Dumb iPhone Apps Are Making People Rich Again (Here’s how)

Summary

Podcast Summary: My First Million - "Dumb iPhone Apps Are Making People Rich Again (Here’s how)"

Date: February 24, 2026
Hosts: Sam Parr, Shaan Puri
Guest: Pat Walls (Starter Story)

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Episode Overview

This episode explores the surprising resurgence of simple, sometimes “dumb” iPhone apps as lucrative businesses. Hosts Sam Parr and Shaan Puri interview Pat Walls, founder of Starter Story (recently acquired by Hubspot), who shares firsthand insights and examples from the bootstrapped founder community. The conversation spans trends in app-driven entrepreneurship, the intersection of virality, AI, and app creation, the importance of systems and focus for founders, and the changing landscape of content creation for business.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. Starter Story—Origins and Acquisition

• Pat Walls shares his journey with Starter Story, a platform featuring founder case studies with transparent revenue, started out of frustration with his own entrepreneurial efforts.
• The business recently entered a sale with HubSpot—Pat details the emotional and psychological experience of negotiating and preparing for closure.
  • Quote: “I had a number in my head before any of this conversation happened... I wanted to be authentic in my negotiation.” —Pat Walls (01:17)
  • Regret: Even after hitting his number, Pat admits: “Do you feel any regret because you're like, oh, I got my number. I should have asked for more? Yeah, 100%.” (02:03)
• Differentiator: Public revenue metrics for case studies—originally inspired by Indie Hackers—proved key for user interest and research utility.

Timestamp: 00:21–05:32

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2. The Unexpected Comeback of ‘Dumb’ iPhone Apps

• Pat reveals that a surprising number of founders are making significant revenue from simple iOS apps in 2026—an echo of the early App Store goldrush.
  • “When I talk to 12 founders a week, I'm seeing six of them are crushing it with iOS apps.” —Pat Walls (00:00, 06:17)
• Examples:
  • Push Scroll — Blocks social apps unless you do pushups (30k/month+).
  • Another app requires users to pray before opening TikTok.
  • Puff Count — Helps users quit vaping by tracking puff count and gamifying progress.
• The playbook: Instead of building first, test idea virality with TikTok/reels. Only build if the idea gains traction.
  • “They created the viral video first...then when it did, they scrambled to create the app. They were able to validate the idea through TikTok and then build it.” —Pat Walls (08:36)
• Why now?
  • AI-powered app creation reduces development friction—lone founders or small teams can build MVPs rapidly.
  • Discovery is driven by TikTok/short video, not App Store search or old-school influencer marketing.

Timestamp: 05:32–15:15

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3. Apps as the New Info Products

• The panel reflects on how, similar to past info product booms (e-books, courses), apps are now low-barrier vehicles for digital entrepreneurship, thanks to AI and new forms of distribution.
  • “Apps are the new info products... it's actually a lot of people who like it... I want that life. I aspire to have that, like, I can make money anywhere, anytime, be on a beach type of lifestyle.” —Sam Parr (12:33–13:00)
• Old stories (Alan Wong’s 5-0 Police Scanner app), and new ones (fitness, tracking, or habit change apps), show that a single founder can build a high-margin business.
• Example: Calorie tracker built by high schooler Zach Calai, scaling from $30M to $70M+ ARR after going viral.

Timestamp: 12:33–16:09

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4. Video and Content Creation for B2B & Beyond

• Pat highlights the current “wild west” in business video:
  • Demand from enterprises for authentic, engaging video is surging. No company-wide playbooks exist yet, unlike established functions for design or engineering.
  • “Video is now the native tongue of the Internet. If you can't make good video, it's like moving to America and not being able to speak English.” —Shaun (17:10)
  • Many companies or startups pay handsomely (e.g., $50k–$100k/month) for YouTube strategy and format-based video agencies.
• Key obstacles:
  • Fear/shame in being on camera keeps competition low, presenting opportunity for those willing to try.
  • Example businesses:
    • 'Man on the street' interview agency, potentially hitting $10M/year in revenue (23:21–23:26)
    • Done-for-you "podcast interviews" for corporate social clips.
• Pat shares his rigorous content prep system (treatments, outlines, titling before recording) as a differentiator over ad hoc approaches.
  • “I always try to think about the vibes and the feeling that the viewer will get. Why should this video exist?” —Pat Walls (26:02)

Timestamp: 16:12–28:42

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5. Systems, Focus, and the Founder’s Journey

• Process over “busyness”:
  • Pat and hosts discuss the dangers of “urgency culture” and the virtue of building asynchronous, systematized companies.
    • “Busy people are the biggest losers...everything exists on a notion. All tasks that need to get done are simply assigned out to people.” —Pat Walls (31:40)
• Entrepreneurial OS:
  • EOS (Entrepreneur Operating System) is discussed as a flexible tool for managing growth, with caveats from Shaan on avoiding tool-chasing before product-market fit.
  • “The system manages your headache as you grow. That's how it's been for me, at least my personal experience.” —Shaun (38:32)
• The importance of focus:
  • Pat recounts a pivotal “think week” road trip that led him to jettison distractions and double down on Starter Story—doubling revenue in a month and setting up a path to eventual acquisition.
    • “I went all in on Starter Story. Best decision I ever made, obviously. I doubled the business’s revenue in a single month after that.” —Pat Walls (41:46–46:14)
  • “There's something that I like to call, you have your ego business...but actually, follow the money... What are you truly good at making?” —Pat Walls (44:26)

Timestamp: 28:42–47:14

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• “You haven't made it if that [regret] doesn’t happen. That's the final stage. Maximum regret and then it turns to maximum relief when it's done.” —Shaun (02:05)
• “If they come, then we'll build it…I think it's the right way to do things now.” —Pat Walls (09:35)
• “99% of people would rather write an article or do something that doesn’t have to put themselves out there…that’s actually why YouTube will be a huge opportunity.” —Pat Walls (18:48)
• “If you get the value hypothesis wrong, there’s no company. If you get the value right, but the growth one wrong, you’ve built a very, very small business. If you get both right, you just have to be an idiot to not get the money part right at the end.” —Shaun (29:09)

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Important Timestamps

• 00:21–05:32 — Pat’s background, Starter Story’s differentiating features, acquisition journey
• 06:08–16:09 — iPhone app resurgence, examples, virality-first strategy, impact of AI and TikTok
  • 08:36 — Reverse approach: viral video before product
  • 11:01 — Puff Count (anti-vaping) app, gamification
• 16:12–28:42 — Video as next business battleground (B2B angle), content systems, prep workflows
• 31:40–38:32 — Systems vs. busyness, asynchronous work culture, EOS pros/cons
• 41:46–47:14 — "Think week" breakthrough and the power of focus

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Final Thoughts

This episode spotlights how technological shifts (AI, new discovery platforms) are reviving old opportunities (like simple iPhone apps), why virality and market validation can precede product development, and the persistent value of discipline, systems, and focus for founders. Pat’s journey offers both tactical playbooks and inspiration—especially for builders navigating the chaos between idea, product, and sustainable business.

