Building a System That Makes $1M+ a Month | Nathan Latka

WEBVTT
1
00:00:00.080 --> 00:00:08.720
We're five people doing over a million a month of revenue, and we're very, very profitable. You're really fantastic at using media, using audience to bootstrap businesses.
2
00:00:09.120 --> 00:00:18.910
I put the media business across the top, and they will fuel Founder Path or my magazine or whatever I launch in the future. That, that is sort of my king-making machine. How do you go viral like this?
3
00:00:18.940 --> 00:00:28.900
What is the playbook for a post that performs this well? Yeah. Our best month here was, what, 428,000 downloads. Now, today, we're only getting 37,000 downloads a month. But you know what?
4
00:00:29.120 --> 00:00:39.810
It is much better to have a small army of wealthy people that can pay you than a large army of poor people watching your content, juicing views. You have this machine gun of, like, attention.
5
00:00:39.820 --> 00:00:49.760
But I actually think, like, you could take the things you're doing and point it at any business model and have it be pretty damn successful. Yep. It's, it's never been easier. Here's what I wanna- where I wanna start.
6
00:00:49.860 --> 00:00:56.980
Uh, you run this podcast. You're known for asking people about their numbers. I wanna know your numbers. How, how much revenue did you do last month?
7
00:00:57.040 --> 00:01:07.960
Not how much lended, like, like, revenue to your company, to your lending stuff. Yeah. So Founder Path did over a million dollars of revenue last month. Hell yeah. And, um, give me a quick...
8
00:01:08.060 --> 00:01:09.440
Tell the audience, like, what, what is Founder Path?
9
00:01:10.060 --> 00:01:19.610
Founder Path is a platform where you can connect your P&L, your bank account, your Stripe account, and we'll immediately offer you capital that you can pay back over one to four years. You keep all your equity.
10
00:01:19.660 --> 00:01:29.160
And Nathan and I built that because I raised too much VC at my first company. I made very little when I exited. So Founder Path is now a debt fund where anyone listening can get money quickly. Yeah.
11
00:01:29.180 --> 00:01:37.960
And you, um, you've invested a shit ton of money, basically, right? Like, hun- hundreds of millions of dollars. Is it something like that? Yeah, we... I was just looking at the real-time dashboard today.
12
00:01:38.020 --> 00:01:47.020
About 270 million deployed into about 700, a little over 710 companies. Hell yeah. That's cool, man. That's cool. Um, here's where I wanna start.
13
00:01:47.140 --> 00:01:54.870
So, um, I love this thing you do in your interviews where you, you kinda, like, share screens and, like, you get into stuff. And, um, I wanna do this.
14
00:01:55.020 --> 00:02:03.320
I, I wanna walk through, like, my understanding of your business because you, you have this, like, media model th- that rolls up, right, to ultimately the lending, and I think it's really smart.
15
00:02:03.380 --> 00:02:10.400
I could be totally wrong about how it works, but I, I want your point of view of this, and I have a bunch of questions 'cause I wanna use some of this stuff for my business.
16
00:02:11.260 --> 00:02:21.600
So I wanna talk to you about the purple stuff mostly 'cause, like, I think the media part is, like, what people can use for any business. But, like, to learn your business, like, there are these banks who you work with.
17
00:02:22.070 --> 00:02:27.600
They give you, uh, a big line of credit. This is, like, your fund that they- that you've raised that's multiple hundreds of millions of dollars.
18
00:02:28.460 --> 00:02:40.239
Your job, like, my understanding of what Founder Path is, is you're a software platform. Like, your job is to use media to source software companies or CPG companies. You have a couple different ICPs who want loans.
19
00:02:40.300 --> 00:02:41.140
You underwrite those loans.
20
00:02:41.160 --> 00:02:53.280
You have awesome tech that does that really, really fast, and you're using all this media stuff we're gonna talk about, like podcasts, your, your database, webinars, conference speaking, to cram all that attention into the platform and, and do more loan origination.
21
00:02:53.320 --> 00:03:03.140
Is that kinda, like... Is that how it works? Yeah, you nailed it. The only, like, conceptual way I think about the world that's different than this great layout you've put together is it's all just totally flipped.
22
00:03:03.200 --> 00:03:11.609
It's an upside-down triangle. In other words, there's a lot of people right now that are s- building media brands and selling them. And you know, you know many of these people. You've had them on your show. Yeah. I think
23
00:03:12.700 --> 00:03:24.440
the most powerful thing anyone can have today is media and attention and selling that, you know, for 40, f- even 50, 100 million bucks today. There's so much future value you've given up by exiting today.
24
00:03:24.520 --> 00:03:34.000
I will never sell the media businesses. So I put the media business across the top, and they will fuel Founder Path or my magazine or whatever I... or my conference or whatever I launch in the future.
25
00:03:34.080 --> 00:03:41.950
That, that is sort of my king-making machine. Same way Oprah uses Oprah Magazine to do that. You're, uh, you're SaaS Oprah. [laughs] That, that's what you're saying, right? [laughs] Eh.
26
00:03:42.000 --> 00:03:50.190
I'm not as good-looking as her, I don't think, but I'll, I'll take it. No, dude, you're, you're the only guy in, in SaaS I've met who's, who's, like, uh, properly looks maxing. So I, uh [laughs]- Yeah [laughs]...
27
00:03:50.190 --> 00:03:55.120
totally give you some, some credit there. Um- That might be a disadvantage in the software, right? I was joking before this.
28
00:03:55.140 --> 00:04:01.640
You were saying, "You look so fancy," and I'm like, "Nathan, come on, I gave you two buttons undone. Let's go, man." [laughs] "I'm trying to get my founder cred." Here's what I think is really interesting about you.
29
00:04:01.700 --> 00:04:02.450
So you have all this...
30
00:04:03.180 --> 00:04:13.180
Y- Like, you have thousands of data points on software companies and, like, their revenue and, like, their conversion rate, their trial, you know, all, all the stuff they're doing to, like, build to millions and millions of dollars, generally bootstrap.
31
00:04:13.800 --> 00:04:25.380
Um, a lot of that comes from this, this podcast that you have. Yeah? That's, like, what fuels, like, all this other media stuff. Is that, is that fair? Yeah. The, the podcast was my second major media sort of success.
32
00:04:25.460 --> 00:04:34.410
So your podcast is not a typical podcast. You do these, like... They're almost like sniper episodes. They're, like, 15, 20 minutes. Sometimes they'll go as long as 30.
33
00:04:34.880 --> 00:04:45.099
You've interviewed a couple buddies of mine, like Zach Yatagari, uh, he's founder of Cal- Cali AI, a bunch of cool people. You're, um, you're extremely good at getting people to share their numbers on that podcast.
34
00:04:45.160 --> 00:04:54.230
So I, I was watching the Zach one, and, like, I... You, you screenshot, like, uh, text messages with him where he's, like, giving you his revenue, and I didn't even know that you knew Zach.
35
00:04:54.580 --> 00:05:04.960
See, uh, how are you getting these people... This is Romain here. Like, he literally pulls out his stripe chart and shows you his, like, month-by-month MRR. How are you getting these people to give you their numbers?
36
00:05:05.000 --> 00:05:15.980
Like, what, what's in it for them? Yeah. So almost every episode now has... I ask founders to do this live because it's so easy to create fake charts on X and LinkedIn, so we always get the real video version of it.
37
00:05:16.000 --> 00:05:25.050
But the reason, it's a social, it's sort of social psychology here. I'll give you the exact cold email I use to get someone like Zach on, so I'll just share this really quick with you. Yeah.
38
00:05:25.080 --> 00:05:36.980
If you go into Google, if anyone right now goes into Google and you search Cali AI revenue, we dominate the number one spot, right? And that was even before he came on the show. So what I told him is, "Look, we have..."
39
00:05:37.000 --> 00:05:40.760
When I go into my search console, we have millions of people clicking through to GitLab.
40
00:05:40.900 --> 00:05:48.840
We're getting now over a million impressions per day, 1.5 million impressions per day in chat results, LLMs, uh, Google Search, et cetera.
41
00:05:49.220 --> 00:05:56.020
You should come on to make sure that your story is told in the most detail as possible on GitLabCA. Right?
42
00:05:56.080 --> 00:06:12.688
And then they come on, and when they come on and you go to the page, you see the, the, the, the transcript is sourced over here, and when we copy the transcript, we upload it to, uh, GitLabCA, and it automatically fills in all the, all the data points he verbally gave me.And so that's how the system works, that's how the SEO works, that's how s- the psychology works.
43
00:06:13.408 --> 00:06:25.288
Yeah. This is fascinating. So, I mean, the reason I wanted to spend some time on this is I remember, and I would i- imagine most people feel like this, starting a podcast feels like a tremendous amount of work.
44
00:06:25.608 --> 00:06:33.148
It's very hard to attribute value to. And I think you've done this in a very smart way, where the podcast really is like an input.
