The Brandon Zhang Show

Today, I am speaking with Fabrizio Rinaldi, the co-founder of Mailbrew and Typefully. Mailbrew is a product aiming to reduce our reliance on social feeds and curate a healthy information diet. Typefully creates a clean location for people to draft and write tweets. On today's episode, we cover Mailbrew's approach to growth marketing, Mailbrew's future roadmap, and how to maintain creativity as a founder.

Links:

Mailbrew
Typefully
Fabrizio's Writing
Fabrizio's Twitter

Contact Me:
My Twitter
My Website

5 Key Takeaways: 

1. We're kind of building an anti feed in a way because we were trying to give people a better way to get content online. So following their favorite creators, thinkers, sources, websites, apps, all in one place. And indeed, it started as a simple daily email digest that you can build for yourself. 

2. After almost a year now, since we launched it originally, it's become much more than that because you can like add blogs, more sources, your calendar events, even your stocks and crypto stuff like that. So it's becoming more personal. We want to make it even more comprehensive in the future so that people can use it to unplug from feeds and hopefully reduce their information overload.

3. We built a ton of optimized landing pages for made will tailor the different sources and content creators, and in different use cases for maybe also hundreds and soon, they will actually be 1000s of landing pages. 

4.  We decided to invest more in creating actual curation tools that we want to provide as there are many information curators that use our platform to share Brews with their audience. And another very important things that we want to do is enable API and custom sources as we want to empower these people to build on top of Millbrew to create sources.

5. Most of the time the most important thing you can do is to reduce confusion. So whatever you're doing, so it's not just design, you can apply this theme to many other fields. Writing for example comes to mind. If there's one thing that unsettles people, and then it can create discomfort, and also is the reason for many of the actions of people is reducing uncertainty

On today's episode I speak with Eric Jorgenson, the Product Strategy guy at Zaarly and the author of the Almanack of Naval. We spend time discussing the forms and importance of leverage, building the infrastructure around online education, and the most unexpected benefit of publishing his book.

Links:

Eric's Twitter
The Almanack of Naval
Eric's Personal Website
Course Correctly

Contact Me:
My Twitter
My Website

5 Key Takeaways: 

1. I think of mental models as just like a quick, memorable sort of metaphor for like a way that the world works.  So it's kind of a mental toolkit, I guess, is like the way I would think of mental models. 

2. I definitely have a focus on the idea of leverage, where you build specific knowledge, you take on accountability, and then you apply leverage through capital, labor or product. 

3. I also know that there are people selling basically scams, as online courses and their landing pages pretty much all look alike. So I think there's, there's definitely some like credibility that can get built, which is like, I started Course Correctly. Course Correctly focuses on independent, unbiased, like thorough reviews of online courses. So I've actually, like, hired somebody who starts soon here, and we're gonna like, kind of double down on starting to build that much more aggressively. 

4. I think there's really interesting stuff to do around curriculum, like treating every course, as a modular piece, and building curriculums and stories and career paths. So somebody who's coming in saying, like, you know, I'm 19, when I'm 25, I want to be like, a founder of a technology company. And I want it to be like a venture-backed, scalable thing. It's like, Okay, cool. Here are the courses that like we would all put together, we're gonna start, you know, it's maybe one year of full-time education, but then five years of part-time education. 

5. It's easy to overlook the fact that like, even 100 people reading a blog post, like, while you just go about your day, or like, are asleep is a fucking miracle, right? Like that is an awesome miracle. And is 100 more people, like if we were in a room and you were going to get up in front of them and read this book, like, you'd be nervous.

On today's episode I speak with Bilal Zaidi, an ex-Googler and the current founder of Creator Lab, a leading entrepreneurship podcast and digital marketing consultancy. Bilal has had over 15 years of experience helping startups and fortune 500 brands grow through marketing, partnerships and business developing, including 7 and a half years at Google and Youtube, 6 years on his own venture and 2 years at charity water. On today's episode, we talk about how he was able to get large guests like Gary Vee and Daymond John early in his podcast, the future of the creator economy and how he is hedging risk while transitioning to a full time creator.


Links:
Creator Lab
Bilal's Twitter Account
Creator Lab Youtube Channel

Contact Me:
My Twitter
My Website

5 Key Takeaways: 

1. We're all getting used to seeing paid communities, substack paid newsletters, courses, etc. And more and more people are willing to spend money on those things. But there's gonna be a time where we're all sick of paid newsletters, probably, there's gonna be a time it might be 10 years from now. But you know, over time, things become saturated, the more people do it. So I think what's interesting is always, as the person who's an entrepreneur, whether as an individual creator, or like starting a bigger company, with employees and stuff like that, you always need to at least be experimenting with that 20% of trying new stuff. 