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Resources Mentioned:

• Starter Story (https://www.starterstory.com/)
• EOS / Traction by Gino Wickman
• App examples: Push Scroll, Puff Count
• Calorie tracker founder Zach Calai (Calai)
• Alan Wong (5-0 Radio/Police Scanner app)

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Check out Starter Story on YouTube and all mentioned platforms for more founder insights.

Transcript

[Pat Walls]

When I talk to 12 founders a week, I'm seeing six of them are crushing it with iOS apps. There's a guys that we interviewed on the channel that have an app that forces you to do pushups. They're doing 30k a month.

[Luis]

I feel like I can rule the world. I know I could be what I want to. I put my all in it. Like no days off on a road let's travel never looking back.

[Shaun]

Pat is here from Starter Story. Pat HubSpot just bought Starter Story. That's amazing. Congratulations. Congratulations.

[Pat Walls]

Thank you.

[Sam]

Is the news out?

[Pat Walls]

It is technically not closed yet, so I'm in a going through a whirlwind. I'm going to try to put on a good face for you guys.

[Sam]

You're seven days out right now from selling and when this goes live, it is presumably closed and yet you are nervous. What's that about?

[Pat Walls]

Well, the deal is supposed to close tomorrow, but, you know, it's the psychology of it needs to be signed, closed, wired, otherwise I cannot take myself to that place yet, that place to, you know, celebrate or tell people or anything like that. And it's kind of weird, you know, doing the production process because, you know, content needs to be recorded early to go out. So it's super weird to do an interview before it's done.

[Shaun]

How did you do with the negotiation? Do you feel like walk us through how you approached that and how you think you did give yourself a score there?

[Pat Walls]

I had a number in my head before any of this conversation happened. When it just came to my head and I started talking to chat GPT about it, having a little conversation of like, what is before even the. The sale or anything conversations happened, she said, like, what would be my walk away number? And I just remember thinking back what that number is. And when I went back to the negotiation and then it sort of was that number, I was like, okay, well, I made up that that would have been my number before any sale influenced me or anything like that. I negotiated to that number because I wanted to be like, authentic in my negotiation of like, that was like truly my number, not to make up something for whatever that was actually the number.

[Sam]

Do you feel any bit of regret because you're like, oh, I got my number. I should have asked for more.

[Pat Walls]

Yeah, 100%.

[Shaun]

You haven't made it. If that doesn't happen, that's the final stage. Maximum regret and then it turns to maximum relief when it's done.

[Pat Walls]

Yeah.

[Shaun]

All right, so let's, let's explain what is Starter Story. People don't even know.

[Pat Walls]

Starter story is a lot of things, but it started out as a side project while I was working a 9 to 5 because I couldn't start any successful business. So I said, why not just start interviewing founders and sharing their stories online and maybe I will find a co founder through that or I'll find a good idea through that. Long story short, it took off. We found other mediums. We had the blog with the case studies, we had products, we had community, we had a YouTube channel. It is all built around interviewing founders doing anywhere from 10k to 100k per month.

[Shaun]

Let me ask you, what'd you get right? Because this idea of, hey, I'm going to interview founders about, you know, how they did it, that's not like a new idea. And you did this only a couple of years ago. How many, how many years have been? Three, four years? How long has it been?

[Pat Walls]

No, I've been, I've been in the game longer than, than you might think. Eight years is when I officially started the business.

[Shaun]

Even eight years ago, that wasn't a completely novel idea. But you, you did well with it, right? You separated yourself from the pack. You made it a success. What do you think you got right that others didn't? And I really hope it's not just like a. I worked hard, you know.

[Pat Walls]

Yeah. I think one thing that now I'm looking back, what. What did we get right? Is that we were. You had to share your revenue to get on the website. So a lot of founders at the time, they didn't want to share those things because they had investors, it was private or whatever. We made it a requirement to share your revenue on the site. This is something that we got from indie hackers at the time, which was big on that too. Shout out Courtland. Who built that? But once you could see, like, you don't want to read a story about a business and you don't know how much revenue they're making. You want to know, how's this business doing? Okay, now I want to learn from this business. So having that revenue number at the top, that was really, really big.

[Sam]

If you guys Google like starter story case studies and you could find one or. And you could find this thing. It's called the full case studies database. And so early on you were really interesting because you would interview people. And I always thought that I was like within a very small niche of people who like this. But I think it's actually a lot of people who like it. Where I love numbers, I'm obsessed with Numbers. And you would do these interviews with people, and they very clearly were not interviews of you speaking. It was as if you just sent people a Google Doc, the same Google Doc over and over and over again. And you asked questions, and they typed out the replies, and then you created a graphic at the top. And it said, uh, here's one. It says Brumate. I think it's called Brumate. Yeah, Brumate. I grew a Drinkware brand to $1.1 million per month at 23 years old. And it said Jacob, and it said his revenue per month is $12 million. His. There's one founders. There's 53 employees. Like, the way he. You did such a good job of just outlining those numbers. And then what you did was once you had like, a hundred of these, I could sort through, like, D to C sas. I could sort through all these things. And frankly, if I was just trying to clone someone's company. Yep, that's probably not the right word, but figure out what business model I wanted to do. And like, well, if you wanted to clone someone's company, some asshole was gonna do that. Yeah, but, like, if you wanted to, like, research. That's a better word. You were like, you, you, you. And indie hackers were like, the best. But, like, you had, like, a bunch of legends. Like, you had David Hauser from Grasshopper and a bunch of people like that on early on. And it was really cool.

[Pat Walls]

Every single week, I talk to founders, as I mentioned, that are doing between 10k and 100k per month, and people that have sort of their businesses have took off recently. So I, like, I get to see. I get to have these conversations every single day and see, like, what's working like, right now. We can go over some of that if you want to.

[Shaun]

Yeah, give us one.

[Pat Walls]

Yeah, sure. What do you guys want to talk about? I have a couple options for you. We can talk about iOS. We can talk about YouTube, SEO. We could talk about APIs. We could talk about B2B video. What's exciting to you?

