Growing Podcasts, Bookkeeping Biz, and Creator-Led Companies with David Senra and Mitchell Baldridge
What do a podcaster, writer, and accountant all have in common? Tune in to find out. (Hint: rhymes with beverage.)
Remember podcaster David Senra? He’s a returning guest, and you may have heard some ads for his Founders podcast at the start of episodes. We are also joined by our friend Mitchell Baldridge, CPA, finance magnate and Twitter threadboi.
We decided to do a podcast version of conversations we have in private. We explore how a single thing (an Overcast ad in this case) can have a crazy impact. We talk about the reach of the internet and marketing. We bounce around ideas for each other’s businesses. And hopefully, some of our ideas can spark or enhance your own ideas too.
Links to Platforms:
Here’s what I learned from the episode:
Each of our businesses is fueled by the internet. But we harness the internet’s power in different ways.
David believes success is about staying in the game long enough to get lucky. Pick something you enjoy, and time will carry most of the weight.
Kobe Bryant practiced more than anyone else. Nobody could catch up to him. You can apply the same idea to whatever it is you are doing.
From Balaji, we learn studying history is a form of leverage. We can gain a lot by studying those that came before us. You can download others’ ideas, but you have to put in the work.
David takes an idea from Walt Disney: in others’ mediocrity, you can find opportunity.
If you want to grow a following on a social media platform, you have to package your message to fit the algorithm.
Mitchell and David have opposite problems. David’s top funnel isn’t scaled to fit his bottom of the funnel. Mitchell’s top funnel outstripped his bottom of the funnel.
David paid for an Overcast ad for his podcast. That ad led him to meet Mitchell. Mitchell introduced David to me. Go on down the line, and the ad led David to be a guest on Invest Like the Best and to gain tens of thousands of Founders listeners. You never know what chain of events will lead to an outsized result.
Learn more about David Senra:
Learn more about Mitchell Baldridge:
Additional episodes if you enjoyed:
Defeating Taxes, Crypto Taxes, and Financial Planning with Mitchell Baldridge
Self-reinvention & building leverage in podcasts with Chris Williamson
Episode Transcript:
Eric Jorgenson: I'm so excited to talk to you guys. And I think we need to start by thanking David for sponsoring this podcast.
Mitchell Baldridge: Thank you, David.
David Senra: You're welcome.
Eric Jorgenson: I don't know if you officially agreed to that before I said that. But you have to do it now because you're on the record. I’m on the record as having volunteered you to sponsor it. And here we are.
David Senra: I told you and I told our mutual friend Chris Powers who I met through you, like never send out an episode without an ad. Just text me first. I will take all your ad inventory that you have. Yes. You don't even have to ask, just like hey, I'm doing a podcast. I put it out there. Here's the Stripe payment. That’s fine.
Eric Jorgenson: This and Chris Powers- Do you have any other podcasts that are in that rarefied list for you, for people?
David Senra: I'm working on it for you. I will take- if you're listening to this and you have a podcast that you want an advertiser on, just get in touch me. I will advertise on your podcast.
Eric Jorgenson: I think this is- I'm really excited to watch you do this because you're one of the only people I know who's literally all in on only podcast. And I feel like everyone who does a bunch of different stuff is like podcasts are so fucking hard to grow. I don't know how to do it. Like it either grows through word of mouth or doesn't. And I feel like you're the person thinking the hardest about how to grow literally just a podcast. And I'm always excited to see all the tactics and stuff you've come up with for it.
David Senra: So that's actually interesting because I went on- well, one way to grow- the best way to grow a podcast is through other podcasts. Obviously, the main driver is word of mouth. But the point I made, I went on to Not Investment Advice podcast with like Truong Phan, Jack Butcher, [inaudible 1:44] and all these other people – or all the other people, there’s three of them. But we talked about this because the point was that I made on the podcast is like no one actually knows. There are some ways that they test and they have ideas. But I think the way I phrased this is like the unknown unknowns of podcasting is a lot larger than the known knowns. Because I know a lot of people think, oh, it's saturated, oh, it's too late. And I have the exact opposite opinion. That it's like day one. We're sitting at the very bottom of a giant technological revolution. And we have no idea where this thing's going to go.
Mitchell Baldridge: So, I know, real Gs move in silence. But do you have- we were talking about- like lasagna. But you were talking about, like you were doing Overcast ads, like that doesn't work anymore. Are those too expensive? Or what are the, just if you were starting a podcast today, and you just want to grow your podcast, what do you do?
David Senra: Okay, so the answer is I don't know. I'm not entirely sure. I'm like in the process of figuring out. The biggest thing, because this is a non answer, like, what has been the single biggest driver of growth from my podcast? Go on Invest like the Best and then have that episode go viral to what Patrick just tweeted the other day. He's like, we've done 300 episodes. Most likely, that episode will be the most downloaded episode he's ever done.
Eric Jorgenson: Holy shit. Really?
Mitchell Baldridge: It came out six weeks ago, or-
Eric Jorgenson: It was the most- your episode is the most downloaded episode of Invest Like the Best.
David Senra: It's on track to. After the first seven days, it was- it had the most- it was fourth of the most- of the first week downloads, and then it just kept ripping. And so again, that makes no sense. I don't deserve that by any means. If you look at the list of guests, its like billionaire CEO, billionaire CEO, public company, or billionaire investor, billionaire investor, public company CEO, and me. It's just like that doesn't make any sense.
Mitchell Baldridge: Powered by espresso.
Eric Jorgenson: He’s had some insane guests. Many insane guests.
David Senra: Yeah. And obviously, me joining his podcast network, he's going to put like a lot of emphasis behind it. And they say unbelievably nice things about the Founders podcast, everything else. But my point is that's not- that's not advice, because I don't even know how that happened. I did not expect that to happen. The only person that expected that to happen is our mutual friend who we were just talking about, Sam Hinkie. He's like, “No, I knew this was going to happen.” Because I got an invitation to go visit him. That episode came out on Tuesday. He had told me like the week before, he's like, “Hey, next weekend, why don't you come visit?” And I was like, oh, and when I was there, I was like, oh, this was just kind of not luck, I forgot the word I used, where like, oh, this is just a coincidence like this happened to be just the biggest week ever. He's like, “No, it's not a coincidence. I expected this to happen.” But as Mitchell says, like Sam’s got a giga brain. I don't understand that either.
Mitchell Baldridge: Well, the reason we're really here to today is for me to read in the record that I called your shot a year ago.
Eric Jorgenson: That's true. I don't know if you have a strict like draft number of times when people signed up as Senra super fans, but I think Mitchell is early, like double digits. He gave me the Senra pill. I know he gets credit for me for sure.
David Senra: So that- okay, so this is like, basically, we were talking in private. We're like, hey, we have all these- so people understand why we're doing this podcast. We have all these interesting conversations. We're all building different businesses fueled by the internet, largely. And we get to have- we get to meet all these crazy people. Because if you produce things of value on the internet, like they act as magnets, and they just bring in all these likeminded people. And so, you find yourself learning from these gifted people in private. And so, the idea that us three were talking about, I think it was Eric's idea actually, just like, hey, why don't we just all get on a podcast? What do you guys want to talk about? Well, let's just talk about the same- as much as we can, which obviously, some things are always going to stay private. But as much as we can, let's just discuss how we're thinking about our work today because there's ideas in that. Just like the same reason I'm reading hundreds of biographies of entrepreneurs, like there's ideas in those books that are valuable. Those people are dead. They don't need them anymore. Why don't we use them? And so, since we're all alive and building businesses, and we have these conversations through text, through FaceTime, through phone calls, let's try to put a lot of this out there. So one of those things is what you just said, where I consider Mitchell like this super connector. He's like- my version of him is like super polite, unbelievably nice, sneakily funny. He makes me laugh. He just says the craziest shit. And you don't see it coming because it's like this dry wit.
Eric Jorgenson: We'll see if he's still funny when he's recorded. Most of his jokes you can't get recorded.
David Senra: You can’t. And they're completely improv because it's like he's responding off something you said. I'm like, dude, he is quick.
Mitchell Baldridge: They can’t get repeated.
David Senra: Mitchell gave me this, actually, this way to think about things I never thought about. It's like, I think of it like the golden retriever idea, where he's like, some people, they just like, they bounce around. They're super nice. And they're so polite. Think about a golden retriever, like how a golden retriever greets a stranger. Yet underneath that, it's like this killer brain and really serious operator. And the more I observe Mitchell, I'm like, oh, he's doing this. He just goes around, hey, I'm just doing a couple of Twitter threads, and I'm doing these conferences, and I just happen to know everybody. And all this business just rains down out of the sky on to any business that he starts. And so, it's like, oh, this guy is like the golden retriever.
Eric Jorgenson: I will say, Mitchell makes it look easy a lot of the time. Mitchell makes it look way easier than you do, David.
David Senra: Because I don't like- 100%, because I'm the exact opposite, where I'm very much like a lone wolf. I was just like trying to grind away by myself. But he just launched something or he just said something earlier that I think is important. It's about just staying in the game long enough to get lucky. So, I've repeated this on a bunch of episodes because it's very obviously in his books, it's like, just stay alive, stay in the business you're in, if you enjoy it, just time will carry most of the weight. You just got to stay alive to get lucky. So, I had no fucking idea how to grow a podcast. And I did it the exact worst way because I was like, hey, I'm going to have- I have no social media following.
Mitchell Baldridge: I remember I was like walking down the street talking to David on the phone. And he's like, “Well, the easy way to grow a podcast is just to go on other people-” We were talking I think about Ben and David at Acquired, and he's like, “Well, they just did it the easy way. They just went on everybody else's podcast.” -what you said, but it was the easy way at the time. And I was like, why don't you do it the easy way, David?
David Senra: And so they actually helped- because I remember- I talked to Ben years ago because he was developing this like service called Glow that would let you sell a private RSS feed. And I was like one of the first customers on there. But the reason I said I did it the difficult way is because not only did I not have a big social media following, not only was I really introverted, and I decided hey, I'm not going to do interviews, so there's going to be no- like guests can't Tweet or Instagram or anything about it. And I'm going to put my episodes behind a paywall. On hard mode.
Eric Jorgenson: Which you came on my podcast like three months ago and proudly laid out your entire bulletproof case for a paywall and how genius it was and then immediately left my podcast, changed everything, and went on Patrick O'Shaughnessy’s podcast. Like God damn it, David. So now you get to tell the story of changing your mind, which is also going to be interesting.
David Senra: Okay, so this is the benefit of- I talked about this yesterday where I became- I started becoming friends with Truong Phan who I knew because the guy went from like having no Twitter following to having like half a million followers in like a year and a half, and you just couldn't get away from his threads.
Eric Jorgenson: Yeah, amazing writer, hilarious guy.
David Senra: That is a combination of he does a lot of research, he's a really good writer, and he's funny. And so the first time we talk, we wound up talking for like two hours. And we wind up saying exactly the same about like, hey, if you gave us a bag full of money, which we're going to get no matter what, it's like the day to day life is not going to change other than you might have semi nicer shit, other than like he just wants to research and be completely plugged into what he's doing and write. And I just want to read and make podcasts and talk to other smart people. But what happens is when you're- and the reason we started linking up is because I've watched his podcast for a long time. He's discovered Funders, started getting really into Founders, and then invites me on his podcast. Same situation with you two guys. And what happens there is like, then because people- you've put out work that gives value to other people in the form of books, Twitter threads, podcasts, whatever it is, it's like they reciprocate. And so, then Truong schools me on like, hey, I have like this crazy set of data, maybe the only person in the world that has read over 100,000 pages of history’s greatest entrepreneurs. I have 20,000 different individual pieces of atomic content sitting in my Read Wise app. I've been repurposing it in other ways, which helped draw in new listeners. But I was like, but I don't know shit. Like, my Twitter following is growing actually pretty fast right now, but nothing compared to him. And so, for like 30 minutes, maybe 45 minutes, he's just like, hey, this is what I've learned. This is what you need to do. Do step one, two, three. Mitchell's done this as well. He's like, okay, and then when you're done with that, jump on LinkedIn because you actually have a better opportunity over here. And this is how you do it. And this is how you- and then, the point being is like if I just didn't know Truong off the street and said, hey, I need an hour of your time, if you can tell me everything that you know about writing and growing a newsletter – in his case he's growing a newsletter, I'm obviously growing a podcast – on Twitter or LinkedIn, that is literally- that would cost thousands of dollars, and it would still be a good deal for me.
Eric Jorgenson: Do you know- how does Truong make money? I feel like he just has a shitload of followers. Does he have products or a business or anything?
David Senra: So, obviously, this is the part of our conversations where like we have to be- like a lot of the stuffs going to be private because people will tell you a lot of things. Truong has like an unbelievable amount of opportunity. To answer your question specifically, it's like he has a very popular newsletter. And he's part of that- you guys know Workweek? Have you heard of this company?
Mitchell Baldridge: That's where Coked Up Options, Charlie joined Workweek. A bunch of people joined Workweek.
David Senra: I don't even know what the hell you're talking about. What is Coked Up Options?
Mitchell Baldridge: You don't know Coked Up Options? Charlie Light became – I want to make sure that I'm telling the truth here – but Charlie has this shitpost account called Coked Up Options, John W. Rich, Fake Tech.
David Senra: It's a network. It's a network of- I'm going to use the word because I use it. I just hate this word, creators. I understand that's the word we have to use. I just think there needs to be-
Eric Jorgenson: It’s better than influencers.
David Senra: No, hell yeah. But still, I just don't- It's not how I think about myself. But anyways, it's a network of creators. They're doing- everybody thinks like creator led businesses are this new category. And I know people are making investments in there. That's fine. But these are as old as time. You aggregate attention, you build a fan base, and then you sell- you start buying-
Mitchell Baldridge: You've read 100,000 books. So what are like- what's another kind of network of creator led businesses from a historical standpoint?
David Senra: I wouldn't say a network. I'm saying like when I- what I'm describing is like think about Jimmy Buffett is the example I wound up using yesterday. It was like the guy gets really popular by playing music and then builds out, over time, slowly builds out in every single thing that his- the people that like his music buy from restaurants to vacations. He's got his own strain of weed. He got his own- like you’re a Jimmy Buffet fan, it’s five o'clock somewhere, drink a margarita, probably smoke a little joint in the Keys. That's my interpretation of him. So he's like, oh, I have my own strain of weed, because now weed is legal. And then I'll name all the strains after my songs. Like that's actually pretty smart, what he's doing. My point is like I remember reading a profile of him years ago. He's like making $50 million a year building these businesses over time. So to answer your question, he's got a really, really popular b2b newsletter. And then he's had an unbelievable amount of opportunity. So actually when I talked to him, one of the times I talked to him, I actually brought you up, Eric, because I know they're huge fans of your work. But he has- basically what you say about me, I said about Truong, and it's like he's been focused on hey, this is my main thing. If this pops up different things in the future, I may do them. But so far, he said no. Like other people said, hey, raise a fund, the same things people generally say – raise a fund, do this endorsement, etc. But his whole thing is just like, hey, if I could just read, research, and write all the time, and then he obviously has ideas for scripts and stuff like that. But Workweek is doing, what I hear, incredibly well. And they're building a very sophisticated b2b ad network and then diversifying off of ad revenue through helping creators launch whatever businesses they want to.
Eric Jorgenson: So, they're trying to help creators get- I'm looking at their website right now. They have like a job listing for creator. So you can get hired- you can paid to create your own brand, and they pop in like ads from their network or whatever.
David Senra: There's a ton of people doing this. Look what HubSpot is doing. Like if you go to the HubSpot creator fund, what I noticed is I think they call it the Creator Fund, but it's really- they've adopted the language of venture capital and applied it to podcasts because they're having such success by either buying or partnering with a ton of business podcasts. And if you're selling enterprise software, that is one of the best audiences that you could possibly target because you'd have huge- like the lifetime value of your customer is probably extremely high. Podcast skew heavily educated, a lot of business owners, a lot of executives, a lot of marketing people, a lot of founders.
Mitchell Baldridge: Especially people who are listening to Founders podcasts or who are listening to this podcast are developing themselves, are interested in learning and growing and trying new things to get new outcomes.
Eric Jorgenson: Everyone listening is very smart, good looking, has made great choices in life.
David Senra: No, because it's true. Because when I started advertising on Eric’s podcast and going in Eric's podcast, like I was blown away by the quality of people that listened. I don't- the amount- it's again, another way to think about this, like yes, one way you could target like just sheer amount of people. So, take like Mr. Beats, if you're Mr. Beats scale, then that's different. Like you can sell them hamburgers and chocolate bars and all that. And that makes perfect sense. But you can also have an audience one hundredth thousandth of his size, but if it has the right people in it, it can be just as valuable. And in some cases, you're going to see, and this is where I have to be careful because like there is people that we know that are already doing this. And let's say they have an audience size of 100- 150,000. When you put- you have something that's- I mean, we're going to talk about leverage, which is Eric’s specialty. You have- people are like, David, hire more people or don’t do your editing, do all this other stuff. It's like I understand why you're saying that but like the product itself is leverage. It's pure leverage.