2. What I do on the podcast is publicly talk about business level with the best entrepreneurs in the world. So wherever, whoever we're talking about how they grew to strategy, innovation, marketing, branding, all that sort of stuff, we cover all of it. So that is kind of my equivalent of working in public, people get to hear how I think, you know, and if you listen to the show we're talking about like real, tangible business conceptshow they invested millions of dollars in paid advertising, and how they were able to change that over time, or how did they hire their best people, etc,

3. I ended up selling that knowledge as a mini consultant, I was about 18 when I started doing that, and just going around, I was doing an internship and I would go knock on doors at lunchtime, because we were in this wholesale district in East London. And I would just like pitch these old-school business people like how to build a website.

4. When I left Google, it was actually started maybe two years before so in 2015. It actually coincides with the podcast because I was kind of in a pretty bad place. Like I'm quite careful to say the word depressed because I don't know if it was actually fully depressed or not, but I felt like I lacked any meaning of my work, I would go to work, I could do it really easily. I wasn't challenged, I didn't feel like I was reaching my potential. And my learning curve had essentially flattened. 

5. The other big thing I mentioned are second-tier podcast platforms, so for me to be featured on Spotify, or iTunes, trust me, I've tried, right, like it's very difficult to do that. They're too busy.  I looked at well, who the other players that they have millions of people, but I can actually do something with them. So one of them was tune in radio. I ended up like pitching them finding someone who worked there, having a call speak, you know, traditional sales, partnership stuff, tracking them down saying, "Hey, I'm a podcast, I've got an idea for you can we talk about it", and they put me in touch with someone. And then the punchline is I hosted an event at TuneIn radio, where I interviewed like Rahul Vora from Superhuman, Hiten Shah and a bunch of people.

On today's episode, I speak with Kevin Lee, the co-founder of Immi, a CPG food brand paying homage to their favorite childhood dishes but reimagining them to fit our modern diets. Immi just launched three different products in their first vertical, Ramen. Amidst the busy launch, Kevin took time to talk with us about the process of creating healthy ramen, early lessons as a founder, and the goal of getting Immi into every supermarket in the country.

Links:

Immi Website
Kevin's Twitter 
CEO of a Massive Japanese Food Conglomerate Tastes Our Ramen
We Tasted 100+ Ingredients at North America’s Largest Ingredient Tradeshow

Contact Me:
My Twitter
My Website

5 Key Takeaways: 

1. We've seen that they've [older family members] just really developed more chronic health conditions because of their poor nutrition and unhealthy diets. And so my grandmother is pre-diabetic, both my parents take medication for high blood pressure, the same thing on K Chan [co-founders] family side. And so we started talking about combining our love of food, and health and nutrition to work on a better for you food brand and that was the original genesis behind the idea. 

2. We actually started like, you know, how you might learn anything, which is we went on YouTube, and we literally watched videos of people and chefs making noodles in the kitchen, we watched like videos of manufacturing plants and how they would produce instant ramen. My co-founder actually would download research reports that were in like Chinese and Japanese and we would get them translated so that we could study how other people were approaching it. And it was It's funny because there was a high amount of ignorance and naivety going into this because we had no background. But I think it allowed us to operate from that, you know, that first principles approach of, Hey, we literally know nothing. So we know nothing, how might someone approach this from zero to one. 

3. An important lesson that he really taught me was to have more confidence in these different things I was doing without expecting that they had to be the most professional or they followed a certain playbook. He just said, you know, carve your own path because that's the only way you succeed is you you have to make your own path.

4. One thing my coach taught me really is I  think you have to remember that as a founder. You're trying to serve the needs of your users' and if they don't like your product, for one, it's like they took the time to send you that message, which means they weren't, they weren't passionate about it to begin with, you just kind of didn't meet their needs yet. And that's why they're unhappy. You should take that as a sense of, hey, it's better to have this kind of feedback, that no feedback at all, at least, it means that they were excited and expected something and now you just have to iterate until you meet their needs. 

5. Our vision at me and we always say is, we chose these words, specifically is to enrich lives through the vibrant world of Asian American food. And we picked to enrich lives. Because enriching can mean you know, it can mean multiple things for us. It means enriching your health, right? So we care a lot about making sure that the food first and foremost is better for you. We care about enriching perspectives. So I think we talked about this, but when you eat another culture, food, all of a sudden, you're entering their world. 