[Sam]

Let's do iPhone apps. Because to me, that sounds like 10 years ago.

[Shaun]

Yeah, that was probably the most surprising one on the list. Right. It's like, wait, that's the now opportunity? I feel like that was the 2010 opportunity.

[Pat Walls]

Right, right. So, yeah, it might feel like it's an old opportunity or it's too broad, but again, this is all. This is not something I read on Twitter. This is not something that I just came up with through ChatGPT. This is what. When I talk to 12 founders a week. I'm seeing six of them are crushing it with iOS apps. This is where this is coming from. So a couple examples. There's a guys that we interviewed on the channel that have an app that forces you to do push ups before you can go on social media. Like you scroll, it blocks you. And then you have to put your phone out there and prove that you've done pushups. They're doing 30k. They're doing 30k a month. And actually they're doing a lot more. Can't disclose it exactly. But after we interviewed them, they're doing. They told me some crazy numbers. Then there's another one that does basically the same thing, but it makes you pray, makes you do a prayer to God before you can go on TikTok. Yeah, yeah.

[Shaun]

Just like God intended.

[Pat Walls]

Yeah, yeah.

[Shaun]

To enter heaven.

[Pat Walls]

Yep. There's like a feature in the iOS API or something like that that allows you to screen block apps. So there's tons of apps like this or just, you know, basic blocking apps. There's a bunch of productivity related apps that are popular like that, that have some sort of, sort of almost gimmick element. But you see it on TikTok, you see it on social media and you're like, oh, let me try it. Okay, I want to do some, I want to get a little healthier or whatever.

[Shaun]

And, and are these. Okay, so I see it. Push up, push up. Time blocker.

[Sam]

Right?

[Shaun]

Push up, push scroll.

[Pat Walls]

Push scroll. That's the one.

[Shaun]

Push scroll. Okay, gotcha. So you go, push scroll. Okay, push scroll. Screen time control. So you, you replace doom scrolling with a healthy habit. It literally has a picture of a guy doing pushups, like with AI watching him. And then it says it can limit your, the apps you're addicted to. And basically you earn, you know, you earn it as you, as you make progress. Now here's my question. Are these doing the same kind of like you make a fun kind of novelty app and then you do like massive TikTok content by giving paying influencers or affiliates or basically getting like a hundred or a thousand pieces of content posted every week? They'll come up with their own hooks like, oh my God, y'.

[Pat Walls]

All.

[Shaun]

You know, check this out. I haven't used Instagram at all this week because of whatever, right? Or here's where these gains came from. Instagram.

[Sam]

What?

[Shaun]

And then it's like, you know, is it that, is that the playbook that they're all doing?

[Sam]

Sean, you should become a TikTok affiliate. That's pretty good.

[Shaun]

That was kind of natural.

[Pat Walls]

What was really cool about this app, and this is a cool story worth telling, is that they didn't actually build the app first. They created the viral video first. And this is a really cool story that we told is basically they created a video about them having to do push ups before scrolling, they pretended that the app exists and they showed them having to do pushups or whatever. And they created a bunch of other videos about other app ideas. This is the one that went viral and then when it did, it got some hundreds of thousands of views. They went and scrambled to create the app and then it took off. So they were able to validate the idea through TikTok and through their marketing channel they're gonna use and then build it, which I thought was super cool.

[Sam]

Were they technical?

[Pat Walls]

One guy? There was two guys. One guy was the technical guy. The other guy was the kind of

[Shaun]

the marketing push up guy. Yeah, one guy's just great at push ups. So this is the opposite of Field of Dreams, right? Instead of, you know, if we build it, they will come. It's like, if they come, then we'll build it. I guess. I guess you got to build it then. And they just went viral first.

[Pat Walls]

Exactly. They reversed the whole process, which I think is the right way to do things now. Because imagine creating 10 apps and having none of them work. That would take you a year. Or creating one video in one day and having it work. And that takes one day.

[Sam]

All right, so Pat is giving you guys something straight out of his playbook, which is his method to finding a $1 million business idea. It's a template that guides you through seven proven methods to identify 21 problems that you can solve. It gives you real founder case studies so you can build and validate your ideas fast. If you want the template and case studies straight from Pat, you can download it right now. Just click the link in the description. Now back to the episode.

[Shaun]

Are there other apps that you're seeing? Another genre of apps that you're seeing

[Pat Walls]

that are working apps are the new info products? I think so. Anything in health, wealth, relationships, productivity, self improvement. These are all great spaces. And the reason why I wanted to share the dumb apps, because they're the most funniest when you think about them. I'm not saying go build a dumb app, but build anything in these sorts of spaces right now. And health. So fitness, gym, apps, these sorts of things. Wealth, money, productivity, these sorts of things. That is a great space to be building right now.

[Shaun]

What are you Seeing in wealth.

[Pat Walls]

Well, there's not any kind of the silly apps, but anything that's in like crypto trading, these sorts of things, those are really, really popular.

[Sam]

What's a stop vaping app?

[Pat Walls]

Yep. So that would be another one of the health. I think the health one is a good space. There's a guy that just built an app that helps you track. It was called Puff count and I think you just track how many puffs you took. And then once you get to a certain low amount, it sort of gamifies the process of quitting nicotine. That was a cool one. He sold it for a lot of money and that was a really cool example. Did a lot of TikTok who bought

[Sam]

it like Philip Morris and they shut that sucker down. Get that out of here. And are these kids built like. I assume I watch your channel and it's almost a young like 20 something. Are a lot of them actually technical or are they just using AI to make this stuff?

[Pat Walls]

That's the thing is they're using AI coding and this is why it's big now. And you're thinking it was big like 10 years ago. It's big now because in order to build an iPhone app, you needed to have a team of four. To build a good iPhone app, you needed a designer, you needed a product person, you need an engineer, probably a backend and a front end engineer. But with AI coding tools, you can just have an idea. It's not perfect, but it's like 95% of the way there. You can just build it with zero. Basically a team of zero apps that couldn't have existed before because it wouldn't have been cost effective. You couldn't have built a stop vaping app with a team of four people getting paid $100,000 a year or $200,000 a year. It just wouldn't have been feasible. But now there's this opportunity for all these little kind of weird fun apps that blow up on social media because you don't need anybody to build them anymore.

[Sam]

You know what's interesting is you said that apps, the new info products that didn't hit with me until just a second ago. Do you guys remember the police scanner app? I think it was called five dash radio or five o Radio. Do you remember that, Sean?

[Shaun]

Sort of. Not really. Okay, I've heard of these. Like citizen is the one I know about.

