The Brandon Zhang Show

Today Justin Mares joins the show to talk about the benefits of starting side hustles, the health and loneliness epidemics in the United States and his journey building two large CPG companies. Justin founded Kettle and Fire, the fastest growing bone broth brand in the country and Perfect Keto, which aims to offer better keto food and supplements to people. Justin’s goal is to improve the health and wellness of over 1 million people over the next decade, let’s find out how in the episode.

Links:
Perfect Keto
Kettle & Fire
Justin's Website
Justin's Twitter
Justin's Newsletter "The Next Brand" where he covers health
Justin's Most Popular Article on Side Hustles (over 100k views)


Contact Me:
My Twitter
My Website

Today, Erik Torenberg joins the show to talk about unbundling higher education through On Deck, the best way to build career moats, and his favorite frameworks for hiring. Erik is the co-founder of both On Deck and Village Global. On Deck is an education company for the future and I greatly admire On Deck’s vision and prolific production, as they seem to be launching new fellowships each week, expanding into verticals such as writing, podcasting, no-code, angel investing, and even Chief of Staff. Village Global is a network focused venture capital firm which is backed by the likes of Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos, and Diane Greene. Erik also hosts his own podcast, venture stories, which takes you into the world of venture capital and technology, diving into new fields each episode. 

Links:
On Deck
Village Global
Erik's Twitter
Erik's Post on Podcasting
Erik's Post on Building Personal Moats
Erik's Post on Frameworks for Hiring

Contact Me:
My Twitter
My Website

5 Key Takeaways: 

1. I learned about personal moats the hard way, which is not having one. And just, you know, feeling like I was always pushing this boulder up a hill and if I stopped it would roll back down and reading Cal Newport's book "Get So Good They Can't Ignore You" at the same time just reinforced the idea. 

So in order in terms of the most powerful moats, I would say, at least in technology, starting a successful company, building an angel portfolio, build an investment portfolio, and then I put newsletter or podcast, probably newsletter above podcasts, but they're both fantastic. 

2. COVID is really a land grab opportunity for us in the sense that people's, the opportunity cost of people's time is lower. And these new sort of cohort-based courses are so hard to get off the ground, but once you get them off the ground, and once you're a couple of cohorts in, there's really defensible and they just have a lot of momentum to it.

3. When I look at unbundling university, I think of the sort of three core things. There's the education itself, which has largely been unbundled, because of MOOCs and the internet. Then there's the network and then the credentials. On Deck is probably starting with unbundling the network. And the crudest way of describing is like, what Y Combinator did for founders, you know, it created a better signal than Stanford or Harvard. But that should not only exist for startup founders that should exist for writers or podcast hosts or, or engineers or designers or whoever. And that's what On Deck is building. 

4. One thing I would recommend doing, even if you're not yet starting a company is having a list of people that you would dream of working with. Who if you start a company, or you join a company, would be the 20 people that you'd love to bring on. And just continuing to add to that list, and getting to know them, and checking in with them every few months. One thing I did is I had a retreat, where I invited all of them to the retreat, and I would do this every quarter every six months or so. 

5. I've really been inspired by peer to peer credentials. I'm inspired because I want more people to have great opportunities. And right now universities have monopolies over credentials. That's really what's keeping it alive. I mean, why are people paying quarter-million-dollars for zoom University when if there was no credential, they would just be doing other stuff. 

On today’s show, I talk with Ben Tossell about the future of no-code, starting his own rolling fund, and the keys to building an online education community. Ben is the founder of Makerpad, a no-code education community. Makerpad started out as a side-project while he was running platform at Earnest Capital, but eventually Ben took the leap of faith to go all-in on the project. 

Links:

Makerpad
Ben's Twitter
Creator Grants
Ben's Rolling Fund
Advent Calendar of No Code

Contact Me:
My Twitter
My Website

5 Key Takeaways:

1. I'm a maker, I'm not a manager. But now I'm like a manager of a company that has makers in it. And I think there's a good balance, we need that. And I think I've realized a lot of times, I've got to get back into making mode so that I can, like, enjoy the stuff I'm doing. And that's where I'm best. 