Carlos Gonzalez de Villaumbrosia is the Founder and CEO of Product School, the global leader in product management training with a community of over one million product professionals. Product School instructors are real-world Product Leaders working at top companies including Google, Facebook, Netflix, Airbnb, PayPal, Uber, and Amazon.

Links:

Carlos's Twitter
Product School 
The Product School Podcast
The Product Book: How to Become a Great PM

Contact Me:
My Twitter
My Website

5 Key Takeaways: 

1. The idea of Product School probably first approached me when I was at business school in UC Berkeley. I met a lot of people from different backgrounds, such as management, consulting, or finance and more traditional business backgrounds that wanted to get their hands dirty, they wanted to be closer to the action, they wanted to work to build something bigger. 

2. My experience in an engineering school and then going to Business School inspired me to eventually start a product School, which is a hybrid between those two, that gets the best of both worlds, and can help people learn product management in a much more efficient way.

3. I have 10 years of experience building data products. I started other companies before, and I've been lucky enough to work with incredible mentors throughout my career. So in a way, I feel like I learned a lot of things on the go, and there was no proper curriculum. So I was like, You know what? Yes, I have a big dream to make a global movement but I'm going to start by helping eight people get their first product management job. 

4.  I would say the secret sauce of Product School is that every single instructor that teaches here keeps a full time job at incredible companies such as Google, Facebook, Airbnb or Uber, we believe that best teachers are practitioners, they are not teachers, actually.

Today, my good friend Robbie Crabtree is returning to the show. Robbie's course Performative Speaking was recently acquired by On Deck, a company building a private goal-driven network platform and a new approach to continuous education (the name may sound familiar as I interviewed Erik Torenberg one of the founders, 5 episodes ago. Robbie has also been a long-time friend and has helped me drastically improve my own public speaking both on the podcast and in real life. I am so excited for this new chapter of his life. On today's episode, we talk about the acquisition, the future of online education, building accountability and shipping speeds.

Links:

On Deck Performative Speaking
Thread on On Deck Acquisition
Robbie's Annual Review
Robbies Twitter

Contact Me:
My Twitter
My Website

4 Key Takeaways: 

1. Over the past couple weeks, they've [On Deck] basically released a whole bunch of tweet threads, showing kind of the process that's played out in 2020, how they hire, how they're building what their plan is. 

2.  I don't want to tell people that I'm good at something. I want them to see it. I want them to understand it because I'm giving them value and I'm demonstrating it on a regular basis. And so for me building in public, whether it comes to my writing, whether it comes to YouTube, whatever, maybe even Twitter, it's a way to show that I know what I'm talking about, rather than telling people that they should believe me. 

3.  The best thing is they [On Deck] have a team of people who all kind of have specialties. So instead of me having to wear every hat, as a founder and having to worry about marketing and customer service, and answering emails, and sales, and course creation, like content creation, and actually teaching and working one on one with students, you can remove a lot of that stuff. And say we have somebody who understands the questions you should be asking in the application process, we have somebody who can schedule this out and make it make sense. We have somebody who understands how to track the student or fellow experienced throughout the entire thing. And it allows me to then just get into this creative space and this teaching space to do what I do best, which is create content, create lessons, work with the actual fellows in the course, and make sure they're achieving the results that they need. 

4. I love experiences and culture and history and telling stories and going and traveling and experiencing myself. So to me, I've always said like, my ideal job is to take over like Anthony Bourdain his role, and just explore that world tell those stories have those experiences. And that's really what drew me to him and why he continues to live in my head. 

 

Dan Go is the number one fitness coach for entrepreneurs and the owner of high performance founder. Dan focuses on helping busy founders create healthy routines and lifestyles that maximizes their energy through simple formulas. On today's episode we talk about starting an online coaching program, facing adversity and the biggest myths in fitness.

Dan's Twitter
Dan's Coaching Program

5 Key Takeaways: 

1. I can't be inauthentic in what I do. Everything I do must come from the heart and the soul of Dan, or else I am not going to be proud of it. 

2. During this time where you actually have no, you have less clients, you don't have as many as many people joining your program? Are you going to bet on yourself at the worst possible time? You know, or are you going to, you know, let's just say take the easy route, go work for someone else, get the salary, get, you know, some equity and, and kind of go against the values that you said. So I had to think about it a long time. And then I gave it a week. And then I just journaled out. And I was just like, you know what, I got a bet on myself. 

