How to Make Your First Dollar Online: Key Strategies for Success

[00:00:00]I sold my last company for $ 46.2 million I crossed $100 million net worth at age 32 and I just made my biggest investment ever by becoming the co-owner of school and I always wanted breakdown videos from Jeff basos and Warren Buffett and Elon Musk what were they thinking like of course they're 100 billion now but I want to know what they were thinking at 100 million and 10 million I want to show you what the thought process is behind the investment and most importantly how you can model that decision-making framework to make way more money in your life I decided to invest in school and make my single largest investment to date including putting my brand behind it and endorsing the company because there's multiple things that are aligned in the same direction so Charlie Munger talks about this he calls it the LA laaloa effect and so usually when you get these like massive explosive growth opportunities it's not because of one thing so a lot of people want to have a silver bullet so it's kind of like a silver bullet fallacy it's thinking that there's this one big thing that if we just do that then everything else will work and more times than not it's the hundred golden BB's no silver bullets it's two three five six things that all have an incremental boost but when you multiply all them together create this insane outcome and so I see that with school and so let me Zoom all the way back out to like the ecosystem so this would be like big thing number one if we look at the education industry so let me let me show you some math real quick education globally is 10 trillion big all right us is 1.3 trillion still very big now this is split between two things you've got formal education so that would be like twoyear and fouryear degrees and right now that's around depending on the source 850 billion and for those of you who Google and find out that it's 863 or another source this is 842 it doesn't matter because in this type of stuff that we're talking about we're talking about big forces and we're talking about directional corre Ness but it's around 850 billion for formal education now on the other side it's split you've got e-learning in online education I'll put it that alternative education which right now is about 200 250ish billion 200 to 250ish billion depending on your Source all right so close to that now here's the really interesting thing about this and this will relate to why I'm betting really big on school or at least one of the reasons is that this one is shrinking by 6% per year kind of interesting this one is growing by about $40 billion per year now that is because this one's growing at roughly 20% per year so you've got this massive nut here that's shrinking by 6% all right which is about what's the math here about $50 billion is what it's losing every year and we've got this other one that's gaining $40 billion a year and growing at 20% so when I see these two things and I see this big overall industry in terms of 1.3 trillion 1.2 trillion whatever I see this as actually a crisscross so formal is continuing to go down and alternative or e-learning Etc is continuing to go up and so it's almost the exact amount that this loses every single year is almost the same amount that this one is gaining every single year and so that underpins a shift in buying Behavior people are seeing more and more that formal education doesn't give the return that it was promising and people are able to learn skills directly that can contribute to them making more money and being able to contribute in society feed their families pay their rents pay their mortgages and ultimately just live productive lives and so if you're a hair stylist you're like well you know what the the formal education thing doesn't matter because all I have to do is like learn how to like post on Instagram like my clients that even I do in my garage and I get more DMS for people who want me to do that and not a single customer's ever asked me for what my certification was huh so maybe this skill is more valuable than this skill huh and this girl is willing to teach me how she does it for 1,000 bucks whereas this school is 2 years and 15 grand well well the ROI is not there right and so what's happening is a lot of this money that has been going to these big endowments these these hars these these big university money now I do think at the top those guys are probably protected for a while but it's like the mediocre middle it's CCU state right like those are the ones that have four-year degrees that don't mean anything that no one cares about all of that money is getting actually pushed all the way back down to the bottom to basically creators people who are good at teaching a niche skill they're like hey I did this thing it worked well for me here's how you can do it and that works for anything whether it's like you're selling a customer like hey I lost this weight this is how I did it I ate all meat all the time and somebody else is like I only ate plants whatever and if that sounds cool to you I can show you how I did it and so this industry is Contin to grow so when I see this I think okay huge amount of money Changing Hands in a very fast time zone I'd rather be in this boat than in this boat and so that's thing number one so that's kind of the industry overall now if you look at me personally like how do I intersect with this well the first two companies that I sold so gym launch and Prestige Labs well I'd sold companies before that but they were just low seven fig numbers not bigger numbers those companies service creators and as somebody who came from first a direct response marketing background and selling media and Licensing uh to Brick and Mortar gyms I'm really familiar with this model like there is no University for gyms and so I did my best to create that University for gym owners because if you went to school for being a gym owner you'd make a heck of a lot more money than if you just went to school for like business and then opened a gym I have lived through this huge shift in wealth because like I started I think when I was 27 years old I think we took home $16 