45
00:06:33.188 --> 00:06:41.868
The, the podcast is like data effectively, and, like, that data powers a bunch of stuff you're doing. Just like what you just showed, GitLaka, is kind of this database platform.
46
00:06:41.968 --> 00:06:50.948
You were making a bunch of money from that for a while, but now it's, it's evolved to, like, SEO, I feel like, and lead gen. And to me, that really switched my mindset on the purpose or the use of a podcast.
47
00:06:50.988 --> 00:06:52.918
It's not to be a podcaster, right?
48
00:06:53.268 --> 00:07:00.968
It's to have information that nobody else on the internet, nobody else on the planet can have, and you can use that for your products, for your media business, for things that will fuel your, your company.
49
00:07:01.008 --> 00:07:12.908
Is that, is that how you think of the podcast? I, I try to think in the age of sort of AI and foundation models, what unique data can I get that a foundation model will never be able to get to?
50
00:07:13.328 --> 00:07:26.908
So for example, Google and OpenAI are enemies. They have competing foundation models, Gemini versus ChatGPT. Google does not let ChatGPT or OpenAI or Anthropic scan Google... like, YouTube transcripts.
51
00:07:26.968 --> 00:07:35.608
They've blocked it. So transcripts and voice data are proprietary datasets that models will never be trained on. Why is that important?
52
00:07:35.628 --> 00:07:43.768
Well, because if the models aren't trained on data points, like what Cal AI's revenue is, they have to backlink to my page, so I get the impression and I still get the click.
53
00:07:44.108 --> 00:07:53.068
What a lot of media operators are running into today is they're getting the impression, but they're not getting the click-through to their website because all their data is already sucked up and scraped by the foundation models.
54
00:07:53.598 --> 00:08:05.118
So I'm constantly thinking about this, this asset class. And then, you know, the, the, the way I think about doing the podcast interview is I am... You know, a lot of investors pay me a lot of money for deal flow, right?
55
00:08:05.168 --> 00:08:13.048
Because they can't get a f- a c- a founder to give them their data. So I use my media channel and get them on live, right? Get them to share it live and then send it.
56
00:08:13.108 --> 00:08:21.148
So I'm effectively an investment, you know, the w- the world's most powerful investment analyst embedded inside a lot of these sort of VC firms. And so that's how I think about the show.
57
00:08:21.208 --> 00:08:31.618
It's, it's really an investment analyst call masked as a podcast. Yeah. I like it. And, um, what's... H- how do you position that to somebody like Zach where... I mean, I get it.
58
00:08:31.688 --> 00:08:37.618
It's kind of like, "Hey, once you're in my database, we'll rank very high on SEO. Your company will come up."
59
00:08:37.668 --> 00:08:42.788
I get how maybe that would work for B2B SaaS founders, 'cause you go, "Look, man, like, we-- this could get you an enterprise contract."
60
00:08:43.268 --> 00:08:49.848
But Zach is, you know, selling, like, $20 annual, like, consumer subscriptions to, like, a fitness app. So, like, what's the...
61
00:08:50.008 --> 00:08:57.008
W- why would someone like him, like, come on and, and just give you all, all his revenue numbers? Well, uh, first off, you know, Zach is sort of a rare case.
62
00:08:57.028 --> 00:09:04.708
He's already pretty open about a lot of stuff, so his revenue's already public. But I was able to drill down on CAC and conversion rate, stuff he hasn't shared in other podcasts.
63
00:09:04.768 --> 00:09:10.508
Um, it's also just, like, elephant bumping. Like, Nathan, I reached out to you about your personal IPO summit because you have really great guests lined up.
64
00:09:10.608 --> 00:09:18.458
So you do the same thing I do, which is, like, we feature our best interviews on gitlaka.com. So, like, the CEO of Block and Square has come on. This is Jack Dorsey's co-founder, Brian Halligan.
65
00:09:18.748 --> 00:09:25.848
You know, Zapier, ClickUp. So when people see all this and they've come on, they go, "Wow, I wanna go on the show too." Right? So it's a bit of groupthink. Yeah. It's the SEO value.
66
00:09:26.288 --> 00:09:35.608
And frankly, when people are going into a round or they're considering a raise or an exit, they'll come on the show because they know a lot of buyers and private equity funds, pension funds, et cetera, listen to the show.
67
00:09:35.808 --> 00:09:43.188
So they'll get tons of inbound offers for the company when they come on the podcast. What does that look like when, like, when you, when you email somebody?
68
00:09:43.268 --> 00:09:49.357
So I think what we were talking about, the Zach Ettinger email, and, and you, um, you showed the, the gitlaka.com. But, like, what does the initial email look like?
69
00:09:49.398 --> 00:09:56.148
'Cause one thing I'm, I'm thinking about, so A, really smart to be doing a podcast, and I'm gonna talk more about, like, how you're plugging this into your broader ecosystem.
70
00:09:56.558 --> 00:10:02.448
But I imagine, like, conditional on somebody wanting to do a podcast, like, I experience this, like, it's hard to get guests on sometimes. And, like- Yeah...
71
00:10:02.508 --> 00:10:11.328
it's a lot about the social proof of the other guests and what you say, because ultimately it, it's an offer, right? It's like, "Hey, you're gonna spend this time here with me. What are you gonna get out of it?"
72
00:10:11.648 --> 00:10:20.308
And, like, a lot of times you have, like, an email or two maybe to, right, to make that case. What, what are you saying to get these high-profile people on? Yeah. You know, I wanna...
73
00:10:20.368 --> 00:10:29.228
This just happened yesterday, and I think it's better, I think it's better to show than tell. Do I-- Is it okay with you if I share screen and show you how I recruited a guest yesterday? Yeah. I would love that. Okay.
74
00:10:29.288 --> 00:10:37.148
So this CEO on LinkedIn yesterday, um, let me see, ceo.tive.com. His name is, uh, Krenar Komoni, right?
75
00:10:37.608 --> 00:10:48.388
And you can see he put out a post yesterday, um, right here, one day ago, where he was holding up his phone and, Nathan, he effectively said, "Hey look, we've passed 100 million of booked ARR."
76
00:10:49.128 --> 00:10:57.708
And me being my investment analyst self, I commented and said... Now I'm not gonna be able to find my comment, but I said something like, "Hey, what is the definition of booked ARR?"
77
00:10:58.428 --> 00:11:07.988
And so ultimately, what that led to is me just pinging him. Um, let me see. So he connected here. Here's, and here's the, here's the full flow. Here's the, the exact full flow.
78
00:11:08.418 --> 00:11:16.258
"I feature 100 million ARR CEOs on my podcast. Come on..." This is literally yesterday. We're recording on Wednesday. "... Come on for an episode." He says, "This is what we did last month," blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
79
00:11:16.418 --> 00:11:24.907
"Free to record it." So here's a couple things. One, I said, like, "I'll get on right now." And here's the other thing. I'm not asking for an hour of his time. It's quick. It's, like, very quick.
80
00:11:25.388 --> 00:11:32.428
And he said, "Look, I'm about to fly to Singapore at 1:00 AM," but, like, I can... I said, "Can you jump on quickly?" And, and then I did the social proof elephant bumping, right? "You wanna come on?"
81
00:11:32.888 --> 00:11:43.008
And then he confirmed. He came on, right? Invite sent, he came on. And now, uh, that full recording, this is how I do my podcast thing. I mean, we... You can see we're booked here through December already.
82
00:11:43.468 --> 00:11:54.628
Like, we're already into 2027 in terms of the release schedule. But Tive's episode yesterday was so good, I told my post-production team... Where did I move him? I moved him all the way up. Oh, it's in Riverside.
83
00:11:54.668 --> 00:12:00.898
I moved him all the way up here somewhere, like, like... Oh, here. Yeah. To release, like, next week. You know? So... And he gave me all the data.
84
00:12:00.948 --> 00:12:13.168
Like, I have the full, I have the full transcript here, and this transcript will then get uploaded to GitLaka, and all those numbers will populate, and then anyone can click the numbers, whether it's revenue, and actually see the point in the episode when the CEO gave that data point.
85
00:12:13.248 --> 00:12:19.748
So you just saw, you just saw the full cycle right there. Yeah. Dude, I love that. This is, um, this is fascinating. Makes me think I should be doing this.
86
00:12:19.768 --> 00:12:29.060
So, so your recording schedule, one thing that was surprising to me-So y- you just keep an open calendar where, like, you'll, you'll book a guest the same day. Is that atypical?
87
00:12:29.180 --> 00:12:37.590
Like, are you, are you typ- Like, the way that I would do it if I was doing this is I would, like, I would stack every Thursday, you know, 9:00 AM to, to 5:00 PM, just these 20-minute slots.
88
00:12:37.630 --> 00:12:46.080
'Cause I'm like, you've gotta prep a lot. It's like, you know, it's taking you out of your, your, uh, your flow to record. Like, how, how are you doing it? How scheduled are you? Yeah.