Mitchell Baldridge: Well, I was listening to your- Oh, sorry.
David Senra: No, no, go ahead, go ahead.
Mitchell Baldridge: Oh, well, I was listening to your Kobe podcast this morning that you just released. And he was talking about his practice, his like historical practice as leverage, meaning like he practiced so much more than everybody. Everybody who goes into the NBA is 18 to 22. And he's like, just nobody can catch up because I practice so much. And I've always talked to you, David, about your moat of just having 300 podcasts before anyone ever even heard of the thing, and then you walk into it. And just even if people are going to rip you- no one can rip anybody off. People can't take your idea. But just nobody could catch up with you. Because it's just you're so far ahead, it would take years for anybody to get there doing two a week.
David Senra: And there's actually I thought- this is actually ties into Eric because I've been keep telling people hey, go listen to Eric's crazy podcast Balaji. We got to go back to the Overcast ads, and then I want to go to Balaji, if you guys don't care. But Balaji had this great quote where it's just like, and, Eric, maybe you can fill it in, where he's talking about like, hey, there's 7 billion people alive, but 100 billion people have lived or whatever the case is. And he said, studying history is a form of leverage. Do you know that exact quote, or if you don't mind if we can actually find it? I can probably find it. Because I think it's going to dovetail nicely into what we're talking about.
Mitchell Baldridge: Billions of human lifetimes have passed. You only have one. You can try to figure it all out for yourself in limited time, or you can gain some leverage from the lessons of history. It's the lessons of history book, which Eric has talked about as well.
David Senra: Yeah, that's it. So, you brought up the Kobe episode I just released today. I read a 600 page biography on him. And that biography could have been 250 pages because it's just the same four things over and over again. Find something you're completely obsessed about. Have singular focus. Have one metric. His metric was how many rings do I win? And if I can get to 4, 5, 6, or 7, then I'll have a seat at the table for the all time greats, which is what he wanted to do. He had extreme personal practice habits. He would identify his weaknesses and then complete- and then keep working till his weaknesses are now his strength, and then study the greats. I was amazed. I'm not kidding. Like a dozen times in that 600 page book, it is Kobe just watching videotapes. Somebody, a promoter when he was 17, because he gets signed to Adidas. He jumps from high school to the NBA. So, he gets signed to Adidas before he ever plays a game of basketball. One of those promoters goes to his house. In Kobe’s house when he's in high school, he opens the closet door, and it's a stack of VHS tapes of just Michael Jordan games. And all he would do- Kobe’s girlfriend at the time said, “Hey, yeah, I dated Kobe in high school.” “What was that like?” “I'd go over his house at night and we'd watch tapes of Michael Jordan.” He was obsessed. And so he talks about that. I just recorded a bonus episode for his book Mamba Mentality, I'm going to drop in a couple days. And he talks about that. He's like, listen, because I just completely brainwashed myself with- I downloaded useful information, if I needed to add something to my game, then I could get it immediately. So, I’d try it. It didn't work. Try it again and keep going. But he's like, when you keep studying the greats, your learning curve is shorter. And that was the entire book. That's why I thought that podcast was going to be like two hours. Oh, man, that's going to take me forever, it is going to be a two and half hour podcast. It's like an hour long because it's like, oh, it's just the same thing. He did this when he was 4, 7, 11, 13, 17 until he retires.
Mitchell Baldridge: Well, and then he had Jordan. He had Jerry West. He had Tex Winner. He just like had these- The coolest thing about that podcast was you talking about him thinking of his whole life as an epic or like thinking of his life-
David Senra: He read Ender's Game. He read Ender’s Game and he's like, the protagonist is like on this mythical quest. He's like- he thought in narratives. This is like it breaks my heart talking about this because I just so wish we got to see- like, you have that insane work ethic and drive. Well that- Okay, so we saw what he did on a basketball court. But like he was already winning Emmys, Oscars. He had crazy investments. Like he was already making hundreds of million dollars. Like I wanted to see like, okay, now you have a guy that's 40 years old still getting after it. What is he going to do the next 20 and 30 years? I would’ve loved to be able to watch that.
Eric Jorgenson: He's going to have a second half like Arnold. Same obsession, like redefined a sport, then went on to be governor, then- Crazy multiple chapters over and over again.
Mitchell Baldridge: Yeah, Arnold had been a real estate investor who was like a multi millionaire before he ever even started body building.
David Senra: He had a mail order business. He had a seminar business. He had a European bricklaying business. I've done two podcasts on him. He's- an inspiration for him and something that Kobe would agree with-
Mitchell Baldridge: He was the content influencer.
Eric Jorgenson: Yeah, he was. He had like pamphlets and courses and-
David Senra: He partnered up with this guy named Joe, I don't know how to pronounce- Weider. Yeah, so he winds up building a- Joe Weider builds one of the first bodybuilding fitness media empires and then sells physical like weights and everything like that. But he saw Arnold early in life and did a deal with him. And so Arnold's like, yeah, you can take my pictures. You can make me famous. But anything I monetize after that is mine. And Joe's like, yeah, that's fine. I don't care. And he was again, the same main idea, like why would you want to listen to Founders? Because everybody finds a blueprint, and then runs it in a different manner in their day and time. He was running- Arnold was running this guy named Reg Park. He tells you over and over again in the book, he's like, “Reg is my hero. I put his picture up on my wall. I worked out looking at him.” I said, okay, you get famous by being a bodybuilder. Okay, then you launch businesses, okay. Then you become in movies. And he's like, oh, I'll just do that, too.
Eric Jorgenson: I tried to do that with Balaji actually. I asked him like at each stage if he had a model for each, like the transition that he was going through, like first in academia, then as kind of an entrepreneur, and now as like an ideolog, or whatever you want to- however you classify whatever he's doing right now. But it's interesting because it's hard to find one model for your whole life. I mean, Ed Thorpe is as close as you have, David. I don't know, Mitchell, if you have one. But it's like even finding one per chapter can be really, really helpful.
Mitchell Baldridge: Yeah, I've thought a lot about that. And you have to- or just I think it was Tim Ferriss or someone said, oh, who's your hero? And whenever someone asks a question on a podcast, you just start to ask yourself the same question. And it's like I've made a practice of just having a lot and having a lot for different reasons. I can't take Ed Thorpe because David already took him.
David Senra: No, everybody should. Tim did- And if people are listening to this and don't know who Ed Thorpe is, Tim Ferriss did a fantastic two part interview. I watched them both on YouTube. You can listen to it on Tim's podcast obviously, but I think seeing Ed Thorpe will blow your mind because he's 90 years old, and I'm telling you, he looks like he's 65. And that's part of why he could be your hero because he took- a lot of entrepreneurs, a lot of highly driven people, they will just destroy their health. They willingly forego working out, sleep, nutrition, because it's like one extra hour or two extra hours daily that they can work. That's very short term thinking. Ed took a much longer view. He's like, no, I view every hour that I work out as one less day I'll be in the hospital at the end of my life. That's a simple but brilliant idea.
Mitchell Baldridge: Arguably, and you talk about this, but Founders is just full of antiheroes. And then Ed Thorpe in the middle as like Yoda. But you have Larry Miller, that whole book is about don't do this, or you have Steve Jobs, like I don't want my life to look like Steve Jobs’ life, genius creator, changed the world, but I don't want my family or my choices to kind of turn out that way. They haven't. They won’t. But how do you separate that?
David Senra: I did have a random thought the other day though, just imagine what he went through the last few years of his life. I'm not talking about the cancer, which was devastating. I'm talking about like you made a product and everywhere you go, you see people using it in real life. That's different from build an app. How many people use apps that Mark Zuckerberg made or bought? You know what I mean? Let's talk about made because I guess buying is a little different. But something digital people use or maybe a song you hear playing, that's kind of cool, but they're literally like walking around with this thing that came from your mind. Because it's not like the iPhone- sitting around in 2000, like maybe we should build a phone. His idea, Steve talked about a truly personal computer for decades. He just didn't know- there's no way- like he didn't know what form factor it was going to take. Although he had heard what Edwin Land, which is his hero and somebody I won't shut the fuck up about and I'm sure people are annoyed. They are like, David, shut the fuck up about Edwin Land. But Edwin Land gives this talk. I think it's in the 1970s, maybe 1971. And unprompted, no script, you just have him on camera, and he talks about, hey, eventually, you're going to have a device with you all the time. It's going to be a camera, but it's going to be so much more. And he's like, it's going to fit in your pocket. And he's like, you won't take- Edwin Land is the founder of Polaroid, in case people are like, why is this guy obsessed with cameras. But you won't take 15 Polaroids a day, you'll take 100 pictures or he didn't say. It's just numbers. It's like you just will take pictures all day long, this is what it will look like. So there is like- the reason I bring that up is because Edwin Land- like Steve Jobs. Why do I talk about Edwin Land? Because Steve Jobs wouldn't shut the fuck up about him either, talked about him when he was in his early 20s. This is my hero. This is who I’m patterning my career after. Then he talks about him when he's dying. One of the last interviews he gives in Walter Isaacson, in that book, he talks about hey, I heard something that one of my heroes Edwin Land said about building a company at the intersection of technology and liberal arts, and I thought that was a good idea. Gold watch Apple presentations. What the fuck does he put up on the board? An but idea he got from Edwin Land. It's just so exciting because it's like when I was younger, I'm like, man, how the fuck does everybody figure things out? Like somebody, these people are just so far advanced, like oh, we just- this is in the Jordan- This is in the Kobe book, because everybody's lighting into Jordan, or to Kobe at the time. You're just copying Jordan, you're just copying Jordan. He's like, and I copy David Richardson. And I copied Dr. J. And I copied all the people that came before me. He goes, he still had to do the work. And Jordan makes the point in that book. He's like, that’s how humans learn. We copy and ape each other. It's imitation precedes creation. We're going to imitate first. We're going to take in all these ideas. And then hopefully if you're doing it correctly, you mix it with things that are unique about you and the ideas that are unique to you. And the output will be completely different. But yeah, you're going to copy and download other people's ideas, but you got to do the work.
Eric Jorgenson: And you see that in every medium. Like you see musicians practice scales, practice songs, play other people's stuff before they come up with their own. In writing, Ben Franklin used to do copy work. He would write out literally hand for hand exactly what other people had written. Then he would take the bullet points, set them aside, write his own essay off of those points, and then compare it to the original essay. 100%, doing memetic learning, that is how humans learn languages and movements and everything.
David Senra: It's perfectly normal. And so if I know people are like- I say this line on the podcast, which I stole from this rapper named NF, like all these things come from my love of hip hop. And it's like the mind is a powerful place. What you feed it affects you in a powerful way. That's a really- that's a good bar. But the mind is a powerful place. What you feed it affects it in a powerful way. It's like I know I'm going to copy because we all copy. So, you got to be very fucking careful what you let in your brain, which is why I spend so much time reading books. It's like because I can be staring at the wall, I can be watching TV, I can be looking at Twitter, I can be doing whatever. It was like there's no higher value activity to me in the world to do when you're not working, when you're not taking care of your health, you're not doing something fun, you're not spending time with friends and family, then reading stories of great people who came before you. The idea that somebody built- they spent- like I reread my highlights from Sam Walton, Walton’s book. I read his autobiography twice. And I read this other way lesser known biography on him called America's Richest Man, that came out I think right before his autobiography did. And sometimes you miss shit the first time. And I'm like, wait a minute, this guy's writing his autobiography as he's dying. He starts in retail. Like his career was 50 years long, almost 60 years long. You think this guy who was trying to build businesses for five decades, and he discovered nothing that is going to be useful to what you're doing? You're out of your fucking mind. That is absurd. And so yeah, put down your fucking phone, stop watching sports or anything else. Don't listen to other things. Like don't do things where the value accrues to other people. I'm obsessed with basketball. But if we're in the same city, and you guys say, hey, let's go play basketball, I'll definitely do that. I'll dedicate two hours, three hours to playing basketball. Because the benefits accrue to me – the exercise, the dopamine, I get better shape, the fun, the camaraderie, the friends. Now, compare that to a friend of mine said, hey, meet me at the bar for some drinks, and we're going to watch basketball and spend three hours drinking alcohol, not working, not learning, and watch other grown men make a ton of money and all the value accrues to them. Some things, yes, you're going to do that anyways, and I'm not criticizing people's personal choices. If you find that unbelievably fun, then do it. I like to watch Quentin Tarantino movies. You could argue there might be value in storytelling and all this other stuff that I apply in my work. But the point being is, man, reading biographies is one of the highest activity, highest value activities in the world. Everyone's like, how do you read so much? My response is, how do you not? It's perfectly- you guys are laughing at me. I'm serious. I mean, it's like it makes perfect sense. Why wouldn’t you? This guy spent six decades and then he writes down, he distills his life learning into a book that you can read in a week. And you're like, nah, I don't need to-
Mitchell Baldridge: I do one better. I just listen to the Founders podcast and get it in an hour.
David Senra: No, it's in addition to, not in replace of. Yes. Do I expect people to read 300 biographies? No. But people are like, how should I use Founders podcast? One, I think you should listen to two episodes a week. That means in one year, you'll download the best ideas from a hundred of history's greatest entrepreneurs, and then pick one a month and read the whole fucking thing. Because I'm reading- Somebody said this on Twitter the other day. It's perfect. They're like, David is not summarizing the books. He's talking about what he feels is most interesting. It's my viewpoint. I have no idea what- there are parts that I skip over because they're not important to me. One of the most impressive people that I've met, and that's the superpower of Founders, like Founders attract founders. And then I get to talk with all these super smart people. Some of them are in the startup domain. A lot of them own private companies you'll never hear of. And so one of these dudes is like really young. He has a company, like he has patented technology, private company he owns 95% of and he's just printing money. And you ask him what he does. He's like, I kayak, I hike, I work on my business, I read books, I listen to Founders. I'm not fucking kidding. That's what he says. And so anyways, he had sent me this idea, a screenshot of a picture. I'm like, this sounds familiar. I read this before. And it's in the essays of Warren Buffett by Lawrence Cunningham. And it's about some kind of weird tax advantage thing that Mitchell will probably understand that Warren was doing regarding real estate or taking business profits from real estate and offsetting some shit. I don't have- basically I read that part. I remember reading it, didn't highlight it, didn't bring it up on the podcast. But then this dude listens to the podcast, buys the book, reads the book. He's like, oh, this is what I needed. That's why you read the books.
Eric Jorgenson: Mitchell, did you- Is there like a genius thing- I remember reading- I think I sent you a thread about the Berkshire structure that was like uniquely interesting and valuable, but I didn't understand it all. And I sent it to you and I was like, is this a real thing? Is this legit? How does it work? Will you teach us about it?
Mitchell Baldridge: I mean, I would be interested to like, and I think about doing this or we should talk to Chris Blumstrand or somebody who's just neck deep in that company’s- the Berkshire expert. I've always thought of-
David Senra: He's got a good episode of business breakdowns on Berkshire.
Mitchell Baldridge: Really? I should listen to that. I always think about their tax deal as being wrapped around an insurance company. And there's something called a captive insurance company, and everybody- Businesses can do this in the sense of if you have an insurable risk, meaning I run a trucking company, and obviously, we have auto insurance, and we have this huge risk built around this. What a lot of these companies will do is basically spin up their own insurance company and partner with other trucking companies and basically say we're going to take the first million dollars of insurance risk, and we're going to reinsure the rest, and we're going to pay ourselves premiums for that million dollars, and then we're going to have to have money in the bank to cover that risk. So that money is then post tax. And now you have this insurance company that you can go essentially make investments out of. And so, that's what- I mean, go look at all of Sequoia’s partners and their endowments or their insurance companies or their foundations or their whatever they are, and then go look at the richest companies or the richest founders in the world that have ever existed. And they own those same structures. They own endowments, foundations, insurance companies. And they basically pay tax once, if they pay tax at all, but they pay tax once, where they just go, hey, we're going to take our money, we're going to pay tax on it. And then we're going to send it into some structure where we never pay tax again and where the money just exists in this corporate entity that basically perpetuates forever, because we don't need money. And if we do need money, we will pay ourselves out of this thing. And if we want to go make an investment, we'll make it out of this thing. So I mean, trusts are like a miniature version of that. But it's always just, how can I have this entity outside of my corpus, outside of my world? Is this interesting? My bad.
Eric Jorgenson: If Mitchell talks about accounting for more than 90 seconds, an alarm goes off. No, you had me. I was interested.
