialized in a book called shift uh and it's a chapter in the book shift called bright spots and that piece of learning is Graham Weaver who founded Alpine investors and is a self-made multi-billionaire and has uh now invested in 600 portfolio companies he says that that chapter in the book shift called bright spots which is all about discovering what's working and do of do more of what's working double down on what's working instead of moving on to the next project Graham Weaver you guys can look up he's an incredible also Stanford professor and amazing he says that that chapter in shift has made him (37:43) more money than anything else so for me i' bought Hobbies i' bought biking i' bought all these Internet domain names the thing that worked with Sportsmen and we doubled down on that and ignored the other domains it's this weird like phenomenon that happens where you start growing and the tendency is to diversify your growth channels for the sake of diversifying your growth channels I think it's maybe to partly to drisk people do it partly to like invest in the future knowing that what works today might not work tomorrow but I'm a (38:19) big believer in in exactly that Jesse it's like triple out on your strengths blatantly ignore everything else one day yeah it's going to slow down but like figure it you know worry about it that day instead of spending resources that could be work could be spent on the thing that you already know is working to run an experiment and most experiments fail most ideas don't become successful like that's just the reality of things so I could not believe Sam has an awesome question Pete do you mind if I answer Sam Chin's question yeah College Sam chin says hey Sam what's up (38:50) he says a college student here interested in entrepreneurship any advice to find mentors and learn as quickly as possible Sam here's what's crazy uh we get approached way uh like not as often as you would think and so if if we and by the way I have plenty of mentors so I'm not saying that I'm Mr Mr Mentor I do a lot of mentoring I enjoy it but we don't get approach as much as you'd think and maybe we can't meet with you right now uh but we we say in Q2 I would love to meet with you and I just say approach approach as many mentors as you can and learn about them beforehand (39:29) a little bit and so you come at it not as a spammer but as somebody who like has you know has has gone and done your research and it's very seldom that an Adam Robinson or me or Pete or someone else will say no and and God knows I need all the mentorship I can get and so I'm approaching people all the time too we are seeing this come up all the time like Adam gets inundated with requests for Jack hey can you come to my like I think I think just because of the type of content that I create I get an outsized number of requests relative to anyone who wasn't doing that so publicly (40:11) so unfortunately I actually can't take calls with everybody but uh I do you know someone gives me an intro through a friend I talk to them you know I meet somebody in Austin who's starting his ass I sit down have lunch with them right like um I I I totally and by the way you introduced me to somebody who I hope becomes a great mentor of mine Brett hurt who uh is like a six-time Ser serial founder took a company bizarre boys from zero dollar to IPO as as the CEO and he's a great guy around Austin I've already done two or three things with him I'm going to necer island with him in March uh I'm doing this like (40:55) Austin 100 thing that he and uh Jason bear put together at the end of January um and my whole deal is like he's an awesome guy he's got great values we are even though I'm a bootstrapper and he's very much not anymore because he's so good yeah I just like think it's so helpful to spend time around people that are thinking at this scale that's so much larger than than I am thinking you know um and and uh they've gotten so much farther in their career and John Mackey the founder of Whole Foods is that for him so like that's this event we're going to anyway um yeah I want (41:32) more mentors too you know awesome awesome um for very early stage people so we we notic getting a t and I've known Adam for quite a while you've been pretty ruthless about prioritizing meeting with those people and and whether it's lunch dinner whatever I mean at any time of the day I I just always know you're you're connecting with those people we've noticed especially kind of postco everybody's remote it's much harder to rub shoulders with people everybody's more spread out we're start we're starting a community (42:05) uh for very early stage Founders um I'll drop like a link to Adam's video about what exactly that is but we're we've noticed this phenomenon we're trying to do something to address it uh and try to ramp a little bit in 2025 so if you're feeling lonely as a Founder stuck whatever it might be I'm gonna drop a video in here and by the way Michael did you get your camera situation sorted out yet if you can get it sorted out we'll call you back up to pitch everybody again just you got minutes too you got a few minutes if you yeah if you if you get it sorted out just tell us that it's sorted (42:41) and we'll call you up any yeah John El's messaging you yeah rup wants wants everybody wants to hear the P I actually like that I thought that was pretty cool you know like hearing the pitch and then actually people raising their hand to uh ah I want a demo Michael says niku this is that is the best pitch uh okay so um well I I got one should I answer one of these questions can you tell us what you're currently doing how about you pitch them yeah yeah you pitch everybody and see if see if people want to done with you this (43:17) is like but by the way this is like the most epic credibility and Trust building like if every pitch could be an hour of you talking to people like this it doesn't matter what you do you know what I mean like they're they're going to want to uh they're going to want to do business with you so yeah tell us what you're up to yeah so we have a company called hermetic Ai and we've developed a an agent that sends text messages called Mia and all Mia does is she engages with inbound leads so you've spent all this money and time generating leads right (44:01) that come in through different sources they often come in through a submitted web form right through email phone maybe depends on your industry depends on your motion right your outbound motion or however you're generating leads so it costs you a ton of time and treasure right to generate