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- [00:00]
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Foreign.
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Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to a special edition of the Money Mondays podcast where we cover three core topics. How to make money, how to invest money, how to give it away to charity. These podcasts are under 40 minutes for your listening pleasure. Because the average workout is 45 minutes. The average commute to work is 45 minutes. This episode will be between 34, 38 minutes for your listening pleasure. As you guys know, I've been running this commercial free. The reason I talk about fan bases is because I actually work with them. You don't hear me say any fancy codes. Just go check out fan bases dot com. Why do I talk about high level? Because they've been helping me my entire backend for years. You go check out GoHighLevel and their whole company. We run this commercial free. I want to make a nice easy listening process for you. That's why we have a 93% listen through rate which keeps us in the top 50 of all podcasts on the planet. Because of your help liking commenting, subscribing and sharing, we're going to dive right in. I'm going to have Yash give you guys the quick 2 minute bio, so get straight to the money.
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C
Thanks for having me on, Dan. Quick by on myself, I'm a serial entrepreneur. I've built multiple different businesses in the info product space, the agency space, and have been involved in the startup space for a while as well. Worked on the venture capital side for a few years when I was a little younger and since then I'm the founder and CEO of Fan Basis. We've built the Shopify for selling digital products, services, communities, memberships and virtually anything online. Uh, we give a full suite of tools to essentially help people make as much money as possible. We have really, really strong tools around payments, access to buy now, pay later products, high ticket payment processing, and then everything from hosting a course to a community to building an affiliate program and a lot of other tools that can help you unlock new revenue. So unlike traditional platforms that just want you to host your business on their platform, we come on and say, okay, if someone's coming to your fan bases, how can we help them double the size of their business by, you know, the next year?
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B
How did you get the idea to start fan basis.com? like, where did that come from?
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C
So it originally was a little different. We were a celebrity fan experience platform. So we were like a cameo on steroids. We had a couple thousand celebrities, athletes, influencers that would sell anything from a virtual meet and greet, you know, with Dennis Rodman for example, or a cooking lesson with a MasterChef winner, an Instagram followback from a social media store. And, you know, we built that to a point where it was generating revenue, we were profitable. It just wasn't scaling as quickly as I wanted it to. At the same time, I also had a lot of experience on the agency side and also on the info product side. So recognize a lot of gaps. And two things kind of happen at once. One, you know, on the payment side in particular, with the other businesses I had were facing difficulties with the traditional payment platforms and at the same time with the version of fan bases that we had at that point, the top performers on the platform were selling more scalable digital products and services where, you know, it's easy for. Take a reality TV star, for example. So what we would do is we would go to all these reality TV stars after the season of the Bachelor ended or Love island or whatever it might be, and you would see a really interesting concept where, you know, say there's 10 people that we get on from Love Island. Nine of them will come on, they'll make. They'll make a couple thousand dollars in the first month, and then after that it kind of dies down because they become irrelevant. And there'll be one person that's making six figures a month because they're selling something that's actually real. You know, a digital, like a fitness routine, workout program, you know, anything along those lines that's actually giving, like, informational value to their customers. And we started seeing this trend industry over industry over industry, where, you know, even athletes, like, there's only so many virtual meet and greets that Dennis Rodman is going to be able to, one, sell in a month and then second, actually do you know, getting him to do 30 virtual meetings is a pain in the ass. But, you know, there's other athletes on the platform that would be, you know, selling sports picks, for example, or, you know, training programs or whatever it might be. And that's where we realized, you know, the real money and opportunity here is to create the first platform that actually, you know, not only hosts everything in one place because they could use now Kajabi to host their course teachable, you know, discord for their community, or, you know, stripe for their payments. But there was nothing that was kind of allowing them to have like that central operating system, and none of those tools actually allowed them and enabled them to make more money. It really just, you know, was something that they had to pay for to actually host their business. So that was kind of the major gap that we were able to fill.
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B
So on the make money side of the Money Mondays podcast, what do you think holds people back from making money? They got a little fame, they got 10,000 followers or 50,000 followers, or maybe they're on a TV show, they got a little bit of things going on, but they're not actually making money from their social media. What holds them back from that? Is it the tools, is the resources, the product? What is it?
- [04:51]
C
So when you taking it from the lens of like a creator, quote, unquote creator, right, you know, the traditional influencer is making money because they have an agent or a manager that's getting them sponsorship deals. They get a bikini brand to sponsor them, or, you know, a drink company, for example. That's where we see, you know, one of the major gaps for creators to make money. Because they get, they think that as a creator, that's how they have to make money. And that's the only way to do it. When obviously everyone that's actually making, you know, generating real revenue has some sort of business built around their brand, and they use their personal brand as the face for it, but they're actually hosting, you know, another business on a platform like ours and all of their content and everything, you know, creates a top of funnel audience to drive into whatever digital product or service that they're actually selling. So what's holding them back is just thinking that, you know, them not building a business like, them focusing on more of just being an influencer rather than being what we consider to be like an Internet entrepreneur. You know, like, for example, a lot of the people that we both mutually know, some of the guys that you, you have on your podcast as well, like Garrett White, for example, you know, he's, yeah, he's technically an influencer. He's got probably millions of followers across different platforms, but he's an entrepreneur. Like, he's an Internet entrepreneur. That's, you know, we don't, when I think of someone like that, I don't think they're an influencer. He's built a personal brand as a marketing engine and a tool to connect with his audience, provide value. But at the end of the day, everything kind of, you know, funnels back into the business that he's hosting, selling these digital products, coaching, things of that nature. And, you know, that's what separates the guys that are making 10k a month or 20k a month from the guys that are making, you know, 500,000amonth or $1 million a month.
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B
So let's say Someone is making money, there's a lot of options. They could sell fitness products, apparel, they could try to do, make their own custom things. Now, because there's a lot of white label things. Like when you've got infinite options, how do you decide if you're going to sell beauty or makeup or hair or fashion or fitness? And that like, is just kind of finding what matters to you or what matters to your clients and audience.
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C
I mean, if it doesn't matter to your clients and audience, no one's going to end up buying it. So, you know, I've seen that so many times too. I'm sure you have as well. You know, where people want to do a passion project and then it's like, hey, no one actually gives a shit. But, um, you know, sometimes it doesn't work that way, which is always great. But realistically it's seeing, you know, what have you built your brand kind of being an authority figure on, because that's what your audience will actually trust you for, right? You know, if you're selling something that's a digital product, like you have to be an authority in that space or start to establish yourself as an authority in that space. Some of the most, you know, going back to fitness as an example, some of the best fitness coaches we've seen, like they were extremely fat, you know, and that's, and they built their whole following around them having that transformation from being 300 pounds to, you know, 150 pounds and having an eight pack. And now, now everyone that follows them knows that. Oh shit, you know, I'm, I relate to this story. This person actually did what I want to do and they're more willing to buy from someone like him than like a traditional fitness coach that looks like, you know, they've been taking steroids for like the last three years and have always been in shape, which is super interesting. So like that relatability aspect is I think the most important part of like whatever you're going to sell to your audience. Can they relate to you on that topic? If the answer is no, then you're not going to capture a majority of them. You might be able to generate revenue, but you know, what we also see is like some people have a million followers and they're only able to get after 10,000 of their followers, which, don't get me wrong, 10,000 followers paying you $10,000 each, you know, can generate you a lot of a decent amount of revenue. But you know, if you can tap into what are 500,000 of my million followers actually going to care about and what can I action them to do? Um, that's obviously a much, much larger opportunity.
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B
So who is fan basis useful for? Like someone that's going to go to fan bases.com and apply or want to work with the company. Like who is it for? Like who are the main characters?
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C
So we have multiple different kinds of businesses. When we originally started it was more focused on those Internet entrepreneurs where you have a personal brand and you're building a business around that. Now, you know, we're about 30 to 40% of our client bases. Well, we consider to be an Internet entrepreneur or a creator, but we also have agencies on our platform, we have membership, you know, communities like Founders Club for example. We have software companies and startups that utilize our tech. So we've built enterprise solutions out to where really anyone that's selling something that isn't a physical product, if you're selling a physical product, Shopify is the best place to do that. To be honest. Anything outside of that, you know, our platform is really built for and our whole goal is to, you know, with the payment suite alone can get you the highest authorization rates, access to Buy now, pay later products to help you, you know, double or triple your AOV and make it accessible to a lot more customers. And then also if you have subscription related businesses, we give you the highest rebuild rates, for example and also allow you to kind of manage everything from A to Z. So really anyone that's selling a digital product or service of any sort can utilize our platform.
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B
So you said something aov, can you explain what is that concept?