2. Don't bother with like interviews. It's more about finding someone based on a certain set of criteria. So for me, it was like, find some people who can actually do tutorials who can build stuff and know code and record it. For us it's about doing 2-week trial periods where they are fully involved in the work environment and at the end we talk to one another to see if we are the right fit. 

3. One of the key things I took away from my time at Product Hunt was how to engage the community, how to keep people engaged and how to make people feel like they're part of something. 

4. I think that no code is not a speck of not like a textbase, like AR or VR or any of those things. I think it's like a fundamental shift in how software development happens. We're just going to see the rise of this passion economy, this creative economy, like, it's never been easier to have your own business and no-code is just going to give people more options, setting up a membership community, having been paid events, and all that sort of stuff. 

5. I think I think the biggest opportunity is in b2b space, where I said about sales automations, or marketing automations. There's just so many things that can be automated, and, and done with like, there's just so much there. 

On today's podcast, Thomas Frank is joining the show. Thomas is a Youtuber, Podcaster and writer focused on providing content that will make you more productive. Thomas launched the blog College Info Geek in 2010 and it is now one of the largest student advice sites reaching over 400,000 visitors, and his personal YouTube channel recently crossed 2 million subscribers. Today, we talk about work-life balance, his new Notion course for creators, and what it is like being the co-owner of a Youtube agency.  

Links:
The 1% Rule
Thomas's Website
Thomas's Youtube Channel
Matt D'Avella's Youtube Channel
Notion Tips and Templates
3 Habits for Better Work-Life Balance


Contact Me:
My Twitter
My Website

5 Key Takeaways:  

1. I think Notion is not a notetaking app. Notion is a graphical programming language. It has more in common with JavaScript than it does with Evernote. But instead of coding, which you can do a little bit of with the formulas, instead of coding, you use graphical interfaces to create tools for yourself. 
2. The biggest thing that sticks out to me is just the production value, my friend Matt  D'Avella puts into his work. In 2019, I went out to his place and we did a bit of a breakdown in his work process: the gear he uses, and that was really fun. But more importantly, doing that video with him inspired me to finally sort of get off my butt and really start pushing myself in terms of content, production quality again, because I think, after five years of doing YouTube, I had sort of gotten into this space where we're making some improvements every video, but I'm not really pushing it anymore.
3. There are risks in going super niche, but there's also a lot of upside to it. Because people love to say YouTube is oversaturated and you can't make it there now. And they are correct. If what you're trying to do is the worst version of something that somebody has already done. If you are trying to review apple products, there are already creators who have been doing that for years with incredible production quality and it’s going to be hard to standout. But if you niche down and you're like, alright, we're gonna review Apple technology from the perspective of an illustrator: I'm a digital artist, here's how this benefits me. There are a lot fewer people doing that so you instantly gain a little bit of protected niche where you're kind of maybe the only player.
4. You know, people discount this, but face to face conversation is how people make the strongest connections between one another. 
5. If you want to have work-life balance, I find that the best way to do it is to create social obligations. And this sort of goes to a more general idea that I have around habits, and specifically breaking bad habits or modifying them into what you want them to be. Is that the idea is you don't break a bad habit, you replace it. 

On today’s episode Benji Hyman is joining the show to talk about managing agency work, building an online community and course, and how he and his co-founder Devesh created and sold a side project. Benji is one of the best content marketers in the space building in public and the co-founder of Grow and Convert, a content marketing agency separating itself from the pack by being accountable for converting quality leads, not just the content they produce.