David Senra: You know what the interesting thing is, though, that we've talked in private and I think we should put on the podcast, and this is another thing where Truong Phan has kind of influenced my thinking on this because I've been really- he's like, listen, man, he's like, yeah, first of all, he's like, Twitter clearly- and this is what Mitchell's repeated to me over and over again. He's like, you need to write threads, you need to write threads. You're reading an entire book. You're stupid for not writing threads. He's like, I will help you. I'll connect you with people. He does all these really nice things. I talked to Truong about it. Troung’s like, yeah, he's like, just because there's some people that are like- the Twitter algorithm is not- like it overemphasizes a variety. So he's like, you have a well researched thread that Truong may work on for an entire week and distill it down to like 15 tweets, that is different. He's like, but you'll see people repurposing Wikipedia pages or saying, there's seven people on earth and they don't know how to walk correctly or whatever.
Mitchell Baldridge: The 15 best self help books that-
David Senra: Yes, that. So he's like, you're talking about low- he called it low effort. He's like, your Twitter threads wouldn't be low effort because you read an entire book. And so that is actually something, and now he's convinced me to do it.
Mitchell Baldridge: It’s information density. It's how much can you propel somebody forward? How much value and leverage can you put into 15 posts where it's worth reading?
Eric Jorgenson: So by the same logic that you're doing all the video clips on TikTok and YouTube and stuff that you told me are crushing, the threads fit that exact same model. It's just top of funnel sort of outcome of distillation.
David Senra: Here's the problem: I don't like those shitty threads. And I wasn't- what Mitchell helped influence my thinking and Truong did too, it's like, but your threads won't be shitty. It's like Walt Disney. Walt Disney when he starts Disneyland, amusement parks were like, they were run by carnies, circus people. They didn't call- they didn't call the people guests or customers. They called them marks. This is a sucker who's a mark. And so, everybody's telling Walt Disney- There's a fantastic book called Disney's Land. It's all about Walt Disney's thinking about building that because that was the thing he was most proud of in his life, what he created that was the best. Walt Disney says something that really clicked with me when I was talking to Truong yesterday. And he's just- but he's like, everybody was like, why are you doing an amusement park? They're so shitty. He goes, “Exactly. Mine won't be.” And he's like, their- He doesn't say these words, but this is my interpretation when I read the book, their mediocrity is my opportunity. And so, I didn't bring this up to say I'm going to write Twitter threads. I wanted- because it has had a substantial impact on your businesses. I guess, if you don't- if you're cool sharing, and you don’t have to share numbers or whatever, but it has essentially, like this is the golden retriever Mitchell. It's like, hey, I'm just out here providing value and in the background, he is providing value, all this business is raining down on his head. And he's got this long ass waiting list to get into his firm. And I don't know if you want to talk about the other business. But I just wanted to cue you up for that because that has been super helpful in private conversations and it has changed my thinking.
Mitchell Baldridge: Yeah, I think, ultimately, if you can corner the market on the value you're providing, which I've done a good job in this from a CPA standpoint of on Twitter, as a CPA, I'm the one who's doing it. There's a lot of CPAs on Twitter, a lot of people are doing really, really good jobs. A lot of people who are way, way smarter than me haven't kind of accrued the value I have. And part of that is I’m fortunate. And part of that is that Nick Huber pointed a bunch of people at me and let me go, and then, I've had a lot of help along the way. But then-
David Senra: No, I mean, you’re beating around the bush. I'm glad you brought up Nick because Nick's a good example and you know more than I do. If he was to sell his Twitter, how much economic value has his Twitter brought his businesses? Millions and millions of dollars. That is what I want to talk about. What people have a hard time fucking understanding, why go crazy. And I'm like, you don't understand how valuable podcasts are. They're amazing businesses. People are undervaluing them because it's not like you can't go and buy them. I mean, you can in some cases. But you can't buy Mitchell's Twitter threads. But he's being very modest. Millions and millions- even if he hasn't collected it yet, this has resulted in millions and millions of dollars of value creation from writing a fucking Twitter thread. That's insane.
Eric Jorgenson: They are great threads though.
David Senra: That's the point. But there are threads that have literally saved people millions of dollars. I see the text messages and the DMs he gets because he sends them to me. He's like- sorry, then I'll shut up. Go ahead.
Mitchell Baldridge: Well, but yeah, to the point of, oh, what's the easiest way to grow a podcast? It's to go on other people's podcasts and have other people on your podcast and create this viral message. What's the best way to rank on TikTok? What's the best way to rank on LinkedIn? What's the best way to rank on Twitter? It's like you have to package your gift into the format that the algorithm that serves the platform. You know what I mean? And then if you serve the platform long enough, they give you some little real estate on your profile. We all get to have the little link in bio on Twitter that if you click it, I get- I use that Link Tree thing. And it says where you come in from, and it says how many people have clicked every link. And it's been thousands and thousands. Yeah, I have an email platform that's built out of that, that I don't use enough. But, yeah, to that point, this is a long, long, long game, to your point of this all doesn't have to be captured in the next six weeks, or it's going away, I don't think.
Eric Jorgenson: Mitchell’s was interesting because I think a lot of people start this game and think I'm going to build a following and then figure out what to do with it. And Mitchell, how long were you CPA with a firm before you even joined Twitter?
Mitchell Baldridge: I mean, five, six years. So there's some of that in terms of- it totally changed my business.
Eric Jorgenson: With a ton of experience, with stories to tell and expertise to share. So you just took these conversations that you were already having one on one offline in a professional capacity and were like, alright, let's put my knowledge online in this structured thing on a viral platform, and it massively took off and then you got a line out the door. And now, I think what's interesting is seeing how you're kind of shifting from- I mean, the CPA and accounting and bookkeeping firm is doing well, oversubscribed, and busy but it's-
David Senra: He’s not talking about it. He’s going to be making millions and millions and millions and millions of dollars. I'll say it for him. I don't mean to be bashful, but that’s not even the right use of the word. But he is going- as a direct result of having, really running a blueprint that you've- I think you organized it in the best form. It's why that book, The Almanac of Naval, I've gifted it to so many people. Because all the people are just like I don't know what to do with my life. Read that book. It is going to organize it. He is running the playbook even if he's not working directly off that, the specific knowledge.
Mitchell Baldridge: Oh, yeah, redefine what you do until you're the best in the world at it.
David Senra: You're the only CPA I follow on Twitter, because why would I? You found a weird way to make it fucking fascinating. And as a result-
Eric Jorgenson: And the most exciting thing is, like the reason he’s going to really kill it is because he's shifting from low leverage business models to high leverage business models, which I feel like is the big thing. The CPA firm has a line out the door. He can't scale it fast enough to meet all the demand of all the people who are showing up. I get DMs every single week that are like, hey, can you introduce me to Mitchell? I have tax questions. And I'm like, I will do it, but he will tell you no. So go buy the course or whatever that he's putting together that's like expanding to actually fit the demand.
Mitchell Baldridge: I had this- when David walks on Twitter, he has the catalogue of infinitely leverageable content. And of course, people want to talk to David Senra. But people don't reasonably think that they're going to talk to David Senra. You don't listen to a podcast unless you're me and just start like DMing the guy and going, “Hey, what's going on?” David probably would have responded to you six months ago, but now you just get bombarded. But David had the bottom of funnel totally filled out with this library of years of content. He's telling you to listen to two a week. How long is it going to take you to get through his back catalogue? And then his top of funnel-
David Senra: By then, I’ll have had another 150, so it’s longer than that.
Mitchell Baldridge: Yeah, exactly. You're never- you have this infinite kind of like pile of podcasts that you can never get to of David's and his top of funnel was not scaled to fit to the bottom of the funnel. Whereas I have the opposite problem of, I have a small business. I mean, there's me, there's other CPAs, there's bookkeepers. But you're the leverage guy, Eric, so you're talking about capital leverage, people leverage, operational leverage. I can do all of that. But even then, you can only scale so fast and keep the quality of the product. Versus I built this top of funnel that vastly outstripped my bottom of funnel. So now I'm trying to kind of fill in the middle, I would say.
David Senra: But you are also doing smart things by jumping into other businesses-
Mitchell Baldridge: So yeah, I mean, to what both of you are saying, we're doing two things, or we're doing a few things. But yeah, there's definitely a course in the world that I can provide that's valuable that I've been working on. And then there's a business called RE Cost Seg that Nick is an investor in and an advisor on, and we've been running that which has been amazing and grown very, very quickly, which is awesome, which cost segregation services are this really tax specific niche real estate product.
David Senra: But I didn't know what it was until he mentioned it. Really what I want to focus on is not like the boring details. It's the fact that you have this unbelievable business, the very beginning an unbelievable business and where do you wind up- no because what people are listening to this that they could use is like the dude just launched- no one even understands. Him and his partner have just launched a business that, assuming they stay in the game long enough, will make them millions and millions of dollars probably every year on an annual basis. And it started on Twitter, from Twitter threads. This is my point. It's these things-
Mitchell Baldridge: I met Nick on Reddit, by the way.
David Senra: But where are you getting your leads, where are you getting your customers from?
Mitchell Baldridge: No, yeah, it's all Twitter. Oh, so then the other boring business I'm working on is Better Bookkeeping, betterbookkeeping.com, that we're developing a bookkeeping software and a kind of service platform to provide bookkeeping services and tax services kind of at scale to small business owners. And I mean, my sister has a tech background and has been in video ads for forever and worked for Google and worked for Comcast. And she's like, “Well, yeah, this is a great business. I've seen the customer like pay per click.” And I'm like, no, we don't pay per click, baby. We tweet. And I mean, the idea that you get customer leads without paying is a massive opportunity set in bootstrapping a business.
Eric Jorgenson: I was not expecting to connect these two, but I was going to Money 20/20, actually by the time this comes out, I will have already gone to Money 20/20, this conference, and given a talk on creator economics. And there's a big slide at the end that is like out-marketing department, in-media department. And anybody who is going into the marketplace expecting to lose money acquiring a customer is going to get their ass kicked by anybody who is running a profitable media company or by a creator who is competing for profit just for that attention, and then feeding it back into an ecosystem or a business that is much higher margin because they're earning a profit on getting that attention and the margin on actually selling the product. So people who are going- the pay per click model I feel like is just going to get smoked and out competed and beat into the ground by people who are good at building trust and providing education or entertainment or some combination of them, that people are actually opting into, that's where all the trust is going to flow, which means that is eventually what's going to be directing all of the dollars. And it's creators and podcasters and newsletters and media and video who are actually going to broker that for years.
Mitchell Baldridge: I mean, Facebook's laying people off. The generals are falling. And there's this huge knock on of I posted this thing earlier today that this guy said, money advice can be broken down into these two things. So I said, business advice can be broken down into these two things. Sell things for more than it costs, don't run out of cash while you grow. And it's that used to be true. For a while it was not true because you didn't have to sell things for more than they cost. And you would never run out of cash if people give you enough cash. So there's two- there's real business and then there's whatever. Yeah, if you're going to grow like a nuclear fusion company, you probably need equity investment. But you're not going to take all that equity investment and go pay per click. You're going to bootstrap your own growth.
David Senra: Can I add something on here that I think like I never hear anybody talk about and I don't understand why. Do you guys mind?
Eric Jorgenson: That's what we’re here for.
David Senra: I think the biggest opportunity to exploit is the fact that we don't actually understand the complicated world that we live in. Do you guys know that guy, George Mack? He's on Twitter. He's like a marketer.
Eric Jorgenson: I love George Mack, dude. He helped me a ton with the Naval book. He's great.
David Senra: Yeah, fantastic. He got in Founders early because he DMed me like two years ago saying- like he's after Mitchell, of course. Everybody's after Mitchell. But I have an idea. I have an idea of his that I completely steal. And sometimes I don't even credit him and I need to. And he said something that resonated with me. He's like, there's two types of people in the world: a person that doesn't understand the scale the internet, and a person that knows they don't understand the scale of internet. And so, you could break- when I hear people talk about just in general building businesses or whatever the case is, like a lot of it, the opportunity to me is like the- exploiting what we don't actually understand. So, why I keep repeating that, hey, fuck everything else that you think you know, get in a business that you like and stay in it for a long time. And that is how you're going to capture the most value. Because time carries most of the actual weight. So I'm going to give an example. Like you guys are just talking about paid ads and the difference between paid ads and then creating actual content that people give you for free. And it's like it doesn't have to be either or. It ties this back into how I was trying to grow Founders in the very beginning when I didn't know how to. I thought Overcast was the best podcast app. It's obviously very- you could tell it's made by a person that cares deeply about podcasts. And so that's the one I use because way before I had a podcast, I was obsessed with podcasts in general and audio in general, way before there was even a category of on demand, I loved hearing talk radio and all this kind of stuff. And so I was an Overcast user back before they had- Overcast launched the very first podcast ads inside a podcast player. They are the ones that invented that. Before that, he was- his name's Marco. He was running like a- I think he had Google's ad network, and he's like this kind of sucks because I'm listening to maybe a technology podcast and it has this random thing, like this is kind of crappy. So he's like, I'm just going to rip this out, and I'm going to build my own. And then he's like, then he started thinking, he's like, and there's a blog post I recommend reading where he outlines this thought, and he's like, well, what should I advertise? He's like, well- he runs a podcast too. He loves podcasts. He’s like, the biggest problem with podcasts is not making them. It's growing them. It's finding an audience. It's like why don't I run ads for podcasts? I was one of the first people to buy those ads. And so, Founders would not exist today, us three would not be talking if I didn't do this. So, this talks about exploiting something that you just don't understand, the scale of the internet or how things relate to it because it's just way too complex for a human mind. So I started buying ads. Back then you could get a subscriber for like a dollar, 70 cents, two bucks. I have all of the data on this. And I keep buying ads just because I love Overcast.
Mitchell Baldridge: A subscriber that would pay you- this would be on the free feed.
David Senra: On the free feed. This is going to relate to you. I'm going to connect it all, I promise.
Mitchell Baldridge: Otherwise you'd be a billionaire.
David Senra: Just bear with me. I'm going to connect it to everything in there we're talking about that was spawned from hearing you two talk just now. And so I got thousands of- that's how I bootstrapped the first couple thousand people that listened. One of those people- and then I also had the thought, I was like, this is the best audience you could possibly have for if you're a podcaster because they are so into podcasts. It's iPhone only. They love podcasts so much, they look at Apple podcasts like this isn't good enough. I have to have a crafted experience because that's how much I love podcasts. Those are psycho people. So, I'm like I’m going to buy it. So I bought ads. I was paying around 300 bucks at the time for each ad I buy. And in fact, I kept buying so many that eventually Marco, I remember him like canceling some of my ads. He's like, no, stop. Whatever, I was like please, because I was like putting them in different categories. He was right for what he did. I don’t think he gives a shit about the money. Anyway, this is how this is- again, it's like staying in the game long enough so you can get lucky and exploiting the unknown unknowns. So, I run a 300 dollar podcast ad. That month, Mitchell sees the ad on Overcast. This is fucking going to be fucking crazy. So he sees the ad, starts listening to the free episodes. Then he upgrades because I used to- at that time, I was doing like one free episode and one paid episode. Then he upgrades for almost no money. I was charging way too little at the time for like 50 bucks a year, maybe $100 a year or something like that. Then he upgrades. Then a few months later, he tweets. I think you were tweeting about the episode that you brought up earlier, which is episode 168. It's on this guy named Larry Miller. He owned like 90 something businesses. He was the richest entrepreneur in Utah. He owned the Utah Jazz. He winds up writing his book called Driven, an autobiography by Larry Miller, as he is dying. And he's saying hey, I live in a 30,000 square foot mansion on top of a hill. It's impossible for you to live in Utah and not give me money because I own all these businesses. I own movie theaters and car dealerships and all this crazy shit. And I'm writing this book as a cautionary tale. I destroyed my health. I was a bad father, bad husband, didn't even have fun. It was like the worst possible book, like the worst possible story you could possibly have. But the greatest story- we benefit by knowing that. So anyways, Mitchell, I'm going to connect all this. So Mitchell sees the- I run the Overcast ad, Mitchell sees the Overcast ad. A few months later, he tweets at Founders podcast. I see that tweet. Then I see Sam Hinkie liked that tweet. Then I see two hours later, Sam Hinkie signed up for the Misfit Feed which was at the time- now Founders is a public podcast, anybody can listen to it, its ad based, but at the time it was subscription. Then Sam listens to a ton of them. He winds up buying – I hope he doesn't mind me saying this – but literally probably spent two or three thousand dollars buying gift subscriptions to every single person, like he just gives this out like candy. So then we become- wind up becoming friends. We talk all the time. Then six months after that, he puts me in a text chat with fucking Patrick from Invest like the Best. This is all coming from an Overcast ad. The idea- so I paid 300 bucks for that. I paid $300 for it. I meet Mitchell. Mitchell introduces me to Eric and Eric opens up doors for- you're unbelievably generous to people you introduced me to. Sam puts me in a chat with Patrick. Patrick sends out one tweet in like May saying, “Hey, I never find good podcasts to listen to. I've discovered Founders podcast. It's excellent. Listen to it.” That one tweet sent me hundreds of paid subscribers, hundreds. And then the people in that audience- then I was getting emails from people in Patrick’s audience. They're like, “Hey, I discovered it from Patrick. I love it.” I was selling lifetime access to Founders for like 300 bucks at the time or something. And he's like, “I want 50 of them.” This guy is trying to give me $15,000 over email, dude, because of one tweet. This is again, we don't fucking understand the world we live in and we seem to not understand that we don't understand. It's fucking crazy. So we're like, let's worry about attribution shits. Like no, that's does not- In some cases, there's a lot of value where you absolutely cannot connect the attribution. Like Steve Jobs said, and this applies not only to growing a physical unit, but living your life, like you can only connect the dots working backwards. So then fucking Sam puts me in a group chat with Patrick. Me and Patrick wind up talking all time, for hours and hours, just as friends because I like his podcast, he likes mine. So two podcasters, this the easiest way to make friends, like instantly happens. And then two months later, I call Patrick after I go on Eric’s show and talk about how great subscription podcasting is. Mitchell brainwashed me. I had a ton of people pull me to the side, like David, you're fucking up, you're doing the wrong thing. The Acquired guys are one of them. I'm wearing an Acquired sweater, right here. A ton of people had been telling me this. I had a guy- I can't tell you who it is. But he is- he owns 50% of one of the largest podcasts in the world. And he was like, listen, I've never reached out- He's like, “This is who I am. You know me because you know the podcast. I just discovered Founders.” He's like, “I never reach out to anybody-”
Mitchell Baldridge: This is an amazing story, by the way.