89
00:12:46.160 --> 00:12:55.380
So the problem, if you try to batch, which is the right move, what most people run into is they'll open, they'll go into, like, Acuity Scheduling or whatever their calendar booking is, they'll open a big time slot from 9:00 AM to 5:00 PM.
90
00:12:55.700 --> 00:13:03.780
The problem is you then have people, someone books at 9:00 AM, someone books at 12:00, someone books at 3:00 PM, and your day is shot. You have a bunch of wasted switching costs in between every episode, right?
91
00:13:03.820 --> 00:13:11.329
You can't focus. So what I do, this is literally how I do it, I go into Acuity Scheduling, just, like, right here. Right here, right?
92
00:13:11.440 --> 00:13:18.480
And what I do is I generally book every Tuesday, but when I'm booking out in advance, like, let's go forward to, like, Tuesday here, uh, June 9th.
93
00:13:18.760 --> 00:13:30.820
I'll open up a small four-hour, uh, two-hour window so I can do one, two, three, four episodes there. And I only change this from 12:00 to go to 1:00 PM after those four are filled, so I end up with back-to-backs.
94
00:13:30.920 --> 00:13:41.520
My time is spent very, very efficiently. And then what happens with that is the direct scheduling link. You'll see I always just sort of make sure I check once a week to make sure there's some open slots in the future.
95
00:13:41.620 --> 00:13:50.640
And what happens then, Nathan, is this is what my calendar looks like. So this is a recording day, right? I'll just do, like, 10 back to back like this. Yeah. So it only takes me a couple hours per week.
96
00:13:51.500 --> 00:13:55.310
Wow, this is great. Uh, couple hours per week, and you're, you're recording.
97
00:13:55.400 --> 00:14:06.040
I mean, you do, you release these once a week, so, like, um, my guess is, like, you, you're scheduled out, it sounds like six months, seven months in advance. Uh, this is very efficient. Cor- correct.
98
00:14:06.080 --> 00:14:15.820
The biggest problem I run into is people record, and I don't wanna put more than one episode per week on YouTube. I could release one per day. I have so much backlog. Yeah. Right?
99
00:14:15.900 --> 00:14:24.180
But I don't wanna, I don't wanna o- spam the YouTube algorithm, so I'm trying to figure out, like, how do I release episodes? You see what I'm saying? I don't even know how to say the problem.
100
00:14:24.360 --> 00:14:33.999
That's my biggest problem, though, right now. Yeah. Uh, uh, partially you don't wanna flood it, but also it's like, hey, dude, if I interview Zach, and then I publish this episode, like, four months later, right?
101
00:14:34.020 --> 00:14:41.600
'Cause I'm only publishing once per week. All his shit is outdated now, and he, he- And-... he, he got acquired, so now it's, you know, it's totally different. Exactly. Yeah, yeah. Exactly.
102
00:14:41.640 --> 00:14:50.719
So, like, what we do is we publish it on Get Ladka immediately, and then I fig- I'm still figuring out the right way to drip it out on sort of YouTube versus iTunes versus, uh, Spotify, et cetera.
103
00:14:51.360 --> 00:14:58.640
This is super interesting. What, um, what's your prep like prior to an episode? Um, because I imagine you're very efficient with that as well.
104
00:14:58.670 --> 00:15:05.920
And, like, that typically is the thing that takes people the most amount of time. It's not the episode itself, it's the preparation before. Yeah. Um, I'll show you exactly what I do.
105
00:15:06.080 --> 00:15:08.400
Uh, I've created in Claude this project.
106
00:15:08.840 --> 00:15:18.140
It's called Podcast Hooks, and what it does is it takes all my historical download data from both the YouTube titles, you can see YouTube headlines, uh, iTunes, blog posts, blah, blah, blah.
107
00:15:18.480 --> 00:15:27.060
It knows what, what does well for my audience in terms of click-throughs, et cetera. And then for, like, yesterday, you can see this was 13 hours ago. I just go in here. Give me... Oh, wait, hold on.
108
00:15:27.620 --> 00:15:35.260
If I go to Podcast Hooks, 16 hours ago, podcast interview guest preparation. And the original prompt is very simple. This is it. I'll let you read it. Yeah.
109
00:15:35.820 --> 00:15:44.400
"Read my calendar, help me prep for my podcast interview today." Uh, you want guest name, URL. Interesting. Okay, these are quick hits. And are, are you going deeper than this?
110
00:15:44.440 --> 00:15:50.240
Or, or do you just, you just want a quick TLDR, and you, you go in, you know, no agenda, o- open? Totally open.
111
00:15:50.840 --> 00:15:57.340
I, I, I, I, I ask que- I know what my audience wants, and so, like, when I interviewed Raph, like, he went a certain direction, and I just asked follow-up questions appropriately.
112
00:15:57.400 --> 00:16:09.020
But see, the nice thing about doing it this way is I can see what the foundation models don't already have. So here you can see they didn't find the key, this, they only find a Series B. They didn't find Series A seed.
113
00:16:09.400 --> 00:16:13.450
So when I interviewed him yesterday, I got all that data. That's new- Yeah... data for the internet. Yeah.
114
00:16:13.480 --> 00:16:23.120
So I'm gonna rank number one for that 'cause I got new data, and that's how I'm gonna rank number one for the keyword Didomi revenue in about four days. See, we already actually rank number one because of the SEO.
115
00:16:23.160 --> 00:16:28.960
We haven't even published the episode yet, right? But, like, now we're gonna be definitely number one and maybe actually get into the SERP result.
116
00:16:29.060 --> 00:16:37.300
More of a s- maybe we actually get the video featured here, which will make it go viral on YouTube, or we get more... I mean, we're already dominating this, this keyword, but you get my point. Yeah.
117
00:16:37.420 --> 00:16:46.480
Um, this is fascinating. So, so, like, just, just to summarize this, you are prepping for each episode, it looks like, in under 15 minutes.
118
00:16:46.920 --> 00:16:50.640
The episodes themselves are 20 to 30 minutes to record, and, like, you're releasing once a week.
119
00:16:50.720 --> 00:16:59.010
So, like, y- you could, one week is effectively four to six weeks of content for you in probably, like, a couple, couple hours.
120
00:16:59.040 --> 00:17:09.510
And so, like, you're spending, you know, probably sub 10 hours, 15 hours over a quarter to produce content for the entire year. Yeah. We're building incredible influence with very little time investment.
121
00:17:09.650 --> 00:17:14.120
[whooshing sound] So I think the episode that you were listening to right now could make you a million dollars, and I believe that.
122
00:17:14.540 --> 00:17:22.460
The reason I believe that is because your content diet, the YouTube videos you watch, the podcasts you listen to, is the highest leverage thing that you can do for yourself.
123
00:17:22.940 --> 00:17:34.370
I became a millionaire in my early 20s, and frankly, it had very little to do with me, and it had everything to do with the fact that you and I live in a crazy lucky time where founders like this hop in these podcasts, and they share everything that they know for free.
124
00:17:34.590 --> 00:17:43.880
And so that's what I do. I talk to founders who do millions of dollars, and I talk to them about their financials, their funnels, and their feelings, the mindset that got them to where they are.
125
00:17:44.580 --> 00:17:51.820
And so if you're building something or you're thinking about building something, I want you to do something for yourself, for getting me, which is I want you to hit the subscribe button on this podcast.
126
00:17:52.240 --> 00:17:58.480
I want you to write down the ideas you're hearing, and I want you to get to work. Back to the pod. [whooshing sound] If I wanted to do this playbook, right?
127
00:17:58.520 --> 00:18:08.140
It's hey, maybe the only term worth going after is, like, a company name and a revenue. And so how would that kind of preset... You may tell me there's other types of keywords that are, that are useful to rank for.
128
00:18:08.620 --> 00:18:17.560
Uh, I'd love to know that. But if that is true, then it's kind of like, okay, step one, f- take my ICP, my ideal customer profile, do interviews with them.
129
00:18:17.980 --> 00:18:27.350
Do, like, a revenue-style interview where we're gonna rank for those terms, and, like, I should be reasonably confident that over time, that will get, you know, my website, potentially for my service.
130
00:18:27.420 --> 00:18:33.860
Let's say I did this as a blog, right? I integrated this with my agency website or my enterprise software website. I will start to get traffic...
131
00:18:33.940 --> 00:18:43.960
from peers of my ideal customer profile, and they'll get in front of my service or my software. Is that fair? I think that's a really good way to think about it. Yeah. Um, cool.
132
00:18:44.080 --> 00:18:51.270
Is there anything that's worth going after other than like ICP company name and revenue where you go, "No, that, that's the whole game. That's, that's what you wanna own"?
133
00:18:52.260 --> 00:19:00.980
Uh, look, I think one of the things everyone listening right now is probably fighting if you're trying to build media in 2026 and on, is we all generally wanna go after a larger audience.