[Sam]

This was before that. So I'm part of this forum where this guy is a poster and I knew he was kind of a celebrity to me. A Little bit. And his name's Alan Wong. And he started this thing called 5O scanner. So if you guys Google him, he kind of was famous because he created this iPhone app. And I think his story was that he was an immigrant from another country. He came here with nothing. His family, I think. I think they worked in a restaurant, something like that. He created this thing called the 5O scanner right when the iPhone got started, and he made eight figures. I think he was making like $5 million a year, repeatedly, for a very long time. And he, like, wrote the story about how he was able to retire his mom and dad. Then he, like, bought a Lamborghini and he took a photo of himself in the Lamborghini when he was like, 24. And he kind of went viral for that. But he never actually taught how to make apps. He was like, kind of like, true to, like, just making apps. And I remember this guy, and he was like, one in a million. There was, like, not other people doing, like, these iPhone apps that were making five or eight million dollars a year with one employees. He was one in a million. And it was so cool. And he's like a celebrity a little bit to me, because I kind of grew up. He was kind of like my Tai Lopez. And it is kind of interesting to say that these. The. The. They are the new info products, because info products. When I was growing up, when I was 19 and 25 or 19 and 21, trying to get into the Internet, it was always info product people that, like, I didn't. I didn't exactly look up to because I thought they were sleazy a little bit. But I was like, I want that life. I aspire to have that, like, I can make money anywhere, anytime, be on a beach type of lifestyle. And it is funny that you're saying that the apps weren't even on my radar because I didn't know how to make them. I couldn't. I physically couldn't do that, but now I probably could. And that is kind of an interesting way to look at it. And then we saw. We had this one. What was the kids who we had on here?

[Shaun]

Sean Calorie tracker Calais.

[Sam]

We had calai. He was.

[Pat Walls]

Have you guys seen how big that business is now?

[Sam]

So he talked to it. This guy Zach talked to us. Literally.

[Pat Walls]

He.

[Sam]

It was noon on a Tuesday. What are you doing here?

[Shaun]

He goes, period.

[Sam]

He goes, I came home for lunch during high school to, like, do this interview, and I have to go back to school. And at the time, I think it was a $30 million a year business. How big is it now?

[Pat Walls]

I saw on X, so it's not verified or anything like that, but they, they said they did 6 million in January alone. So 70, what does that put it at? 70 something million.

[Sam]

That's incredible. Well, he launched a thing called App Mafia, which is like a course on how to make apps. And I don't think it landed. I think people kind of mocked it. But anyway, it was cool to like see that this is the new info product.

[Shaun]

Well, it's cool because it sounds like there's two trends coming together, right? It's apps are getting easier and easier to make with AI and vibe coding. And then on the other hand, you have a new discovery platform, TikTok, that you can get your app downloaded from and both happening at the same time. Like Charlie Munger calls these like lollapalooza effects where multiple factors kind of conspire in your favor and then suddenly you get this crazy sort of lollapalooza effect out of it. And so you get 1, 2, 3, 4 variables all pushing in the same direction unintentionally. And it creates like a new opportunity. So we were joking. Like, dude, iPhone apps is. This is like 2010. Like, well, what do you mean that's the opportunity? Well, there's something that changed. Apps got way easier to build and apps got way easier to be discovered. There's a new way to get discovered as an app. So the playing field reopened in a way that the window was sort of closed, you know, over the last, let's say five years ago. It was less juicy than it is currently.

[Pat Walls]

Yep, that's right.

[Sam]

Okay, you wanna do another idea? What else you got?

[Shaun]

Let's do this. B2B. B2B video. I'm curious what you have there.

[Pat Walls]

Yeah, I don't have like crazy business ideas here, but I have just some intel on how big this opportunity is. And there's so many business ideas you can do off of this. So I know this and you guys know this is that video content is hard. Doing anything on video is hard. It doesn't matter if it's long form, short form, paid ads, organic, getting authentic non AI generated. We're not talking about AI generated stuff like video to work for your business that gets views and converts customers there. It's really, really hard. At companies, there's lots of functions, right? Design that's pretty much solved. You get good designers to do good stuff. Product that's a little tough, but kind of generally solved. Engineering kind of solved, especially with AI sales There's lots of playbooks for all these. Right. But there's no playbook right now for video. I'll stop there. Let me know what you guys think immediately about that.

[Shaun]

I think you're spot on. I've said before, video is now the native tongue of the Internet. It's the language that the Internet speaks. And so if you can't make good video, you essentially, it's like moving to America and not being able to speak English. You might be able to get by, but it's not going to be easy for you. And so you're right that the way you just put it is really great, which is that companies don't even have really the job function yet at the majority of companies to be able to produce video. Who in. Who in the company should be able to produce video? Right now? It's like kind of the youngest employee maybe is going to do it. You know, the guy who happens to have a camera and, you know, understands TikTok a little bit. I guess you can sort of do it. The social media person supposed to be expected to do this, but it's probably going to elevate up to the level of product design, project management. Like, there's going to be one of these functions at companies where you need to be able to produce good video because that's how we communicate with the world now.

[Sam]

Yeah. Or it's going to be the person who's least embarrassed. What's funny is, like, so starting in December, I started doing. I tried. I wanted to learn Instagram. So I was like, I'm gonna make a video a day. I was so ashamed to be doing this.

[Pat Walls]

Yes.

[Sam]

And like, that I, like, started learning how to do this. And I was like, this is so, like, manipulable. Like, I know how to do this now. It took me about 30 videos to master. But what was holding me back was just the shame. Just the shame. Like, it's just so embarrassing to, like, be walking down the street and talking and being like, hey, so here I'm gonna. Wait, hold on. Gotta redo it again. Hey. So here I'm gonna. I was like, well, if I hold it a certain way, I could just pretend that I'm on FaceTime. But people hear me repeating the same thing over and over again. Like, this is stupid. Like, I'm acting here. It was horrible.

[Pat Walls]

Well, that's actually why it's a huge opportunity. And I have this in one of my other ideas, which is around YouTube, SEO, but that's also related to video. But I talk to A lot of founders or people that want to be founders, people are afraid to put their themselves on camera. That's actually why there's one of the biggest opportunities, because 99% of people would rather write an article or, you know, do something with like Google SEO or just do something that doesn't have to put themselves out there and put their face out there. And that's actually why YouTube I think will be a huge opportunity, because most people are too scared to actually put a camera in front of their face and start yapping.