these leads yet most people don't engage leads in a personalized fast way through a channel that has a 100% read rate and so what MIA does she's an AI we've been developing her with a six-person software engineering team my incredible (44:36) co-founder Brandon and and then bensa my technical co-founder who worked at Morgan Stanley and BlackRock for five years leading AI teams what MIA does is she sends a text message within 30 seconds of an inbound lead coming in so we audited 500 SAS funnels and the average response time was 17 hours 17 hours right there are some autoresponders HubSpot autoresponders that doesn't count right 17 hours what MIA does is she gets there within 30 seconds with a personalized text message so speed delete is critical you want to (45:12) get there first and you want to get there while they're in the Lion King gift shop right right after they've seen Lion King so to speak right they're excited they're on the website like don't reach out to them 17 hours later don't reach out to them an hour later the halflife on a lead is very very short so Mia gets there she engages the lead she qualifies the lead by going back and forth so to make sure that there's doesn't turn into a junk demo or a junk junk meeting then she routes the lead if you've got multiple AES let's say she routes the lead to the right account executive we integrate with all (45:44) the sales calendars so now she books the lead as as an appointment so she goes from cold inbound well warm inbound engagement qualification she books it and then she follows the user Journey all the way through to long-term nurture all by text message so a lot of leads as you guys know no matter how awesome your you know Anonymous visitor website tracking is no matter how awesome your product is no matter how awesome your service is a lot of leads just disappear into the ether and when they disappear (46:17) guess what HubSpot on down woefully IL equipped to follow how do you follow up what do you do you trigger some lame for email sequence what what do you do you set it a task how can you do that at scale with thousands of leads and so what MIA does is she keeps track of all those and she can have thousands of conversations simultaneously we're starting in Hospitality in private events and so that's another thing I've learned over the years by the way none of what I say is advice it's all experience share it's all experience share that's all I can do but one thing I've learned over the years is and a (46:53) great piece of advice that Godard Abel who's founder of G2 gave me that I shared with Adam had a great meeting a couple meetings with Godard who's who's amazing you know obviously you know $115 million in AR G2 he said you must you must Niche down into an ICP and you must talk their talk walk their walk get testimonials from them eat sleep and breathe that ICP and then fine if you've established that beach head and you're ready to go bigger that's fine but show the discipline show the restraint he said that the horizontal players will never be able to compete against you if you're if you're nich down and you talk (47:35) the talk of restaurants and you know exactly all their needs and Mia speaks their language he said the horizontal players are completely defenseless so that's any that's the long and short of what Mia and hermetic AI do thank you that rocks who wants a demo of hermetic AI let's get Jesse some demos here sweet somebody already said they wanted one but fully agree on the niching down like especially I mean bring the community again but like a lot okay dude they're rolling in we got you four or five right here awesome um okay so uh (48:09) just before we run out of time let's have Michael sorted out his camera situation I'm feeling kind of guilty that we just like flushed him so we're gonna pull Michael back up we're gonna give Michael the two minutes to pitch everybody how about you guys Grill him since I grilled job uh the last time and then after two minutes we're g to see if anybody uh in the peanut gallery wants to book a demo with them um there he is there he is up guys all right Michael okay tell us tell us your company name first and then go (48:46) into your pitch Ready set go two minutes okay my company name is event find us at event. apppp been around for a few months I Al I also just graduated college uh event is a SMS engagement platform where you can uh communities would use us to know collect rcps participant data and communicate all through SMS so essentially instead of um I don't know the student group on campus or a church um like rsps through clunky forms or email um you can just text uh Shabbat RSVP and then you'll have like a data on (49:22) our platform you can see exactly who RP and you can also set automated question flows to get those specific types of information that you want as an event host I don't know like do you have any allergies or you bringing any plus ones or um can you make it to the pre-wedding ceremony uh we seen that SMS is super useful because what are the chances of someone opening up an email and responding email versus a text five times greater over text so that's what we do we're everything Community event and RSVP management and we're built for community and organization leaders grillin guys what questions do (49:58) you have anyone no Pete I have one who are you like who are you targeting specifically what types of businesses or yeah Lal businesses right now were more our initial customers are like a uh Community organizations let's say a religious organization on a campus college campus or like a Freemasonry uh Nik asks is this us-based only uh Canada as well US and Canada um I have well two love hear I have no further questions um anything yeah it can be political or not um so yeah by the way our audience whoa that was it that was the timer (50:51) running out okay so our audience are mostly startup Founders so I don't know if there's like a perfect overlap that the the the other uh job's pitch was I think a little bit more aligned with who the audience is but let's see let's turn it to the chat does anybody want a demo of event which is SMS for Community leaders manage RS he Communications and analytics through text let's give it 10 seconds uh if I would have lived in US definitely yes so you got to kind of take it where do you live Nico Romania all right well you got a demo if you expand to Romania yeah it's (51:37) better than nothing it's 11 pm in Romania so thank you for I don't know if SMS works out there but yeah thank you for uh for hanging with us dude Michael thanks for coming