3. So I feel a lot of people are so focused on the outcome, they're so focused on losing weight, they're so focused on actually, even when you're focused on losing weight, that's like focusing on revenue in a company, you can make a million dollars, but what if you're giving up $999,000? You know, in terms of expenses, in order to make that million dollars, right? It needs to mean something, and you're just doing work for $1,000 profit.

4. And pick a niche that you Feel comfortable talking to and that you feel comfortable helping. And that niche can always change over the course of time. But you've got to choose the right person that you want to serve. Or else one you might be taking in the wrong person, you might be helping someone that you don't necessarily have experience with.

5. I was gonna say it's like, when people approach networking, they approach it from a transactional point of view, right? Oh, I'm gonna meet you, you could do so much for me, right. And I'm going to, I'm going to scratch your back. And hopefully, I'm going to ask you for something a little bit later down the line, and you'll scratch and then you'll be able to scratch mine. But the whole process of networking is let's just call it what it is building friendships. Right? And I don't ever think about asking for favors from my friends ever. I actually look at them as a person. And I'm like, dude, I want to connect with you as a father, as a friend, as a man, as you know, as even as a business owner sometimes, but I want to connect with you 

On today's episode I speak with Bilal Zaidi, an ex-Googler and the current founder of Creator Lab, a leading entrepreneurship podcast and digital marketing consultancy. Bilal has had over 15 years of experience helping startups and fortune 500 brands grow through marketing, partnerships, and business development, including 7 and a half years at Google and Youtube, 6 years on his own venture, and 2 years at charity water. On today's episode, we talk about how he was able to get large guests like Gary Vee and Daymond John early in his podcast, the future of the creator economy, and how he is hedging risk while transitioning to a full-time creator.

Links:

Creator Lab
Creator Lab Youtube
Bilal's Twitter Account

Contact Me:
My Twitter
My Website

5 Key Takeaways: 

1.  I ended up selling that knowledge [from building an Arsenal Fan Blog to half a million unique] as like a mini consultant, I was about 18 when I started doing that, and just going around, I was doing an internship and I would go knock on doors at lunchtime because we were in this wholesale district in East London. And I would just like pitch these old school business people like how to build a website. And if they didn't know how to do it, I would either teach them or I'd make it for them.

2. I think there are types of luck that you are completely like, you know, dumb luck, like, you know, our DNA, where we're born, what our parents are, like, a lot of what our families like, that stuff has a huge impact on your life. And then there's the other sort of luck, which is, you know, the stuff that you either are doing things to increase your surface area of being lucky. 

3. When I left Google, it was actually started maybe two years before so in 2015. It actually coincides with the podcast because I was kind of in a pretty bad place. I'm quite careful to say the word depressed because I don't know if it was actually fully depressed or not, but it was, the worst I'd been inside and I felt like I lacked any meaning of my work. I would go to work, I could do it really easily, I wasn't challenged, I didn't feel like I was reaching my potential and my learning curve had essentially flattened. So that's when I started saying, Okay, I need to go and find stuff outside of my job to fuel me and that is why I started the podcast initially. 

4. All I asked [to the Chief of Staff of Cenk Uygur] was How's your summer going? And she responded back to me, and was like, Oh, thanks for asking. It's actually about to get married. And we just kind of had this back and forth and had email chain with like 43 emails. And by the end, she sent me her wedding photos. It was genuine, I was just being nice. But that's the sort of stuff that it takes sometimes to land your first big guests, it takes a bit of luck. But it takes like going the extra mile. 

5. The other big thing I mentioned a second-tier podcast platforms, so for me to be featured on Spotify, or iTunes, trust me, I've tried, right, like it's very difficult to do that. They're too busy. So I looked at well, who the other players that they have millions of people, but I can actually do something with them. So one of them was TuneIn Radio. I ended up like pitching them finding someone who worked there, having a call speak, you know, traditional sales, business development, partnership stuff, tracking them down saying, "Hey, I'm a podcast, I've got an idea for you can we talk about it," and they put me in touch with someone. And then the punchline is I hosted an event at TuneIn Radio, where I where interviewed like Rahul vora from Superhuman, Hiten Shah and more! 