million in income just capitalizing on this trend and so I know that that money is out there and people are starving for information that they can actually use to feed themselves and so I have the big Trend data that I can see on the charts and the big fancy Finance people but I also have my personal anecdote of having experienced that huge amount of wealth coming towards me so that's thing number two thing number three is where do I fit in with this ecosystem and so my audience for the most part is split between business owners and people who'd like to start a business my whole mission with making the content that we do has been to make real business accessible for everyone and so early on for me I didn't have a lot of mentors and help and so I just looked everywhere I could to learn this stuff and I learned a lot of it the hard way one of the reasons that I put this stuff out there is that also some of the sources that exist out there are just honestly false like they are teaching things they have not done they're regurgitating content from other people and getting key points wrong because they don't know why it's right to to begin with and just basically leading people astray and I actually don't think it's malicious I think they just want the views they want the likes they want the ad Revenue whatever and like I don't blame whatever I would like to at least put stuff out there that I know like I have done this and I have done it many times and so if you follow this process whether you're a good person or a bad person it will probably work for you and so my audience knows that my whole goal has been to make real business successible for everyone and so if we're thinking okay Alex you could have promoted I don't know pick something Drop Shipping like there's a lot of different things I could have done but why why School particularly well because the mission of school aligns with my personal mission which is to make real business successful for everyone they want to like School want myself included now I'm a co-owner want to make business fund and easy for everyone and so I spent six months talking to the founder about like what do you really want this to become and he has a huge massive vision and his vision aligns with my vision of how big I think the space really is if you think about all the different industries that exist most of them have been disrupted by technology in some in some way you've got like Airbnb so hotels got attacked by Airbnb taxis got attacked by Uber these are the famous examples right but there isn't if you think about it no one's disrupted education no like there's no one place that everyone goes to learn stuff it's still completely fragmented and as somebody who's been in that space and understands that space very well and sees the trend I believe that there will be someone who will take it and my bet is that school will be that company now why School versus the zillions so this is like I guess point4 which comes down to why this particular company this particular product and hopefully even going through this the thought process you can still relate to any major decision that you have to make in your life and so why School particularly one of my big litmus tests for something a product that I'm going to promote is that I want it to grow on its own meaning if the only way that a company grows is that it advertises and when it stops advertising it goes down I don't like that I like to have passive growth and so let's go over here and I'll walk you through it so there's something that I call the golden ratio in business you have the percentage of customers who refer customers and the percentage of customers who uh exit so these people exit these people refer and and if the percentage of people who leave every month so this is 0.1 so 10% all right I'll just I'll put as these percentages rather than decimals there you go bear with me if 10% of my customers refer me a new customer every month and 10% leave every month then my business will stay the same now if 20% of my customers refer me a customer every month and the same 10% exit my business over whatever this interval of time is Will 2x 2 over one and that means that no matter how big I get the business will consist consistently double every one of those time intervals and so I look very carefully at what percentage of customers decide to bring other customers to the business and what percentage are leaving or choosing not to buy again and this works whether you're selling physical products this works whether you're selling software it works whether you're selling services it works the same way and so this golden ratio of percentage of referrals over percentage of people who leave or churn is what tells you the passive growth rate of a business now the vast like vast majority of businesses they've got let's call it you know 2% of people are referring and they've got you know 10% of people that are leaving and so they have to fill this bucket up with ads or or marketing or Outreach or whatever it is that they have to do to fill up the top side so that they just don't lose everyone over time and that's because they don't understand how to build a good product now once you have a company that does this and does have more people who refer than leave every month that is when you this is a flame that's when you pour gas on this thing and you say okay now I want to tell the world about it so that that number of doubles it just goes dot dot dot do Dot and then it doubles off the chart and then you add even more and then doubles again off the chart because you're just increasing the nend as fast as you can so that the doubling happens on a bigger amount of customers so when I saw school's metrics I was blown away I had never seen a company who had metrics as good as school to like I've never in my history of looking and we look at a lot of businesses we get gosh several thousand businesses a month that reach out at acquisition. comom for investment and for us to to buy you know a minority or majority of the of the business and so I've looked at a lot of business metrics and so when I saw the passive growth rate that school had it really intrigued