Links

Benji's Twitter
Book: Contagious
Wordable Acquisition
Grow and Convert Website
This Songwriter Accidentally Executed Influencer Marketing Perfectly and Got 40k Viewers Overnight
How we turned a failed product business into a $34,000/month service business

Contact Me:
My Twitter
My Website

5 Key Takeaways:

1. For trends that I see: I see the move to freelance and remote work accelerating, I think fewer people are happy working for others in the traditional sense of going into a job nine to five, having a fixed salary being a fixed location, I think COVID just accelerated the move to freelance and independent work. I'm also anticipating some sort of market correction or recession in the next year, three years. And coming out of the recession, service businesses will benefit because you can hire an agency or a freelancer and not have the risk of hiring someone full time. And the last trend is probably the growth of the reliance on video content. I think that it won’t ever replace written content but more and more people are learning through video content. 
   
   
2. Most other content marketing agencies measure themselves based on output. How many 1600 word articles can they deliver for you. However, they never hold themselves accountable for the quality and quantity of leads that they generate for you, which in the end is all that matters. We wanted our agency to take on that accountability.  
3. The book that influenced a lot of my thinking on Marketing was “Contagious” by Jonah Berger. For me, a lot of the reading is not tactical marketing advice but really understanding how people think and to reverse engineer that process. You learn that people are actually very irrational in their decision making and  
4. Money also can cause more challenges than it can solve. When you’re more resource-constrained it allows you to focus on solving problems quickly and focusing on the right problems to solve. When you have a ton of money, I saw companies just throw a lot of money at headcount and spending money on things they shouldn’t have been concerned with.  
5. I was in Bali, and we had really bad internet. And it took me four hours to upload that blog post. So I get all the images, get all the text, and then put it into WordPress. And I was just like, this makes no sense, there's got to be a better way to do this. And so I started looking for different plugins, that would just help move the blog post from Google Docs into WordPress. And there was nothing out there that worked. And so I called Devesh from Bali and he was with a developer friend who created a tool that tackled this problem over the weekend. We initially thought of it just as an internal tool but soon realized there was a real gap in the market for this. That became wordable.  

On today’s episode, Cathryn Lavery joins us to talk about how she prepared for her jump to entrepreneurship, picking the right co-founder, and the keys to a successful Kickstarter campaign. Cathryn Lavery is the Founder & CEO of BestSelf Co — an organization dedicated to helping people become their best selves, fulfill their potential, and lead happier lives. Cathryn has sold launched and sold over $25 million in DTC products and was placed #318 on the Inc 5000 list in 2019. 

Links:

Cathryn's Company Best Self
Cathryn's Personal Website
How to Name Products
Article on Finding a Co-Founder
Article on Kickstarter Campaigns
Article on Building Relationships as an Introvert

Contact Me:
My Twitter
My Website

5 Key Takeaways: 

1. The Foundation was a program that helps people build their own businesses to create their own freedom. And it was focused on helping you find a problem industry and finding a solution, it gives you accountability partners, different lessons and modules, and guides you through that process. It was one of the first times I was surrounded by other entrepreneurs and it was actually where I met my co-founder.  
2. The most important part about a Kickstarter campaign is being able to understand who you are selling to and why the product will help him. This was easy for me to articulate in my first product as the audience was me and just writing about my personal experience helped me find that audience.  
3. People often think that introverted means anti-social. That’s not true, it just means that I might need time to regroup alone. I think introverts and extroverts just have different ways of managing their energy. This is why I think introverts often think that they can’t network as effectively because of this idea that being social is tied with being extroverted.  
4. I think looking back at my search for a co-founder, obviously complementary skills were really important but I also should have had more conversations to understand their values, their goals for the future of the company, etc. A business partnership is basically a marriage and you want to have the same level of trust and belief in a business partner as you would a partner in real life.  
5. I just read this book “The Five Dysfunctions of a Team” and the first domino was a lack of trust. And this is because you have a group of people that are all afraid of being vulnerable and it creates this artificial harmony where no one is able to be themselves. The best way to deepen relationships is by being vulnerable.  

Today, Corey Haines, joins the show to talk about the mental models and psychology behind marketing, the keys to building internet communities, and how he used no-code to build a marketing job board. Corey writes marketing case studies at Swipefiles.co, teaches SaaS founders how to acquire and retain customers through his course Refactoring Growth, and provides companies and marketers a way to meet through his job board Hey Marketers.