David Senra: Fucking, I'll tie it back together. He goes, “Your show is fucking incredible. I've never seen anything like it. I just want to talk to you.” We get on the phone. The first day, we talked two hours. The next day, we talked two hours. The entire time, he's like, bro, you're the best podcaster and the dumbest motherfucker I've ever met. He didn't- Because he's like, you're doing it wrong. This is the playbook we use. They went from zero to a million and a half listeners in 18 months. He's like, this is what we did. And he's like- and then he's like- he also was like, “Hey, do you want to join this network?” And I had already had a verbal agreement with Patrick. So I didn't do this. But he's like, “I don't even care if we never do business together. I just love your show. I just want more people to have access to it.” And I talk to him all the time now. We text.
Mitchell Baldridge: And tell the painful story of the process of accessing the Founders podcast. That seems to be what-
David Senra: That's the story. So that's what helped- He's like, listen- he was on the phone with a founder friend of his. Because again, founders talk to founders. That's why us three get along so well. It's like, if you're not an entrepreneur- it's hard for an entrepreneur to go to a party, like I sometimes for my kids’ birthday parties or my daughter's friend's birthday parties, I find myself in a group of adults that I don't know. And I'm like, what do you do for a living? Like I ask, I was like, oh, this dude owns a business. Its usually a dude, unfortunately. It was this dude owns a business, I would just b-line right to him. Because I can't- I'm fucking crazy to normal people. And I don't understand how I am to normal people because this is just how I’ve always been. But anyways, the dude that I'm talking to on the phone is like- I'm on the phone with this guy. He's telling me this shit that he knows that like- all this stuff about Jeff Bezos. And I ask him. He's like, how do you know all that stuff? He goes, oh, you got to listen to Founders podcast, but I'll just buy you a gift subscription because the guy makes it hard to share his content. That hit me in the heart. I'm like, that's how he describes me. The guy likes my podcast so much that he'll quote it to other people. He'll buy gift subscriptions for friends. He's like, just because I can't make it easy to share. And that's how he describes me. And I'm like fuck. That is terrible. That's a bad idea. So long story short, connect this back to the Overcast ad. So Overcast, Mitchell, Mitchell on Twitter, Sam, Sam to Patrick. Two months after we become friends, I call Patrick. I'm like, hey, I'm going to do an ad supported version of Founders. I want to compete on a level playing field. I want to fight. And what I mean by that is like, listen, if you have an option to listen to a podcast that you can listen to freely, it's in every single podcast, it's on every single platform, or you have another business educational podcast like mine, but you have to listen to a preview for 30 minutes, then you have to figure out how to sign up. And then you have to install a private feed. And you have to do all this other stuff. That's not a level playing field. But I think if I do it like every other podcast, which I was wrong, the market taught me, David, for every one person that will pay for podcasts, there's fucking a thousand that will listen to it for free. So, it's like okay, that's fine. What I believe, and I'm not trying to sound arrogant, but I believe if given the option, and you can listen to Founders or another business podcast on entrepreneurship, and you can access them the same way, I'll win that. Over the long term. I don't have to win right now. That's fine. I'm in this game for a long time. But over the long term, I'm very comfortable- I say competing, but podcasts are not zero sum. So that's another good thing, like I've listened to 10 podcasts.
Mitchell Baldridge: What is the adoption rate of podcasts? Or what is the market share-?
David Senra: To wrap this up, then I'm on the phone. And I'm like Patrick- and again, this is not my thinking. That's the important part. I don't have any original ideas. I get all my ideas from other people and from books. And if people say- there may be some geniuses out there that say no, everything, all the thoughts I have are original. I'm not like that. I'm fine just mastering the best of what other people already figured out. That's cool with me. And so I call up Patrick. I'm like, hey, I'm going to do this.
Eric Jorgenson: You just drop that Farnum street tagline in there.
David Senra: I actually talked to Shane too, because he listens to Founders as well.
Eric Jorgenson: Of course he does. He's a smart person.
David Senra: So then I call Patrick. I was like, “Hey, I'm going to do this.” He's like, “Oh, that's interesting.” I go, “And I think it should be on your network.” And he's like, “Oh,” and then he's like, he goes, “I'm a fan. I'd love to work with you.” We did this whole deal. Everybody's- a lot of people I've talked to that they're like, hey, how long did it- This must have been hard. It's like, no, we literally had one phone call because he owns the network, I own Founders. The only question is like, “Hey, I own all the shows on my network, would you sell me equity?” And I was like, no, why don't we just- I was like, all I want is we'll share ad revenue. You help amplify my podcast and connect me with first class advertisers. And he goes, “Cool.” That's it. That was it. Done. He's like, “Alright, cool. We'll plan a launch.” And I got to finish this. So then a few months after that, I go on Invest like the Best. Again, you cannot predict this stuff. I go on Invest like the Best. The episode goes fucking batshit crazy. That one episode, and I'm going to be careful here, it's like that one episode is directly responsible for tens of thousands of new Founders listeners. And what is happening? They're going through my back catalogue now, they're telling more people. It's highly likely from that one $300 Overcast ad, I will wind up building an audience of somewhere between 40 to 60, maybe 100,000 people over the long term just from that. How the fuck do you attribute?
Eric Jorgenson: The one Overcast ad and three years of hard work in between, all of the product quality that comes with it and yeah. But yeah, the attribution point is well taken and dominoes that go along the way. So what is the- are the business dynamics just obviously knock down, drag out better as like an ad supported open podcast?
David Senra: Yes.
Mitchell Baldridge: I think podcasts, like everything else, obviously, the value accrues to the top 1%. So if you can be- or for every 1000 podcasts out there, there's 5 that make money.
David Senra: This is why I love Eric. Eric tweets nice things about me. Like the other day, we're on the phone and I get these notifications. And it's like, I thought he was listening- we were having a conversation. He was on Twitter talking about me. But this is why I legitimately love Eric. This is why I went on Not Investment Advice podcast. I was like, dude, we got to talk about Eric. I talked about him before the recording. I talked about him at the beginning of the recording. And then at the end, I was like, dude, we got to talk about Eric's podcast with Balaji because those guys love Balaji too. And they love you, because they like the almanac. But this is again, this is not my fucking idea. It is insane that I devoured Eric's book way before I knew him. And I'm not bullshitting. I owe you a debt of fucking gratitude because all I'm doing is literally taking the ideas. That fucking tweetstorm changed my life, dude, and you put it into a book and you expanded on it. And it's fucking excellent. But it's just like, literally, if you look at what Founders is, just go read the basic outline of Naval’s tweet storm, How to get rich without getting lucky, I think is the subtitle, whatever. It's just find work that feels like play. I didn't understand that people don't read all the time. I'm not fucking kidding. This is not- I'm not being- trying to be like false modest. Because it's such an obvious good idea to me. It's like, why the fuck would you not do this? And so, I remember I was getting chicken wings with one of my oldest friends. And he tried to tell me that the average person doesn't read any books a year. And there's sometimes this data comes up and you see it every once in a while, and it's crazy, the average person or like 25% of people read one or no books a year. And then, even the top one percentile. I think it's in the book. Naval says, I read an hour a day, right, Eric? He's like, I read an hour a day-
Eric Jorgenson: Its like in the top 1% or top 10th of a percent.
David Senra: Yeah, which I don't understand how that's true. But it is true. But the reason, to your point, Mitchell, about it accrues to the top 1%, like it's the Peter Thiel thing, where power laws rule everything around us, and we're completely oblivious to it. I think about this fucking line from Eric's book every day, and he says, “In the age of infinite leverage, being at the extreme of your art is extremely important.” Or I think I just reversed it. You might like do it better. But actually, let me get the exact- let me get the exact number because- here it is. Being at the extreme in your art is very important in the age of leverage. This ties into why I think people that are good at podcasts and multitask are actually making a mistake. If they want to do that, then they should do that. But if you're really good at podcasting, and I define that by if you can aggregate a valuable audience and you're like- continue doing this, continue growing, like the amount of business opportunities or just opportunities in general that flow from that thing is the most valuable use of your time. So that's the point.
Eric Jorgenson: This is interesting. I think this is an interesting group because we all have kind of opposite, or not opposite, but differentiated enough strategy. So, you are all in on the podcast. I admire the focus and discipline you have about that because you just do not do anything else very deliberately. While like Mitchell, we were talking about, has a handful of businesses, like he has Twitter and goes on other people's podcasts and does this and does this and Mitchell has the accounting tax bookkeeping business and the course and the cost seg business and now Better Bookkeeping, and kind of I think that is like I admire both of your strategies for kind of like opposite reasons. Mitchell is building this, I don't know, how do you- I don't know how you describe it, like a holding company, like a bootstrapped empire of financial services.
David Senra: This is your text. We got to talk about this. Yeah, Mitchell, how do you describe it?
Mitchell Baldridge: So financial Andrew Wilkinson is my dream. But no, but just the idea of having an operator in every bucket, having a CEO run every one of these businesses and running- Yeah, a Holdco model is where I think I'd be best suited. And it's playing out so far.
Eric Jorgenson: Has this all been basically cash from other businesses that you own?
Mitchell Baldridge: Yeah, yeah. I haven't raised any equity. And I mean, we put equity into the cost seg business. But yeah, it's like bootstrap the development of the software platform. But yeah, I've just never understood how to start businesses and raise equity. And I feel like if I raise equity, I just owe other people too much of my time and the outcome to serve their- What if I changed my mind?
Eric Jorgenson: Yeah, it's the same decision David made, where he's just like, I won’t sell equity in the golden goose.
Mitchell Baldridge: Go ahead.
David Senra: I’m not saying nothing.
Mitchell Baldridge: What's going on here, guys? What can we not say?
Eric Jorgenson: I don't know. I think-
David Senra: I just things are going to get really weird. Let's just put it that way. I just think things are getting really weird.
Mitchell Baldridge: Just in terms of overall markets? Or what?
David Senra: No, no, I don't care about the market at all. I'm going to win regardless. I don't care about that. I'm just on it every day. So, I want to elaborate on that. My point is, I reserve the right to change my mind. And the whole point is like I don't know what's going on, I have no idea what the future is going to hold. And so, I don't try to make any kind of predictions on it. I just like found something I love to do. It's valuable to other people. And so I'll keep doing it. And as I get- we started this conversation because Eric’s what are the differences between the business opportunity between an ad based much larger audience compared to subscription? It's not even the same thing. I do want to say- And so there's just a million- right now, I don't know what I want to do. All I know is the bottleneck is not opportunity. It's just like-
Mitchell Baldridge: But going back to the original Overcast ad idea of the $300 ad that changes your life, it's like there are all these mispriced opportunities out there in the market today. And they're all about creating content and leveraging the thing you know most about, and then having a funnel sale system to capture that attention and sell people a product that immediately delivers kind of more value than what they pay you.
David Senra: I agree 100%. And that is why I swear to God, I'm not saying it just because he's hosting us on his podcast, I think people should read- every single person should buy Eric's book and reread it every year.
Mitchell Baldridge: Just listen to the Founders episode.
David Senra: No, no, that's not good enough. No, but me and Eric talked about, hey, are you cool, what if I- like we both- I mean, he doesn't have to reread it, he wrote it. But why don't we do an episode with just me and you just going over parts of the book, because I think that'd be incredibly valuable. I cannot stop- I'm just repeating myself at this point, so I'll just move on. It's the most- it's one of the most valuable books, and again, you could read it in a weekend, you could possibly spend time on. I do want to go back to what Eric said about, I want to make it very clear, when I say I have to have a singular focus and I'm not going to do anything else, I think the business you build has to be tied to who you are as a person. When I describe hey, I'm going to work on one thing, I'm going to focus on this, I'm going to work on it seven days a week, a lot of people recoil like, oh, I could never fucking do that. I think what you just said, doing the financial version of Tiny, that in another life, if I- like there's two things I find most interesting, businesses I find most interesting. One I give my entire life and soul to one business. And then the other, like in another life, I would do something very similar to a Berkshire, a Tiny. What's Brent’s company? Permanent Equity. There's a million of these examples, which I think- Go ahead.
Mitchell Baldridge: I had the chance to meet Peter Maloof. And before I met him, I read his like Form ADV for Creative Planning when I went up to Kansas City. And you read Creative Planning’s ADV, and you see that there are seven arms in the business. There's a tax planning service. There's a tax preparation service. There's a estate planning service. There's a legal service. There's obviously an investment management company. There's a financial planning company. They have- I think they sell insurance, I don't know if they sell insurance or not.
Eric Jorgenson: What’s an ADV?
Mitchell Baldridge: Form ADV is like this form that you have to file with the FEC if you own a financial services company. And so when you register, you register with FINRA, and you have to file these forms, so you can go find out information about people's companies that's pretty public. Yeah, about their assets under management and their business. And you have to list all their conflicts. And so, these are the Creative Planning conflicts as he's created this whole kind of ecosystem within that firm. And that's how- and ways he's captured so much value. And so, everything-
Eric Jorgenson: That’s a huge business, a huge business.
Mitchell Baldridge: It's massive. And Eric sees it more because he's in Kansas City. That dude’s the mayor of Kansas City now. But so, in terms of me trying to build in different horizontals or different verticals or whatever you want to call it, it's like I just want to build the best thing for small business owners and founders that doesn't exist out there today that can capture them into this solution that saves them time, saves them money, gives them insight into their business without- And again, if it just existed, I wouldn't have to do this.
Eric Jorgenson: The Better Bookkeeping thing is slick. You showed me that last weekend. It is really pretty cool. Who's sort of the intended customer for that in your mind?
Mitchell Baldridge: I have these kind of different target customers, but the easiest one up front, I've started it as we're going to come in as kind of a high touch concierge model for solo founders, small business owners who are either high growth or high profit. It's going to start as a relatively expensive product for a high margin business or for an equity backed founder who just wants to totally be hands off in terms of connect your bank, connect your credit card through Plaid, kind of have everything done for you, get a weekly email of here are the metrics of your business, get a monthly Loom video that's kind of like, hey, here's what happened month over month. I mean, my goal is to take the bookkeeping business inside my firm and automate a lot of that and be able to use the data a lot better because I have the data in a database rather than it's all sitting in QuickBooks platform, and I got to figure out how to get it out and how to put it all together so that I can offer people kind of like strategies at scale, ideas at scale, advice at scale. And then so the initial customer is broker, equity backed founder, a writer, a book writer, a podcaster who's currently crushing it, people like that who just would get an email every week that says like, hey, here's your change in cash, hey, here's your sales for the week, hey, here are your biggest expense items, go down the road and gain a lot of value out of that.
David Senra: What's your distribution on that? Where are your customers going to come from? Do you find- Do you think the first thousand customers are going to come from Twitter?
Mitchell Baldridge: Yeah.
Eric Jorgenson: I love that. I like the vision because every month or quarter or whatever, whenever I get a financial statement, I always look at it and I have to- coming from a startup where we had amazing sequel dashboards and stats for everything that all happen in real time that we could break everything down, I was like this is not useful data in these financial statements. I want to- I just keep wanting to click on stuff and graph stuff and show me change time zones or time periods and stuff like that. Show me trends, not just snapshots. And I see the beginning of that in this product. It is really cool.