[Shaun]

It's also hard, right? Like, it takes a lot of work to do YouTube compared to a podcast. A podcast is so much easier than doing planned, scripted, edited, packaged YouTube content. And then you get the big view number in your face and you get an immediate, like, slap or you know that, that quick high that you're then going to chase, right? And. And that's a very tough cycle on YouTube, I think, you know, short form is sort of similar. There's like the phrase like 200 view jail, where a lot of people will create TikToks and they just sort of never get past the 200 view number. You just stay stuck in that state.

[Sam]

Right.

[Shaun]

But there's a huge amount of, I don't know, self consciousness as well as actual work that goes into doing this. Today's episode is brought to you by HubSpot. Did you know that most businesses only use 20% of their data? That's like reading a book but then tearing out 4/5 of the pages. Point is, you miss a lot. And unless you're using HubSpot, the customer platform that gives you access to the data you need to grow your business, the insights that are trapped in emails, call logs, transcripts, all that unstructured data makes all the difference because when you know more, you grow more. And so if you want to read the whole book instead of just reading part of it, visit HubSpot.com so what's the solve here? How do you actually. How do you actually solve this? What are different angles you could take? Like, Sam, how would you, let's say you believe this was the problem. I think Pat is accurately described the problem and the value that's there. But you need, you still need a key to unlock the door. What's the. What would be the key? What would be an idea that you would create in this space?

[Pat Walls]

I could show you a couple people. One guy that I think is cool, he does. So big companies, they want to get into video. HubSpot obviously wants to get into video. Big Fortune 50, Fortune 100, Fortune 500 companies. They need to figure out YouTube and they need to figure it out fast. And I know a guy who has an agency that he goes for the big boys. He goes for like the Microsofts, the Figmas. And he basically just sends them, he helps them build YouTube teams and he sends them packaging ideas. Do this title, do this thumbnail. Do this title, do this thumbnail because you are Microsoft or some massive company. He charges like it's different probably per client, but he's told me some crazy numbers, like 50 to $100,000 per month just for YouTube strategy. And that shows you how much B2B. This is a B2B specific play here, how much they're willing to pay to have this problem solved. And I still don't like, that's like one example. I don't even know a lot of people that are solving this problem. I don't know what you guys think.

[Shaun]

Well, there's other people who are doing like done for you, right? So we've talked about the guy, I think his name's Josh, who does the street interviews for companies. So it's like, oh, Josh sucks. You know what's the most shameful and awkward and difficult version of video is like man on the street interviews. So he's like, just niche down into like, I'll give you that format. You give me money. I will walk around New York, I will stop people on the road and I will ask them, you know, three goofy questions to try to get, you know, try to get you some clips. Okay, so that's like one guy who's doing the done for you service. I know these other guys that do, they fly to companies and they, they podcast, interview them. They're like, look, forget even getting booked on an actual podcast. I'll just interview you, chop it up like you were on a podcast. Nobody even needs to know that there's no long form podcast actually underneath this. And I'll just give you the clips like. And for you, that's a lot easier. The usually the CEO or the founder is pretty comfortable just sitting down and being interviewed about their company in a podcast format. And they just do it, the whole thing, turnkey. And it's like, wait, let's just cut out the part of helping you get booked on actual podcasts and cutting it. We'll just fake the podcast. It's great. And so that's like another, like, we will deliver this format to you for a, a, you know, tens of thousands of dollars a month type of type of thing. Now you only need 10 customers and you're, you know, now you're cooking at over 100 grand a month.

[Pat Walls]

Yeah, I like the idea of taking one popular format and then turning that into a business. Like you said, the street interviews do that. One format for one business. And I actually met that guy who started that business and he told me some pretty wild numbers about his revenue.

[Sam]

We talked about it. Yeah, it was doing. I think this year is going to do 10 million in revenue.

[Pat Walls]

Yeah, One format. It's great.

[Sam]

Well, here, do this, Pat. Let's show. Okay, so do me a favor. You sent me a thing where you have your Google sheet or, sorry, your Google Doc that you have for every single video that you made. I want you to show it to Sean. And the idea here is like, what you. Your pre work for your YouTube video was really good and it outlined the whole story. You did a really good job of when you showed me how to make a YouTube video. And what Sean's describing is basically just doing that, but for companies, let's do it. So for the audience. Sean and I have done 750, almost 800 podcasts. Sometimes they're super well researched. Other times we're like, let's just riff. What do you want to talk about? Tell me about your weekend. Let's just talk. And it requires, like, no work. And occasionally those will get seen by hundreds of thousands of people. Occasionally there'll be an interview that has little research and we're just friends with the person and that could potentially get a million views. But then I saw yours, and it was so much more work, but worth it.

[Pat Walls]

Yeah, I'm very anal retentive and I want everything to be planned out. And I don't like off the cuff. I don't like spontaneous. I want everything to be there in the dock before that gets filmed. I'm saying that's better or worse. That's more my style. But I can pull up. Let me just find the right one to show you. Okay, so this is what we call a prep doc. I mean, my first million has something like this too, but this one is a little different. This is our prep doc for all of our videos that we do at Starter Story. And we will do a couple things in here. First, we start with the packaging. So this is before anything gets filmed. It's not post film, it's pre production. And we do the title and thumbnail. So this is this guy here. It's a different guest, but we're saying, hey, this is the thumbnail. We're gonna do. And this is the video. This video did pretty well. I think it got like 5 600, 700k views. So that's why I want to show it. It's like a good example and I learned this when I read this production book. It was like Hollywood production book. But when you sell a script in Hollywood they have what's called a treatment. And it's basically a pitch of a video of why someone will want to watch this video. If you want to sell your script in Hollywood and convince some director to pick it up or whatever happens in Hollywood, you have to sell the. You don't give them the 120 page script. You sell them the sales page of the script. So we always have title, thumbnail obviously. And then we have what's called a treatment. I'll stop there and let me, you guys let me know what you think about this.

[Shaun]

So let's just read this treatment. So you go, this is Mike, founder from Australia. Now are you thinking about this? Like what, what needs to be nailed in the treatment? What do you have to, what is the important part to find when you write this pitch?

[Pat Walls]

Yeah, I always try to think about how and this might have been written by, by my producer. But what I like to think about in the treatment is like the vibes and the feeling that the viewer will get when they watch it. Why should this video exist? Why will this, why will they leave this video and think about it for the next two weeks or tell their send it to their friend? I, I like to think about the feeling that you have when you watch it. Maybe this isn't the best example of that, but what is the viewer going to walk away? This isn't really like an intro. This is more like sell, I'm telling my producer right now, sell me on this idea so that when we go to record it we know exactly what we're trying to get out of this and that it ends up being how we planned.