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C
Yeah, average order value. So that's something that you know, is probably one of the key metrics any business owner should be looking at is when a customer comes in through the door, what is the average customer going to be spending? You know, you might have one customer that spends $5,000, but you know, if the rest of them are spending only 100 bucks, you need to be optimizing for kind of what that AOV is. So you know, what we try to help people do is increase the AOV as much as possible because that means every customer that interacts with you, you're typically making more off of. And there's a lot of different tools to do that. Buy now, pay later is one of the best, best ways to do so. Where you know, say you're, especially when you're selling a high ticket product, where say you're selling something for $5,000, you might have two products, one that's 1,000, one that's 5,000. You know, if you come in and you're just selling this to a mass market audience, majority of people don't have $5,000 just laying around, right. So they're going to go and opt for that $1,000 product where they might be interested in the 5K one, but it's just not accessible for them, even though that could be potentially a much better service for that individual. So with Buy Now, Pay later, what you can do is allow them to finance that over, you know, 6, 12, 24, 36 months and turn that $5,000 program into 150 bucks a month so it becomes super affordable for the customers. Now your AOV, maybe it was $1500, can jump to 3000 because majority of people want to buy the 5K, they just weren't able to. And you know, you're most likely adding. What we see is if someone isn't using Buy now, pay later, within 90 days of joining our platform and getting access to it, they're typically seeing about a 38% increase in their top line revenue. So it's massive. Especially for a business making, you know, half a million or a million dollars a month, it's a huge lift for them.
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B
Wow.
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C
And you know, at the end of the day it's, you know, even that $1,000 product in my example, now becomes available and affordable for, you know, 90% of people that exist in the US because they can finance that for 50 bucks a month, for example. So it's a huge, it's a, it's a massive tool that obviously everyone's heard of, you know, Affirm and Klarna and companies like that over the last 10 years, 15 years, but a lot of businesses have still not tapped into it. And we see this on a daily basis. And you know, it's created some of the best customer loyalty for us because we put them, you know, we give them the ability to have access to these products where you typically wouldn't be able to access it without a company like ours. And now they're seeing a massive increase in their business. They're able to start reinvesting all that cash into growing much, much quicker, reinvesting back into their customer experience, expanding their team. So not only are you seeing an immediate revenue lift, you're able to grow the business much more than that, 38% on average because of the fact that you, you have a lot more capital and you know, capital to spend on in reinvesting back in your business.
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B
So let's talk about the investing side of the Podcast. Except I want to ask a different style of question. I've watched you go from 30 employees to 40 employees to 50 employees to 60 employees, 70 employees. Why is it important to invest into people?
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C
People is the best investment. This is something that, you know, I'm 26 years old, so it's, it's. I have a unique perspective on it given that. Yeah, I started this when I was, I really started working on this business when I was like 21 and started building out the team. You know, like over the last year, really, we went from 18 people total to now, I think, you know, as of this week, we may have just crossed 100.
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B
Oh, wow.
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C
Yeah. And it's been exactly about a year since that's happened. It's really interesting. Our core team, they're the most driven, ambitious and bought in people that I could have possibly imagined to have on the, you know, on our founding team. And it's not something that, like, I went out originally with intention and I was like, hey, like I am looking for this exact Persona and profile of person. It's just more of what we attracted. You know, when you're having early stage business, you really need people that are bought into the vision of the company because if they're not bought in, then they're just an employee that's doing a 9 to 5. They're doing a task, but they don't give a shit. Having them care about what you're building and make them feel like and give them some sort of equity stake and make them feel like, you know, they're also building it because they are, at the end of the day is super important. You know, so those, my core team, they, they love fan bases as much as I do, if not more in certain cases then after that, you know, it was, how can we, as we start to scale now, I need to start scaling quickly because we're just growing the business so quickly. Right. You know, if we get another thousand employee, thousand clients, I need to have the bandwidth to make sure they're getting the best experience possible. So it's harder to be as selective as I used to be, you know, when we didn't have that level of growth and I was looking for just only purely the right fits and, you know, made some mistakes and also learned some extremely valuable lessons of we got lucky with making some of the right hires where we had to, okay, I need to bring in someone to be or how to revenue in the next 45 days. I interviewed 30, 40 people have recruiters involved. You know, we got lucky by finding the right guy to kind of lead the whole department there. But in certain other cases we weren't able to, where it's like, okay, you know, getting someone that's been working in a corporate environment for the last 15 to 20 years where they've had a chain of command in a hierarchy to have them come in and lead a whole department. You know, they may have been the head of something, you know, at their last company, but it doesn't translate to being at a startup where, you know, they had a process from 9am to 5pm they knew exactly what was happening, they had access to all the data they needed. You know, having them come and create processes in a lot of cases was. Yeah, it was harder than we expected it to be.
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B
Cause you guys have 10:46pm like, we're hacking. Oh, yeah.
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C
I mean, you know, we fixing things. We were at the office till 2am last night on a Friday night, you know, and there was a dozen of us there, so. Yeah, absolutely. And that mentality is something that, like, it is really a lot easier to get. And, you know, the best, the best employees that we found have been like, failed, quote, unquote, failed entrepreneurs or people that tried the entrepreneurial path and just didn't really like it as much and they wanted to be a part of something bigger and a much larger vision because they don't have those same constraints in their head of like a 9 to 5. They don't think about things in that way. They think about, you know, we have a goal that we want to accomplish. How do we get to that goal as quickly as possible and as efficiently as possible? You know, and you finding someone from a corporate background, that's just not something that they've ever really had exposure to or thought about. So rewiring someone's brain is very difficult. You know, they need to have it in them. But realistically, you know, the way that we've been able to find the right people is like. And one of the mistakes we made was we would sacrifice culture in certain cases for talent. And, you know, take like product, for example. Like, there was this one product person that we were like, you know, she was not the typical profile of someone that I would, you know, like. But we were like, okay, she's really cracked at product. She's really, really good. She comes in, she's doing a phenomenal job at her job, but now she's not meshing well with the rest of the team, causing issues where other people are not able to do their jobs. And there's ripple effects. And now people are going and you know, in the middle of the day talking about what happened and their interaction with this person. It's like, okay, I hate any sort of bullshit that's going on. Yeah, I need to cut all of that out. So, you know, we realized really quickly that getting people that are, you know, there needs to be a really fine balance of like, we want the best people at the job, but we also want people that, you know, care about the company, care about the vision and are bought into it. They're not here for a paycheck. They're here because they want to be a part of something bigger and want to be in at the ground level and at the end of the day will fit in with kind of the rest of the team that we built. And I think the culture that we've built a fan base is probably the best culture I've ever seen at any company.
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B
So years from now you get acquired by, let's call it Shopify or Amazon or one of these huge companies side, then we're going to. Private equity is going to come in and buy you for billions of dollars and one of your employees has 1% and all of a sudden they've got $14 million. Boom. One wire in their bank account. What do you, how do you sit that person down when they're going to get bombarded by all their friends? They might only be 29 years old now and everyone's hitting them up to invest in their restaurants, invest in my nightclub, invest in my record label, my music, my this, my that. How do you talk to them and say to them about investing, whether it's real estate, stock market, cash flowing businesses, et cetera?
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C
Yeah, no, it's a great question and frankly too from, you know, a lot of people that I went to college with, for example, you know, and just friends that I've had over time, like I, I've kind of been in that similar position already, even without a massive exit. And it's, you know, one I think you have to just be really smart about things. Like, I try to take emotion out of any investment decision that I make altogether, whether it be investing in a stock in the market. You know, I'm not going to go and just invest in and buy a bunch of stock of a company that I like because I had a good experience with the product.
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B
Right.
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C
You have to do actual diligence on everything. The biggest mistakes I've seen angel investors make and I've interacted with some of these guys that have written us Checks too. And it's like, hey, like, you literally did zero due diligence. You know, like, you don't know anything about what we do besides a quick couple conversations that I had with you. So, you know, you'll see, like for us to raise our Series A, that was a three month process of them doing due diligence back and forth. They understood more about the business than I did, I think, you know, after they dove through everything. So doing due diligence is the most important part about any investment. Yeah. As I'm sure you know now, outside of that, I think having a diversified portfolio is important, but figure out what you're actually good at and what you're not good at investing in and bring in advisors that you know are valuable. I have so many friends that, you know, have multiple millions of dollars and they don't have a wealth manager or anything along those lines because they're like, oh, I made a couple million dollars in crypto. Like, you know, I've been able to get 70% returns year over year. You know, wealth managers are only getting, you know, 10 or 15% returns and they're, you know, how am I going to take advice from someone that's not wealthier than me? It's like your whole ideology behind this is extremely backwards. It doesn't make any sense. Like, you know, you're, if you go and work with someone at Morgan Stanley, for example, like they have a multitrillion dollar business that they're able to utilize and they have data that they're spending billions of dollars on getting to help you make the best decisions possible. And as you generate and accumulate more and more net worth, you know, a lot more exclusive opportunities come your way as well. Where, you know, there's a lot of investment opportunities that are not available to the actual public, that those are the best ones to tap into, obviously doing your due diligence properly. But it's really, you know, diversify in a way that actually makes sense for you. Don't start doing 50 different things at once just for the sake of diversifying an asset portfolio. You know, figure out what you're actually good at, what you're interested in investing in. You know, try to have fun with it as well. And, you know, it's okay to gamble a little bit every once in a while, but it needs to be a really small allocation that you're kind of, you know, putting into your portfolio.