me and so that business underlying fundamentals were there the mission of the fact that it wanted to make Business Online easy and fun and it starts right now in the education space like all of those things made it really really a good fit for me now let's talk about uh Enterprise Value stuff so number five I am here to make money and so I I I like to have my my altruistic goal is to make real business education accessible for everyone but guess what we have a lot of people work at this company a lot and you know unfortunately you guys you know want to eat feed yourselves have girlfriends and uh boyfriends hey you know uh and uh and and have houses and cars damn you right and so these guys need money unfortunately I would do this for free but they need money and so uh money is obviously a component of uh of any business so let me let me walk you through um the difference here so let's say that I have a traditional business number one so let's call this a service business and let's say I'm just going to use Simple Math here all right I'm going to try not to do too much math because I know everyone hates math right which by the way get over that because if you want to make money but let's say that we've got a $10 million business that does Topline and it does 3 million in profit okay cool now a traditional service business like this might be a $15 million business so that's just giving a five times multiple to the business which by the way that's how businesses are valued is usually a multiple of earnings and so cool this is a 15 million do company now if I double this company and go from you know 10 to 20 and 3 to 6 then I go this goes into becomes a $30 million business more or less might get a little bit more maybe get 6X cuz it's a little bigger but more or less I have this Delta that I can add to the business now if I had an e-commerce business my multiple might be on top line but it might be a little bit higher so if it was the same numbers 10 and three then this company might trade at call it three time you know two times Topline so this might be a two times Topline business 2x in terms of how the how it's valued so this might be a $20 million business at Baseline and again if I double this business then it goes to $40 million okay well that went from increasing by 15 million to increasing by 20 million so if I owned this business me putting the same effort in I would make more money neat now let's look at this third piece and then I'm going to tie this together for you let's say say we have a tx/ software business and these businesses trade and all of these trading multiples depend on all the fundamental business second Ops I'm trying to keep this really simple on High level because I want the decision-making process to be the highlight more than the individual numbers all right but if a business again is $10 million Topline and $3 million of profit let's say they might get somewhere between 10 to 20x their Topline and so this might be somewhere in the neighbor of 100 to $200 million now let's say I double this business and we go from 200 to $400 million well then we created $200 million in value so we created $15 million by doubling this one $20 million by doubling this one $200 million by doubling this one so if you're going to put effort somewhere and it's the same amount of work you get more for what you put in and that's fundamentally like the acis.com logo is about leverage so like the the it looks like this is our logo and that's because this is a lever and the main point there is that you get more for what you put in and so one of my big things in life the reason we be able to move quickly in terms of accumulating material wealth is making sure that when we make the move we get the most for it and so obviously I've spent four or five years building an audience and not really promoting anything or any of the companies that I own but this one felt too close to what so so many people needed which is they wanted a way to make their first business they wanted to make a way to make their first dollar online um for me the the mission was aligned they want to make it fun and easy for everybody just like I want to make business successible for everyone it had the fundamentals of the big Market behind it so it's moving in the right direction I'm on the right wave and the business itself was sound it was a really good product so I felt for my brand that if I'm going to promote something it had to be really good because if people say I'm only trying this because of Alex and they get in there and it sucks who do they think sucks me I'm the one who introduced them right like if you had a friend who's like oh you got to use S Sally she's a great hair stylist and you go and Sally just gives you a bus cut and puts your hair as blue and you're like but I wanted my hair to be red right forget the bus guy um you'd be upset you'd be like Sally what the hell this person's crazy right and so you be upset at the person who referred to and so the same degree I had to take that kind of I had to take this even at a higher level cuz I'm also a business owner so like I've I've been referred companies and I've like oh it's pretty good obviously there's things they could improve but like I know that the internet um has a short memory and has low forgiveness and so I had to make sure it was something that I could really get behind which is why it's honestly I've been looking for something that I could get behind for years there's just nothing that met the met the standard um that I have for you guys honestly I got very excited about that and so after six months we decided to do the deal and I talked about this big decision that I was going to make in an earlier Vlog was like my billion dollar my billion dollar decision it was about school was whether or not I was going to invest in school and specifically also promote it and like actually talk publicly about it but it felt too big and like it would help too many people for me not to do it and so um that was ultimately why I made the decision now if you listening to this I have two camps right we have business owners and we have people who want to start a business and so I want