134
00:19:01.320 --> 00:19:06.960
It- it's very hard to like post a screenshot of number of downloads and get a lot of traction if you only have two downloads.
135
00:19:07.320 --> 00:19:14.300
But I would challenge your thinking, every- I would challenge everyone's thinking on that, because look at my download graph. Like, this is from Libsyn directly, right? I'm logged in.
136
00:19:14.820 --> 00:19:25.140
I mean, when we launched, like, I mean, we're-- our best month here was what? Four hundred and twenty-eight thousand downloads. Like, Nathan, I felt great. But you know what? A lot of those folks, like they're not fit.
137
00:19:25.200 --> 00:19:36.040
They're, they're, they're, they're people that don't have a business, they're not my ICP, et cetera. Now, today, we're, quote, I'm gonna put it in quote, "only getting" 37,000 downloads a month. But you know what?
138
00:19:36.700 --> 00:19:44.820
Those are really successful founders with real budgets and real ideas on how to use Founder Path's fund in terms of getting investment from me to grow their business.
139
00:19:44.900 --> 00:19:57.320
So the takeaway I would take from folks is, you know, it, it is much better to have a small army of wealthy people that can pay you than a large army of poor people watching your content, juicing views. Yeah. Right?
140
00:19:57.540 --> 00:20:05.600
That, that's what I would think about in the B2B space. I, I, I fully believe this, dude. We are-- You know, my newsletter is something like 9,000 or 10,000 people.
141
00:20:06.140 --> 00:20:15.320
Uh, we do more in revenue than many people who have 100, 200,000-person, uh, newsletters. Part of that is like the first 1,000 people I hand invited.
142
00:20:15.380 --> 00:20:25.100
It was, you know, Austin Rief and Tyler Dank, and, uh, you know, uh, people who run $10 to $150 million businesses. But I, I wanted the right person, right, on that email list.
143
00:20:25.110 --> 00:20:37.140
And so your whole ethos, right, is like, I don't give a shit about like views or, uh, being, uh, well known. I wanna be known well, which is like depth of relationship with the right type of person. Correct.
144
00:20:37.180 --> 00:20:45.690
And when you do that, it also enables you to turn on other revenue channels. Like, you can get away from charging on a CPM basis for sponsors. You can charge a cost per lead basis, right?
145
00:20:45.710 --> 00:20:56.609
'Cause they're willing to pay more cost per lead versus CPM. So that helps a lot of things when you build the right audience, not just a big one. What happens after you finish a podcast?
146
00:20:56.680 --> 00:21:07.010
What are the steps between finishing the podcast and, as easily as possible, getting it on that site so you're ranking for terms? Yep. So we love Riverside. We're recording now on Riverside right now.
147
00:21:07.120 --> 00:21:10.880
I tried a lot of different solutions, but again, we now do everything in Riverside.
148
00:21:10.980 --> 00:21:18.880
Um, c- the only thing that Riverside doesn't have is the ability to pre-schedule invite links for guests to put in the Google Calendar invite. It's all basically the same studio recording link.
149
00:21:18.920 --> 00:21:27.640
So that's the only downside, right? So everything is stored here. Once it's stored here, right, when I'm done, I go into my ma- podcast master folder, and there's a couple things.
150
00:21:27.760 --> 00:21:36.680
I f- I feel terrible showing quality, but like some people might get mad at this, but like let's just talk about what bad quality is. This isn't n- this, this is no knock on the Drivepoint CEO.
151
00:21:36.800 --> 00:21:43.910
It just means I couldn't get them to share as much data as I usually get. That's, that's- Yeah... what determines if it's high or not high. So it's n- no knock on the founders, right?
152
00:21:44.360 --> 00:21:52.160
I respect all their time for coming on. And then so, so I rank them, and then I basically do the release schedule based off the most valuable episodes next.
153
00:21:52.260 --> 00:21:58.829
Or if someone says, "Nathan, you know, we're, we're announcing this exclusive on your show. We just closed a $100 million round at a half billion valuation." And I say, "What do you want?
154
00:21:58.920 --> 00:22:07.940
When do you want me to release this?" I'll plan the release date around that. And so it just goes into this file right here. And then what I do is, um, I make sure I have the record date here, right?
155
00:22:08.020 --> 00:22:12.780
So that when you watch it on YouTube later, you know when the data, the data is all timestamped. You know when I actually captured it.
156
00:22:13.240 --> 00:22:22.240
I then give suggested title to my video editing team, and sometimes I even write the origin- the, the script that I want them to use in the first 45 seconds, right? I'm just sticking it all right here.
157
00:22:22.280 --> 00:22:32.020
I've now built an agent that fills this in based off what my audience-- based off YouTube retention graphs, so we know what keeps people, you know, 60% of the audience listening at minute four, at second 45, et cetera.
158
00:22:32.500 --> 00:22:41.540
Then the Riverside link with the raw file. Oh, go ahead. That's interesting. So, so you're saying like, "Hey, we take our, our video, our YouTube videos that have the strongest retention.
159
00:22:42.000 --> 00:22:47.150
We look at the types of things that were being said early in the video. And I g- I, uh,
160
00:22:48.220 --> 00:22:58.800
take a prompt, and I use that to tell my team, 'Hey, from this new video, these are the moments you should be extracting in those first couple minutes so that we retain the, the viewer.'" Yeah? You na- you nailed it.
161
00:22:58.880 --> 00:23:06.820
It's all, and it's all stored. My brain for that is stored here in the project files for, for, you know, for Podcast Hooks, basically.
162
00:23:06.900 --> 00:23:14.340
And again, all it's doing is it's going to the YouTube channel, and it's going and scanning and going like, "Whoa, you know, this one got..." Let me just pick one.
163
00:23:14.420 --> 00:23:18.480
This one got 9,700, which is way above, you know, 2K just on the YouTube exposure.
164
00:23:18.530 --> 00:23:28.860
And all it's doing is there's a little, there's a little bot that's going in and using this little extension I have, and it's copying the full transcript so it knows what the first s- you know, pieces look like.
165
00:23:29.280 --> 00:23:40.480
And then it's, at the same time, going in and understanding what the retention curves look like on this, right, on this thing, and saying, "Okay, how do we keep replicating the same retention curve o- over the first, you know, three minutes and 11 seconds?"
166
00:23:41.300 --> 00:23:45.640
Yeah. Dude, this is very cool. And, and, um, what's the relative opportunity?
167
00:23:45.760 --> 00:23:56.890
So I, I guess one thing I wanna understand, your goal ultimately, um, is to, uh, I imagine drive leads and, and borrowers, like people who you can help do financing for, to Founder Path, right?
168
00:23:56.920 --> 00:23:58.220
That's the ultimate business.
169
00:23:58.300 --> 00:24:10.940
If I were to look at a pie of your, your leads or your applications or whatever KPI is like up funnel and most important to you, would you tell me that like 60, 70% is from the database and everything else is, are these other channels?
170
00:24:11.000 --> 00:24:20.060
Is it, is it less than that? Like, what's the mix here? Um, it's a mix between, I would say 50% comes from getlatka.go- com, which is the database.
171
00:24:20.780 --> 00:24:29.240
Maybe 10% to 20% comes from our YouTube motion we're running on Luma, uh, which, you know, is, is, you know, a lot of people struggle with webinars.
172
00:24:29.260 --> 00:24:34.420
But, you know, we'll get 1,100 people registered basically every, every month. So it's, it's coming from here.
173
00:24:34.440 --> 00:24:39.760
And then we also run, you know, when you opt into our webinar, we get your text message information, so we have a text message marketing list.
174
00:24:39.840 --> 00:24:53.368
So when we, when we promote on there, that will drive maybe 10% of leads to Founder Path every month.And I want to say the rest is, um, it's, it's frankly, it's, you know, in the age of AI, you know, you're investing in this a ton, I'm investing in this a ton, but it's, um, it's this.
175
00:24:54.788 --> 00:25:06.768
All right? It's, it's in-person events. Yeah. You know? Yeah. And these are all- So- These are events you are going to and speaking at, yeah? Exact- Well, not only. It- it's also ones that I wanna promote, right, right?
176
00:25:06.828 --> 00:25:16.728
It's, it's friends of mine, right, that are in the software world hosting events. But this is also, like, now an SEO play, right? 'Cause if you do top SaaS events, we should rank number one. Yeah. Yeah. Right? So- Wow...
177
00:25:16.768 --> 00:25:25.408
this is, it's like another SEO motion, sort of like the podcast, but for another term that I wanna dominate. This is so smart. Um, this is really cool.
178
00:25:25.448 --> 00:25:36.198
Your way of SEO, I think, is the, like, uh, such a strong, like, maximalist version of the way that, uh, I don't know, SEO probably should be done in this age, which is like, you gotta have first-party data, otherwise, like, okay- Yes...