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B
So you mentioned the Series A. When someone gets approached to invest into a company and says, hey, we want you to invest into our series A, what are some of the questions that they should be asking before cutting that check?
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C
As in from an investment perspective? I think for you know, a check that, that's, that's that large where it's over, you know, five to $10 million.
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B
So they're just going to be throwing in a couple hundred grand. But they're just, they got approached about investing into a series.
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C
Oh, got it as like investment. Yeah, I see, I see. So I think the main things are one, you know, go get the cap table, figure out the org structure. Let's understand exactly who owns the business and what's going on. You know, you might really like a founder, but if they only own 20% of the company, you know, how vested is their stake? Right. Figure out kind of what the progression of the business has been. P and L balance sheet can tell a great story at this point too. You can use AI tools to really analyze that and help break it down. If you're not someone that's super savvy when looking at financial statements now, figure out where did this jump come in? Or is this business growing at 5% or 10% year over year where you're seeing a big number but you're like, okay, this is going to be a, a, you know, they want to sell for $5 billion, this is going to be a 20 year long investment. Or you know, is this something that they can possibly achieve in the next year to two years? So you know, the financial picture always paints, you know, the most telling story out of anything. And then outside of that, you know, obviously figure out like, you know, do research online, figure out do they have any adverse media, go on Twitter, look at the, you know, what are people saying about this company? Make sure you're doing your due diligence on just the, you know, you know, the intangible piece of the company to see what the sentiment looks like. Something I think is super valuable too is doing customer research. So when you do a series A or series B, you know, they're probably not going to tell you. Or sometimes they ask you for references and intros to your clients. But usually a lot of the times they hire companies like, you know, Alpha Insights, for example, to go and reach out to a bunch of your clients and you know, essentially interview them, pay them thousand dollars to hop on a call and do a quick interview. That's the most telling way to figure out exactly what's going on in the business. Talk to some of the customers, don't ask the business about it because obviously if you ask the company about it, they're gonna give you the best references that they have, right? Yeah. If someone asks me for a reference, I'm telling them to talk. Yeah, talk to you. But figure out, look at the people that maybe even wrote bad reviews online and ask them, or the three star reviews and ask them, like, hey, what was your experience like with this business for XYZ reasons? And figure out what the actual pros and cons are. Because now when you're speaking to the founders, obviously it's their job to paint the best story possible. And if they're introducing you to someone, they're going to be really strategic with the way they're doing that. If they're not, then that should be a massive red flag on its own. But I think that's probably the best way to actually figure out what is truly going on with the business. What are the different products that people are actually utilizing and what's the real value for this company being created on.
- [23:49]
B
So I've done 43 angel investments in the last few years. I raised $56 million for food and beverage brands and consumer products. And I have four people you have to get by for me to say yes to an investment. I call it the Four Horsemen. First is my accountant, which is my older brother, so good luck. Second is my attorney. Third is my CEO. Again, good luck. He's got 30 years in the TV game. Their job is to protect me and to rip you to shreds. And fourth is an advisor. But the advisor changes. So the first three people are the same. Accountant, lawyer, CEO. Those stay the same. The advisor changes. Because if it's a tech founder or tech company, I might say, hey, Yash, will you look at this and see if you say that they pass. If it's a new snack company, I might ask someone else that's deep into that category. Right, right. I want to ask someone that's in that category. So the advisor part changes. Why do I have the four Horsemen? Because I might get excited when you pitch me your brand might get excited when you pitch me your deal. We could be in an elevator. You pitch me. It could be at an event, and you pitch me. I might get excited about it, but I need to understand, does it pass? Accountant, lawyer, business, and advisor. So finding those type of characters in your life to have your own version of the four Horsemen, what happens is oftentimes we just get excited because our friend pitches us something or we don't know how to say no. I'm going to give you one quick Trick on how to say no. Ask them for their financials, investor documents, wiring instructions, their basic information. For the most part, they don't have their business plan. And so just by you saying, hey, send me your business plan, your financials and your investor documents, most of them disappear. They just don't have it. And the ones that do actually go have the paperwork, you can actually start to consider investing into before you start the stages of getting someone else to look at the deal. All right, final chapter of the podcast. Charity side. Why is it important for brands to get involved in some type of charity philanthropy for their customers, clients, employees, et cetera? To see them actively involved in charity?
- [25:50]
C
I think it really depends on, you know, the value that you get out of it depends on the kind of business that you have. Obviously, you know, if you have something that's super mass market and you're appealing to, you know, millions of people, having a charitable approach definitely can help those guys have a great perception of your company, relate to your brand a little bit better, especially if you're solving problems that they've seen in their own communities or helping with problems, you know, they've seen in their own communities. You know, if you have a business that's more focused on, say you're only dealing with Fortune 500 companies, you know, having that one. Being involved in charity can get you in the right rooms in a lot of cases. Just thinking about it from a business perspective and not, you know, purely from a giving back perspective, but outside of that, you know, it creates kind of this basis where you can relate to other people and, you know, if there's someone, like there's conversations. My father, for example, when I was growing up, on his birthday, every single year he would go to the soup kitchen and that would be like his birthday, you know, experience, which like, I was really annoyed about when I was younger because, like, hey, we could be doing something fun. But you know, looking back on it, like, I remember one time I was with him at a, I was at a box at the Yankees game in New York and there was someone else that like owned one of the soup kitchens, you know, in, in New Jersey that, you know, he would go and volunteer at that he just ran into, didn't know, they didn't know each other at the time. And they ended up going, you know, co investing on like three deals afterwards. And they, that was the basis of how they were able to form that initial relationship and essentially, you know, relate to each other with some sort of common ground. So, you know, it unlocks a Lot of different kind of opportunities like that. And obviously, you know, there, it shows a whole nother side of a person when it's not just about how can they benefit from every single relationship. It's, you know, it, it tells you a lot when someone's looking for ways to kind of give back and make just the overall community stronger.
- [27:44]
B
Would you like to have children someday?
- [27:46]
C
Probably.
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B
So there's only one question. I asked the same question on every single episode, and I've never gotten the same answer. So you build fan bases up to a multibillion dollar company, get acquired for $3.1 billion, you start another company, sell that one for 1.2 billion, and you are a serial entrepreneur. And so let's say a hundred years from now, a long, long time from now, unfortunately, time for Yash to pass away. What percentage of your net worth do you leave to your children?
- [28:14]
C
It depends on how my children turn out. You know, if they. I would assume that I'm going to raise them right, and they're great. In that case, I would probably leave them at least 90% of my net worth if, you know. But the, the way that I was raised was when it came to information and relationships, I had access to everything that I ever needed. When it came to capital, you know, and having to build businesses, like, I had to go through kind of the, you know, the A to Z on that. There was nothing that was ever handed to me. So I'd probably want to replicate a similar environment because that brought out a lot of hunger. I grew up with a lot of wealthy kids as well. That majority of them either working like some sort of, like, basic job right now, or they are like, you know, are doing essentially like fuck all because they just had everything handed to them. It was super easy to begin with. So there's nothing that really created that inner sense of motivation and drive where, you know, I have other friends as well that, you know, maybe some of them had wealthy parents, some of them didn't. And they're some of the most successful people that I know because of the fact that they were raised the right way and they were. Nothing was ever handed to them. They were always, you know, know, hey, this is what's possible for you to achieve. You know, you. You have to go and claim that and figure out a way to get there and figure out your own path to get there. So I think, you know, that's probably the most important part is kind of, you know, giving them the resources that they need. Not just not capital, though, to, you know, achieve whatever their goals are. But yeah, realistically I would hope that there's a scenario here where I can give them majority of my net worth.
- [29:48]
B
Where can people find you? Find fan bases, tell them all about it for social media, websites, everything.
- [29:53]
C
You can find us on fanbases.com f a n b a s I s dot com and find me on Instagram.