to share some cool metrics uh at least they get me very excited about this and for the future that if you want to start a business even if you have a business that you'll find interesting and that could probably make you money all right because we now like now I'm a co-owner of the platform I have access to a lot of information that other people don't have and so we ran something that we wanted to call the school games and so so this was something that Sam and I came up with together we were like how do we make this fun like how do we make this cool and so we're like like it has to be it has to be something more than just try this out right and so we're like What if we gave away what everyone else charges for which is usually my like go-to like how do I how do I look at what everyone else charges for make it better make it free like that's been my I'll write that process out like look what everyone else is charging for make it better make it free all right like if you want to get customers that's the Playbook now so with the school games what we did was I said okay what what does everyone else give away oops school games well most people have like coaching calls whatever you want to call it so people charge for that uh they have courses right they have courses they put inside all and they charge for that uh they have a community these are all C's that's kind of nice uh they have a community um that they have uh in involved there and then uh I want to have another one so I'm I I want to keep it to C's uh but so they have code which is realistically they have tools right so they have tools that they give people right and so it's like okay if someone has expert help they have doy self training they have support from other people doing the same thing which this also builds out there here's another C for you builds their conviction because in the beginning making your first dollar online so little of it has to do with making their first dollar and so much of it has to do with getting out of your own head which is why a lot of people were trying to get into business start with personal development first because they have to get through all their fears of rejection and why their dad didn't love them and why they're doing this to begin with and what's my passion blah blah blah blah blah right all you got to do is make a dollar and then you're in business just FYI so these are all the things that people charge for and we're like okay well let's just make it free and so that's pretty much what the school games was about it was giving all of this stuff uh and so we do I think three a week with all the top Community owners so this isn't uh so this is the people actually doing it and the nice thing with school because we own the platform we know no one's fronting we see all the numbers and so and all the numbers are public so no one can claim that they're like I'm making a million dollars a month they're like dude you're right there I can see how you I see what what you make right and so it just keeps everything honest and transparent in an industry that lacks a lot of that and so my hope also Sams as well is to is to bring transparency to an industry that's been very shrouded uh in in just lack of transparen just lies honestly in deception I would say misrepresentation would be the the correct word for that so we do all that stuff and we said uh we'll make it 30 days and so I'll give you the the business explanation behind this so we did 14 days for free in a 30-day games that way people have two weeks if they're like you know what this isn't working for me they can dip out if they do think it's working for them and they finish the games then they can the top 10 people fly out um to Vegas and we help them grow their their communities and and learn from them see how we can make the product better things like that now this is the part that uh might interest you well hopefully that interested you too but this might interest you so I got the stats from the first games um and 3.44% of people finished the first month of the games so they they went to 30 days made their first dollar online so just under one out of three people made their first dollar or more obviously um who finished their first month after the school games and that to me was like the most excited I've ever been finding this out because I obviously like I have so many people in our community who want to start businesses and I was like how can we make this as easily as seemly possible it's like okay well there's no other piece of software that has to get used you don't have to learn anything else it processes the money it helps you with the delivery it's all in one place like there's nothing else that's needed like you can run the entire business on the platform um and you can start for free and so that's what got me really excited about it and so I'll explain the business model to you guys if you're interested in terms of uh how I'll explain how School works and I'll explain how uh the school like hosts work so school is just a $99 month platform and longterm that's not the monetization place I just like to explain um where it is so right now it's $99 a month um and we keep it that way because we just want it to be simple like if we wanted to maximize profit we would have lots of tiers and we could do you know a ton of other things believe me to make more money with the system that's just not the objective right now the objective right now is to get as many students on the platform and as many teachers on the platform so that we just create a richer and Rich community of content so that we can tackle that 10 trillion dollar Global nut of Education because if people can go to one place to learn whatever they want from people who are actually doing it and they'll do it affordably compared to $50,000 a year or whatever you know CCU charges that is a bet that I'm willing to make and so right now we're in growth mode and so that's the model it's just however many groups there are is the times 99 is what is how how much money the platform makes and the platform has been losing money because we've been aggressively reinvesting in getting better and better software