Noah Kagan is currently the founder at Sumo Group which is made up AppSumo, a marketplace for the best deals in software, Sendfox, the most affordable newsletter solution, KingSumo, a giveaway platform to help you grow your email list. Before that, Noah was employee number 30 at Facebook and number 4 at Mint. In today’s episode, we talk about the million-dollar weekend, growing on Youtube, and setting goals for 2021.

Links:

Noah's Office Hours on Goals
Noah's Youtube Channel
Noah's Twitter

Contact Me:
My Twitter
My Website

5 Key Takeaways: 

1. I think YouTube is gonna, in the next 10 years, it'll probably be one of the biggest job creators on the planet. There are so many jobs around it. There are thumbnail designers, there are producers and writers, there are operation marketing people. There are hardware companies. 

2. I think this going to be surprising, yet not surprising. The most interesting person making money on youtube is Gary Vaynerchuk. And everyone has heard of them. If you're an entrepreneur, up and coming, a lot of people have known of him. But I think what Gary's actually done from a business perspective is really fascinating that he doesn't sell you courses, doesn't make money on ads, he doesn't sell you merge, he doesn't do a lot of like, Hey, here's a sponsored video, I'm gonna talk about, you know, this wallet, check it out. He has these external businesses that he uses all of his attention from YouTube and pushes that traffic into so we have a video coming out two weeks about him where he does somewhere around 150 to 200 million a year as a marketing agency. And that's because he has a big YouTube channel, people know about him. And he says that he sold over almost a million copies of his book, which makes him more popular. 

3. I think I always thought I was gonna be rich. I just when I finally got rich, I didn't really believe I was rich. So I still act poor.

4. 90% of your YouTube traffic comes from YouTube. It's not your external traffic. So what that means is you need to pick one of the topics today and that are on YouTube that people are really engaging in within whatever vertical you want to specialize in. Within gardening, clothing, audio, business, whatever. 

5.  I think there's basically there's kind of like three types of goals that I think are the only ways you can do it: either very objective-based, system-based, or interest-based. So like, I want 100,000 subscribers by the end of this year, that's a clear objective. Then there are system goals. I think James clear, made this popular, which is like, I'm gonna go to the gym three times a month. That's a system goal.  And lastly, I have around 150,000 people on my email list and I don't care if it gets to 160 or 170, I just want to keep it growing because it's fun. That's an interest based goal. 

Today, I am speaking with Romeen Sheeth, the president at Metasys Technologies, a workforce management advisory firm based in Atlanta. Romeen is the host of the Square One Show, where he hosts conversations with founders, investors, and executives at the cutting edge of business. His past guests have included Andrew Yang, Sahil Lavingia, Hunter Walk, Keith Rabois and Allison Barr Allen. Romeen invests in 25 startups a year and in this episode, we go over his frameworks for operating and investing, why the 2020s will be the renaissance decade and why Atlanta is the rising tech hub of America.

Links:

Atlanta Tech is on Fire
The Top Lessons Learned Angel Investing $1 Million in 2020
50 Things I learned in the First 90 Days of Running a Company
Romeen's Thread on 2020-2030 Trends

Contact Me:
My Twitter
My Website

5 Key Takeaways

1. The biggest learning for me investing has actually been surrounding myself with world-class operators. A couple of my really good friends - Dave Tisch at Box Group, Arjun Sethi who runs Tribe, Steve Schlafman, Bradley Tusk, and others have been instrumental to the development of my thought process in investing. And that’s really important because you understand what “good” is really quickly. The toughest thing when you’re new to something or you have limited time to dive in because you’re doing something else is knowing what the standard is.

2. We’ve developed a higher ed system that’s frankly really out of touch with reality. It’s disconnected to the job market, with the skills you need to succeed in the real world and most dangerously it reinforces mindsets that I don’t think are necessarily pertinent to where we are today.

3. Jobs aren’t just about “what skills do you pick up, etc.” they’re about how you grow as a person. It’s always funny to me how on one hand we talk about how startups are unique and every startup has its own path, yet we then revert to generalized platitudes.

4. Phase I is all about access. One of the most difficult things about tech in general is being in the “in crowd.” And a lot of people have called this out for the not good thing it is and that’s a separate debate. But the first prong really is about did you even see the company. Because if you didn’t phase 2 and phase 3 don’t matter.

5. When you’re looking at a startup it’s so easy to ask what could go wrong or look at flaws. Getting a startup off the ground is a herculean effort. I think what people new to investing often miss is when they think about risk, they think about all the things you can see. E.g. does your product end up working, do customers like you, is your pricing right, is their competition, etc.