179
00:25:36.228 --> 00:25:44.878
you're not gonna be first. So those of you, like, looking at this, what's my... Like, you might be wondering, "Well, Nathan, how do you outrank SaaStr Annual," right? S- Jason's got a massive audience. How do you do it?
180
00:25:45.348 --> 00:25:52.438
Well, Jason doesn't... Like, we get more reviews for SaaStr than Jason gets. And, and, and- [laughs]... we publish all the review, and we publish all the reviews.
181
00:25:52.908 --> 00:25:58.008
And we require when people leave a review, they take a selfie of them at the event so people know they're not fake reviews, right? Yeah.
182
00:25:58.028 --> 00:26:08.028
This is all, like, crazy valuable first-party data that both the conference organizer loves, uh, and also we love because it keeps juicing our SEO, our SEO rankings. Yeah.
183
00:26:08.068 --> 00:26:20.328
One thing that I think that's cool about your podcast, right, is you're getting this proprietary, like, pretty cool data people are willing to, to talk about publicly, and that's the same data that's, like, fueling your webinars, so like your, your Luma live events.
184
00:26:20.388 --> 00:26:27.648
It's the same stuff. I looked at this, uh, you did, uh, SaaStock, some, uh, SaaS conference. I don't know much SaaS stuff, but, like, you have this beautiful deck.
185
00:26:27.688 --> 00:26:38.548
It's like 100 pages, and it's all this like, um, uh, all these deep metrics and, like, w- what makes companies defensible in AI, and it's all coming from these interviews, right? The interviews power all of it.
186
00:26:39.808 --> 00:26:50.148
When I put together a keynote, I don't have to be, like, coming up with crazy new information, to your point. I just go into here because I've, 'cause I've created the brain. I'll show you exactly how I built that deck.
187
00:26:50.588 --> 00:27:01.208
I go in here, right, and I go keynote, uh, and you're... And actually you can see here when I did your thing- Hell yeah... as well. But [laughs] when I go in here to build a webinar or a keynote, you know, the prompt...
188
00:27:01.388 --> 00:27:09.438
Let me see if I can find... I, I maybe can't find the SaaStock one really, really, really quickly, but, you know, AI, you know, growth strategies here. All I'm doing is, like, I'm giving a keynote.
189
00:27:09.568 --> 00:27:20.888
I wanna reuse some of the recent content I've created. Give me headline ideas, do, do, do, and what it does is it effectively builds, it pulls from all of my transcript data in the last 180 days, and it pulls
190
00:27:21.848 --> 00:27:29.008
basically the top nine CEOs I've interviewed that support the title I agreed to keynote on with the event organizer, and then that...
191
00:27:29.088 --> 00:27:38.368
So here's nine of them, and then this way going forward, I don't even have to come up with the good stuff. I just play the clip of Flossie or Rev or the Fathom CEO, right? So I'm really just master curator here.
192
00:27:39.148 --> 00:27:46.457
This is amazing, and this is like, um... So this is Claude Design. So you're... I mean, I'm sure you do some last mile edits on the PowerPoint, but, like, the...
193
00:27:46.908 --> 00:27:56.068
Claude made this, and it, this looks really beautiful, yeah? Like, Claude made this- Yeah, Claude, Claude, Claude, Claude makes it. Um, let me see if I can SaaStock keynote.
194
00:27:56.568 --> 00:28:03.938
Here's the one I think that you're referring to that maybe you found. The... It does... It... The, the way that I build the slide is I always start with one slide.
195
00:28:04.028 --> 00:28:11.628
A lot of people try to one-shot 70 slides, which is really silly. You one-shot the summary slide, which is this, and then you build from there.
196
00:28:11.748 --> 00:28:20.608
So my second prompt is, "Okay, now build the five slides for Allo," and I've trained it, like, these are the five slides for Allo. It's a screenshot of their homepage. It's their revenue graph from the podcast.
197
00:28:20.668 --> 00:28:29.058
It's the clip from the podcast, right? And then it's summary of his top three growth tactics, and then a summary of any other tactics that I wanna share taken directly from the podcast. Wow.
198
00:28:29.088 --> 00:28:40.748
So that's how I build a 70-slide very valuable deck really quickly. How long does it take you to put this deck together, start to finish? Um, under an hour. Wow. Um- Yeah... and it's... How...
199
00:28:41.198 --> 00:28:49.908
Uh, what parts of it are manual? Like, are you telling me that it's, it's pulling the clip and the revenue chart, like, like in one shot? Like, you don't actually have to go in and put the numbers in? Yeah. Yeah.
200
00:28:49.948 --> 00:28:54.708
It's like, check this out. Watch this. Give me a bash command I can use on my terminal to pull a clip from a YouTube video.
201
00:28:55.108 --> 00:29:02.488
What a lot of people are doing right now is they're using tools like Veed or Submagic to manually go in and pull clips, but what you don't realize is if you just feed the YouTube... Here we go.
202
00:29:02.568 --> 00:29:11.958
If you just feed the YouTube clip into your terminal and, and use this bash command, it'll automatically save [laughs] the timestamp that you want directly to your, as a clip directly to your desktop.
203
00:29:12.548 --> 00:29:24.938
And then all you do is you, is you take all those clips like this, you put them in the keynote file as, whoops, as videos- Yeah... and then you just embed each of those clips in the actual PowerPoint or the- And-...
204
00:29:24.968 --> 00:29:36.188
keynote... where, where is this pulling from again? So is, is it a YouTube link, or are you saying you have a workflow that automatically pumps all your videos into a database that Claude can access? So the...
205
00:29:36.268 --> 00:29:44.948
Remember, all of... Where a lot of people struggle in the age of AI is they don't have structured data. I am obsessed over this. So all of my podcast data is structured via the database at Gitlab, right?
206
00:29:45.008 --> 00:29:53.128
So for Flip CX- Yes... if you went in here, you will not only get all the data points, but you will also get the, the direct link to the YouTube video. Oh, that's an error. I see.
207
00:29:53.188 --> 00:30:01.648
But, but, but, but what we're then doing is we're feeding that YouTube into this bash command here. See, YouTube URL. Yeah. And it already knows what section to pull out 'cause it has the transcript.
208
00:30:01.688 --> 00:30:08.248
Claude just built me the, the transcript for the section, and then that's how I'm getting all these saved clips over here. Cool. That makes sense.
209
00:30:08.368 --> 00:30:12.148
And so there, uh, w- what's the relationship between the database and this tool?
210
00:30:12.188 --> 00:30:19.188
Like, is it, uh, is it plugged into the backend of your database, or is it s- like scraping the stuff that's there, like, in real time, or something different?
211
00:30:19.348 --> 00:30:27.068
Uh, the way to think about it is that Cl- I've given Claude a brain that has access to all of my transcripts and YouTube videos. Yeah. [clears throat] Cool. That makes sense.
212
00:30:27.468 --> 00:30:31.448
It's wild 'cause, like, let's say, let's say someone's listening and they wanna launch an affiliate program on your software.
213
00:30:31.928 --> 00:30:37.848
I can put a command in Claude saying, "Pull every time a CEO came on my podcast and explain how they launched their affiliate program.
214
00:30:38.268 --> 00:30:46.784
Only give me the examples where the affiliate program drives more than a million a month of revenue." Yeah. And I instantly get, uh, like a book on how to launch an affiliate program.Dude, that's crazy.
215
00:30:46.804 --> 00:30:55.384
This makes me think of, uh... Do you know who Alex Hormozi is, yeah? Of course, yeah. Yeah. Like, A- Alex is like, um, a AI chatbot, effectively.
216
00:30:55.444 --> 00:31:06.904
So he has this, uh, uh, level three thing that you can do where you go in, you spend a day with him, you and seven other founders, and it's $135,000 per person. So he makes $800,000 every single time he does it.
217
00:31:06.914 --> 00:31:16.884
He gives all these people advice, and these people fill out every piece of data in their business, and they record all these sessions. All of that gets plugged into a database that this AI tool then pulls from.
218
00:31:16.984 --> 00:31:27.504
And so you have, like, instantaneous real information, real metrics, and, like, as a business owner, it's like holy shit, like, I can... Uh, for, for l- s- something dramatically less than $800,000, [chuckles]
219
00:31:27.724 --> 00:31:36.464
I could come in here and get, like, the best answers from founders who are already doing $10 million plus a year. I-- This stuff is incredible. I, I love that kind of stuff. It drives a lot of our alpha, that's for sure.
220
00:31:37.064 --> 00:31:42.704
Yeah. This is cool. Um, okay, there, there's one more leg here I wanna cover you mentioned, which are these free webinars.
221
00:31:43.204 --> 00:31:55.804
So, um, one thing to me that's fascinating, uh, my first lead magnet is that I ever did on LinkedIn, which would have been November, December of 2024, um, I stole them from you.