- [29:59]
B
Yashdaftery All right guys, when you listen to these podcasts, keep in mind it's not just for you. It could be for your friends, family or followers. And it might happen six months to 12 months from now. You're out of breakfast, you're out of lunch, et cetera and someone's talking about something and then bam. You remember what Yash says. So it might be from someone from your past, present or future. When you listen to the Money Mondays podcast, there might be characters that are on this show like Yash that might be useful for someone else that you could afford this episode to. The reason that we need your help is liking commenting, subscribing and sharing. It helps us stay in the top 50 of all podcasts in the world. We are able to then provide a free platform for you guys to listen to this podcast in a nice 30 to 40 minute type setting. Appreciate you guys. Make sure to check out fanbases.com we'll see you guys next week here at the Money Mondays. Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to a special edition of the Money Mondays podcast where we cover three core topics. How to make money, how to invest money. How to give it away to charity. Normally I have individual guests, but this company is too cool. So we're doing a double guest episode. As you guys know, this episode will be under 40 minutes for your listening pleasure. Because the average workout is 45 minutes. The average commute to work is 45 minutes. This episode will be between 34 and 38 minutes. So you can listen to this on your drive to work or while you're at the gym or running around town. Now, as you guys know, this is very important. I've been running this commercial free for years and years and years. So you actually listen to it. We have what's called a 93% listen through rate, which is helping us on the charts. There's no commercials here. I do work with fan basis and fanbases.com because I actually use them, but you don't hear me saying some fancy code for that. Just go check them out. I work with High Level. Go highlevel is a company I've been using for many, many years. Same concept, no fancy codes. Just go look at high level to help backend your coaches, courses, agencies, whatever's going on in your world. Outside of that, there is no commercials. I just want to talk very straightforward about money. Because we grew up thinking it's rude to talk about money. I think it's ridiculous. We have to talk about accounting, loans, finances, taxes, should I lease? Should I buy? What happens if my friend borrows 400 bucks? How do I get it back? These are real life things that go on in your lives, but so you have to be able to talk with your friends, your family and followers about money. So without further ado, Chris and Aaron, each of you give us a quick 2 minute bio so we get straight to the money.
- [32:09]
A
Let's go. Thanks for having us. Yeah. Chris Mead, co founder of the Founders Club. Started a company called Crossnet, the world's first four way volleyball game about 10 years ago. Grew up broke, speaking of money on a farm in Connecticut and desperately wanted to change my life. Did not want to get to the end of my life and be working a 9 to 5 and look my kids in the face and say dad didn't do it. Dad didn't try. And so I had a good idea one night, I just went for it. Worse comes to worse, I was gonna go back to my full time job. Here we are on the pod.
- [32:39]
B
Nice.
- [32:41]
D
Aaron Spivak also previously had an E commerce DTC company called Hush. We brought the world's first adult weighted blanket back in 2017. I was very young, I was only 21 years old. We scaled that up over four years. We, we went from zero to $50 million a year with about $4,000 of DJ money that I saved up over the weekends.
- [33:03]
B
I love it.
- [33:04]
D
And we died. The top 10 Kickstarter of all time exited in 2021. Took a couple years off to figure out what we wanted to do. And that's when Chris and I came together and had this incredible idea to build essentially a modern day ypo, which is the Founders Club.
- [33:19]
B
Very cool splain, Founders Club.
- [33:24]
A
Founder stuff. Essentially, as Aaron said, a modern day ypo, but an entrepreneurship club or community or fraternity or sorority for modern day founders. And there's a different value prop every the way you talk about it depends on the angle you take it. But for me, I think of it as an insurance policy. In the next 12 months you're going to go through some for sure, whether it's personal in business, you want a divorce, you want to buy out a partner, you're scared about Inventory, you need money instead of going to somebody and like begging for help before the problem actually happens, before it's too late. You now have in the palm of your hand or in your community 1200+founders who are equally stoked, equally yoked, bigger and better and have those connections. So the goal is to have a resource for any type of problem under the sun. And we also take it a step further. It's not just a business community, it's a life community. And I'll say, dan, I'm gonna make you richer and happier. Like my goal is, Dan, I'm going to make you happier. Your life is going to get better because you unlock all these things. I'm not giving you a 10x ROI on your investment. Your life is going to be better because you're a member of the founders club.
- [34:26]
B
What's your version of it?
- [34:27]
D
Yeah, I mean for us it comes also from like our own journeys, being young entrepreneurs, trying to figure it out, you know, for both of us. Like our parents did not create multinational corporations. My dad wasn't able to give me the resources and the advice or his best friend couldn't connect me with anyone. We always had to figure it out on our own. And I thought that was just unique to us. And what we realized was that's actually unique to majority of entrepreneurs. You know, at the time our exit was the third largest DTC transaction in Canadian history.
- [34:58]
B
Wow.
- [34:58]
D
The joke of it was that I found my lawyer on a Google search. I literally googled MNA lawyer and like whatever ad popped up was what I clicked. And in hindsight, like that was the stupidest thing I could have done. What I should have been able to do was go to a group of people that I trust that have been through it before, that have sold. There's been many companies that have sold for way more and said, hey, I'm going through this for the first time. You have a couple people you think I should speak to?
- [35:23]
B
Sure.
- [35:24]
D
You know, I read an NDA for the first time. It said you couldn't tell anyone. I literally didn't tell anyone. I didn't fully understand what an NDA meant.
- [35:30]
B
Right.
- [35:30]
D
You know, let alone an loi, let alone what it, you know, we sold to a publicly traded company what that means, what fiduciary duties means. Like all these things I had to learn and make mistakes for the first time. And we saw that every modality in life has community, religion. If you're into yoga or pilates, whatever you're into, you can find your jam. There's people out there that you can go and be in that community with. Because we believe that environment is way stronger than willpower. So when it came to entrepreneurship, all the communities that were out there, we felt they were a little bit outdated, felt they were an old style of entrepreneurship. Most of them were just boys club. And we created a modern day version of that that brings curated connections to a whole new level where people never have to feel like we felt, which was lonely entrepreneurs.
- [36:15]
B
Who's the avatar? Like what size business are they, what age are they, what part of their career are they? Like, where are they?
- [36:21]
A
Yeah. So right now our average member is about 35 years old, doing about $14 million a year in business. Our demographic, 65 to 35% male to female. And month over month, it's just getting stronger and stronger. We had limited beliefs two years ago. We couldn't service brands past 10 million. And now every single week we have billionaires joining the club, which is just fascinating. Like it is literally fascinating that people that you would think have their life figured out, it's so far true. Like there are problems, even you have problems. Like you have a whole new set of problems with a new family, children, like you're going through something. So at every stage of life people need connection and need help. And that's what's really happening right now, which is really, really cool.
- [37:04]
D
There's also like the, the side of things where we feel that, you know, one thing about our average founders, you know about like 14 to 20 million, that's without the billion, the billionaire skew it.
- [37:16]
B
Cost averaging.
- [37:17]
D
Yeah, exactly. We don't do that, you know, but, and the reason why we, we say that is to give people context. But a big reason for that is because they're growing. Right. And next year, you know, we're trending closer to be 25 to 50 million as an average. And that's yes, our bigger brands, bigger founders joining. Yes. But what's actually happening is our entrepreneurs, our founders are growing because our definition of success isn't just money. For many it is. And I totally understand that. We go back and forth all the time on this. But for us, our three virtues are mind, body and business. And no one's perfect. We don't expect anybody to be perfect. But for us, if someone were to apply, they have $100 million company, which is great nine figure operation, but they are lying and stealing from their friends. Nobody talks to them. They have a horrible relationship with their partners or their kids. They're not good community members. They only take they never give. They have no charitable asset. They don't care about their health whatsoever, but they got a really good business. Those are not Founders Club members. Founders Club members are ones that want to maximize and live life to their fullest potential. Which is like, if you ever look at Maslow's hierarchy of needs, it's self actualization, which is hard to achieve, but it's way easier to achieve when you're surrounded by like minded people. So you know what? I might be eating really unhealthy this week and I'm off and I got a lot of shit going on in my life. But if we're hanging out and you're on your health kick, the likelihood that I eat healthy because of you is way higher than if we weren't hanging out and vice versa. If you're struggling with a relationship or you're avoiding a tough conversation, I'm feeling good. I can be there for you and push you to go. Be the best version of yourself. So we always say that we're curating all day long these curated environments for people to step into and reach their highest self.
- [39:03]
B
So is it a couple events a year? Is it pods? Is it one big cube mega conference?
- [39:08]
A
It never ends.
- [39:09]
D
All the above. All of the above.