Mitchell Baldridge: Yeah, getting a PDF versus getting a Tableau, or you know what I mean, getting a table, getting a dashboard, as opposed to getting this static PDF that you can't double click on and- Having your books done automatically is great. Saving money is great. And then yeah, having- the issue is that everyone has to have their books done just to like stay out of jail. There's the stay out of jail level, which everyone gets done somehow or some way, either- we just passed the October 15 final tax deadline, which is the deadline where everyone's filing who just wants to stay out of jail. But if I did your books in October for the period that ended 10 months ago so that we could get your taxes so that you don't go to prison, you would pay me kind of almost as much money as if they were just done in December and you had data that was current and somewhat useful.
David Senra: So you are going to charge on a monthly basis for it, take what you normally spend, divide it over 12, it makes it easier, and everything's done automatically. So if you’re talking about- so when is it- When can people actually sign up?
Mitchell Baldridge: You can go sign up on the website right now. It's a kind of live beta product.
David Senra: Can I tell people- it's a fantastic URL, betterbookkeeping.com. Can I tell people what the video that you sent me when you bought the domain?
Mitchell Baldridge: What did I send you?
David Senra: Have you ever seen this video of Puff Daddy, also known as Diddy, he's on the phone. He's in his office. And he's like, “Yeah, can you bump them? I want that spot.” I don't know what he's negotiating. And he's like, “Okay, cool.” He hangs up the phone. And then he goes, “I'm a savage!” And he picks up his phone and slams it. He goes, “Whatever I want I must have!” It’s hilarious, like 40 seconds. This goes back to how we started conversation. I don't know if it was before we got on the recording or after about how Mitchell is like low key hilarious, but it comes- like you can’t predict when it's going to happen. And it's just like the energy that Diddy has in this video is inside of Mitchell, but he hides it. So, he's like, look what I got. It was- I thought that name was fucking fantastic.
Eric Jorgenson: How much did that URL run you?
Mitchell Baldridge: Do I want to say out loud? It was 10 grand.
Eric Jorgenson: That’s not bad. For betterbookkeeping.com, that's not bad. With no misspellings. That’s great.
Mitchell Baldridge: Well, I already bought the misspelling too. A known domainer coached me through the whole thing. And yeah, it was one of those, apparently, domainers are just like known dicks in the world. And so, I was like trying to lowball. It said 10 grand or best offer. And so, I was trying to offer and the guy just ignored me for like four months. So, then I just finally bought it. He won.
Eric Jorgenson: Zero sum games, man, you can't- those will ruin you.
Mitchell Baldridge: So yeah, we have auto renew on. We have it locked.
David Senra: I want to ask Eric about his business because he's been peppering us with questions. But before we go there, do you have any ideas- So Mitchell is going to use Twitter for initial distribution. Do you have any other ideas that you think would be good for him? For Better Bookkeeping, specifically. Because this is like the shit we talk about in our private chats which I think is like what we should try to get as much as possible onto the actual podcast.
Eric Jorgenson: Yeah, I like that we all just have like a list of ideas for each other's business. I know Mitchell has a doc that is many pages long about ideas for David.
Mitchell Baldridge: I've invited you to it. I just call David and give him ideas. I just nag him every day. Like he's even asking.
Eric Jorgenson: I don't know. I feel like my brainstorm is- the only stuff that I have for Mitchell is like figure out a more specific first customer. There's almost certainly somebody who is like the MVP is perfect for as it is, and I would start selling- find that niche and start selling aggressively into that immediately. The mistake that I feel like people make often is waiting too long to add full paid customers to prod and investing in sales effort and infrastructure basically. Like if you don't have a thousand customers in nine months, give or take, I feel like you're going to slow.
Mitchell Baldridge: The long or the initial strategy is, again, sell to somebody who either has a lot of money because they raised a lot of money or has a lot of money because their business just makes a ton of money. So it's- and has a small business, meaning like they're a broker, they're literally an author, they're literally a podcaster, they're literally a marketing agency.
Eric Jorgenson: One person, sub five person-
Mitchell Baldridge: Sub five person company who's just like, listen, we make a lot of money. We want these analytics. We want this done for us. We want to optimize. We never want to hire a bookkeeper. And it's funny, like this world of, you read- David would tell us because he's read all these books, but it's like you read these books from the 70s where people grow these companies, and the bookkeeper is like their third hire. You know what I mean? Or you have these founders and then you got to bring in the old guy to do the books or they're the founder, yes. And so now, people grow these businesses where they're like, oh yeah, we have $5 million of revenue. But we don't have a controller. We don't have a bookkeeper. We never want a bookkeeper. We have this lady who does it for 300 bucks a month, but it's way behind. And you're just like, guys, let's harness knowledge. Yeah, we've gotten a lot of leverage because of computers and because of databases that we can go kind of take a lot of the day to day of bookkeeping and automate it. But now, let's tap this resource. Let's start to use this a little bit better.
Eric Jorgenson: This is probably techie-er than you're going at least at your current development. But are you using AI to make these assignments? That feels like a relatively straightforward thing, considering some of the other AI tools I've seen.
Mitchell Baldridge: We have this categorization rule set sheet that's inside of a Google Doc. So now, when you go to categorize, it pings the Google Doc and it pulls the latest ruleset in. But I talked to a guy a couple of weeks ago who worked for this startup who does AI for search and they run the engine for one of the big kind of billion dollar unicorn FinTech startups. And it's like I think we would end up at scale just sub contracting that function. We're going to build our own ruleset engine out until we hit enough scale where we're like we need to go subcontract out. And so yeah, I mean, at scale, yeah, this thing will have thousands of customers in it. And really the MVP customer is the jobs to be done. We make a really, really good 200 grand to $2 million. And we are- we just need this in a box. And so, one of my first tweet threads that I'm going to do to really start talking about this is one of my clients in the CPA firm who has been my client for like- she was one of my first clients. She is a psychotherapist. She made like 220 grand her first year as my client. She still makes 220 grand a year. I took her from essentially paying 50 grand a year in tax to paying like 25 grand a year in tax on 220 grand top line. And she saved 25 grand a year for like eight years being my client and you just can build these- like this is the power of threads and the power of Twitter is you can build this information dense case study kind of white paper of this example of this person. And that's the tax savings angle. Probably 220k is the minimum viable client I could really advertise to at the price I want to sell at. And then you just walk down the path of like this is who she was, this is who she saved. This is exactly what we did step by step by step by step. My product Better Bookkeeping is going to do exactly that. If you want to get on board, let's go. Then you do it for the million dollar a year broker guy who has a different set of fact patterns who saves more than 25 grand a year.
Eric Jorgenson: Spend 12 grand a year to save 100 grand a year.
David Senra: I laughed. I smirked when you said the one of the first Twitter feeds, Twitter threads that you're going to do to announce Better Bookkeeping. I was hoping you're going to break down that Diddy video.
Mitchell Baldridge: I’m a savage. Whatever I want I have to get.
Eric Jorgenson: Can we pack savage.com?
Mitchell Baldridge: I'll see if that is available.
David Senra: Can we please talk about Eric?
Eric Jorgenson: Yeah, we're out of time, guys. Thanks. That’s 90 minutes. We're going to call it.
Mitchell Baldridge: I have the catheter put in.
David Senra: I texted him because I had heard you had done- So I guess you could fill us in. Balaji has a writing school. What is that recording I heard of you and Camilla? 1729.
Eric Jorgenson: 1729 is kind of like this organization that's vaguely towards network state. It's like people who are supportive of his ideas, community. And I'm not the right person to kind of define it. But yeah, they have meetups. And so, Camilla invited me to kind of go talk to some of the people that are basically like, I don't know if they're compensated, or they're just kind of a writing cohort. And so, they get together and they write essays that are sort of under the mission of 1729, which is kind of technological progressivism and sort of a network state kind of vision of the future and they just help each other edit and share and do a bunch of cool stuff.
David Senra: So I think I told Eric this privately-
Eric Jorgenson: -I think that's where you heard it.
David Senra: So I saw it because they made a recording, they published to the podcast, I listened to the podcast, and I text Eric immediately. I was like, a lot- I listen to a lot of writers on podcasts. And there's a reason they're writers. They're fantastic writers, not polished speakers. But I was like, Eric, you have this crazy skill set where you can distill very complicated information, and you make it- and, again, you took Naval’s entire philosophy and made it into something you could download in your brain in a weekend. Not only that, the way you communicate and the way you speak is really, really impressive. And that leads me to the next thing on- but then I was like, hey, can I call you tomorrow or whenever it was because you mentioned something on this 1729 recording that you did an eight hour or an all day Zoom with Balaji. I always want to say Balaji. But it's Balaji.
Eric Jorgenson: I think either will work. Like how you pronounce it says more about where you're from than what he wants it to be.
David Senra: And I was like, dude, what was that like? And Eric hit me with intense. And so now I've told that story a million times. In fact, I told it on the Not Investment Advice podcast yesterday, and I tell it in private conversations. But I want to go into how you're thinking about your work because you and I talked about it a bunch, and I think the idea that you have is really, really spectacular. And then there's just another idea that I think if you're comfortable sharing, you were talking to another writer who's unbelievably successful, has sold millions and millions of books. We don't have to say his name if you don't want to. But you guys were having a discussion. And this idea behind the discussion I have stolen and think about all the time now. It just came from a random comment you said. And you guys are both launching new books soon or next year, whatever. And you ask each other the question, who had the best book launch in the world? And what were they doing that was different from other people? And I was like, damn, that's a fantastic idea. Because it can be applied to Better Bookkeeping, Founders podcast, every single thing that you're working on, the books that you're writing.
Eric Jorgenson: Studying the greats, yeah. Figure out whatever everybody else is doing.
David Senra: How were you- now when you describe yourself, you say, I'm a writer. Is that accurate now?
Eric Jorgenson: Yeah, I did a really bad job of this for a year as I was trying to figure this out. And now I basically would say I'm a writer and investor. So, I write books, and I do early stage tech investing. And I usually just stop it there. I consider kind of like the podcast, the newsletter, Twitter, like all of that to either be next to it or under it. But yeah, I write books and I write checks.
Mitchell Baldridge: Sandwich connoisseur.
David Senra: So this book is coming out Q1 of next year, most likely.
Eric Jorgenson: Yeah. Fingers crossed, if we move at pace, then yeah.
David Senra: We were talking about distribution, the weird shit that happens on the internet when you make things that other people find valuable. I know Balaji is like going to put a lot of weight behind him. He's got a giant audience. Do you have- what are you going to do for distribution outside of him?
Eric Jorgenson: I mean, I will- This is interesting. I haven't really put my head here yet until we're kind of really on the conveyor belt of publication. But my subconscious is kind of churning on it. And I think I'm going to spend a lot of time on it over the next couple of months. And there's a long list of stuff that is absolutely good and worth doing and a lot of it's podcasts and newsletters and sort of just getting the story clear and talking about who this is for and reaching all the people a sufficient number of times. But I think it's interesting, like what you said about your experience with Patrick and then going on Invest Like the Best is really I think a good model because I know the power law governs so much of this. And whatever the single biggest thing is that happens, whatever that is, will be, one, impossible to orchestrate ahead of time, two, hugely dominant on the outcome. And I don't even really know what that is. I can make some guesses about what it might be. But even if I knew what it was, I can't engineer it. We can just try to kind of buy Overcast ads and reach Mitchells and try to see if you can get the dominoes to fall to topple the enormous domino that is like the sort of kickoff of a long term viral thing. So I think that matters.
David Senra: Do you think you already have the network for this now? Or do you feel it's something you need to keep building as you get closer to launching the book?
Eric Jorgenson: I mean, you always sort of keep working. I think we know a lot of people who carry a lot of weight and who I think people trust to make good recommendations about stuff like this. So, I'm not- I don't feel like I'm starting from scratch, and having already done one book, I think it's going to be- I know a little bit more about what's coming and how it's going to go and who might be helpful. But yeah, if Balaji ended up going on like Rogan or whatever, within a few months of the book coming out, that would end up being the thing, but you can't- no amount of money or planning or effort can create that.
Mitchell Baldridge: And you don't know what Rogan is going to be listening to in the morning. Somebody was talking about, I'm trying to think about who that was. But they were basically like- who was telling me this story where- Oh, it was on My First Million that he was- Sean was on some talk with somebody who, I forget the guy. He does some kind of conservative news thing or straight news thing. And Rogan loves it and Rogan had it on. He just was like, yeah, Rogan listened to it one day, and then six months later, we're on. Back to the Overcast ad, you do not know the chain of events that are all going to hit, that are going to take place, that are going to create the outsized result. You should have just done nothing else, except that.
David Senra: You said something that came to mind. So I think one of the advantages we talked about, like the weird ways that there's- you can always extend a moat. In some cases, when you're building physical businesses, like the moat of Rockefeller Standard Oil was obvious. These are like- Vanderbilt, Jay Gould. They're controlling physical infrastructure. But in the world that we operate in, there's a million different ways to create a moat. And one of the ways I think I'm creating a moat, and it is constantly expanding, is that I have over 20,000 highlights in this app called Read Wise, and they're all indexed, searchable. And they're like highlights from books and also notes that I have. So, while I'm hearing Eric talk, and I do this all the time, it's something, I don't know why, but something you said reminded me of something. So I typed in the word power law. Because I knew that the highlight I'm looking for that relates exactly to what you're saying contains that word. And I have 15, 20 things. But it's exactly what- it's from zero to one. It's Peter Theil’s book, and he says, if you do start your own company, you must remember the power law to operate it well. The most important things are singular. One market will probably be better than all others. And then this is your point. One distribution strategy usually dominates all others, too.
Eric Jorgenson: Yep. I love that book.
Mitchell Baldridge: Back to that great point you made, Eric, about Better Bookkeeping and who's the early stage customer, it's like you almost let that person find themselves in this weird way. And once they've found themselves and you've seen it three times, you start backing resources around that. And then once you can predictably spend $1 and get one subscriber. You just hit it as hard as you possibly can until the owner of the company won't let you buy ads anymore. You just exploit it until literally it just won't work anymore. But you don't even know what that's- I've heard people tell stories about, I knew it was going to be this and I executed and executed and executed, and then it worked out perfectly. But that's just not been my experience.
Eric Jorgenson: Especially your expectations are going to be off high or low. And I just want to do a bunch of stuff with like you predict if I do X, I get 10. And I'm happy to do X all day long, but there's a chance that every hundredth time I do X, a million comes out the other side. And I mean, to David's point earlier, that's creating on the internet. You never know what things are going to kind of go viral or what influencers are going to pick up what book and share it with their audience. And you can try to in the initial work to create something that has those characteristics, but you can't- Taylor Pearson talks about it this way, when he's like writing a book, which I think is the single most helpful thing anybody can hear about writing a book. Every book, as you write it, is either a brick or a feather. And every book launch is you throwing that as hard as you can. And if your book is a brick, you can only throw it so far. But if it's a feather, you can't throw it very far, but the gentlest wind will keep it afloat, and it will carry on farther, much farther than you could have ever thrown it. And I think that's a really, really interesting- 99.5% of the marketing of the book is done in the writing. And you can't make up for a subpar, non-world class book with any amount of marketing exposure. I don't know how to sell books or market books. I only know how to write a book that people sell to each other. And that's why I just don't- I don't know, I don't have any tremendous words of wisdom about launching a book because it just all comes from the craft.
David Senra: This is where we deviate somewhat. And I think I annoy you, even though you're too nice to ever use those words. Because the way I look at it, when I just talked about this giant honeypot of information that I have accrued for a long period of time, Eric has similar things. It may be more narrow, like this is what I learned about Naval, this is what I learned about Balaji, but it's like a million- like there is four pieces of content that Eric could post that would benefit somebody else's life that is a micro lesson, like a little piece of educational content. So, if you look at all of the content that I put out on like what I do for Founders, that is not my own idea. That is Michael Bloomberg. I read Michael Bloomberg’s autobiography. At the end, if you ever look at the show notes of Founders episodes, what I'll do is after I'm done with an episode, I'll listen to it again myself before anybody else does, and I literally take notes. I'm like, oh shit, that's interesting. I'm listening to myself. I'm like, oh, I need to write that down.
Eric Jorgenson: Wow, David, you're so smart.