[Shaun]

So in this case is the kind of, the main thing I would be feeling or wanting is oh man, I really want the sort of exact playbook.

[Pat Walls]

Yeah.

[Shaun]

You know, in this case the 10 step playbook validated by a Reddit post with 151 comments of how he's built these. You know, he builds SaaS apps to 200k mrr, something like that.

[Pat Walls]

That's the premise of this video is that hey, I have this very specific 10 step playbook and this is something that we found because he had written this awesome Reddit post about it. And it was really like a simple ten step playbook. If I do this, I do this, I do this, I do this. Something that our audience really likes. So we build the whole video around that checklist, and that checklist almost becomes like a character in the video that we can further dive deeper on. And the whole video, and this is another thing too, I kind of have it down here a little bit, is that every video has, like a big idea, like, why should this video exist? I don't want to tell the entire story of how, you know, he was born and how he grew up and all these things. I want to do it around one idea. And for this video specifically, it's the 10 step playbook. And then everything is built around that video. Because when the. Yeah, that's something that our audience likes and is really valuable because he used it to actually build a great business off of Gotcha.

[Shaun]

That's very cool. And then when you go to interview them, you're. You're trying to extract. You're trying to basically now fill in the blanks of this skeleton you already think is a winning video.

[Pat Walls]

Yep, yep, exactly. And I like to look at. I mean, one thing that I like to look at is successful social media posts, successful Reddit posts, successful seminars or like talks that they gave at a conference. Those are all good bones for a great. And this is the checklist right here that he did, or the ten step process. Those are all great bones for any video. It's like how I like to think about videos. If they've done this sort of talk or they've written this before, it's always, always a great outline, I guess.

[Sam]

So how many of these videos are you doing a week?

[Pat Walls]

We're aiming for two to three right now.

[Sam]

So you're making two or three of these a week. That's a lot.

[Shaun]

Yeah, yeah. It seems like you kind of undersold yourself at the beginning when you were like, you know, I stuck with it. I think obviously consistency and sticking with it mattered, but it sounds like also what really mattered was building a system to be able to do this at scale. Right. A team and a system, you had to do that. I would say most creators don't know how to build a system.

[Pat Walls]

Right.

[Shaun]

And it sounds like you found the, the growth. The growth hypothesis, which was if I put these types of stories on YouTube, there's always. YouTube will keep feeding me more and more audience for this type of content, and I can grow that way versus SEO versus anything else. Right. Like one of the frameworks I always Liked that I think has kind of gone out of style. Was Eric Reese when he did the Lean Startup, and he said, basically a company, you really have two main hypotheses. There's the value hypothesis, that if I do this, this will be valuable to this type of person, right? It will help this type of person with this problem. And then he goes, you have the growth hypothesis, which is totally separate from the value one, which is if I do X, Y, Z, that will create sustainable compounding growth. And that growth hypothesis can be, if I run Facebook ads, I can spend this much money, acquire users for this much, and generate this much to reinvest to buy the next user. It can be SEO, it can be YouTube, it can be anything, right? Where you're going to basically have some hypothesis as to how you grow. And he's basically like, if you get the value hypothesis wrong, there's no company if you get the value hypothesis right, but the growth one wrong, you've built a very, very small business. If you get both of those right, you just have to be an idiot to not get the money part right at the end. And I always liked that framing. And so whenever I do a project, I sort of try to think about what's our value hypothesis? And I call it a hypothesis, because we don't know until we go test it. And what's our growth hypothesis? We don't know until we go test it.

[Sam]

What do you do with the money once you've already made it? This is a question Sean and I ask our successful guests all the time. And the reason we ask it is because if you are successful, if you do have a little bit of money, information on how to spend or invest your money, it's actually really hard to come by. And I know this because inside of Hampton, which is my community of founders, people ask this question all the time. People have made 10 or $50 million. How do you spend it? How do you invest it? And so to help solve this problem and answer this question, I actually interviewed 80 plus founders. Guys like Scott Galloway, Alex Hormozi, Brian Johnson, people who are worth 50, 100, even billions of dollars. And we got them to reveal everything. So their net worths, how much they pay themselves, their monthly expenses, their portfolio, things like that. And we turn these 80 interviews into one document. And I don't think you can find this type of information literally anywhere on the Internet. And it's completely free. So if you want to see behind the net worth of people who are worth billions of dollars and their portfolios or Expenses, everything. You go to joinhampton.com/reveal. Again join hampton.com/reveal. Check it out. I have a feeling you have a bunch of other like stuff up in that Chrome window with all those tabs. And I personally am very interested in seeing you click around. Can you do that?

[Pat Walls]

Yeah, let's do it. So, yeah, as Sean said, I'm a big fan of systems and processes. Maybe that's just like my more like logical brain, former software engineer, spreadsheet kind of guy. So I try to build my company around a lot of systems and I had a note in here that I wanted to talk about, which was busy people are the biggest losers. I used to be in corporate 9 to 5 and I hated when I hated urgency culture. I hated getting emails and one off Slack messages. I worked at Deloitte and you'd get an email and then all of a sudden you're working a deal the whole weekend. I hated that. So I knew that when I started a company, I didn't want to build my business like that at all. I wanted to build it around systems, asynchronous systems so that I could play tennis every day at noon. And also my people that work for me enjoy that too. It's not for everyone, but this is how we operate. So everything exists on a notion. So right here we have our. All tasks that need to get done in the company are simply assigned out to people. And there's no like real like deadline or meetings about them. There are just things to get done. When you can manage that deep work session that you meant to do that day, go and do those and we're good as long as you get the stuff done that we plan to and we hit our KPIs and all these things. You can work whenever you'd like. And everything is here in this notion. Additionally, we have all of our production for our company, including YouTube, Instagram, Twitter, everything we post on any sort of social media. We track it all inside notion here and we have freelancers helping edit the content and create content.

[Shaun]

Who manages this board?

[Pat Walls]

I would say. Well, I have a like a producer, like producer light, I call him, who's sort of starting to manage this more. But I built this over. I wanted to get more serious about repurposing. So I built this over like course of like two, three months. Built it. It's more just like created the spreadsheet and created the processes and then I sort of handed it over in the last two months to someone else. So I have a light producer who manages this right now.

[Sam]

Light as in part time or light as in half a person? A little guy. Both A little guy. A little guy who works a little amount. Yeah. All right.

[Shaun]

I love the busy people are the biggest losers because I think busy is a badge of honor in a lot of different circles. And what a, what a terrible badge to, to. To be proud of.

[Sam]

Yes.