- [39:11]
A
So the way we look at it now, we have six core chapters. Miami, New York, LA, Austin, Toronto and Vancouver. And there's pods within them. So they're. Each of those chapters have about 100 people. That's how this podcast out. Maybe it grows to 120. They have assigned vetted mastermind groups. So it's a peer group of eight people that look the same, feel the same, but maybe they're in different stages. They meet monthly for peer development, whether it's business, life coaching, whatever. Outside of that, we have activities on a monthly basis that are more revolved around the mind and the body. So last week we just partnered with F1. So big F1 event. Next week we're going out on a boat. Right? So those type of community events maybe rent out of the box at the Heat game or msg. And then annually we have what we're working on now, which you're speaking at the Founders Forum. So the forum is our large super bowl event. I look at it, it's like my. It's my entrepreneurship bonnaroo. It's. It's my festival. I've always wanted to create a music festival. This whole thing actually started where we were planning out the dinners based on concerts and snowboarding events that we wanted to go around. So for two years, we traveled the world. We, we saw a concert, we hosted a dinner, we flew back.
- [40:23]
B
Right.
- [40:23]
A
With a cool memory and 20 new friends.
- [40:26]
B
Right.
- [40:26]
A
So the forum is our one large big event. I trade in all our favors. We have incredible speakers come out, and it's a destination wedding for 500 plus members. So 500 people start as strangers, leave as best friends, and they're so amped for the next one. So that's our big event that we're working on right now.
- [40:44]
D
Yeah, I think, like, one thing to note also is, you know, what we, what we really strive for is a curated connections. So when it comes to events, like we do 150 events a year. We do them all.
- [40:55]
B
150 events a year.
- [40:56]
D
150 events.
- [40:57]
A
20, 20 to 30amonth.
- [40:59]
B
Whoa.
- [40:59]
D
All over. All over. All the cities. Core cities, non core cities as well. So if you're anywhere in North America, basically, you can definitely join the club. A lot of our events also happen virtually as well. So we have weekly master classes that are being taught by experts. A lot of them are members. So members that raise their hand and say, hey, I've spent 12 years, you know, building out a way to save 30 grand a month using AI. Let me show you how I do it for free. There's never a catch. We don't allow people to sell. There's no soliciting.
- [41:26]
A
That's the big thing. If you get caught soliciting one time, you are kicked out from the community. No refund, nothing.
- [41:31]
D
It's just super important. But like, then we have obviously the masterminds that exist virtually. So for people who, you know, don't live in the core cities, also, there's some people that fly in every single month to a core city just to sit with their group. And that group is super unique because we spend, it's almost like creating the perfect wedding seating. You know, it's like this person likes this person who's perfect to sit beside each other to have an amazing night. We do that for entrepreneurs. And some people think like, oh, I want to sit with eight people. This is what everyone says, right? They go, I want to sit with eight people who do exactly what I do, but are just a couple steps ahead of me. And it's like, yeah, no, because why would they want to sit with you? But what we've realized, we call it the FC Secret Sauce, is like, we spend a lot of time. And we also leverage AI because we do about 150 minutes of interviews before we even offer you an application to join the club, we get about 3,500 applications a month. We accept less than four and a half percent. Now, 3,500 are. Are all qualified? No. About 65, 70% of them are. Right. And from that percentage, 2,000 people, you're.
- [42:32]
B
Just picking 50 to 100 people this month?
- [42:34]
D
Like 95, 4%. Yeah. Super small. Yeah.
- [42:39]
A
We're disqualifying a lot.
- [42:40]
D
We disqualify a lot.
- [42:41]
A
And we want to be aspirational, you know, like ypo. You meet somebody, ypo, it's a badge of honor. And we're in year three of Founders Club. But this will become a badge of honor. You're like, shit, that person's in Founders Club. They must be legit.
- [42:52]
C
Yeah.
- [42:52]
A
And the moment we start letting in one to two or three of the wrong people, whole thing goes to hell.
- [42:57]
D
Takes a lot of time. Just background checks. We verify revenue. Like, a lot of people lie. They show up as something they're not. Like, we want you to know that if you're in and you come to one of our events, you join one of our masterminds and you take three hours away from your family and the people you love that you can be doing. You're running a business. If you're in the club, you're running a business. You got a lot of things going on. And we're going to put you in a room with no phone to sit at a table with eight other people with a guided discussion. To go deep and be vulnerable and share some of your dark, deepest, darkest secrets. You have to trust us that those seven other people at the table, we did the work to make sure that they're not going to potentially hurt you or you're vulnerable or you'd be exposed. Like, these people need to meet the criteria. So we take it super seriously.
- [43:36]
B
And you said there's no phone during those three hours?
- [43:38]
A
No, no, there's no phones allowed. I think also we didn't even touch on our. Like, the founders of Secret Sauce and all the other communities can steal. It is like, when you look at a YPO or eo, they're mostly segregated by the city. So it's like the New York chapter, the LA chapter, US is global. So with all those events, Dan, if you're in LA or in New York this weekend, you could pop into those events. 100 for free. Like, this morning, we did a 5k run club with a bunch of the Miami members. We had an LA member fly in. Not for the event. He was just happy to be here for meetings. But he Plugged in, he came in, he had an entire time. We did breakfast together. Now he left with four friends.
- [44:10]
B
Exactly.
- [44:11]
A
I love that part.
- [44:13]
D
The idea is to truly have a global network. If you go to Marbella in Spain and you're like, what's the best coffee shops? Or where should I take my family? Or what's a good beach to go to with a young kid? Don't use gbt cause it'll tell you whatever someone programmed it to. Like the local that lives there. You can just write in the group. And not only that, they'll probably take you out because we encourage people that they must. One of our code of conducts is you must give before you take.
- [44:36]
B
I love that we have some people.
- [44:37]
D
That go in, they just only ask questions. They never answer. They only ask. And we keep tabs on all of that and we let people. You've been asking a lot of questions, like you can't answer anyone. It's like I only jump in when I need something. It's like that's. There's tons of groups out there. There's so many groups out there for that. For us, it's a give first community other that way the bowl, the container is always overflowing. And that's why people, when they don't, when they leave an event or they leave a mastermind or they leave a paddle tournament that we do, no matter what we do, they leave with energy. They leave full. They don't leave like someone just sucked blood out of them and like, oh my God, I'm never coming back.
- [45:11]
A
But dude, since I've known you, like, you've embodied that right. Like you connect me to Chris from Click. Just had a great breakfast last week, but you don't want anything from that. The. The world just goes in a circle. It's like we are looking for people just like that.
- [45:22]
B
Yeah.
- [45:22]
A
That just want to make the world a better place. And it all comes back full circle.
- [45:25]
B
You know, so it's interesting. I've been throwing masterminds for years and I'll go get fancy celebrity or a big performance or rent out a stadium or something crazy. The number one thing on the exit survey when the members leave is the breakout session.
- [45:39]
D
Yeah. Yeah. Who should you meet?
- [45:41]
B
The three hours you talked about. We only do 90 minutes of two hours. But because it's three days in a row. But the three hours you're talking about is the most important thing. Literally. Like, did you like Mark Wahlberg and Kris Jenner and Shaq or blah, blah. No, no, no.
- [45:53]
A
Yeah.
- [45:53]
B
The breakout Session.
- [45:54]
D
We don't really even announce, like, speakers. Well, one is, like, ours are members only, so we don't, like, necessarily use it. But, like, our members sign up for it without even knowing who's speaking.
- [46:05]
A
Nice. Yeah.
- [46:05]
D
Because they just want to meet other people.
- [46:07]
B
I don't even let my staff know who's speaking.
- [46:09]
A
Exactly. And we actually. We had three. So the event coming up in March, we had three stages. We actually just removed an entire stage and made a curated connection stage. So all day long, you have an hour block. You're assigned to that hour block, and you're going to walk away with 10 new friends.
- [46:22]
B
Nice.
- [46:22]
A
And you know what? The feedback's probably better. The. All the paid speakers. Everybody like that stage the best.
- [46:27]
B
Sure. For sure. Okay, so let's talk about the entrepreneurial journey. You sell the company. You sell the company. But you also didn't mention you have the Pilates studios. Oh, yeah. You have multiple location Pilates studios. How did that come to Rise?
- [46:43]
A
Yeah. I met my wife here in 2018, and she. She was amazing. She's a smart marketer. Really, really great girl. And we were just starting Crossnet. I was living on unemployment. I remember, like, sitting on my first date with her, like, she's on the left side of the Uber. I'm like, when we get to 10 sales a day, baby, we're gonna be rich. And she started, like, I'd always ask her for copywriting help, and eventually Covid happened.
- [47:05]
B
Yep.