up thank um appreciate your pitch best of luck I think it's awesome that you've just graduated University and you started startup bye-bye um okay uh well we got a couple minutes left um how about Jesse tell everybody where they can find you learn more about you connect with you whatever and then if we get another good question or two we can (52:14) answer them yeah absolutely Jesse hermetic doai I'm just putting this in the thing you can go to hermetic Ai and uh book a demo so yeah that's for that's for hermetic and then just to to leave you all with an awesome hack that has nothing to do with benefiting me at all so something that's benefit that's been amazing for me for years is what I call people also ask and it's a really cool way to kill multiple birds with one stone as a digital marketer go to Google and type in like your head head keyword if you're you know building a a diet website it might be you know diet uh (52:56) supp or diet plans or something and then you scroll down on Google there's that area that's people also ask everyone kind of knows that that area that's the area with additional questions right that is with all of Google's processing power those are all the that is the keyword Universe surrounding your space and so we're not talking SEO now that's just one one leg in the stool we're talking about like very very quickly developing a contents strategy your whole strategy for for uh your whole strategy for Reddit to develop blog (53:33) articles and also just to get your arms around your industry generally giving giving you ideas type your head term into Google scroll down to people also ask and start clicking on those as you click on the questions it'll spawn more questions and it usually Taps out at about 80 or 90 questions I can see Adam's doing it right now so what you do yeah yeah and then it gives you the questions that are the most important questions in your in your industry but I know it's probably giving you some noise too but you but it also gives you something more important than the questions which are the answers that (54:10) Google deems to be most authoritative and those are gold and the first thing you want to do with those is you take all the questions and answers throw them into into GPT have GPT tell GPT to reword them slightly and then throw them up on your website throw them up on quora throw them up on Reddit and what that'll do is it'll start giving you Authority on the search engines but most importantly 50% of searches now are voice search Siri Alexa and so forth those little short you know Punchy questions and answers are incredible and (54:49) they'll be and what they'll do is they'll Grease the skids for you for large language models when people go and query you know Gemini and they qu GPT and they query grock and so forth your answers will start to come up and no one's doing this that's a great hack Jess on The Cutting Ed all these stories are you like there the day after it was available like whether it's the domain thing or like you're just running affiliate uh stuff online in 2007 thank you I think all of us thank you I think all of us bootstrappers together to have that same sense of urgency because the (55:28) threat of getting hanged in the morning focuses the mind doesn't it so it's like when you don't have the the cash backup with a with a funding source I think it's an in incredibly liberating it's a little scary but it forces you I think to be more creative than other folks perhaps so I think we're all okay by the way Jesse uh when I asked about your background earlier they weren't talking about your resume they were talking about what's behind you oh where where where are you this is this is K kisan which is (56:02) about 15 it's an island 15 minutes from downtown Miami and my my favorite car by far is my golf cart that's awesome I'm looking forward to seeing kisc when I come hang in April for the YP marketing event oh that would be great that' be great thanks for speaking at that appreciate it yeah um well dude that that's just about the end of I think one last question I saw was kind of interesting uh I just want to do it ask it quickly before we leave how many of your Acquisitions came from inbound SL you working the relationship versus you hiring a (56:39) banker yeah um they were all inbound used a banker for two of them though so I Bankers so we we didn't run a process we kind of ran a half-hearted process for sports M but it was like they already wanted to move forward Michael rubin's whole team knew us well already again comfort and Trust right comfort and Trust will make it so you don't necessarily have to hire a banker and run a process and remember like if you're if you're hiring a banker and running a process you're either in a position of weakness or you're probably (57:18) not going to get the price that you'd like the ideal and one of the benefits of cultivating all these people years in advance is it becomes their idea so just like in the movie Inception right if something's someone else's idea it's like a hundred times more powerful so yeah the three Acquisitions so in 2005 the interactive agency that came because our the acquirer had years of trust and comfort Sportsman was was um was Michael Ruben and then the wrinkle cream thing the I joke that the you know there's (57:50) this porn Kingpin guy who's actually pretty serious-minded business person but that be that came about because we had cultivated trust with everyone around him for years and so he just flew in and he was ready ready to go so and of course a strategic acquirer much more powerful in terms of multiple than you know than PE uh and so forth but you know it's my My Philosophy with this stuff it's awesome to run a great great business and Adam you have a like you guys have just a phenomenal business but take chips off the table whether it's whether it's cash flow from (58:25) your business or whether it's selling some small portion of it just take you never know when a Black Swan event is going to happen that's my that's my experience share totally dude this was really awesome uh thank you very much for sharing all your wisdom um we'd love to have you back on some other time and uh dude that's the end of today um I don't know who's up next week I did a crappy job at preparing for this uh let's see who do we got oh yeah Veron from Clay is next week co-founder of clay we're gonna talk to him about what (59:04) it's like to be riding on a rocket ship which should be very exciting um cool well thanks everybody for coming and we'll see youall next week thanks everybody thanks Jesse