[Shaun]

In my opinion. I remember my buddy came and worked for me and he used to work in, in investment banking and he would, he kept saying this phrase that we were like, dude, Sam, what is this thing you keep saying? And he would say, he's like, yeah. He's like, can you get that to me asap or sooner? And I was just like, dude, what is asap? Means as soon as possible. What does ASAP or sooner mean? And he's like, I don't know, we just always say that in. I was like, what a. What a like fight or flight? What a cortisol phrase injecting in your company?

[Pat Walls]

Yeah, you know everyone has that friend when you, you hang out with them and they're always on their phone, they're always on work emails, they're dropping out to take calls. I remember when I was a kid I was on a hike with my buddy and his dad was on the hike. I'll never forget this. I was probably like 9 years old or something like that. And his dad was just on the phone for the entire hike. We were like, really nice hike. And I was like, man, I just never want to be that person. Like you said, it's a choice. It's more typically around a bad business or a flaw systems flaw or an overextension of yourself. It's usually not like you're just handed that.

[Sam]

What's that EOS thing up there?

[Pat Walls]

Yeah, EOS is cool Entrepreneur operating system is. You guys are probably familiar with that, right?

[Shaun]

Yeah, I've never actually done it. Do you, do you do it Sam at Hampton, do you pay for EOs?

[Sam]

Well, you don't have to pay for it. You could read a book and just make your own shoes.

[Shaun]

People pay for the implementer and all that stuff.

[Sam]

Yeah, I paid an implementer for a one day seminar with our leadership team.

[Shaun]

And that was like 20 grand or something?

[Sam]

No, no, it was like $3,000 for one day.

[Shaun]

Oh, you got like the clearance integrator or what did you do?

[Sam]

No, like I like someone who was like a certified like implementer or something. I was going to hire him and then I showed him my pre work and he's like, well you guys are actually almost there. Let's just meet with your whole team for six hours and I'll teach everyone how to do it. And then we'll go over your current rocks and I'll show you the right format. And then you're good to go, it looks like.

[Shaun]

Is this the first company you did it at?

[Sam]

No, I did it at the Hustle as well.

[Shaun]

EOS specifically?

[Sam]

Yeah.

[Shaun]

Oh, wow.

[Sam]

Yeah, I, I'm a fan of it. I think that.

[Shaun]

Are you like, I swear by it kind of guy or where are you at with it?

[Sam]

I swear by a. We use like a transformer version. So for example, E, for those listening, it's an operating system run your company. The book is called Traction by this guy named Gino. Gino, by the way, Sean has asked to come on a whole bunch. So if we, if we want, we can invite them on. But basically it's a. The, the crux of the whole thing is your L10 meeting, which happens every. For us every Monday at 3 o'. Clock. It's a two or one and a half or two hour meeting. And each team has some number or metric or goal that they are assigned to and then tasks below to reach that goal. And we go over each week what's going well, what's not going well, and how to improve. Typically, EOS is divided quarterly. We actually at Hampton do ours every six weeks. So we do rock planning every six weeks as opposed to quarterly. I think quarterly is too long for a startup, but so you can kind of like manipulate it to like, fit your needs. But over the course of many, many years, we've kind of made our own.

[Pat Walls]

I like the six weeks that we do it quarterly, but I already, like

[Sam]

six weeks because, like, with a startup, like, with a startup, like, you get, you can get new information relatively quick. And so what we do is we actually, each team actually only we try to limit it to two rocks. So each team just gets two important rocks and that's six weeks. And then we change them or, or keep them. But whatever we want to do. Every six weeks.

[Pat Walls]

Yep, yep.

[Sam]

And then you have a scorecard. And what we're looking at is your scorecard where you go over every single week, what's going on. So this looks like the scorecard that you go over at your L10 meeting.

[Pat Walls]

Yep. It gives you nice. For someone like me with no management experience, I don't have an mba, don't know how to manage people. It was nice. We've been doing it for like two, maybe over two years. It's Nice to just have a basic. I don't think it's the perfect system, but I think it's a system for someone who's a creator, like we talked about earlier, who wants to start building more of a business, or someone who's going from solopreneur like me, that didn't intend to build a business. It's a good Rails OR system for KPIs planning, and it's not perfect by any means, but it is a system and most people just need a system.

[Shaun]

Can I say a quick disclaimer? Because I used to be the kind of guy who somebody. I'd be watching something or I'd hear a talk and somebody would be like, oh, I use this system. They gimme some acronym and then they're like, yeah, this is what I do. This is. It's so good for me. And I'd be like, ah, that's what I've been missing. Just, that's the tool. I was one tool away. I was one framework away, one acronym away from success. And turns out, spoiler, I was never one acronym away from success. And there's a specific type of person and a specific moment in time when you need a system tool. And that is when you have growth, but you have a growing headache. So the business is growing healthily, but your headache is growing, you know, maybe even more than that or proportionately to that. And I think what most people have is a business that is not really growing enough. And then they try to add systems and processes and it actually slows them down and they don't even grow faster because growth often is like a matter of like striking a vein. It's like drilling for oil. You don't need to be super efficient, you just need to find the oil. And sometimes that's brute force. Sometimes it's a little bit of gut instinct, sometimes it's a little bit of cowboyness to trying different little experiments. But I think, you know, I just want to say that out loud because I wasted a lot of time when I actually needed growth. And then I adopted systems of people who had growth. And I've conflated the two. I thought the system creates the growth. No, no, the system manages your headache as you grow. That's, that's how it's been for me, at least my personal experience.

[Sam]

I'll take the other side of that, which is I think that there are times where the system does create growth, because I think typically what happens when you have companies, you can get to a million or 2 million or 3 million in revenue through a combination of either luck or you knew how to do one thing well or for a variety of reasons. But what I have found is whenever I hit those that like three, whenever I get to like three million in revenue, I then like think like, okay, I need to now go do this new marketing channel or do this new thing. And oftentimes the actual answer is no. You should actually do less things and just do this one marketing thing over and over and over again.

[Shaun]

You're saying at 3 million, I'm saying most people are not even at the 3 million. Most people don't get to 3 million. Most people who watch this or are going to watch any type of content on YouTube are pre getting 1, 2, 3 million in revenue. And for those people, I think that's the sucker like spot where you think you might be a tool away. So I totally agree with you. If you've already got the thing that's again, you have healthy growth. If you've gotten to 1, 2, 3 million in revenue and you know from there you need, you need systems to scale, right? But you don't need systems to scale if you don't have a working thing

[Sam]

or even when your team size gets kind of above four people, you kind of like have to like have something. But yeah, I hear what you're saying. You want to show us anything else?