Links:

Corey's Twitter
Corey's Website
Swipefiles (Marketing Case Studies)
Corey's Courses (Mental Models for Marketing, Refactoring Growth)
Corey's Article on building his job board

Contact Me:
My Twitter
My Website

5 Key Takeaways: 

1.  I got my job at Baremetrics unknowingly using a method Ramit Sethi teaches called the Briefcase method where you come to the job interview with a plan on how you want to do things so you have the power in the conversation. I emailed Josh Pigford with some suggestions I would have for whoever takes the position at Baremetrics and he encouraged me to go into the application process. 

2. If I had to go back and teach myself about marketing, I would focus on starting a podcast, learning how to grow listeners there or starting an e-commerce store, spending money running ads and other campaigns. Those two methods would basically be worth a degree. 

3. An important view for marketing is that your product needs to be the power-up mushroom in Mario. You are not selling powered-up Mario, you are focused on selling the transformation. 

4. Copywriting is more about psychology than about writing. The best copywriters don't do their own writing, they let their customers do it for them. They conduct surveys, get on calls, read reviews and use the phrases the customers use to understand their wants, fears and needs. 

5. That's why I love community because it's a really fundamental and core owned platform. And then once you have the rented platforms, where you have a big audience on Twitter, for example, then you can push people to that owned platform and build that up. 

Today, Ari Lewis joins the show to talk about why everyone should start a newsletter, actionable lessons from Disney and Barstool, and what he learned from hiring a writing coach. Ari helps companies and thought leaders earn attention without paying for it. He hosts the podcast, “The Attention Economy,” where he talks with entrepreneurs, executives, and industry leaders on how they capture the scarcest resource on earth.

Links:
1. Ari's Twitter
2. Ari's Website
3. Brandon's Twitter
4. Brandon's Website

5 Key Takeaways 

1. I had around 1200 Twitter followers and I had zero people on the email list. So I just started to write, my goal was to write twice a week. As I began to grow, I realized there were like, all these advantages and to have you know, an audience. A lot of people they talk about, you know, build a product and go find an audience. And I'm really big on like, if you have an audience, you can sell them anything, you can figure out the product later. (Attention Merchants by Tim Wu) 
2. What I'm beginning to realize is like, yes, growth hacking works, but it only works to a certain extent, if you don't have good content, or if your content is not like serving a purpose, you're just not going to grow at the end of the day. And if you don't know how to growth hack, but you do have good quality content, you will grow in the long run. 
3. If you become like “The Everything Bundle", a great example, they're really turning into a traditional, “publication." They have like six or seven writers. Now they have multiple newsletters, multiple sections, they're doing events, they're doing podcasting. Well, how much money are you willing to give this up substack, how much does it cost is build out the same features internally and be able to personalize it. 
4. What barstool has done in a very similar way to Disney, is that they're not just good at creating content. They're good at monetizing their IP.
5. If you want to play college sports if you want to go to the pro level. you need many coaches, right? You need a fitness coach, you need a coach for the sport, you need maybe a wellness coach, you know, there's all these coachings you need? And well, what's the difference with running a business? If arguably running a business, there could be more money on the line, then, you know, playing a sport. So why wouldn't you have a writing coach? Why wouldn't you have you know, a psychological coach? Well, you have all these different coaches.

Today, George Mack joins the show talk about attracting luck, what high-performance lessons we can learn from Josh Waitzkin, sensory deprivation tanks, and the mental models behind video games. George specializes in growth marketing for e-commerce and tech businesses, and he studies how mental models influence our thinking. 