222
00:31:56.344 --> 00:32:05.504
Um, I- [laughs] Uh, and what I mean by that, dude, is I- I love that... you were blowing up on LinkedIn, and you did these posts where, uh... Let me click this one, actually.
223
00:32:05.664 --> 00:32:22.024
I remember seeing posts like this where you post a screenshot of a slideshow, and this is like, this has probably got to be t- top 10 highest, like, likes, comments I've seen on any LinkedIn post ever in, in the, in the last three years.
224
00:32:22.104 --> 00:32:32.464
Like, this is top. Um, it's incredible. H- how do you go viral like this? What is the playbook for a post that performs this well? So this doesn't work anymore, right?
225
00:32:32.644 --> 00:32:41.884
I did it, it went well, then a lot of people copied it, and now the audience is desensitized. So if you did the exact same copy, it wouldn't work anymore. So it's har- It's... I don't-- You couldn't just copy.
226
00:32:41.964 --> 00:32:48.804
What-- There's some tactics, though, I think you can take from this, right? You want the visual to figure out a way to communicate, like, value as quickly as possible.
227
00:32:48.904 --> 00:32:58.604
So now a version of this would be like, instead of 60 slides, I'd have little faces of 60 agents, right? Yeah. Whatever the hot thing is right now, you know? That would be the variant.
228
00:32:58.644 --> 00:33:04.644
The second thing is this actually, this was a keynote I was giving at an event, and what happened was it went viral.
229
00:33:04.744 --> 00:33:13.924
Well, now I just go up and I click the triple dots in the upper right whenever I wanna edit, and I'll edit the link. So I'll, I'll, I- Huh... a lot of people don't know you can do this.
230
00:33:14.004 --> 00:33:21.844
Like, I can just point this traffic to wherever I want and then put ads behind it, and it's an ad with the most social proof you've ever seen in an ad before. So this is a real asset.
231
00:33:21.873 --> 00:33:30.984
This is a real media asset that lasts forever. You know, Mar- Naval talks about creating, you know, asset value that has, y- you know, you just, you know, you do it once and you're paid forever.
232
00:33:31.144 --> 00:33:41.684
This is a real asset for the business. This is very cool. And so you, you haven't done it here, but, like, for other posts, do you go back and you just update everything to your latest event link? Yeah, yeah, exactly.
233
00:33:41.724 --> 00:33:47.634
Sometimes I get lazy, which is what you were seeing, and I didn't do it. But let me-- Like, I'll show you exact- just so if you guys wanna replicate this, here's what I do.
234
00:33:47.664 --> 00:33:55.674
I go in here, I click here, I go down and click Edit Posts, and I simply just put in my new link that I wanna drive traffic to. [chuckles] It's as simple as that. Oh, yeah.
235
00:33:55.684 --> 00:34:00.504
And to- And then I click Save, and then I put ads behind it potentially. And sometime you, sometimes you don't even have to put ads behind it, right?
236
00:34:00.624 --> 00:34:09.464
Or you, you email this out in a link, in a blast or a text message, and it's gonna convert very high because it has so much social proof. Yeah. And, um, is it,
237
00:34:10.544 --> 00:34:17.484
is it a hell yeah, like an easy hell yeah to run ads behind a post like this? Is it, "Ah, sometimes it works, sometimes it... You're seeing it has... You know, depends on these three scenarios."
238
00:34:17.504 --> 00:34:28.884
Like, h- how should I think about that? Um, I don't wanna answer that question. What I will tell you, though- Yeah... it, is it will 100% be your best return on ad spend. It will be your cheapest cost per click. Okay.
239
00:34:28.934 --> 00:34:38.164
Right? Yeah. Like, by far. Can't tell you if LinkedIn ads are gonna work for you, but I can tell you if they are, this is the best version of them. Exactly. Okay. That makes sense to me. How does your business work?
240
00:34:38.204 --> 00:34:40.444
Are you a spread on another spread? 'Cause, like...
241
00:34:40.624 --> 00:34:53.844
So if I'm a bank, right, I, I think of Nathan as like, dude, you, you could bring me so many people, right, who we can lend against, and you have this software that uses a lot of this data you're collecting to very quickly make s- very strong, educated guesses.
242
00:34:53.884 --> 00:34:58.784
So you can get a loan in, like, under 24 hours on, like, if somebody's gonna be, uh, a great candidate or not.
243
00:34:59.264 --> 00:35:08.804
And so I would look at that and go like, um, "Dude, uh, you know, ch- charge me, you know, every time, like, we get a loan through you." Is that how the model works? Sorry, just to be clear, we're-- It's our own fund.
244
00:35:08.844 --> 00:35:19.684
We're lending our own money. We're not giving leads to banks. It's my own fund. Okay. All right, this makes sense. Yeah. You, uh... Maybe I misunderstood. So you, you, you tell me.
245
00:35:19.744 --> 00:35:29.744
Um, who, like, what kind of folks have you raised from? My understanding was like, um... I think you and I have talked about this. I used to run a, help run a company where we were buying mobile apps, and so, like, um...
246
00:35:29.894 --> 00:35:39.924
I, I guess, yeah, we, we had, like, committed debt, where, like, we had a credit facility we worked with, with two separate banks with fairly similar covenants, and, like, we would draw on that anytime that we wanted to make an acquisition.
247
00:35:40.124 --> 00:35:42.604
It sounds like you were saying that the model is a little bit different than that, actually.
248
00:35:43.664 --> 00:35:52.544
Well, yeah, so it's like when someone raises a V- when somebody raises a VC fund, right, they, they, the c- the, the LPs, right, they don't wire all the money on day one. They do capital.
249
00:35:52.604 --> 00:35:57.404
The, the L- the GP does capital calls when they have deals ready to fund. Sure. We operate the exact same way, right?
250
00:35:57.484 --> 00:36:14.764
So our most recent fund, you know, it started off with my own money, but I wanted cheaper money over time, so we ended up, you know, our third fund is 145 million bucks, and our key partner here i- is a bank, uh, an FDIC, FDIC-insured bank, which gave me capital at a very low rate, which allows me to give money to founders at a much, much lower rate.
251
00:36:14.804 --> 00:36:19.704
So that money is like, you know, it's in our bank, it's ready to go, and we've tied that to agents inside of Founder Path.
252
00:36:19.764 --> 00:36:28.644
So this is a, this is a real account where you can go in here and actually just use the agent called the Capital Raiser card, and when you hit Send, it's gonna spit out a 10-page memo with an offer.
253
00:36:28.674 --> 00:36:38.324
And if you say, "Yes, wire the money," it wires the money to your bank. I mean, this agent has wired over $200 million. That's crazy. I, I haven't seen anything like this. Yeah.
254
00:36:38.424 --> 00:36:49.024
Um, what, what do you think the moat of this business is? And I, I, I assume you're gonna say, "Nathan, well, it's obvious." But, like, do you think of it as like, hey, it's-It's a, it's a lower interest rate, right?
255
00:36:49.084 --> 00:36:55.364
That's the number one thing. Is it, "Hey, we're, we're speedy. Like, we're super fast"? Um, is it the media business?
256
00:36:55.484 --> 00:36:59.884
I'm sure it's a bit of all three, but, like, is, is there a clear, like, hammer, uh, that, that you, you put on top?
257
00:37:00.904 --> 00:37:10.484
What founders tell us is, um, they love the fact that they can come in here, connect their key data platforms, and get funded for up to $5 million in under 24 hours. It saves founders significant time.
258
00:37:10.824 --> 00:37:17.264
And look, we're not always the cheapest money, right? But we're not expensive. I mean, there's other folks putting money out at 40% interest rates.
259
00:37:17.604 --> 00:37:25.764
We've got deals out at 14% interest rates, you know, where we take- Yeah... no warrants, you pay back over four years. There's a two-year IO period, et cetera. Yeah, that makes sense.
260
00:37:25.784 --> 00:37:36.384
So, like, uh, you-- these loans in general, regardless of industry, 'cause there's all these other terms, right, and things you get attached, like, are, are much more simple, right, for somebody who's trying to borrow money.
261
00:37:36.704 --> 00:37:48.784
And then also, like, um, like I've thought about borrowing the money in the business before to use on paid ads or whatnot, and I go like, "Ah, dude, I gotta, like, I have to apply to, like, a bank," and they ask me like 50 fucking questions, and it takes, like, weeks.
262
00:37:48.864 --> 00:37:52.484
And your thing is like, yeah, yeah, that's like a really shit experience. Like, let's just do it today.
263
00:37:53.444 --> 00:38:00.844
Yeah, not only that, you just connect your Google Analytics and Google Ads account, and we look at your ROAS, and we'll just fund you instantly because we see that you're in the money. I mean- Yeah...
264
00:38:00.864 --> 00:38:14.424
we're, we're seriously considering launching a lending arm that lends to media operators, you know, 100K up to five million bucks, so that if you wanna spend a dollar to build your email list and you can generate $1.50 on that subscriber in the first 30 days, we'll fund you growing your email list to a million on your email list.