- [47:05]
A
And she lost her job. And I was like, yo, come full time and help Crossnet. So she became employee number one.
- [47:10]
B
Wow.
- [47:10]
A
She worked with us, ran our marketing department. And I looked at her and I'm like, one day, she gave up her corporate America job for my dreams, and I respected that. And 2021, we were getting married, and it was either get married or open the studio. Cause you really wanted to open a studio. And we didn't have a lot of money back then, so we're like, all right, we're going to get married first. One day, we'll live your dream. And I never wanted her. I grew up in a house where my dad would sit at the kitchen table and tell us all about the dreams he never lived. And I really started that. I never wanted to be that father, but I never wanted her to be that mother. And to know that life happens quick if she had a kid. Never got to live the dream. There's no perfect time, but now is the perfect time when we don't have a family. So we opened up the studio last year. February 3rd. She's the operator. I'm just the. The supportive, moral husband. I've made a very strong commitment to Aaron that we're full in on Founders Club. Like, I can't escape the Pilates talk. I'm so proud of her, but it's incredible. Yeah, she has two locations. We just signed two more. She's gonna be opening up 12 locations in 2026. And, yeah, she loves building a. A juggernaut, dude. Yeah. Today there's. I saw there's 297 spots today in class, there's only four available.
- [48:26]
B
That's wild Beast.
- [48:28]
A
And I'm so proud of her.
- [48:29]
B
That's amazing.
- [48:29]
A
Yeah.
- [48:30]
B
Okay. You sell a company, one of the biggest transactions in Canada, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Why go back into this? Like, why dive into something that takes a lot of work, time, and energy to slip around the country and now internationally to do it?
- [48:44]
D
I think it's funny you asked that. I think one thing most entrepreneurs don't realize about selling a business, specifically when you started it, when you invest in a company, it's like, that's like a transaction. But when you start something with your. With your nails, with the dirt on your blood, sweat, and tears, it's very much like. Like your baby, and it's a part of you. And little do we realize, like, how much our identity is trapped into it, how much our joy, our fun. Like, we used to be on Shopify. Like, the number of dings on my phone was, like, dictating my. My happiness for the day, you know? Like, that's how connected I was. You know, it's like I could be in the worst day ever. Like, three nice dings. Like, it's crazy, right? They should do a study on that. But my point is, when you sell your business, you think that is the. That is the final ding. That's the thing that's going to last forever, right? And that's not true. In fact, it's the opposite. You feel like you lose your identity. You feel like you lose your purpose. And sure, you got money, great. Could buy some stuff, but we all know that doesn't last too long either. So I was very scared. I was very worried. I didn't know really what I wanted to do. But the one barometer that I really wanted to proceed with was the same barometer I had in the early days of building that business was I wanted to have a lot of fun. Right? It's like one thing that, like, Chris and I like when we first started this, like, he mentioned before, like, Concerts and snowboarding. Like, I've been to more concerts and I know how to ski. I never been to ski. Like, I've skied. I visited. I now, like, know, like, raising canes and the sodas shops. Like, I. I didn't. I was from Toronto. I never traveled. Like, we've traveled over 35 cities. I've had dinners with over 6,000 founders.
- [50:34]
B
Like, wow.
- [50:35]
D
Yeah, we have so much fun.
- [50:38]
B
Yeah.
- [50:38]
D
And still to today and like, when we. When we tell, like, our team and like, when it gets intense, and it does get intense. A lot of shit. 1200 souls, you know? Like, sure, this is no joke. Like, and it gets too intense. We'll stop him and be like, we're gonna remind you guys, like, if this stops being fun, we're out.
- [50:56]
B
Right?
- [50:57]
D
Like, this is fun only. And fun first is really our mentality. And they appreciate that. We have fun with our team. We have a lot of jokes. We. We mess around, we make mistakes, but that's it. Like, there's. I couldn't imagine not, like, doing this. I would go as an entrepreneur. As I now, after 11 years, I consider myself a pure red entrepreneur. Like, I don't know what else I would do. Yeah, I think some stupid shit probably.
- [51:25]
A
Also, I think the magic Dan is like, we didn't sit at a kitchen table. We're like, yo, let's start a business together. This was like, a complete accident. And we're very much, like, happy to own that. We were hosting dinners. We would have sponsors that would fortunately sponsor my newsletter. Aaron doing a selfie on Instagram. We convinced them to pay a little bit money to come out. And eventually it just fed our lifestyle. I want to go to this concert.
- [51:48]
B
Cool.
- [51:48]
A
The sponsor will pay for us to come out. And we connected people. But after two years of doing that, we'd come back to a place. And it started as a place to just fulfill our travel needs. But the people we'd sit down would be like, yo, I don't think you remember this, but you sat me next to this person. We've now become roommates. We've now started the business. We're now dating.
- [52:06]
B
Right? We're like, look at our baby.
- [52:09]
A
It's crazy. Like, members are dating now.
- [52:11]
D
It's buying each other's businesses.
- [52:13]
A
Yeah. People are acquiring businesses.
- [52:14]
D
Came to your dinner. And now I'm an exited founder. How well, the guy you like, what? It's unbelievable.
- [52:21]
A
And so that just happened. And we did that for two years. And they were like, yo, what if we just launch this community and for me, I was the exact opposite of Aaron. I was never investing in courses, never in community. Like, never had paid for that. So I was like, if we're going to do this has to be fun, it has to revolve around having as much fun as possible with really amazing people. And everything doesn't have to be about business. But if me and you hang out, we're naturally going to do business because we're good people and we have similar interests. So the community started like that. We got the first 50 people a couple of years back, and, damn, it's growing like crazy. But we've never lost the fun element.
- [52:59]
B
When you close your eyes and you think about 2027, 2028, 2029, is there. This is a worldwide thing. Are you? Absolutely.
- [53:08]
D
Oh, certainly we have demand. You know, our biggest fear is just not building the infrastructure to support, like, the demand.
- [53:17]
B
Sure.
- [53:18]
D
You know, one of our members, like, brought up a point not too long ago, and he was like, hey, can I share something with you? I was like, yes. And he's like, I'm worried that at one point there's gonna be too many members in the community, which really stuck with us. We're just like, oh, my God. Like, do we cap it? Cap it at a thousand? Two thousand? Is there a number? And what I later realized is there's no this community as long as it remains vetted and every single person that comes in meets all the criteria. It's only more powerful with more I go to my phone or ask questions channel. It's insane. Some of these. Someone asked for a. A German lawyer that can help transfer money through. Like, this. The most complicated question I've ever seen.
- [53:55]
B
I was like, someone's like, oh, yeah, no chance.
- [53:58]
D
Three minutes. Someone's like, I have the perfect guy. I'm like, what? It's like, unbelievable. So, yeah, if there's 3,000 people, as long as they all remain the same, it's even more powerful. So I think the number grows. We have so much demand in Europe that we've yet to really build the infrastructure to support, like, 30, 40 a week coming in from Europe. So we'd really love to do something.
- [54:19]
B
How are they coming in? Are you running ads? Are people talking? Is it social?
- [54:21]
A
Like, what's happening next year?
- [54:23]
D
All the above.
- [54:23]
A
A lot of organic. What we're seeing now which is the best is we're getting member nominations, like Yash.
- [54:29]
B
Right.
- [54:29]
A
The podcast before this. So, yo, I got two or three members for you. Like, those are perfect, because once they have a good Experience. They will also have members.
- [54:35]
B
Yes.
- [54:36]
A
So the spider web just continues to grow. But it all starts with leaving a great first impression and then them getting value out of it.
- [54:42]
B
Yeah. Cause like my group's a hundred thousand dollars, so I don't run ads. I have to have referrals.
- [54:46]
A
Exactly.
- [54:47]
B
I need to create the best experience humanly possible.
- [54:49]
C
Yeah.
- [54:49]
B
Because me running an ad that's. I call it whale hunting.
- [54:54]
D
Definitely a product first engine. And you know, it's also three years. Right. So it's like it took us pretty much two years to get to like 150 members.
- [55:02]
B
Sure.
- [55:03]
D
And then we went from 150 to 1200, like really, really fast. Right.
- [55:07]
B
So with turning down thousands of people.
- [55:09]
D
Yeah, yeah.
- [55:11]
A
Being very selective. And this year we'll go to 3,000. Yeah. We've been raising the price every single month with the value. We're pretty capped on the price right now. We're happy at. And so nice grandfathering people in because they've seen the maturity of the business. Right. The value.
- [55:25]
B
I think you're at the perfect price point because it's easy for someone to.
- [55:27]
A
We just had the event at Grutman's house. We have the fully. We're just stacking good stuff and members keep appreciating it.