engineers and designers and developers to make the product absolutely exceptional so that's why obviously I wrote a big check into it because I want it to happen I wanted to to crush in we will like it's doing really well so we're good there but let's talk about you so if you if you were to start a school Community because a lot of people who follow my stuff are like well I would like to start a business and um if you think this is okay then I might give this a shot so I'll just explain how the business model works so you've got this is my Instagram my Instagram icon man this is going to be tough let's see if I see if I can I know all of them that's that's Tik Tok I think and then you got Facebook right you got Facebook all right whatever that's good enough so you got social media so you got traffic you got eyeballs all right so just think about this like this you got eyeballs that you have to go get now you can get those in any ways you want you can post you can run ads you can do Outreach you can partner with somebody who already has an audience all of these are ways to to fundly just get eyeballs and so then you drive those eyeballs to your school page so this is why this is kind of neat so I'll explain this to you so our vision for this is that like we just turned on ad tracking this last month so it's kind of exciting is that if you think about the difference between Shopify and Amazon okay so Shopify let's say I sold a pens I sell these markers okay so that's my product I sell these markers and I sell on Shopify well I'm going to to customize the whole page I'm going have to learn the Integrations I'm going to have to build all this stuff but I have a lot more control all right so that's that's the the plus is that you get a lot more control a lot more customization the downside is it's a lot harder uh and there's no inherent brand trust so if you just throw up a shop store with pens why should I buy from you not a really compelling reason although in The Other Extreme you have like Amazon so I'm the same same guy selling pens but I put on Amazon now I can't control the color the reviews the I can't control anything I just know that I have to use the template that Amazon has and I put this on there but here's an interesting stat for you so I have a book I have multiple books1 in $100 mil Ser $100 offers $ leads and another one coming out soon um and so my Shopify page converts at like 2 to 3% something like that which is like fairly standard for e-commerce my Amazon page that has the same book converts at 30% so 10 times as efficient in terms of converting now Amazon obviously takes its fee for you know doing the transaction whatever but the key point is that because what happens is you start to build inherent trust in the platform and so as people begin to trust School more and do more and more transactions on school then these School pages will convert better than any page that you could possibly build on your own because you get to borrow school's credibility that's the key point and so if you're trying to get into business like number one way to make lots of money just have amaz like a massive huge brand of and an audience okay but if you're trying to get into that it's like uh it's like telling a model like how do I be successful it's like be born beautiful like like how do I be born how to be a great musician like be born a great musician whatever point is is that we can actually help arm people who are getting into business by letting them borrow our brand credibility and because of this it also becomes way lower technologically in terms of difficulty for somebody who's starting out interestingly it's like if you look at Amazon l Zillow you look at Airbnb they almost all more or less converge at the same overall layout you've got a video right you've got a video you usually got a carousel of images you've got you got some reviews for the thing you've got a buy button and then usually a handful of bullets about the product almost all of the pages look like that and so by the way if you're going to build something maybe something to consider that those guys have more traffic and conversion data than anyone on Earth they built it that way for a reason and so the school page looks the same way that way you can build it that way so you get your eyeballs whatever you want you drive it towards the school page which probably convert better than anything you make on your own and then you have your community so you've got all your people inside your community and they're all happy and they look like they have dresses on cool whatever and so and so then you provide value this people and this becomes a recurring Revenue stream and they pay whatever between you know $1 and 9999 whatever per month and that's it and the reason I like this model overall too is that it it creates a way for people to provide value to people with low risk like if you say hey I need $50,000 to for you to do this thing with me it's a big risk if you don't know anything if you haven't consumed anything but this allows people to have a front end that with low risk someone can come in learn about them get value and then if they want they can choose to ascend to higher levels or that just becomes the main thing and they just drive tons and tons of volume through it people have won in either of those scenarios but this is fundamentally like the simplest business model I could possibly imagine for someone's trying to get started you don't need inventory you don't need any third party Integrations you don't need to know anything about technology and you can actually make your money on the platform so this is from Evelyn I just want to read this to you because I think it it'll it'll say better than I can she said $99 a month worth it I think you need to understand this I keep seeing post questioning if $99 this is inside the school games if $99 for Community is worth it and if you should go with a free Facebook group instead I didn't see or understand uh this when I started on school but if you want to actually build a community of a meaningful size you need to hear this um I have deep regrets yesterday I was listening to Matt Thompson and his latest