265
00:38:14.824 --> 00:38:25.704
You know- Yeah... you just come in and connect and get funded. Who does this work well for? And, and what I mean by that is, like, for software, dude, all their data is in Stripe or, you know, another payment platform.
266
00:38:25.744 --> 00:38:33.904
It's well structured. Like, you can easily pull that in, you can benchmark against it. Um, and I imagine s- software is recurring, so it's very predictable.
267
00:38:34.254 --> 00:38:40.944
I would imagine that is not the case with media, it's not the case with services, it's not the case with some of these other businesses. Is that true? That i- yeah, that is true.
268
00:38:41.004 --> 00:38:48.344
So we've written different underwriting models for those different businesses, right? So maybe you are a company and you are, I'm just trying to find an example that's not SaaS.
269
00:38:48.744 --> 00:38:56.824
Maybe you're on, like, Google Play, you're selling an app, right? Or- Yeah... I don't know, you use Bill or Brex or Sho- you sell on Shopify, right? E-commerce. We do a lot of deals there.
270
00:38:56.884 --> 00:39:07.224
The underwriting model is just different for e-com. Yeah. Do you, um, do, do you have the, uh, Apple App Store on here? Like, do you guys do iOS apps? Uh, we do.
271
00:39:07.364 --> 00:39:15.904
We don't have the live connection yet, so you'd have to just- Yeah... upload that manually. Uh- Right... we would just look at your P&L basically via QuickBooks and see the deposits from Apple and do it that way.
272
00:39:16.044 --> 00:39:25.254
But look, we're gonna deploy a billion dollars on the platform, all, all via an AI agent. It's the first agent I've seen that actually is connected to our bank account wiring real money in under 24 hours.
273
00:39:25.284 --> 00:39:29.204
So that's the vision for Founder Path. And, like, we're continuing to invest.
274
00:39:29.573 --> 00:39:40.664
Uh, you know, I think you saw a little bit, but, like, I'm launching brand-new media channels like The Deal, which most of my software founders don't even know about, but I'm walking randomly into small businesses around the country and offering them money on the spot.
275
00:39:40.864 --> 00:39:51.024
We invested 50K in the Cereal Museum, and it got 118,000 views. So this is now driving all of our lead gen for our non-SaaS lending. Yeah. Is this, um, is this working?
276
00:39:51.104 --> 00:39:58.844
Like, are you s- 'cause th- you mentioned, like, the quality of views before. Like, that's a very top of funnel, like, "Oh, that's really interesting," you know, kind of like MrBeast style.
277
00:39:58.884 --> 00:40:03.964
We invest in this, you know, uh, local business kind of a thing. Like, is this actively driving, like, qualified leads too?
278
00:40:04.864 --> 00:40:13.444
Yes, because I'm running the same playbook here that I'm running on the software interviews on my other channel. And the playbook here is take the transcription, and then on Founder Path, build out the SEO value.
279
00:40:13.484 --> 00:40:19.184
It's a nine-by-nine grid. So for every CPG brand we invest in, we feature the brand we invested in along...
280
00:40:19.384 --> 00:40:25.964
Then we take the transcript, and we bucket the use of funds into these nine critical SEO keywords for getting new brands.
281
00:40:26.424 --> 00:40:34.224
So now every one of these pages has its own landing page with examples of, you know, companies we lent to for working capital smoothing or new s- new SKU launches or whatever.
282
00:40:34.244 --> 00:40:41.904
So we're gonna start dominating those keywords and beating out other e-commerce lenders based off transcripts from data. Same playbook. Yeah. Um, this is baller, dude.
283
00:40:41.984 --> 00:40:49.284
Do, do you have, like, an SEO team, or is this, like, all just, like, the playbook that's in your head? Uh, no SEO team. I'm doing most of this.
284
00:40:49.344 --> 00:40:58.104
You know, shout out to my engineering team, which has given me full power to launch all this stuff via Conductor. So I mean, I'm writing code every single day at this point. Yeah. That's cool, dude.
285
00:40:58.444 --> 00:41:10.344
Um, I remember wh- when I was running that mobile app portfolio, we, we wanted to build a software that would, like, connect to the App Store for our diligence, 'cause it was a very manual diligence process, and we had all these people against it.
286
00:41:10.784 --> 00:41:14.424
And, like, it was really hard. Like, we, we weren't able to do it.
287
00:41:14.884 --> 00:41:26.854
Um, so, like, uh, just knowing, and I wasn't on the dev team, but, like, seeing how difficult that problem was to solve and, like, seeing you having done it for, like, you know, whatever, how many industries you had on that page, I'm like, um, you're, um, you're a killer, dude.
288
00:41:27.064 --> 00:41:31.364
This, this is incredible. Well, we're learning. I mean, the SEO traffic right now is not good for these, right?
289
00:41:31.384 --> 00:41:39.184
What we're building-- my point in showing that is there's folks listening that might be thinking, "Well, I can't do what Nathan-- what one of the Nathans have done 'cause I'm not starting with a big audience."
290
00:41:39.214 --> 00:41:47.334
And what I will tell you is it's not about, like, how much you start with. I mean, there's people that have a million YouTube subscribers, and they post a new video, and it gets 10 views. Yeah.
291
00:41:47.344 --> 00:41:52.784
There's people on X, there's people on LinkedIn with 90,000 followers. They post a LinkedIn post, it gets 10 views. Like- Yeah...
292
00:41:52.794 --> 00:42:01.104
it doesn't matter how many subs-- Every piece of content has to stand on its own in terms of the algorithm and the platform you're embedding it in. And so anyone can get started here.
293
00:42:01.144 --> 00:42:12.304
You just have to think about what is the sort of attention hook for your audience on the right platform. Yeah. Um, dude, I, I asked you to send me some, like, hot takes or, like, things, things you believe.
294
00:42:12.724 --> 00:42:22.204
And, um, I like one of these, these things you sent me. You say, uh, that the fund managers who win won't have the most capital, they'll have the best audiences, which leads to the best deal flow.
295
00:42:22.304 --> 00:42:35.144
Um, you're clearly doing this very well. Who-- If I wanted other blueprints for this, like, who, who else is killing it at this game? Oh, gosh. I mean, look, what, what's interesting is actually more about sequencing.
296
00:42:35.204 --> 00:42:43.924
Okay, let's look at Andreessen for a second, Andreessen Horowitz. Yeah. Best VC fund in the world, right? Really, really great brand. They are now trying to catch up on the media side, right?
297
00:42:43.964 --> 00:42:52.404
They launched their own competitor to, or funded a competitor to TPBN, right? They are trying very hard to launch and build their own media brand. You see the folks on the All-In pod, right?
298
00:42:52.484 --> 00:43:00.164
Chamath is now trying to launch his own YouTube channel to maybe diversify away fromJ- having every, all of his eggs in the all-in podcast bucket, right?
299
00:43:00.204 --> 00:43:09.204
So there's, there's people that are very good finance that then do media. There's people, I imagine your audience, that are very good in media, and they're going, "Man, I wish I had a $10 million fund," right? Yeah.
300
00:43:09.504 --> 00:43:17.624
And then, and then there's other people that run physical locations, like a retail shop, going, "Man, I wish my TikTok account brought me more in-person traffic."
301
00:43:18.024 --> 00:43:29.884
So, like, my thesis on the world, I s- I'm sort of calling it ABC Capital. It's Atoms, Bits, and Capital. Atoms is the physical asset. Bits is the media audience or the software and code. And C is the capital.
302
00:43:29.984 --> 00:43:40.964
The winners over the next 10 years are gonna be the ones that make all those things work together. Yeah. Um, I love it. How I... H- how do you spend your day? Like, like, if I followed you around, what would I see?
303
00:43:41.013 --> 00:43:50.724
'Cause what's really interesting about you, so one thing I, I like about you, you're, you're extremely fast. So, like, any time I, like, text you, it's, like, instant text back. Like, you're, you're just, um...
304
00:43:51.004 --> 00:43:56.614
You're very, like, dialed. And I, I wanna know more about, like, your, your day. How do you allocate your day? What would you guys guess?
305
00:43:56.944 --> 00:44:01.724
I'm, I'm gonna ask Nathan too, but just in the comments below or somewhere, just tell me, what would you guess my, my sorta day looks like?
306
00:44:01.763 --> 00:44:07.584
Let's say, do you think I have a big break in the morning where I do most work, then I do meetings in the afternoon? Do you think I gym in the morning and do meetings in the afternoon?
307
00:44:07.624 --> 00:44:18.244
Do you think I stay up late to do work or I'm a morning bird? Nathan, what's your guess on some of those things? I feel like you wake up at 6:00 AM, uh, i- in that shirt.
308
00:44:18.584 --> 00:44:28.624
[laughs] With red light therapy, and you're like, you're like, uh, you're like software Bryan Johnson. [laughs] That's hysterical. Um, so a couple, a couple things.