- [55:33]
D
Yeah.
- [55:34]
A
But yeah, Global Network 2027, we're still having fun and we're traveling the world still.
- [55:40]
D
Yeah.
- [55:40]
B
So there's something that I do at some of the events where we have companies present and we're raising capital for those companies. Are people ever pitching at your events? Is that something that you guys are.
- [55:53]
D
We don't allow it. But there's definitely a group of people that would love if we set up some sort of like deal flow channel for them.
- [56:02]
A
That's the biggest thing they keep asking. I think we need to organize it in a great way.
- [56:06]
B
That's my retention. My retention. Is that. Sorry to cut you off. Yeah. My biggest retention is my syndicate. So a lot of my mastermind members, they don't care about the 100k because they get to invest into deals.
- [56:15]
A
Yeah.
- [56:16]
B
And because they invest in deals, they know they're going to make more. Hopefully not know for sure, but of.
- [56:19]
A
Course, hopefully make ROI on it.
- [56:21]
B
Yeah. And so they like to plug in. I have members that literally are paying for that because they're getting access to deal flow that they know that I'm vetting it and our circle is vetting it and we're co investing to the deal together. So we do small rounds. We do three to six million per deal. And I do one every six to eight weeks. Okay, so raised 56 million in the last three years. Three to six million bucks at a time. 18 companies. We just find products that are in our system. Food and beverage, cpg, et cetera. I just think that you're going to have thousands of members as long as you're strict about vetting it. I also have a minimum requirement. They do 5 to 20 million because it reduces my risk. What you don't want to do is raise someone's life savings rate. Yes. So everyone's a credit investor. We don't do big rounds. So I'm not raising $37 million for one deal. It's just 3 to 6 million bucks per deal. Most checks are small, 25k, 50k, 100k. Some do 250 to 500. But a lot of 50k, 100k checks. But the retention rate is a lot because of that. And there's a communal part. Now the concern is, what if the company fails? Right. You get egg on your face if it does. Of course, you don't really have much backlash if it's a successful company. Meaning you raise money for a $16 million food brand and it goes bankrupt. They're not mad at you for that. Yeah. You raise money for a startup and the guy takes off with the money. Now you have egg on your face. Right. And so it's just something to be thinking about. I'm talking live on the camera, but, like, it's something that I've. My elevator syndicate now has 1100 investors in it, outside of the Mastermind.
- [57:49]
D
Wow.
- [57:50]
B
And so I can fund a company in 15 days.
- [57:51]
A
What's the infrastructure look like for free?
- [57:54]
B
So we utilize Angellist in our backend. So Angel List handles everything in the back end. Let's say it's a food brand. Right. We're raising money for Skinny Pasta, which we raised 3 million for them. Twice. Everyone gets a text message and email, but first the founder does a presentation at a live event. So you throw your live event. Say there's 500 people, for example. A founder can present as long as obviously you vet the whole thing ahead of time. Blah, blah, blah. Let's say this pasta company presents and it's for 30 minutes. They are presenting in a learning style fashion. So you're not just getting pitched, you're learning about it. And we do what's called a soft touch. Everyone's going to get a text message, hey, Skinny pasta is raising $6 million. Reply back if you'd like the paperwork. If you don't want anything, say nothing. So if they say nothing, they don't get another text. So they're not going to get bothered. Like 15 times sales reps calling them. It does not happen. It's one message. If they respond, yes, pasta. They say the word pasta back. Will now send them the deck, the financials, the wiring info and everything in one shot in the financials and so they can make a decision and not have to ask any questions. Why does I do that? It removes the back and forth and it makes a seamless process. They then say, okay, 50k. It's all done through Angellist. They sign and wire. That's it. By doing this, I can't even explain. We did it for Candy brand. We did 4 million at an 18 million valuation. They just raised 30 out of 135. Number two in target. Like it's great. Candy Brand. We did it for Icon Meals, we did it for Everbowl. We raised for them. There was 17 locations, now there's 104. But during those years, all the members are part of it. They're all franchisees. Buying franchises, investing more money. Like things happen. You have the most perfect group in the world for it. So just keep in the back of your mind, not now, but whatever in the future again, as long as you are vetting the group, which I know you guys will, because you're vetting the members and you bring them offerings, they want it bad. Especially for your exited founders. Someone sells a company for 26 million, they're like, what do I do now? Yeah. Having people talk about money and investing, there's a lot of things are going to happen in your founders lives. Your guys are going to go from 29 to 33 to 37. What happens there? They're building a company, they sell a company, they get married, have kids. Yeah, you need to talk about that. You need to teach them about family. You teach them about things that are going on in their life. You need to teach them how to protect themselves and their finances. Wealth managers, like it's like a combination of the NFL combine and like, yeah, how do you protect all, everything? Who's going to cancel? No one's leaving your group.
- [60:30]
A
Yeah, exactly.
- [60:31]
D
So we say we're, we're building for every season of your life.
- [60:34]
B
I love that.
- [60:35]
D
That's what we say.
- [60:35]
B
That's reality.
- [60:36]
D
That's reality. You need different things at different times.
- [60:39]
A
We already have father chats, mother chats, there's father getaways, mother gets away. It's like we're building for stuff that doesn't even relate to us right now, but it's there when we get to that season.
- [60:48]
B
Absolutely. It's kind of cool because those founders, Wellness, they. They turn 42 and they have their second kid and, like, they want to hang out with your other members. Yeah. And they want their wife and kids to do it, too.
- [60:58]
A
Exactly right.
- [61:00]
B
And, like, that is a big deal. And you're. Again, I don't see people canceling your group. It's the right price point. You vetted it hard. It's the right members, and you're making it fun. Why would you leave?
- [61:12]
A
They don't like this one.
- [61:14]
C
They don't.
- [61:15]
D
At least not yet. Yeah.
- [61:17]
B
I just. I know it and I. Yeah. And because you guys are enjoying it and you guys are young, it's unlikely you're going to want to exit because it's fun. Unless someone makes you a crazy offer. If they make you a crazy offer, you'll probably still stick around and do it.
- [61:27]
A
Of course.
- [61:28]
B
Right. They'll give you golden handcuffs to keep running the thing. Right. Because there's a lot of groups that, you know, in the event space, in the membership space, the ones that stand out, we can all name. Right. There's a company out of San Diego, has 52,000 members at eight grand each. Right. That's a lot of revenue, as you can imagine. And you obviously mentioned ypo. Like, there are groups that have tens of thousands of members at that 8k to 12k price point. Holy smokes. Those are not small numbers. And the deal flow that happens with inside of that is wild.
- [62:03]
D
It's insanity.
- [62:04]
B
And what will happen is, as you evolve, you're going to start to see, what can we do to provide value for the members. Do we have, like, a dedicated partner that's like helping with merchant processing? Do you have a dedicated partner that's like Gary Brecker for Health or something? Like, do we do a deal with Gary Bracker to teach everybody about blood work? You know, like, you start to think about, what do these people care about? What do they spend money on? Is it accounting, taxes, life, travel? Can you get them a fancy credit card deal discount? Like, things start to evolve because you've got the perfect members for it. Okay, question on the charity side. Why is it important for. For brands or for people as individuals to have some type of charity component into their life?
- [62:50]
A
You want to say something, Something we haven't done yet, to be honest. We haven't done it yet with the forum. It. Well, the forum is charity. Yeah. For Sure. I think, to be honest, and I want to get there for me, if we do something. My problem with charity and maybe you could help me is I never actually get to see when we do donate where the money. Right. And for me, like, I lost my dad to alcoholism when I was 18.
- [63:09]
B
Yeah.
- [63:10]
A
There's nothing to do with Aaron's charitable cause. But like, for me, if I give back to people that are struggling with alcoholism, get them, make their life better.
- [63:17]
B
Yes.
- [63:18]
A
I don't know the right charity yet, but it would be very interesting for me because made a very big impact on my life.
- [63:25]
B
For sure. Yeah.
- [63:26]
A
If I could give back. I know it has nothing to do with the Founders Club, but it has something to do with me personally. So.
- [63:32]
D
For me, it's like, it's. It's just like standard for me, I guess, just because I'm a Jewish guy. So I've just always kind of donate 10% of everything I've made. Yeah, it's not complicated for me. That's just what I do. It's just I've been doing it for a really long time, so I don't really like, feel it. I would say as like, I used to. I feel like a charity is kind of like a muscle, you know, it's like you gotta like, continue to have that like, natural tendency and certainly have been burned in the past. Like, I know what Chris has talk. Certainly been burned many times.
- [64:09]
A
Yeah.
- [64:10]
C
I don't know.