podcast when one thing really struck me that I want to share with you it's insane how much Community Management cost you save when you use School versus a Facebook group for context in my own communities we manage over 11,000 paying monthly members and combined with my other business partner over 20,000 because there is a no payment integration and B Facebook restricts our paid reach down to an average of 300 out of 6,500 members in our biggest group so you have this group of people and you can't actually reach them that sucks but that's the prevailing that's like what's currently out there and if you want to have payments it doesn't integrate with anything you can't do it right and so we have to pay team of people to a find and remove people who don't pay because Facebook doesn't do that automatically like school does and then B provide 24-hour workday written support because school members in contrast School members actually see each other's posts and want to help each other out because of the gam gamification element and the connection that comes from having to start to engage and so some of the things that school has which is why it's growing at the rate that it is is that we've put gamification inside of it and so people get points for getting likes and getting comments but to them to themselves and so they gain a status in the community like in real terms they gain status and then that status actually unlocks other abilities like a game and so the core of the development team at school is actually all gaming developers because we wanted to make business fun and so we wanted to make it like a game because there's so many people that I see especially younger people but just people in general who are absolutely insane at different games and I'm like dude if you just took this level of focus and applied it to business you'd already be a millionaire like no doubt in my mind but no one's just taken business and tried to turn it into a game and so that is absolutely the vision of what we're trying to do is how do we make this fun and easy for everyone how do we just take the bar that's already low and just make it that much lower so that way more people can cross cross it like you don't have to be this tall to ride this ride anymore you just have to be this tall right that's the idea and so she says honestly this is so genius our community is now one of our the the community she built on school is our most profitable community because one we don't run ads to it at the moment 234 members of net growth in the first month after playing the school games all organically from school Discovery page in this community so one of the cool things about school is that it's a platform and so what that means is that like when you have a community this ranks in our directory of communities and so just like Google ranks web pages we rank communities and so people will go to learn things they want to learn how to do plumbing at home or they want to learn how to fix their roof or they want to learn how to play ping pong or the watercolor whatever and they go there and click watercoloring groups and then the groups that come up they joined but the people who own those groups didn't generate that customer we did again this is you borrowing off of school and so we can actually help people get customers as well which is one of the again one of the cool things that I like about the platform she had 234 new member net so that means net of turn people who left people she added 234 without any paid ads pretty cool and so the second reason that it's more profitable is that we haven't paid we haven't promised 24-hour ritten support and don't deliver it because members are helping members and it's working amazingly here I'm really mindblown this would never been possible with a Facebook group it might be the amazing Community the lower cost or the fact that I can finally reach my own Community again but I'm becoming a Super Fan I say that because I think she can say better than I can um is that if you actually want to have a business and this is the hard part about being being a beginner is that if you actually are successful then you will run into new problems later and so school unfort like for me as a marketer this is the worst position to Market from because no one is suffering from the problem yet but you will suffer from the problem if you actually win it's like if you lose weight you're going to have to change the clothes out of your wardrobe because nothing's going to fit anymore but people are still so focused on losing weight that they don't think about the next thing but I'm telling you that if you follow the steps and you you become one of the 30% right of people who make their first dollar right 3.44 make their first dollar well then when you make your second doll and5th doll and thousandth And1 10,000th quickly you're like oh shoot I wish I had started this on a platform that already knew how to scale and with school you can start the right way from the GetGo rather than rather than have a switch later and so big picture I decided to make this bet on school because it was growing Without Me based on Word of Mouth it's harnessing a huge Trend in the industry in terms of Education overall I personally know a lot about education have made a lot of my wealth in education um and so I felt uniquely qualified to help the company grow fourth my brand has been built and my mission has been about making real business education accessible for everyone and until now I haven't seen anything that actually really anybody or any team that even came close to the level of dedication that school's team has and also the level of talent exceptionally talented stacked developer team like A+ talent and uh we're able to make a platform right now that handles currently millions of users every month Millions many millions of users every month and it just works seamlessly and so for those reasons and because now I have the data to support this so just to be really clear the first four things is why I made the bet the fifth one which is what I just showed you the 34 3.44% of people who make their first dollar after their first month of school like that's