David Senra: No, no, no. It's always their ideas, not mine. But an hour into the Michael Bloomberg episode, I realized because I didn't know- I knew his name. I didn't know anything about his business before I read the book. And I realized how much of his media operation was this giant magnet for selling these really expensive subscriptions. And if you could sell- if you could use educational media to sell $30,000 or $25,000 a year subscriptions, whatever it is. You could do that for a book. You could do that for bookkeeping software. You could do it for a podcast. And so I go, he's got a lot of these roundabout ways to get in front of potential customers. He's repurposing the information that his unique business collects. That was something that I realized as I'm reading the book. And I'm like, wait a minute, he has a very unique business because it's all this financial information you can’t get anywhere else. It's like, yeah, but I do too. Why don't I repurpose the information that my unique business collects? Eric's fucking research process is incredible. He is spending full time- again, it is- the way to think about it's like he has built a business that collects unique information. You can then repurpose that into small bite size forms of information that if- like, my Twitter right now is fucking growing crazy. I don't know what happened. But these screenshots I do-
Eric Jorgenson: You went on Invest like the Best.
David Senra: No, that too. But I'm talking about the performance of individual tweets.
Mitchell Baldridge: I told you this from the beginning, I was like, David, make them all look the same and find what works and just do it over and over and over because you talk about your-
David Senra: So I have a really small- you guys have much bigger Twitter followers than me. But I'm- several of my tweets in the last few weeks - this format, basically, I have a headline which I work on, I rewrite a bunch. I don't spend forever because I'm not a good writer. But I rewrite the headline probably five times, and then I take a Read Wise- something from my Read Wise and put it on and italicize, screenshot that, and then put it out. The reason I'm bringing this up, and I mean, I don’t have to tell you, Mitchell, because you do this as well, but I think this will work for Eric, and I brought it up to him a few times where I think he's just like, shut the fuck up, man. There's some that like have gotten millions of views. It's an individual tweet. I don't have the Twitter audience that- the performance of the tweet and the size of my Twitter audience is like I'm batting way above, like I'm shooting way above or fighting, punching way above my weight is I think the tortured analogy or metaphor I'm looking for there. But I just think this is not a unique idea. I think, Eric, I would find it fascinating because I follow Eric on Twitter, if a couple times a day, it's just like, this is Balaji on building a company today, this is Balaji on recruiting, this is Naval on whatever. Because even if, let's say you follow Founders podcast on Twitter, and you never listened to the podcast, the goal is like, okay, all of my social media is a way for me to say, hey, this is what I'm into. If you're into it, too, you might like listening to my podcast. But even if you never listen to the podcast, I want people to get something out of there. And I just think that is a very basic idea that can be utilized over and over and again, and I tell people this and I say, hey, this is really working for me. Let me give you an example. This is a real example. So I take a- I was going through the show notes of this podcast I did for when I read Mark Andreesen’s blog archive. I did this podcast like back in 2018. I was rereading the show notes as a way to refresh the highlights. I was like, oh, this is interesting. I copy it from the show notes. I put it on Twitter. And then I do that. It takes five minutes. Then I record- I set up my phone real quick. I record a short form video to put on TikTok and Instagram, of me rereading- 30 seconds. It's like, “Hey, Mark Andreesen is a billionaire investor and inventor of the web browser. This is what he said about x.” And I read it. And I go if you want to learn more at the end, go listen to episode 50 of Founders. So that, what I just described, which I'm trying to get Eric to do, and I think he hates me for this, is that, what I just described, 10, maybe let's say 20 minutes from start to finish, that tweet got like hundreds of thousands, I think it's like 250- 300,000 views on Twitter, and it got 250,000 views on TikTok. And it gave me the largest one day spike of my downloads on a day that I did not release a new episode.
Mitchell Baldridge: Is that the one where the pod was behind the paywall still?
David Senra: That happened previously. That's how I knew this- Okay, so he brings up the- Because again, my assumption is that we don't know how to market podcasts. We are going to discover something that moves the needle. And even if something moves the needle in the past, there's always going to be a new way to do that. And so, what Mitchell was talking about is, I had done this and another example, it got hundreds of thousands of views on TikTok, which took 10 minutes, so I took less than 10 minutes, got hundreds of thousands of views. And then I go, hey, if you want more, listen to episode 50. I didn't know that that podcast wasn't out. And so, the comments, this is how I knew- this is, again, accidental. This is how I knew, oh shit- because a lot of people will put up clips on social and I know it may give you some listeners, but ending it with hey, here's 30 seconds of value. You want more? Go here now. It just works for if your end goal is to not just make people- can watch on TikTok or YouTube, but actually convert them into podcast listeners, which is my main goal. And so what happened is it just lit up in the comments. Is it some kind of fucking joke? What is going on? This episode doesn't exist anywhere. I'm like, oh, wait a minute. They watched the video. They heard what I said. They went to the link in bio. They follow the podcast in a podcast app. They search for the podcast. They didn't find it, then they get mad, and they come back to the video. I'm like I should do more of this. So do you- What do you think of that? I know you're like, hey, I got to focus, 90% of your time is writing, but what if you hired- like you have EAs and stuff. When you hear me say, hey, this is working for me, you should use it for your business, what's your response?
Mitchell Baldridge: I’m so jealous of both of you because you're both sitting on content powder kegs that there is a bottom of tax and financial advice that you can give to people where you're just saying the same thing over and over again, where I can only think of so much stuff where it's like-
David Senra: You should repeat it though. David Ogilvy said, you're not advertising to a standing army, you're advertising to a moving parade.
Mitchell Baldridge: I tell people that all the time. And my best tweet ever that wasn't a Costco hotdog was just a repost of another tweet. But you, David Senra, have however many thousand quotes just sitting there that are all a seed for a content of either copyright a headline, do a TikTok ad, write a fucking thread, put it on LinkedIn. And then Eric Jorgensen you can be the James Patterson of you can write a book on everybody in their own words series. It's like it's forever expandable content that's just sitting there.
David Senra: So what do you think when I say this? Because me and Eric have had this conversation like half a dozen times.
Eric Jorgenson: David, if it makes you feel better, I have now started posting stuff on TikTok and YouTube clips. So we're chipping away. We're getting some of it. The basic answer, though, is that I'm not sure that views on social have quite as direct of an impact on my business as you might think. The two main revenue sources are book sales and subscribers to the fund, investors in the Rolling fund. And it's not obvious to me that sharing more Balaji quotes is going to sell more books or have subscribers coming to the phone. I know that those are also long term butterfly wing Overcast ads and that it's more exposure. But when I sit there and look at a to do list for the day, it's like do I want to spend that incremental hour on getting more followers or writing the next chapter. I pretty much always choose to write the next chapter.
David Senra: What's your- Okay, that's actually a good thing to think- to talk about. What’s your break down, from making to marketing, what is it? Is it 50/50? Is it 90/10? Because this is where I fucked up. And I'm only saying this because I'm a huge fan of your work. And I want more people- I genuinely believe if more people read your shit, their lives will be better. So I fucked up because it was 95% making and 5% marketing. And then everything changed starting at the beginning of the year, when I was like, I'm doing 50/50. Because the podcast is obviously very difficult to grow in general. It's just like I'm going to spend the first half of my day making the podcast, which is like uninterrupted reading. The second half of my day is practice, which is what I got from the Michael Jordan biography. And it's just rereading old highlights because then I use that on future episodes. And then I use the rereading of old highlights as marketing, repurpose those. And I'm going to, when we get off this, I'm going to send you a TikTok that I think might change your mind. There's a guy named Hank Green, I think is name. No, they're brothers. They're YouTubers, science YouTubers. Hank is the young one. It’s the older one, John Green, I think is his name. I saved the TikTok and I'm going to send it to you. And obviously, he's got 600,000 followers, or at this time, I think like 600,000 followers on TikTok, or whatever. He's been creating on the internet forever. He's got a large audience. But he makes this video where he's like, “Guys, I don't know what the hell's going on.” And this is how I know this works. Because it happens to me. And then I tell people, and they don't do it. It's like, it goes back to me and Patrick were having a conversation the other day about planning our world domination. And we said- because I keep telling- I meet with a bunch of investors and people that do what he does. And I'm like, why don’t you start a podcast? And they're like, oh, they don't even understand how valuable it is. And I go, I quote Edwin Land where it's like, if you want to keep a secret, the best way to keep a secret is to shout it from the rooftops. So, I keep shouting this, hey, if you have a unique brain and a unique way you spend your day, and you can repurpose all the stuff you're learning, you might as well put it on a podcast and point people there and magic will happen, I promise you, if you're- and it may take a long time, but it will. But anyways, John Green goes, “Hey, guys, something weird is happening. I'm getting all these calls from my publisher. And we're having spikes in book sales. And I'm not doing anything but sitting at home making TikToks.” He's just- just the idea of him making more TikToks not even related to his book. And he's like, I'm not even mentioning my book, but you guys are going to my TikTok profile. And the only link he had was that book. He was selling more books. I think it came out either like a year ago or months ago. It was not like a new launch. But he's like, hey, just thank you. Think about that. Just like he's getting hundreds of thousands of views on his TikTok’s, which again, is not always correlated to the size of your following on TikTok, and him not- and I'm fucking default aggressive. I'm like, listen, I'm ending my TikToks with “Listen to my podcast.” So, this guy's not even saying that and he still- It does sell books. That's the point. It does. It's just we don't understand it, so therefore we don't do it. And all the stuff, these breakthroughs that have been happening are accidental. They're just experiments, and, oh, I don't know, we'll just see. And TikTok just happens to be one vehicle where it took a while to get going. Like the first month I had like 1000 followers. The second month I had like 1000 followers. Then I remember the day happened where one of them hit, I got like 2 or 300,000 views in like two or three days or whatever. And I saw a direct correlation. I told Mitchell about this. It was like- Mitchell, do you remember the percentage? It was like it bumped my overall downloads by like 20% that week or something. Remember?
Mitchell Baldridge: Oh, yeah, that was bananas.
David Senra: That's the- I'll end there. It's just like, dude, you're sitting on a valuable pile just like I am. This shit is working for me. I know it will work for you. And even if right now, if it's hey, we talked about this the other day on the phone, even if it’s like, fuck it, I don't have anything to sell. Okay, then they sign up for your email list. We talked about- Me and you talked about Louie CK for a while, and his mastery that he used for his email list.
Mitchell Baldridge: You just do the Hormozi. Just tell them you have nothing to sell. That’s it.
Eric Jorgenson: I knew that guy was lying from the first minute. I have nothing to sell you…yet.
Mitchell Baldridge: Someone tells me they got nothing to sell me. Yeah, but that's it. I'm working on it.
David Senra: But no, Hormozi has a good idea that I liked, his video. I think Mitchell was probably the one that sent this to me. Where he said, “I couldn't crack short form until I understood that it's just spoken tweets.” And he goes, “Oh, I'm just going to take my tweets, and I'm going to look at the camera and speak to them.” And I was like, I'm going to take my highlights, I'm going to look at the camera, and I'm going to speak to them. And then I'm going to say if you want more from this guy, go listen to 15 fucking podcasts I've done on Steve Jobs. That shit just works, dude. And again, some people were like, oh, and I don’t want to market, whatever. It's like, do you believe that your product that you're making is going to make somebody else's life better? And if you do, then fuck your feelings, you have a moral obligation to get good at marketing. It doesn't matter how you feel.
Mitchell Baldridge: Also, just giveaway the best ideas you could ever think of, everything that you could possibly sell people for any amount of money or love, just give it to them. Eric, your books are free. Why do people buy them?
Eric Jorgenson: The books are free. I was thinking that when David was talking about that he had the paywall up. I literally did the opposite of that. I gave away a paid product that everyone expects to pay for. And I think it reached more people and then resulted in more sales because of that.
David Senra: So, four times a day about the shit you are learning about Balaji, turn them into TikToks. And again, do whatever- Like it's none of my business. Just again, it's a place of love. Because I'm not fucking kidding.
Eric Jorgenson: This is definitely true. I intellectually deeply appreciate and respect the power of media to drive business. And I preach it more than I live it personally, probably for comfort reasons basically. Also, it's work. But it's just easier to do what you do and put your work out then to super, super aggressively market it and risk over promising and under delivering.
David Senra: It's impossible for you to under- to over promise. You're sitting on gold, dude. You know this because you get- I mean, how many fucking DMs or emails have you gotten as a result of that Almanac of Naval that talk about how it impacted their life? You've probably got tens of thousands if I had to guess, messages. How could you get a steady stream- And that's also where we have an unfair advantage, people like me and Eric, as opposed to if you're building services for businesses like Mitchell. It's like I'm sure Better Bookkeeping is going to kick ass. It's going to be great. It's going to save me a lot of money. The amount of fucking inbound messages you get every day if you have a podcast or you write books, you have an email, newsletter and all this other shit about like they just tell you that your fucking work is impacting their lives and then all I do is like this morning, this is a perfect example, you guys are-
Eric Jorgenson: We should sent more nice notes to Mitchell. That's what you're telling me right now.
David Senra: These shots of espresso that you see me knocking back here, it's because I wake up at 5:30 in the morning and I shoot out of bed like a fucking rocket because I'm so goddamn excited because every day people are like, yo, what you're doing is fucking impact- he's like helping me build a business or start a business or it's helping me motivate a team. Like yo, I don't deserve to sleep. Like get the fuck up and get back to work because this is making an impact on people.
Eric Jorgenson: Preach.
David Senra: So even if you don't want to do it, man, I like I know you got these secret- like you have all these leveraged fucking people all helping you do shit- I was listening to- do you know who is the perfect example of this? Mitchell mentioned My First Million. I just listened to the interview with Ryan Holiday.
Eric Jorgenson: That was a great episode. Mitchell sent me that one too.
David Senra: That was excellent. Because Ryan Holiday’s like- I felt better because I'm like, how the fuck does this guy put out so much high quality content in the volume he does?
Eric Jorgenson: He's got a team of 10.
David Senra: Okay, that's- I didn't know that before that. I'm like, bro, this is fucking amazing. And then you see it because if you follow him on all the- I follow him on YouTube and TikTok and Twitter and all this other stuff. Like, oh, he's repurposing- He's like, okay, there's a tweet. That tweet is now a TikTok. Then I'm going to add some other shit to it. And now it's a five minute YouTube video. And then it's going to go into Daily Stoic. It's a 500 word daily stoic email. It's like he's showing you the blueprint for people like me and you.
Mitchell Baldridge: Content recycle.
Eric Jorgenson: The waterfall, yeah.
David Senra: Even if you only have one person, right now, or two people, like I have no- I have one person that's semi helping me but I'm sharing them with the network at the moment. But even then, and most of its like going to them. But my point is it's like dude, he's showing us the blueprint. Think about all the opportunities, how many books he could sell, the success of his podcast, the growth, like that's not just exclusive to him. Why aren’t we all doing that? It's like he's showing you it's a good idea.
Mitchell Baldridge: So Eric, you're going to go pull out the Navalmnac and start reading some clips from it?
Eric Jorgenson: I posted 5 TikToks in the last three minutes.
Mitchell Baldridge: So, my first beat on the thing, and I don't know when we got to wind down, but I said podcast pill me. So I'm the only one here without a podcast. All of you have a podcast. Yeah, I did like four TikToks a while ago. But it's like- and then I gave up like a loser.
Eric Jorgenson: Yeah, I don’t know why David's picking on me. Mitchell's doing even way less than I am.
Mitchell Baldridge: Just I'm a thread boy.
David Senra: Yeah. And I'm not picking on you. I promise you. I talk about you so much, people are going to think I like have a crush on you.
Eric Jorgenson: I have a crush on you. It’s fine. I told you, we can express affection for other men as men. It’s 2022 baby. It’s not taboo anymore.
David Senra: I don’t care about that. I just like legitimately, and this is now the seventh time, so I'll shut the fuck up, but your book literally changed my life. The ideas in the book, when Charlie Munger says in a Poor Charlie's Almanac that there's ideas- There's ideas worth a billion dollars in a $30 history book, that's legitimate. The economic impact that Eric's book had, if you could calculate it and how it changed the trajectory of tens of thousands, hundreds of- over its lifetime, hundreds of thousands of people's livelihoods. And then you bump it up by 10, 50, 25 percent, whatever it is, the economic impact of that is in the trillions- I don't know, trillions, but it's gigantic. It doesn't even make sense. You know what I mean? No, but that's books in general. Just they change people's lives. Ideas really, I mean, whether it's in the form of a book or a podcast or whatever. It's like ideas change people's lives. And because your ideas have been so fundamental- I'm just so fucking appreciative of the fact that you guys put this out, and I could utilize it, and then it just makes my life better. My life is a lot better now applying your ideas in your book than it was before. So that's why I fucking bother you so much about it.
Eric Jorgenson: Yeah, I hope- our businesses, I feel like, have a lot in common in that. The impact is huge. It's other people's ideas. And what you said earlier is like it didn't occur to me that other people couldn't do this. The feedback that I get is sometimes like, wow, this is- you have a great talent for this. I was like, this is just- it's just work and common sense to organize this stuff and try to put it together in a way that makes sense. It's not obvious to me that a ton of other people couldn't also do this. I mean, I'm- right. And I hope that the next book on Balaji has the same impact that the book on Naval does. I think it can and reach some of the same people and hope it has a huge impact, and people love it and appreciate it. And whatever comes next comes next. I hope Founders does the same thing.