Links:

1. George's Twitter
2. Brandon's Twitter
3. Brandon's Website

Mentioned:

Naval Bot
How to Operate
Thread on Josh Waitzkin
Nicholas Nassim Taleb Bot
Thread on Incorrect Experts
3 Ways to Attract More Luck

5 Key Takeaways: 

1. The Lindy effect is a theory that the future life expectancy of something or some idea is proportional to their current age, think of it almost like a half-life. So if a book has been around for 10 years you can assume it will be around for 10 more. 
2. When you have specific knowledge in something, so for example, going back to growth marketing, say for example, the Social Dilemma, the film that came out, there'll be specific things about data and what people can do with Facebook ads, which I know isn't true. And I'm seeing it in the Financial Times, or I'm seeing it in the Economist, like publications I respect, and you're then in a very, very weird phase, because you go, "okay, that's clearly not true." But the only reason I know this is from spending years in it to have a lot of nuance and a lot of depth within that field. And the interesting thing that then arises you go Oh, shit, okay, so that for every other article, which I had no nuance or specific knowledge in, has probably the exact same thing. And, and it's a very, that's, that's a very, like, red pill moment in the matrix. 
3. [On sensory deprivation chambers] So you basically enter a tank that is sort of 500 pounds of Epsom salt, you close the lid, the water is heated to the temperature of your body, no sight like you can't see anything, you can't hear anything. It's the darkest thing you've you've ever seen. And there's no stimulation. So that is very much the opposite to modern life. 
4. Yeah, so I find whenever I get stuck on a project, I will break it down into a video game. So a clear example of this, of how it actually looks is I wanted to learn about programming and I wanted to create a bot that would just churn content out and I set that as level 10. And then let's just work all the way back. What is level one, and level one for me is always let's just try and map out the other levels with enough insight that I have right now. Level two, let's just find three good articles that explain it. Level three is find the simplest instruction from those articles and write it out. And then you begin to build that and you have constant momentum. And you feel like you're winning at every, every scale. Whereas when you don't do that, because you're maybe you're at level five, and you're like, I'm not at level 10 and you quit too early. 
5. Even if they were just hired, or they've been there from day one, they are all constantly repeating the simple sentence back to themselves. Whereas if you gave them a sort of 200 page guidebook with over 72 principles, would it have worked? Definitely not. But having like, one simple sentence that you can repeat back to yourself defines the company culture. 

Today, Matt Ragland joins the show to talk about his recent decision to become a full-time creator, how to get better at bullet-journalling, and what goes into a perfect coaching experience. Matt used to work at both Convertkit and Podia, two companies geared towards helping creators turn their passions into a career. Matt has joined the ranks of the creators he used to help, as he decided to go full-time on his Youtube channel, a podcast he is launching next month, and his products, courses, and coaching.

Links:
1. Matt's Youtube
2. Matt's Twitter
3. Brandon's Twitter
4. Brandon's Website

Mentioned:

1. The Annual Review
2. Daily Journal Prompts
3. Matt's Courses/Masterminds


5 Key Takeaways: 

1. A goal that I had, internally,  was to be able to replace the salary that I had at Podia, three months in a row with what I was doing as a creator. 

2. I turn down way more sponsorships than I accept and not just and it's mostly just from a fit perspective. But the sponsorships I do accept are all related to notebooks, productivity, productivity, apps, time management, time tracking, and that has been a combination of me outreaching and having a list of brands, as well as brands contacting me. 

3. I feel like I have a huge opportunity to really start that practice [of creating in the mornings] for myself and be intentional at the beginning with what I do in the mornings.  It was inspired by the Paul Graham essay "Maker's Schedule, Manager's Schedule," where I try and have a maker's schedule in the morning and a manager's schedule (taking calls, interviews, meetings etc.) in the afternoon. 

4. Bullet journaling, particularly to me, the reason I like it is that it is very tactile, like having a physical product in my hands. And so being able to write ideas down, connects a little bit easier with me. Also, it's one less app that I have to open to like do a specific thing I do like, like all the research shows, like single-tasking works. 

5. [On successful mastermind groups] But people in any kind of a group need to feel safe. And they need to feel like secure and open with what they're going to be talking about. The way that I talked about is like, almost everyone who is in the group is having, like, some specific, big issue with how they're doing work or you know, sometimes not doing work. And if we can't, like be comfortable with that, like if we're not secure enough to talk about those things. We're not going to get to the heart of the issue.