what just gets me even more Jazz that it was the right call and for those of you who are business owners as a side note almost every existing business would benefit from having a community in one place so whether you're a real estate agent or where you just want to have a place that you can just spoil your customers they get to know each other you make introductions that means you add value and the cool thing with communities is that the members add value to each other that's like what the concept of a network effect is is there's a network effect like people each when somebody else gets added to the group it actually adds value to everyone else so if there's one person in a in in a community there's no network if there's two great when you add a third person both of these people benefit from the new party when you had a fourth person all three benefit from the fourth and that's one of the cool cool Parts about this and so if you're a business owner and like I said whether you're a real estate agent or you're you're a plumber or you're or you're a gym owner or you have a salon and you do hair it doesn't really matter having a place where all your customers can be together without worrying about like the craziness of like Facebook and some of the other social media platforms that exist and know that you can curate the entire experience uh just the way you want it and you can reach 100% of your customers every single time you make a post um and they can you can reach out to them you can DM them you can do all these things uh you can host the the content you can have calls regular basis all that kind of stuff and they are incentivized to engage in there and that's one of the big lifts of the platform is that people are incentivized to engage and I'll tell you it's it's wildly addicting because I'm in this I'm obviously in school as well and I'm in the school games Community for everybody who starts it's 14 days it's free I want to see my little ranking go up I was like I own the platform I was like I got to [ __ ] up high ranking and so I'm I'm I'm I'm in there posting and engaging more than I do on any other platform more or less uh that is why I decided to uh to make this big bet and make it public uh because I do think this will be our this will be my one of the paths that we uh they create a billion or Plus in net worth and I hope that people look back at this video and be like wow Alex looks so dumb then but now he's a billionaire so it sounds cool um and so I wanted I wanted to have that and so I'm going to I'm I'm committing I'm going for monthly um I'd like to give updates of the the cool stuff that that's happening kind of from a business perspective so that you can see us build this 1 billion 10 billion hundred billion dollar Enterprise so let's do this so I have my team here they just heard me talk through that and so I just told them write down your questions and so when I'm done I'll answer them and so this is the questions that they had while I was presenting this so so you get it like we really just do this in real time all right so shoot the traditional education it's very centralized right a big play billions and billions of dollars is the e-learning more distributed is it is it an easier playing field for the little guys who don't know what they're doing yet yeah 100% so so a lot of markets basically it's a cycle of centralization decentralization that happens over and over and over again and so right now like all the power was centralized and so if you look at like Rome right the Roman Empire like is all centralized and then you start the Barbarians at the gates that are all these tribes that are independently none of them could take on the power of Rome but in aggregate attacking from all these different angles they just start nibbling away at it so a lot of Empires and centralization doesn't lose in one big coup I mean obviously in the political scene sometimes it does but it often erodes so it's little itty bitty Snippets little crumbs that get broken off but the the cookie is so big that the crumbs are actually the size of this building right like they're big crumbs um and the reason that the smaller competitor can beat the larger competitor right now is two main things well I'll say three one is to beat the larger competitor you don't have to offer more classes than Harvard you just to have just have to know one thing better than how they teach that one thing or whether they teach it at all and so if I am the best pottery maker and I have a whole Instagram or social media or YouTube channel whatever of me making these insane pots who are they going to who are people in general going to want to learn from just generic teacher number six at CCU who teaches Pottery or the the largest pottery YouTube or Instagram person in the world well probably that person so number one number two what's the cost difference so this is the the this is the cost component new entrance can enter because they don't have to have a building they don't have to employ anyone if you have an iPhone and you have an internet connection you can be you can get famous you can distribute and so distribution which is three so cost of delivery is zero cost of distribution is zero and so that's the big thing is that distribution has been disrupted which is fundamentally what the internet did in general to all Industries it's just at this moment and I honestly think the like you guys want the I'll try not to put my clip political cap on but the reason that the the formal education industry has not been disrupted or has been more slow to be disrupted than other ones is because the government Prof it up people have interest free loans they don't have to pay for for 10 years if that weren't there they would already be gone like I just like the fact that the government fronts $200,000 $100,000 $50,000 and the way it actually works is that they back lenders so they say if these people don't pay we'll pay you back there's more Nuance to it but fundamentally the government backs the loans if it doesn't cost people money to buy something then the incremental cost appears to be zero it's obviously way more and I've made videos about it