David Senra: I appreciate that. But this is the idea about like I don't know if you've spoken on this publicly, but it's just like you found something that works. It's extremely valuable. You like doing it. Like you said, it still feels like work but it's uniquely suited to you so- the reason I think this is fucking genius is because I just discovered Paul Johnson. I didn't- this guy’s been writing books for 30, I don't know, probably 30 years. And what Paul- me and Eric talked about this the other day. So again, I'm trying to take stuff from private conversations, throwing it on the podcast to benefit other people. So because I feel what I just went through with Paul Johnson, a person, like my daughter might discover Eric Jorgenson’s books like 10 years from now. So, Paul Johnson writes these really compact like less than 200 page biographies on all these historical figures. He's done a bunch. I've read, I don't know, four or five, done episodes on- a bunch of podcasts about them, too. And so, once- so he had this idea of, let me take biographies that are way too long in many cases, but these people are really interesting. Let me take- fuck 700 pages. Let me say I'm constrained to 200 pages. Let's make this interesting. And then write a sequence. Because what happens, like I think the first one I discovered was his Churchill one, and then, oh, let's see what else does this guy have? Oh, he's got Socrates. I’ll read that. He's got Mozart. I’ll read that. He's got a collection on heroes which profiles 30 people. I’ll read that. I think what you're doing is so genius because you always talk about the long term game and that there is going to be undoubtedly a fuck ton of people that buy the Balaji book and then be like what else does this guy do? Oh shit I didn't even know about the Almanac of Naval. And then what happens? These long term games compound. I sent out a tweet today about Charlie Munger. He's just like he started off so basic. Like, I'm an attorney, I don't like being an attorney. I'm going to dedicate an hour a day, he sold an hour to himself, and I'm going to learn about real estate and stock investing. And then he talks about the- he's like, then he figured out, oh, knowledge compounds just like money does. And he goes-
Eric Jorgenson: I have the quote right in front of me: “It was slow going at first. But after a great number of years and thousands of books read, he started to see how different areas of knowledge interplay with each other and how knowledge like money can compound, making one more and more aware of the world in which he or she lives.”
David Senra: And then he goes, I'm a better investor at 90 than I was at 50. And so what I see for Eric, and why I keep talking about this is like, dude, so imagine when he gets to book 5, book 10, book 12, however many he can do, it's like- I think, Mitchell, you put this in typically geeky terms, like you said something about my back catalogue is like an annuity. How did you describe that to me? Because you helped seed this idea into my brain. Do you remember how you phrased it?
Mitchell Baldridge: Yeah, I mean, it's just back to leverage, you just don't have to work, and it pays you money. No matter what, you're collecting royalties. If it were a gas well, you know what I mean, that was just perpetually pushing out money. And you didn't have to work because you had put in all the capital. Like you put in- And especially time capital.
David Senra: Yeah, you made the point that the longer it goes on, the more valuable it is. Eric's in the same exact situation. It's like they're going to discover him on book 5, book 6, book 10. And then they are going to go back and, oh shit, now I can buy 10 fucking books.
Mitchell Baldridge: So now your customer LTV goes from $7 to $28, Eric. Let's go. But it is a long- Also you just bring- or what's his name? Sahil was talking about that, surface area of luck. It's like just the more you do, you just make your own luck.
Eric Jorgenson: And this is the huge difference between leverage or compounding, the combination of both is massive. I feel like- David has leverage already. If he stops right now, he would still- if he never made a podcast again, he would still have income from the product leverage that he’s done for the last 10 years. But he's going to keep working, obviously. And it's going to both compound and be leveraged. It's like just the extreme outcomes that you see, the crazy high impact people, crazy wealthy people come from combining both of those ideas. And compounding is a lot of airtime. And I don't think leverage gets as much. But it's definitely a combination of both. And it's just a difference in choosing business models, basically, or where you want to invest your time and that iron test of what happens if you're not- Are you working on building leverage, or are you just one in, one out, or even one in, three out? It's not always the same. It's so dominant when you see it play out. It's crazy.
David Senra: And then just one piece of advice that I see gets communicated a lot, which my own personal experience conflicts with, and so people might find this valuable, but obviously, I think the most valuable network in the world in terms of who's on it and who you can reach is most likely Twitter in the sense of like, even though I kind of fucking hate the product, and it makes me sad to use it, the people that are extremely important and can change your world are on there. They're also on LinkedIn to a degree as well. And this is a main lesson that Truong was teaching me. He's like, Dude, you need to go on LinkedIn, so people that are- People that are marketing to other businesses, this guy knows a ton about marketing to businesses. He's doing it better than almost anybody else I know. He's telling you to do that, maybe you should listen to his advice. I've started taking his advice, and I'm seeing some good results over there. And from a negligible starting point. I didn't even have a LinkedIn. I didn't even know what it was because I don't apply for jobs. So, it's correct. But one thing that conflicts is like people say, oh, if you're marketing to businesses, oh, don't even waste your time with TikTok because it's just fucking little kids or like a bunch of stupid people or- and to some degree obviously, it's like the easiest app to use. And if it's easy to use- Twitter's difficult, like to make it perform well for you, it's not like Twitter does that for you, you have to do it yourself, which is why its user base is so small compared to other networks. But what I'm just telling you is like the benefit I had that other people didn't is the fact that when you run a podcast, you don't know who's listening. There's almost no- like the analytics for podcasting is like worth- It's not what you think it is if you don't have it. So, but the benefit I had that other podcasts didn’t do where it wound up being a mistake, but I've benefited from it, was that I knew who every single one of my listeners was. Because to listen to a full episode at that time in history, you had to sign up, and when you sign up, you give me an email address. And I'm telling you right now, what happens is people would sign up, they’d discovery me through TikTok, they’d listen to a preview, they'd like it so much, they fucking pay to listen to a podcast, which is crazy. Then once they sign up, everybody automatically would get my email, then they would email me. And they would tell me where the fuck they came from. And so I'm hearing everybody say, b2b is dead on TikTok. It's a waste of time. And I'm just saying, hey, this founder of this company, this fucking venture capital firm’s there this fucking endowment’s here. Just I see your fucking emails, and I'm telling you right now, that's not true. That is absolutely not fucking true. And part of me is like, okay, keep believing that because I will then build- I'll take- I'll siphon these people off TikTok and put them on the Founders feed.
Eric Jorgenson: But you already have like 1000 followers on TikTok, dude. How long has it been?
David Senra: Followers is irrelevant. Because that's what people have a hard time understanding.
Eric Jorgenson: That it's about views on TikTok.
David Senra: I don't give a fuck about followers. I care about views. Because there's people that have signed up, this has happened a few times, they saw a TikTok that had maybe 100,000 views or whatever it is. They sign up, and they don't even follow me on TikTok. They just saw one fucking video. Because when you use TikTok, I don't even- like everybody's on their for you page. And so this is why it's so fucking powerful. And I've told you, I've told- Mitchell started doing TikToks because I fucking bothered him about it.
Eric Jorgenson: Did you start? Are you doing it, too?
Mitchell Baldridge: I did a few and then I quit. But it is interesting that you have these three like millennial- me and David are millennial boomers, and Eric's a young millennial. But we have these guys who all have worked on our brand, have worked to present our ideas in public to the best that we can. Eric wrote a book. David's recorded hundreds of hours of pods. I’m a thread boy. And we all want to kind of push this forward. And we all have this, except David, we all have this resistance. And even David does to some extent of, I'm like David post- post threads, post five of your byline plus italicize- or you have these things, David, that are working and you're not doing enough because you have unlimited content at the bottom. It's like the best thing you can do if you're listening to this right now and you've made it this far, and you don't know what to do in life is go find- DM me, don't DM me, and find content influencers and do the ghostwriter thing or do the producer thing. Find them and push them.
Eric Jorgenson: I get one of these DMs every single day.
David Senra: This is another advantage I have of having email- knowing people's emails, because when I was doing ads on Eric's podcast and then when I went on this podcast, the people that are listening to this know what they're doing. They're just looking for new ideas. I was blown- I’m not fucking bullshitting. I was blown away at the quality of people that listen to Eric's podcast, and it speaks to the quality of his work, because they fucking email me and they tell me I heard you on Eric’s fucking podcast. I just need to finish that thought though. The reason why it's so powerful is because of the way it's set up that when you have a viral TikTok, you can look at the analytics. Over 90% of the people that saw that, which are then prompted to make some kind of action which is I'm pushing them to my podcast feed, do not follow you. That means they're showing you to a new audience all the fucking time. So there's this guy, there's a guy that you guys should- this is the magic of the internet, it goes back to that George Mack quote I said at the beginning, like there's two types of people, people that don't understand scale the internet and people that know they don't understand the scale the internet. There's a guy I want everybody to look up. Go to TikTok, type in Frank Niu, N-I-U. Okay, you're going to see this guy. He's got over a billion views. Okay. What does he use? He has his fucking phone up to his fat fucking face. And he talks directly into- No, there's no production value here. His videos are like 15 seconds, 20 seconds, 30 seconds. Yes, that's it. That’s it. I'm not insulting him. I fucking love Frank. Frank's my dude. I fucking love this guy. But my point being is like this guy started out and what he would do is like he was a Netflix engineer. He's like one of these fire guys who makes like $500,000 a year and then spends no money and then retires early. So now he's like- and I think he's like 30 something and he's retired. And so anyways-
Eric Jorgenson: Oh, he's the TikTok Mister Money Mustache.
David Senra: Yeah, so like that, but check this out. So he started out- he's like, well, he didn't have a social following anywhere else. And he would just make like 10 or 15 or 20 videos a day. Why? Because it's just talking directly- This should not work, and it fucking does. This guy just sits there. He's got a big brain because he like reads a lot and just had a lot of life experience. So he sits there, takes the shit that he's learned in his big fucking brain, spits it out in 30 seconds, uploads it. Then he takes his phone back out and does it again. Does that 10 fucking times a day, 15 times a day. This guy did it in a year and a half, this is what's going to blow your fucking mind, in a year and a half, he accrued over a billion views. A billion. And his issue is, to Mitchell's point, there's no bottom of the funnel. He's just getting views on TikTok, because he's just like, I have nowhere to send them. I think he did a small amount of investing or whatever. But he just like sends you to Instagram- just sends you to another thing. But imagine, I was like, why don't I do that? I could do, to Mitchell’s point, I could do 5, 10, 15 a day, whatever that is. They go out. Most of your followers don't see it on TikTok. And like I have a bottom of- all three of us, we have something to direct people to – buy a book, listen to a podcast, fucking do Better Bookkeeping or follow Mitchell on Twitter, whatever you want to do. That is insane. The idea that you could just take a guy, an iPhone, a brain, and an app and get a billion fucking views to other humans in a year or year and a half is insane. And they're like, oh, these are low quality people watching. I'm watching. I don't think I'm low quality. You're out of your fucking mind.
Eric Jorgenson: No, you’re great, David. It's like you got a digital version of a politician just like shaking hands. It's like imagine being able to shake hands with a billion people. Even if it's a quick greeting. Hey, hi, hello, this is what I think, this is what I like. Yeah, I get that, especially if you have a good sort of middle and bottom of funnel.
David Senra: What if it's like Paul Graham's essay that everybody's read, all entrepreneurs read, do things that don't scale. And he uses all these examples.
Eric Jorgenson: Are you doing Paul Graham's essays as an episode?
David Senra: Yeah.
Eric Jorgenson: I’m was excited for that one.
David Senra: Yeah. Because one of his essays is How to do what you love. I legitimately, I remember laying in bed, I couldn't sleep. And I was like, fuck it. I'm going to spend- I'm willing to spend every single dollar I have, I'm willing to go down to zero. And at the time I was married with a kid, now married with two kids. But I was like fuck it. I'm willing to do this, because I'm going to give everything to try to do podcasts for a living because I just trusted I'd figure it out. And so I had to live off savings for a while until the podcast started paying for everything. But do things that don't scale, to your point, all- Estee Lauder is the best example of this. Where like-
Eric Jorgenson: Your Estee Lauder episode was killer. I listened to that and I definitely bought that book, gifting it to a friend who's like really into the beauty industry. A really, really interesting one.
Mitchell Baldridge: You were name checking it too on Kobe, talking about kind of big ideas-
David Senra: It's amazing how many- like you never know when you put something out when it resonates. I thought the book was fantastic. That fucking episode went crazy. That episode is the one that Patrick linked to that got me hundreds of paid subscribers back when it was just a paid- he's like, fuck- I think it's episode 217. But my point being is, she did this, to your point, just the reason I thought about this is because you're like, hey, it's politicians shaking hands. And she's like, “Hey, I'm going to touch more faces” because her business was beauty. And so, she's like, my goal in life is to touch more women's faces than anybody else that has ever lived in human history. And so, she would- she built her business by riding buses and riding trains all over the country and showing up, if it's a large opening for a product or tiny, it didn't matter, she would show up. And she used the time, her transit time, because if you're a woman sitting in the train across from Estee Lauder, I think this is probably in the 1950s, 60s, I don't know, right around there, she's going to come up to you and she's going to offer to give you a glow up for free. And she's going to take out the product that she built, that she built with her own hands, that is named after her, and she's going to touch your face and give you a free blow- free like beautification or whatever it is. And she said, this is fucking dead serious though. This is why it's so important. This is why I respond to-
Mitchell Baldridge: Which is still the business model, by the way, of a cosmetic counter is you show up and they give you everything for free, and you walk away.
David Senra: You can do this too, because I probably respond to, not every day, but a lot, probably like at least 50 messages a day. I can't get to- I try to do as many as I can because I think of Estee Lauder where she's just like, you have to understand, three decades, four decades after I was doing this, I still get messages of women that met me on this bus to fucking Corpus Christi or this fucking train across the country. To your point of if we're playing the long game, this shit will compound. You took 5 minutes, 10 minutes to make somebody's day and that person is a customer for fucking decades.
Eric Jorgenson: Gary V does the same thing, but digitally. He replies to as many- so many fucking tweets. He's making stuff all the time.
Mitchell Baldridge: One of my first- I got on Twitter in October of 2020, two years ago. And I remember, we were talking probably about Founders podcast, about Danny Meyer, and about how to imagine that book, setting the table, and then Danny Meyer chimes in, and I'm like, holy shit, Danny Meyer just came by my table and asked me if I'm having a good meal, and there is a way to do that as a- just to be a maître d of your own growth online.
David Senra: So this happened, this happened because the idea is I try to- if I find something that works, I try to share it with other people. Patrick is sitting on this giant back catalogue of 300 episodes, too. So he's been repurposing content. And he did one on Danny Meyer from an episode like two years ago, and what happened? Danny fucking quote treats it. And he talks about, man, this is what I love because it is all in the books, too. He's like, he talks about the importance of hospitality. And he's like- Danny says in tweet form, he's like, man, sometimes I miss the first 10 years of my career. This is a guy that is now worth hundreds of millions of dollars, just to Shake Shack, who knows what his real estate or his restaurant empire, and he's telling you, as you know, he’s probably in his 60s by now. He's like, man, I wish I could go back to the first 10 years of my career when I worked the door, and I could actually give individual hospitality. But that's the magic. What fucking Mitchell just said, it's like you put the shit out here. And in Patrick's case, the people he has on his podcast are alive and they're on Twitter. And then they amplify. I guarantee you somebody saw Danny's fucking tweet, did not know about the Invest like the Best episode, maybe has never listened to Invest Like the Best ever, now saw that, followed the link and now listens. And if he likes it, he or she likes it, like, okay, I'll try more. That is all I'm saying. It's like, just do that, do it forever, and let the score take care of itself.
Eric Jorgenson: I think that the mix is the really interesting thing. So you switched- David, you said you switched from 90/10 to 50/50 this year. How long ago?
David Senra: January.
Eric Jorgenson: Mitchell, what would you put your split at?
Mitchell Baldridge: I've hired a great CPA at my CPA firm who’s helped take a lot of that weight off and helped me grow the kind of core business firm. And then on RE cost seg, my wife runs it, Melanie. So like that, we have a very competent CPA in place, or not CPA but CEO in place. And then, I've been focusing-
David Senra: I heard the CEO of cost seg listens to Founders too.
Mitchell Baldridge: That's true. Yeah, now that it's an open feed, she's excited she can listen to it. And then yeah, I've been doing that as well on- I've been spending a lot of time developing Better Bookkeeping, and a lot of focus in talking every day to my co-founder there. But yeah, I think businesses that have me as the linchpin of the operating capacity are not going to succeed very well. So, finding operational leverage and system leverage has been huge for me. And it's just like if I'm the keeper of knowledge and the conductor of the train, sitting in the middle of my business, it's just not going to go very far. So I've purposefully kind of stepped away to just be like, if things break because I'm not holding them together with baling wire and bubblegum, let them break.