- [64:10]
A
I think it's hard to question Dan either. Like, you, you're the Aaron route with the 10 of your earnings or whatever. And me, I grew up in Connecticut on a farm. Nobody was giving me charity. I didn't have charity. Like, it's hard for me now to be on the other end being like, I gotta find a place. And that might be shitty to say out loud, but I need to find something I feel connected to.
- [64:26]
B
Absolutely.
- [64:27]
A
But it starts with the operator to know where that money actually goes. For sure.
- [64:31]
B
The reason I started my charity was that exact scenario. I did a charity poker tournament in 2008 in my store in downtown San Diego. I had all these football players, business people, big charity poker tournament. We raised $165,000, presented the big check. We're super excited. Monday became Thursday, Thursday became next week, Wednesday became next month. I never heard from the charity again. Not that they did anything nefarious. I don't know, it was bad, good what happened, but. But I couldn't report back to my friends that I'll just paid 1000 bucks each to be in my charity poker tournament. What happened? They wanted to hear stories. So I made my model citizen fund backpacks for the homeless with items inside because I wanted a cause and effect. I knew that if I gave out backpacks to the homeless, there was 14 pounds of supplies in it. Start the toy drive. You can visually see. When I do my toy drive, I'm going to fill up an arena or stadium or a building, whatever, and give out toys to children. You're going to see children walk in, leave with toys. I want to make it very visual because of what you feel is that sometimes you just donate 10 grand or a thousand bucks, 100 bucks, a million. You just don't know what happens with it. And so what I would say to you is to get over the hump is it has to be something that you care about or someone in your circle, someone that you are close with, right? That they went through homelessness or they, like, wanted something with leukemia or breast cancer. Something has to be meaningful to them that makes you passionate about it until you find what matters to you. Sorry. And it doesn't have to be money. Time and energy is also very useful. Like, you might not want to cut a check to something with alcoholism, but you might go to a sober house once a month and spend a couple hours with them and talk to them and teach them or something. Like, you might get connected that way, where you're not just donating a thousand bucks or ten grand, whatever, to them. Sometimes it's just the time and energy. Like, you get the Founders Club to go to the beach and clean up. There's no money involved in that. They're just cleaning up a beach. And you can see the cause and effect of it, but it creates experiences, it creates memories. And so I, like, obviously, I'm a very big pusher of charity, but I'm also. I'm also trying to change the narrative of what you feel inside of, like, I don't want to donate 10 grand because I don't know they're going to run off with the money.
- [66:35]
A
At what level of wealth or time in your life did you start getting involved in it or you felt like it was the right time?
- [66:40]
B
So 2008 is when I started throwing the charity events.
- [66:43]
A
Okay.
- [66:43]
B
And I was throwing them with other people's charities. At first I didn't have my own, and then I finally started my own, and that's when it changed. And it wasn't that I was donating a ton of money to my own charity until I had a big amount of money. And then I started deploying a lot of capital through it, and then I was just self funding most of it for many years. Like, if you look at the toy drives for the first like eight, nine years, I just paid for it all. Yeah, me and my partner did everything. And I had some people volunteer and donate a little bit, but like, I really just paid for it all because I didn't want people to feel like that. Now I'm mentally obsessed with getting more and more people to donate because they can now see I'm the vehicle to give out toys effectively and efficiently. And so the money part, the number doesn't actually matter. Meaning it depends on the financial journey. Whether you donate a hundred bucks, that's a huge deal for some people, of course, right. Family of $400 could be a humongous deal for them. 1,000 bucks could be a big deal. 10 grand, the math doesn't actually matter. Them taking the time, money, and energy is what actually creates the emotional relationship. And you'll see if there's something that they can do that your group can do to like, we're going to go build a school, or we're going to go clean up a beach, or we're going to go do this, this, and this. You have so much power building up. You have 1200 members now. You're going to blink your eyes and have 3000, 3000 people doing $14 million. Averages a gazillion dollars and it's hundreds of thousands employees. What happens in 2029? Yeah. When they have 1.9 million employees amongst them and you can do push a button and everyone knows about this breast cancer charity or this beach cleanup, or let's all get together around the world and we're all going to do this thing for children or homelessness. Like the power you guys are creating is staggering. Staggering because of people that you're bringing in. Okay, I know you mentioned you don't have children. Do you want to have children?
- [68:36]
A
Absolutely.
- [68:37]
D
For sure? Yeah.
- [68:38]
B
Okay, sure. So there's only one question I ask on every single episode, and I've never gotten the same answer before. As you guys build this company, Founders club grows to 10,000 members and worth a bazillion dollars later on in life. And you do all these other ventures, you join advisory boards, and you both become multi billionaires. What percentage of your net worth do you leave to those future children?
- [69:01]
A
I'd say the biggest challenge I have in my mind is like my relationship with money growing up was so sparse. So how do you flip the coin on the children to have the same values around alcohol, around money. I have a good friend who actually works with us in the Founders Club. Dad died early. One of my best friends. And he receives a monthly stipend until he's like, 35 or 40. And the stipend is nothing crazy, but it's enough for him to live a sustainable life and live a good life and not have fear, but also not turn into an arrogant. And at 40, he unlocks that money. And I think, for me, if that was the relationship I'd set up, by 40, you kind of develop who you are as a person, as a man, or as a female. So I think that's a good system. Whether it's 90 or 100, who knows? But I love the way of drawing it out.
- [69:47]
B
Yep.
- [69:48]
A
Yeah.
- [69:49]
B
No one big no.
- [69:50]
A
I. I think that.
- [69:51]
B
Here's a gazillion dollars.
- [69:52]
A
I think that'd be moronic. Yeah.
- [69:55]
D
I mean, I don't have kids, so it's like, I don't have the emotional cloud right now. So without having that cloud. And maybe this will change. But personally, I don't see myself leaving any money behind. I mean, really.
- [70:15]
B
No.
- [70:15]
D
I think my kids will enjoy all of the resources and the connections and. Actually had the best example ever. What? My financial advisor, Zach, called me the other day, and he goes, can you get me Kevin o'? Leary? I was like, for what? He's like, one of my clients is a billionaire, and every six months or twice a year, he does a family retreat with his three sons, and he brings in a speaker to hang out, like, with them and to teach them on different aspects of wealth. Because his whole thing is, like, by the time I die, I want them to be, like, at the highest level of understanding and have the most amount of connections, because that's how they're gonna operate in life. So, like, I'll do things like that. Cause I think that is so cool. Like, put them in the right rooms, give them the leverage. Never make them feel disconnected. But I don't. I wouldn't want, at least without a kid right now, having that emotional. I wouldn't want to leave a whole bunch of money. My goal is to, you know, maximum. Maximize this. This whole lifetime.
- [71:16]
B
Yeah.
- [71:16]
A
But you also never know when you're gonna die. Right. So if you haven't educated them on, like.
- [71:20]
D
That was his position. If I die in a plane crash and my kids got a billion dollars, my daughter's one.
- [71:24]
A
So my. Yeah. When my dad died, he was 18.
- [71:28]
B
Yeah.
- [71:29]
A
Our family split $30,000. That was all he had. So I got 10,000. Greg got 10,000. My mom got 10,000. My 10 went to a camera. I was in film school, so I used that camera to. I spent seven grand on the camera and three grand for my credit card. And that camera got me through college and got me my first jobs after college. But, like, in that situation, I love that my dad came with a tank because I'm glad it didn't get siphoned out. But it also depends on the level of wealth. But it is important to get a little. Little cushion at first.
- [71:59]
D
A couple bucks. $10 million.
- [72:04]
A
Crazy.
- [72:04]
B
All right, so tell them where your socials are personally and also for the company.
- [72:08]
A
Yeah, Chris Mead on Instagram, LinkedIn, Twitter, Founders Club, official.com and Founders Club on all social.
- [72:15]
D
Just Spivak SP I V A K on Instagram. And, yeah, LinkedIn. Connect with us or. Yeah, Founders Club, Founders Club, official.com. yeah, you can pretty much hit us up anywhere.
- [72:27]
B
Very cool, sir. All right, guys, as you're listening to this, keep in mind, it's not just for you. There might be a founder that, you know that might be doing $14 million revenue as well that you want to introduce to Founders Club. Whether it's now, later in the future, this group and company will be going on for years and years and years. You might be sitting at a lunch or dinner, like, wait a minute, this friend is doing 27 million in sales. He should join Founders Club. Oh, this girl is doing 13 million sales. Maybe she should join Founders Club. Just keep this in mind for the future. You might want to forward this podcast to someone that's in their entrepreneurial journey. Appreciate you guys. We'll see you guys next Monday here@themoney Mondays.com.