309
00:44:28.724 --> 00:44:34.494
I, I ha- I wear Oura Ring, so I keep my stuff very healthy, but there's this app called E-N-D-L, Endel. It's free. Um- Yeah...
310
00:44:34.494 --> 00:44:42.664
and it's very cool because it basically creates all these sound therapy things to help you focus, and it actually generates it on the phone. So it works when Wi-Fi's not working, when you're on an airplane, et cetera.
311
00:44:43.004 --> 00:44:51.254
This keeps me focused in the morning. But what, what surprises a lot of people, most people, I think, win in life when, um, they can move extremely quick. Speed is the ultimate winner.
312
00:44:51.764 --> 00:44:56.294
Now, if your calendar is booked back to back, you can't move quickly. So I actually made a priority.
313
00:44:56.384 --> 00:45:03.864
I mean, when I'm not batching podcast interviews, this is my schedule next week, I have nothing, so that I can react- This is incredible... very quickly to big opportunities. Yeah.
314
00:45:03.984 --> 00:45:13.464
This is not what I would assume the calendar of somebody who's doing a million dollars a month, like, looks like. It's engineering. It's with my engineering team. It's podcasts. It's my management call.
315
00:45:13.484 --> 00:45:22.304
And then outside of that, I am taking advantage of big opportunities with the free time. Yeah. What big swings are you taking right now? We're investing.
316
00:45:22.664 --> 00:45:32.544
Uh, I, I'm trying to figure out how to get more into physical assets. Let me give you an example. A company connects to Founder Path that sells software to waste management companies.
317
00:45:33.284 --> 00:45:43.224
I don't wanna just fund the software company. I want the software CEO to let me fund his customers purchasing waste management trucks. And it's really hard to, like, figure out how to get through there.
318
00:45:43.344 --> 00:45:53.374
So the swing I'm trying to decide whether to take or not is, do I just go raise a fund and roll up all the software waste management companies, and then go roll up all the physical assets underneath?
319
00:45:53.424 --> 00:46:02.224
Uh, this would be a major swing. Uh, I think it's the ultimate AI hedge, though, is to have the physical atoms plus the bits plus the capital. So, like, that's a big swing I'm taking.
320
00:46:02.264 --> 00:46:16.364
You know, I'm spending an inordinate amount of time on, um, travel and meeting founders in person. I mean, it feels good to me to do that. Um, I don't manage my team, like, super tightly in terms of, like, week...
321
00:46:16.424 --> 00:46:24.344
I mean, you just saw my calendar. There's no one-on-one stuff. These are sorta, like, bullshit things that I'm nervous about, so I'm not answering your big swing question, but that's what's top of mind. No.
322
00:46:24.484 --> 00:46:33.924
Uh, uh, do, do you have an operator in the business? Like, how, how do you get by with, like, no internal team calls or very few internal team calls? Um, just the 9:00 AM weekly kickoff with my management team.
323
00:46:33.964 --> 00:46:41.484
That's me, my CTO, uh, my head of underwriting, and my head of sales. And then engineering is the day after. Those are all the...
324
00:46:41.504 --> 00:46:48.724
And there, I mean, we're only five peop- I mean, I don't talk about this a ton, but I, I'll give it to you here. I mean, we're, we're five people doing over a million a month of revenue. And we're- That's crazy...
325
00:46:48.744 --> 00:46:58.124
I'm not gonna share what the profit margin is, but I'm gonna tell you we're very, very profitable. Yeah. Um, wow. And so e- everybody's just a killer in that, in that scenario. Like, you have to be.
326
00:46:58.224 --> 00:47:03.624
And we've g- They have to be. And we've gotten smaller over time. There's nowhere to hide. I mean, we were maybe 15 people a year ago.
327
00:47:03.704 --> 00:47:14.524
But I've let go of some underwriters who, like, frankly, some of the agents, I showed you the capital raiser agent. That agent replaced two or three full-time folks. Yeah. Um, how did you, how did you find these people?
328
00:47:14.564 --> 00:47:20.784
And, like, how, how do you recommend in general people find A+ talent at the leadership level? 'Cause it's hard. Mm-hmm.
329
00:47:20.824 --> 00:47:29.904
The way I found my current, like, CTO is I asked other engineers who the smartest person was they've worked with, and then I did whatever it took to go recruit people. And I, and I pay them whatever they want.
330
00:47:29.984 --> 00:47:40.864
I don't even negotiate. I mean, I, our salary, I'm sure what I pay people is w- will sho- I can't share that obviously, but it will shock you. You gotta pay good, good money for good people. Do you feel rich? Yeah.
331
00:47:40.924 --> 00:47:54.304
I mean, look, I, I think, um, rich is about, uh, you know, doing what you want all day, going to bed when you are out of energy, uh, you know, having an open calendar, nothing on the agenda. Um,
332
00:47:55.244 --> 00:48:01.804
like, literally you can measure it via Oura Ring, look at your stress level, look at your sleep. Uh, so yes, I, I have never, I never think about money.
333
00:48:01.984 --> 00:48:10.184
I just think about taking big risks, and I think that's the ultimate definition of wealth. I do think some people would say, "Well, Nathan, you're single. You have no family. You're 35."
334
00:48:10.624 --> 00:48:16.004
I think I look great for 35, frankly. I can probably date for five more years. [laughs] But, uh, but people might say...
335
00:48:16.164 --> 00:48:25.354
Like, and I do sometimes see other, like, men my age, married with, you know, you know, on Mother's Day, pictures of their family, and I go, "Ah, like, am I waiting too long? Am I putting too much on the business?"
336
00:48:25.424 --> 00:48:33.924
But, like, look, I mean, Nathan, you know this. Every founder that I know that's really crushing it is upset. They don't have work-life balance. It's just not a thing. So- Yeah...
337
00:48:34.134 --> 00:48:41.424
that's where I'm sort of, like, maybe most people would say I'm not rich or wealthy, is I just, you know, I'm not dating. I don't have a family. Do you, do you want that stuff?
338
00:48:41.464 --> 00:48:52.164
I mean, one, one thing I'll often ask people on, on these, these episodes when I'm jamming with somebody is particularly when they have a significant other, I always ask them a bunch of questions about that, 'cause y- and you and I chatted about this in person, I think.
339
00:48:52.324 --> 00:49:04.054
I'm definitely a waiter. A- and in my head, I think I did that for m- I'm doing it for many of the wrong reasons. Like, I wanna have everything, you know, all said and done with the business.
340
00:49:04.134 --> 00:49:14.274
I want it to be steady Eddie there, and I wanna be the person that I, I think my dream person will want. And what I hear a lot of the people who already are in relationships, it's kinda like, "No, fuck it.
341
00:49:14.344 --> 00:49:22.704
Don't, don't wait." Like, the, the... You want somebody who's gonna stick with you, who's gonna see you grow into that person, like, eventually. And, like, you, you shouldn't be procrastinating against that.
342
00:49:23.184 --> 00:49:35.304
How do you, how do you feel about that? What, what do you want? For me, I think about it in a very black-and-white way. If I was married with two kids right now at 11:43 AM, they're obviously off at school.
343
00:49:35.344 --> 00:49:41.244
Maybe they're w- you know, my partner's working here in the office. But, like, I have to then think about what I'm cooking for the family tonight.
344
00:49:41.284 --> 00:49:47.464
Well, right now, I just go on Uber Eats, and I get $40 from Fray's Sauce, you know what I mean, here in Austin, Texas, and it's done, and I can just stay productive.
345
00:49:47.504 --> 00:49:56.104
So, like, in my opinion, if I was really unhappy or I felt, like, low energy all day long, and I really felt like I needed sort of that thing, I would go seek it more. But I'm very...
346
00:49:56.224 --> 00:50:02.284
I just don't feel that, and I don't wanna g- I don't see the value yet in the opportunity cost. You know, look, I might also be blinded a bit.
347
00:50:02.324 --> 00:50:11.084
I mean, you, you, you, you just see all these people that are in unhappy relationships, right? And, uh, and, and, you know, they stay in it for the kids. They stay in it for religion. They stay in it for a lot of stuff.
348
00:50:11.184 --> 00:50:20.164
I just never wanna feel trapped. I, I, I value... I mean, if you take one thing from listening to this episode, guys, it's like I value maximum optionality. It's why I'll never sell my media business.
349
00:50:20.204 --> 00:50:30.144
It's why I wanna be really intentional about if I date, how I date, and how I build a family. It's why I keep my calendar blank. I mean, this is all part of my DNA. Yeah. Hell yeah, dude. You're, uh, you're fascinating.
350
00:50:30.204 --> 00:50:39.684
It's, it's, uh, awesome, uh, learning from you, man. I, uh, I appreciate you doing this. Thank you for having me on, and great questions, Nathan. Yeah, dude. Hell yeah. That's the pod. Boom.