David Senra: What’s your split, man? Answer the question.
Eric Jorgenson: So the question of Better Bookkeeping, and then marketing for everything else?
David Senra: I think 90% of his time-
Mitchell Baldridge: I just talk to David every day for two or three hours.
David Senra: I get these texts, and my phone's always on DND. So I'll see like I missed a call. I'm like, hey, I was like, Yo, let me hit you back. I'm reading or making a podcast. He’s like, I'm basically free all day, bro. So this is my interpretation of Mitchell. You tell me if I am incorrect.
Eric Jorgenson: Mitchell tells them to tweet about him. That's his marketing effort.
David Senra: Mitchell has fully internalized your evangelism for leverage in the sense that he realized just like if you listen to the episode I did on the founder of Kinkos, it is very similar to that. He's just like, I'm not going to have any operational experience or any operational, what’s it called? Any operational responsibilities. All he would do is travel around to all the stores, the Kinkos stores, figure out what's the best fucking ideas they had, and then spread them over through the network. That's how he chose to spend his time. And that business was so successful that when he sold it, he was a high school dropout, if I’m not mistaken, and he winds up having buildings at UC Santa Barbara dedicated to him. Patrick just did another- actually interviewed him live. I got to listen to it. Because me and Patrick, way before I was on his network, me and him were texting about that book because, I don't know if this is public or not, but Patrick is investing in a company that essentially Paul ran his entire business on voicemail because he's dyslexic, he can't read. He doesn't like to read. So he's like fuck your email. So, he would just do these like voice memos. So he'd call into this fucking number and say, he’d just hit you with like a two minute fucking idea. And then you could listen to it on demand whenever you wanted to. And so, there's companies that are developing that. Audio, so companies are developing that idea. So Patrick had been telling me about that. And I was like, oh fuck, dude. And I sent him - I was like, dude, Paul did that idea fucking 30 years ago, and then he went to reading the book and then he fucking has a crazy network, so he gets Paul on the show. So again, weird ways this connects. But my interpretation of Mitchell, and then I got to go to dinner, guys, if you don't care, if we can wrap this up in like five minutes, sorry. My interpretation of Mitchell's like, I have, obviously, co-founders on all these things. They have certain responsibilities and he can think about like I can bring in business through Twitter threads. I can bring in business through rainmaking because fucking, he's got more customers than he can service now for his CPA business. I would say the split is almost all- like what is it? 75/25, 75 in growing the business, 25 actually operating the business?
Mitchell Baldridge: The cost seg thing, I spent weeks and weeks and weeks setting up all the processes, setting up all the systems, training the engineer, training the sales guy, and they've been better than I would have expected and now I only show up when people need me, and they don't need me that much. And yeah, I think it's really just-
David Senra: So, you have no fucking excuse not to do a podcast now. I’m dead- I’m dead fucking serious, dude. You are a super connector. I just gave fucking Eric his flowers in public. Like Mitchell, I told you before I texted him, I was like, bro, after this, I had this crazy experience when the podcast started blowing up, and I was like, dude, this is all traced back to you. And I told him the story that I just told on the podcast, and he's just completely dismissive. He's like, no, it's fucking nothing to do with me. I'm like, dude, like you saved my fucking ass. You helped me so fucking much. So anything I can do for you, I feel like I'm indebted to you. But what I realized about Mitchell is he's a fucking super connector. The dude knows everybody that I know that knows Mitchell says nothing but good things about him. Same thing with Eric. You have a fantastic reputation. And so, since you have a bunch of free time, you can get to anybody you want that will come on your podcast. You know a fuck ton of people like Chris and Michael and those other people and Eric and me that have podcasts. I mean, you have distribution built in. It may take- it may not be valuable day one, month one. I fucking promise you, I fucking promise you, it'll be unbelievably valuable three, four or five years from now. Just fucking do it. And don't quit. You have the time. Fucking do it. You put on the docket before we started talking today, poison pill me, what the fuck did you put? Like, red pill me? I just podcast pilled you. Just fucking do it, man.
Eric Jorgenson: If you think being a CPA on Twitter is valuable, imagine being the only CPA with a good podcast.
David Senra: But your first guest list could be fucking Girdly, Chris Powers, Moses Kagan. You know what I mean? You have the fucking insane network. Sam Hinkie probably would fucking go on it. I'll go on it. I know Eric would go on it. Not that I'm not in there, this class of people. I’m not putting myself in their class. I mean, but my point is, dude, you already have it. You're an interesting fuckin dude. It'll help you learn how to tell stories and communicate. It opens up unbelievable opportunities for you. Fucking do it.
Mitchell Baldridge: Well, there we go. I got to do it.
David Senra: I'm sweating.
Mitchell Baldridge: This whole episode was wind up David Senra and let him go. We're working on it. That was our goal. And we feel like we've accomplished our goal, but-
Eric Jorgenson: We've accomplished all our goals. I feel like we all left with more ideas, more inspiration, more excitement. David, do you feel like you got ideas too? Do you feel more educated or just like you had to give us a clinic in getting our shit together?
David Senra: No, that's not how I- Like no, I don't feel like I have my shit together. If you were to ask my own assessment of, I give myself right now- like I think I'm pretty good at podcasting but not nearly what I can be like with more practice and experience. Fucking I didn't realize this about myself until really you guys have helped me with this because you know how Mitchell describes me to other people, what he told Chris?
Eric Jorgenson: I'm guessing it involves the word-
Mitchell Baldridge: I was literally going to say a maniac. You are a maniac.
David Senra: He's like, I call you a maniac. And I didn't understand the- how I come off to other people. So if people understood like I haven't- this is like fucking day one. The reason I end every podcast with this is 272 books down, one thousand to go, and that number one thousand never fucking changes. I literally have people, they're listening to like episode 253, they're like, wait, so you're going to stop on 1253? That is oddly specific. I'm like, no-
Eric Jorgenson: No, you need to listen to some more episodes.
David Senra: I’m not going to stop. But no, I don't think I have my shit together. I would give myself right now a six on podcasting talent and a two on marketing. So, it's Charlie Munger’s orangutan theory, which I discovered by reading Katherine Graham's autobiography, which was recommended by Jeff Bezos. That's how I discovered the book. Where Warren was telling Katharine Graham when he was doing the investment, he is like tutoring her. Imagine like she had to learn how to run- her husband was running the Washington Post. He took a shot gun or gun to his head and fucking blew his brains out. And imagine coming downstairs seeing the father of I think four children, fucking brains on the bathroom wall, and then realizing, oh fuck, now I got to run a business. I've never run a business in my life. And so, Warren identified it, he thought it was a good opportunity. And essentially, she had like a personal one on one tutor to learn how to run a business. And it was fucking Warren Buffett. So this is in the 1970s. So she told- they were having a lot of these conversations, which again, dude, all I do is steal your guys' ideas, you influence my thinking. And she said that Warren told her that, hey, I subscribe to Charlie Munger’s orangutan theory, and I'm going to butcher it. But it's like, hey, a smart man walks into- gets in a cage or is sitting next to an orangutan. He talks to an orangutan. The orangutan eats the banana. After an hour, after 30 minutes, just from the guy hearing himself talk, he leaves smarter. And the orangutan just leaves full of bananas. So Warren's point was that it's extremely helpful in all your- anybody's professional capacity to have somebody that you trust to organize your thoughts with. I spend an amount- I have more people that I could talk to than time in a day. And I spend a lot of time talking to you two because I fucking respect the hell out of you and I learn a lot from you. So the answer is, yeah, there's going to be ideas that I take away from every single conversation I have, just that I told you, that framework that- literally, I think I've mentioned this like half a dozen times on the podcast, the idea is like identify the person that's best in the world at what you want to do and ask what they're doing differently. That's an idea I got from you. That's not my idea. That's an idea- like fucking Mitchell being relentless about organizing and putting out more content. And direct- he told me, the very first fucking thing, Mitchell was the first person I met in person that listens to the podcast. Now, I meet a ton of listeners. But I- so he sent me a DM. He was like, bro, I love your podcast, and I was like, Dude, I appreciate you fucking tweeting about it. He goes, “Where do you live?” I go, “I live in Miami.” He goes, “Oh, I'm actually here for a conference.” And I think I was like, “Oh, do you want to have coffee tomorrow?” And so I walk up. Michel doesn’t say, “Hey, David, nice to meet you.” He goes, “Why the fuck aren't you more famous?” That's the first thing he said to me. I don’t think he said fuck. He goes, “Why the fuck aren't you famous?” And he essentially me lectured me in a very kind way. He's like, your bottom- He said it- What's the word you used? Your bottom- Not the bottom of the funnel. You called it like-?
Mitchell Baldridge: Yeah, I mean, you just have the goods. Most people are out there working and don't have the goods.
David Senra: Yeah, what's the- Anyway, so, you're going to have this bottom of the funnel. He goes, “Fix your top of your funnel, dummy.” That's my interpretation. He said it in a nice way. But he was telling me- yes, exactly. So I take ideas from everybody. I try to learn from everybody. But I've learned a fuck ton from both of you.
Eric Jorgenson: How much better- You said you changed at the beginning of the year, we're 10, almost 11 months in, we’re 10 months in. How much ground have you covered? You can use whatever metrics or units you want since changing-
Mitchell Baldridge: He said he was a 2 in marketing. He was like a negative 3, so he is up 5.
Eric Jorgenson: When you said better, is it like 50% better? Is it 20 times better?
David Senra: Yeah, it's more than 20 times better. Yeah, because I didn't know what I was doing. I don't like- And also we discovered, running these experiments, thinking about- essentially I started with the year like, how do I get more listeners? And then if you work backwards from that, that leads you to remove the paywall, that leads to seek out partnerships with Patrick, and then- my point being is like I see Ryan Holiday’s content system. And I'm like, he reads a ton, but I have the content too, like very similar to his, but his execution has been way better than mine. And so, it's like, how do you get to the execution?
Eric Jorgenson: Neil Patel was here. He would say, go hire someone who's currently running a content engine for someone else, poach them immediately. Cut them loose on- hire somebody who's already done this before and apply them immediately to your own business. Because there's people who are experts at this. You don't have to reinvent the thing. And you don't have to do it all yourself, for sure. You don't have to hire and train someone to do it. There's people who could knock this out for you. If you want to have a Ryan Holiday org in a year, I feel like that's doable.
David Senra: My little boy just ran in here. So I 100% agree. And I think that's where I'm going. Because I have this idea where it's like, well, anybody- the benefit of having a podcast is, I use the example of Troung. Like you can go- there's people in the audience that are world class at what you want to do. So I have people I could talk to that literally get hundreds of millions of views a month on short form that I constantly picking their brain. I go to Truong, how do I get better at Twitter? How do I get better at LinkedIn? There's a million different things that you could do. But the one thing, and that will be built out, but part of this also is I like just naturally like to learn. And so-
Eric Jorgenson: Yeah, that's a leverage battle actually. It is so hard to- for somebody who loves to learn and execute and do stuff yourself and figure it out, it is so hard to not have the reflex to say like, oh, I'll go acquire that new skill, and instead say, I will go buy that outcome through some combination of humans and tools. And that's a very different thing because you're still going to hit a ceiling of your own time well before you run out of outcomes.
David Senra: Now we've progressed to the part where I share a lot of what I learn, but then I have some weird ideas. If I say it out loud, people are like, you're fucking weird, which I can tell you later. But all the developments in technology are flowing to people like me and like you guys and like anybody that's creating educational content or content in general. And so, I just- my whole point is just like the- this is a longer discussion that I don't have time to do right now. But the optimal size of a company is clearly decreasing. And that is, in my opinion, going to accelerate to the point where you are going to- I talked about this on like episode 100 of Founders. Like, it's inevitable that we're going to see a single person billion dollar company. And so, this framework is, how can you design within constraints and really figure out- because I just told you I was rereading my highlights from Sam Walton’s autobiography. And he came across this where it's like he didn't have money to grow. He couldn't compete. He didn't want to compete in major cities. Essentially, the idea of his hypothesis was, hey, what if I just like build these in these like towns of 6000 people, if I just compete on price, and I control cost, will people drive out to my strange stores, even if it's a town of only 6000 people, just to save money? That was the hypothesis. The first Walmart, he's like, oh shit, they will. He had a constraint. He winds up doing experiments within that constraint. The meta point here's he had a constraint, he wound up doing experiments within that constraint. And then he developed, he discovered or stumbled upon- just a long tail of business that nobody was addressing, that created one of the most valuable fortunes in the history of the world. And so that weird fucking idea, and I don't think this is going to make sense to other people because it's just like in my mind, and I haven't figured out a way to explain it to other people. That concept of trying that weird idea is like how do you apply it to a one person media company that is targeting and making content for the most successful people on the planet? Then it gets into weird fucking things where it's just like- And some of this stuff I can't talk about because I don't even understand it yet myself. I just know- I'm like a fucking pig sniffling for truffles. It's like I smell them. I just can't see them yet. And I got to fucking figure out where the fuck the truffles are. So, that's a David Ogilvy line too. See, I can't even come with anything unique at all. So my point is I don’t want to evade your answers. I don't know the answer to the question. All I know is that spending time learning these skill sets, it's not going to be wasted time, even if I can't capitalize on it yet. And with that, I have to go to dinner.
Eric Jorgenson: Mitchell and I can keep going. You go to dinner.
Mitchell Baldridge: Yeah, we got another three hours in us. Yeah, David, I love you. You are a good man.
Eric Jorgenson: This is proof that we need to do this again and make it a recurring thing because we always have stuff to catch up on and teach each other.
Mitchell Baldridge: Yeah, it doesn't matter if other people listen and enjoy it or not. I enjoy it. And yeah, this is worth doing.
Eric Jorgenson: But if you are listening, we do care about you.
David Senra: Listen, I'm going to boogie. I'm going to boogie. That's another line I got from Truong, by the way, because he started saying that. This is how influential podcasts can be because I’ve been watching NIA since it came out. And then he starts saying that and then I start saying it in real life. And I'm like, where's- I'm fucking imitating people again. But it goes back to- we fucking influence- Again, the mind is a powerful place. What you feed it affects you in a very powerful way. Dude, guys, seriously, thank you for the opportunity. Anytime you want to podcast, whether it's Mitchell's unnamed podcast or your podcast, dude, I'm always down. Like I thought about that. I cut that part out of the Kobe interview. Or Kobe podcast you were listening to earlier, Mitchell. Because he winds up getting injured. I tell the story where he had like a, very similar to Jordan, had a For the Love of the Game clause where a lot of NBA teams won't let you play. But Jordan says no, I want it in my contract I can play no matter what, like I can play a fucking pickup game down the street if I want to, and obviously it goes against the interest of the owner. What happened to Mitchell?
Eric Jorgenson: He got a notification. He had to dip. He has to refresh. So he'll be back. Don’t worry.
David Senra: The- so anyways, I cut this out. But Kobe was the same way. He winds up injuring himself playing a pickup game in Venice Beach. He's already in the NBA, and he’s fucking injuring himself because he just loved to play. And so anytime people invite me onto the podcast, I don't- Some people are dicks, where they're oh, what's your download numbers or like, oh- I just say yes to everything. Because I just- it's like the equivalent of Kobe wanting to play basketball is me wanting to podcast. So anytime you guys want to do this, just text me and I'm there.
Mitchell Baldridge: Free alpha. If you invite David on, he'll bring the heat. And he will-
David Senra: You guys are way too nice to me than I deserve. I'm dead serious. Both of you have been hugely helpful to me and fucking the podcast.
Eric Jorgenson: You do incredible work and we want everyone in the world to see it and experience it. And I think it makes people better and smarter and stronger and able to live better lives. I’m a child of Mitchell's love of you. But I’m very careful to not put people- I know that wherever we direct attention matters. And whatever you put in front of people, they tend to believe or they tend to absorb some of, just like the mimetics thing. And so when I see somebody doing work as amazing as yours and with as much hutzpah as you do it, I want to shine a light on that and I want to bring other people's attention to it and I want to- because I truly think it makes not just their lives better but the world a better place where more people are influenced by high quality, high integrity work like this.
David Senra: Yeah, you're both- I'm indebted to both of you. I love both of you. I put a lot of my fucking life energy into this and for people to say they get value is just like it's hugely motivating. So I appreciate it. Anything I can ever do for you guys, please let me know. Sorry, I have to boogie but I think we've been talking for like three hours anyways.
Eric Jorgenson: Let's go eat dinner.
Mitchell Baldridge: Yeah, I’m hungry too.
David Senra: Alright guys, I’m sure I’ll talk to you tomorrow.
Mitchell Baldridge: Eric, I feel like we did better closing the loop-