[Shaun]

I want to ask you a question about this blog post in December 2020 and maybe you could take us back to like how the business was doing back then. You wrote a blog post that says 2020, I am my own greatest obstacle. Yeah, I already, I haven't even read the post. I already nodded my head because every entrepreneur gets there to this realization. Can you explain where you were at this blog post and what this blog post means?

[Pat Walls]

Yeah, this, all this blog post all revolves around a single week in my life where I is post Covid. I was about three years into building the business and what most people don't know, they think, oh, you just built Starter Story and you grew that? Well, no, I was the guy with like 10 side projects and I had two businesses that were like I was splitting my time on and then other side projects and other personal brand and doing all these things. Starter story was making $8,000. These are sort of high level numbers, but it was making $8,000 a month. And then this other business I was building, which is like a software plugin type app, was doing $2,000 a month. I thought this was going to be bigger than Starter Story because I didn't Think Starter Story was going to be big. And I was so burnt out that I said, I heard about this Think week by Bill Gates where you go off to a cabin and you just think about stuff. So I couldn't afford a cabin in the woods or anything at that point. And I decided, okay, I'm just gonna go get in my car and I'm gonna go drive across the country, and I'm gonna think through that process, through that week of not being on the phone. You know, this is no social media, nothing. I couldn't even check my email. I realized that Starter Story was the. Was the business I should be going all in on. This is the business that I was meant to be built. I'm throwing basically no time into this business that's doing $8,000 a month, and I'm throwing all my time into this business that I'm supposed to be building. This is how I get into YC and I do all these things I should. I'm putting 20% of my effort into 80% of the revenue. Let's just drop everything else. And in that moment, after that week, after I realized all this, I basically sold that business, stopped working on anything else, and I went all in on Starter Story. And this is three years after starting it. Best decision I ever made, obviously. And I don't know if I would have made that decision if I didn't take that week off. And essentially I doubled the business's revenue in a single month after that. And then everything went up after that. And that's probably why I'm here today, selling my company and talking to you guys, is that I realized that I was the biggest obstacle, right? If I. I was limiting my own success by thinking I could do everything.

[Shaun]

I love that. That's very powerful. What sounds right on paper and what's actually right for me might be two different things. Because a lot of people would tell you, you should do the SaaS business. Recurring revenue. It's amazing. You could do this plugin and it's software and all these great things, but you kind of realize, like, the thing I'm good at, the thing I enjoy, the thing that has momentum is this other thing. And if I keep splitting focus. Yeah, I'll never know.

[Pat Walls]

There's something that I like to call, you have your ego business. This is. This is the business you're supposed to build, the business that you look up to other people because they built those, or that's the business that you're supposed to start or whatever, but actually follow the money. What's making money. What are you truly good at making? What are you meant to build? I think it's like a lot of people watching this maybe think about that. What's the ego business and what's the actual business?

[Shaun]

So for this think week, you just drove 3, 000 miles just like.

[Pat Walls]

Yeah.

[Shaun]

I'm looking at the map. It looks like you started. Where'd you start? Salt Lake City.

[Pat Walls]

Yeah, I was living with my mom at the time. So the shout out my mom for housing me in this time when I was trying to figure things out. But yeah, I went from Salt Lake or up through the down to the west coast and then up and around

[Shaun]

back to Salt Lake, driving like a giant circle, basically.

[Sam]

Yeah, yeah. On the west coast.

[Pat Walls]

It wasn't my plan route all the

[Shaun]

way, all the way up to Jackson Hole, but in a circle format, being

[Sam]

29 and living at home. And I think in this blog you say you met a girl later on, so I assume you're single, 29, living at home, trying to like, do this thing. That's definitely not the most glamorous place to be in.

[Pat Walls]

Yeah, I was more just, I would do anything. I worked in corporate for five years. I worked at Deloitte, I worked at some startups, I worked at some, like, big companies. And my motivation, I was so sick and tired of that. I think a lot of entrepreneurs just start early. They start at 17, they start at 18. I actually went through college and the corporate life, so starting this business was more about freedom and I knew I would do anything. I moved to Asia because it could be like a thousand dollars a month. I lived with my mom because I would. I could not go back to a regular job. That was my main motivation. And then obviously the business started working out and that's why I live with my mom.

[Shaun]

So check this out. This is your monthly revenue at the time. So it looks like for the year preceding your think week, you were basically plateaued from August 2019 to mid-2020. August20, almost August 2020, June 2020. And you're basically at 8K a month for a year flat. You do the think week, you make the decision. Six months later, you're now over 25,000amonth. And the trajectory, you change the trajectory of the business with that. Yep, I think that's a great story. Also in this blog, I like, you know, you were talking about, like, you know, how you felt. You're like, I know I had so many projects and tasks I know I should do, but at the same time, I felt Unmotivated to start any of them. I'm in this really weird spot right now. I don't feel motivated about work. Nothing feels super important to work on. I don't feel like tweeting or writing. I don't want to read any books. You know, kind of burnout, essentially. And, you know, the solution to burnout wasn't like, I need to take six months off. It was like, I need to do something that's just more in alignment with what I'm trying to do and simplify rather than keep adding.

[Pat Walls]

Yep, exactly.

[Shaun]

That's cool, man. Well, congrats. Congrats on all the success. Congrats on, you know, fingers crossed that this thing closes. We have to air this episode anyways, and it will be a cautionary tale about counting your chickens before they hatch.

[Pat Walls]

But thank you, guys. Yeah, you guys are huge inspirations to me. Been listening to my first million. Obviously got a lot of inspiration to do what we do through everything that you've done, both in my first million and out of it. So you guys are awesome. Keep doing what you're doing.

[Sam]

You're the shit. Thanks for doing this, man.

[Pat Walls]

Thank you guys for having me. I feel lucky. I feel lucky.

[Shaun]

Cool. Check out Pat. Check out Starter Story on YouTube. And, yeah, all the things.

[Pat Walls]

That's it.

[Sam]

That's the pod.

[Luis]

I feel like I can rule the world. I know I could be what I want to. I put my all in it. Like, no days off on the road, let's travel. Never looking back.

[Sam]

All right, my friends, I have a new podcast for you guys to check out. It's called Content is Profit, and it's hosted by Luis and Fonzie Cameo. After years of building content teams and frameworks for companies like Red Bull and Orange Theory Fitness, Luis and Fonzie are on a mission to bridge the gap between content and revenue. In each episode, you're going to hear from top entrepreneurs and creators, and you're going to hear them share their secrets and strategies to turn their content into profit. So you can check out Content is Profit wherever you get your podcast.