but it feels like zero because you sign a piece of paper and then you get to go to Disneyland for for kids and so and you don't have to do anything for four years and you just get free money right so you have this discount this big big bad thing that happens years from now but you get all the good thing today and that just leverages human behavior like one cookie now more people will take it than two cookies later just is what it is but also side note successful people wait for two cookies won't get into that the reason that that centralization has even existed is because of government subsidized uh payments but the new Creator can win because their content will be more specific and deeper and they will have proof and evidence that they are the best at it the cost of creating that content and or the deliverable which is now digital education courses calls whatever is also free and the third one is that the cost of Distributing that is also free and so the barrier to entry is pretty much just the cost of the few pieces of Technology you have to rope together to have a business and the crazy thing about this is that it's the irony is that it's never been lower risk to start a business than today and so if you re rewind a 100 years in 1924 you would have had to save for 15 years have a house use your house as leverage to go to the bank and say will you help me start this Bakery and then the bakery had real cost and if you went out of business you went bankrupt you lost your reputation and then that was it you'd be known as a failure for the rest of your time now because of that the stakes were higher people tried way harder but fewer people did and so the trade is now it's way lower buried to entry and also a lot of people who have no work ethic can get into it but it also requires the same amount of work but less risk you still have to work just as hard as you did however long ago but you don't need to risk as much to get it and I think that's pretty cool and so fundamentally that's why why the crater economy overall is just booming because one person won't bring down the the system but a million tiny players will bring down the whole thing because they each will beat that one big player at their tiny sliver could you break down the math how much money could I actually generate for well um so I want to be really clear about claims implied claims anything like that all this is involve risk in general so if you pay for a platform that's $99 a month then your risk is $99 a month all right just to be clear beyond that the amount of money you make is subject to how hard you try how much you promote but if you were to look at and I think this is a decent proxy if you look at some of the largest communities that exist in General on the internet outside of school you've got many many communities that are at 1 million 5 million $10 million a month and it's because you have a single player free distribution and basically as long as you have a good enough product and a ton of traffic to bring people into that product then people will pay to be in there and see well let me give you a little little tip so a lot of people are like well what do I put inside of a community I'm going to give you a little little tactical nugget here all right so profit well uh which is owned by a buddy of mine who just sold it for $250 million did a really cool 14,000 um business survey of what were the features that people were buying that had the highest willingness to pay so wtp is willingness to pay um and then I can't remember what these four were but basically they looked at all these different features that people had in communities and which ones people wanted to buy the most versus things they thought were par for course versus things that they didn't really care about at all and so it's kind of like care vers versus willingness to pay so if you have a lot of care so care let's put it this way so they care a lot and they're really willing to pay this is where you want to be they care a lot but they're not willing to pay means you have to do it it's kind of like protein in your supplement stack like people care a lot but you're not really willing to pay an arm and a leg for it because it's almost like an expected right and then on the flip side this would be the worst thing which is like no one cares and no one's willing to pay so don't do anything in here and so they had things like discounts like if you have a community where you put like exclusive discounts uh like merch merch was one that was over here like some people like merch some people don't like some people are willing to pay on the care Spectrum not really high over here and this is where it gets really interesting or important newsletter was uh something that people like kind of expected for a community they want some sort of regular communication um but they weren't like willing to pay a huge amount for it but the big three that we're in here and so I include this one as my number four by the way because I still I want to make sure I do that right is they wanted exclusive access so that means q&as uh talking to experts they want to be closer think proximity either digitally or in person but just for the sake of this conversation for digital Community it's like they want to be able to ask you questions and so that means like they post and you respond or you hop on a call and you respond any of those things would count so number one was access uh number two was content meaning they like some of the stuff that you put publicly they just want more of that stuff privately that they can't get somewhere else and so you have exclusive access exclusive content um as the second kind of bucket courses would fall under this uh trainings things like that and the final one which surprised me actually uh was events and so people in a community want to be able to meet up they want to meet up in person you can also do virtual events of course but I think I think the real power is if you can meet people in person have them fly in or fly out to them depending on the size of the community and so these are the big four that people put into communities to drive value is that I will be the one talking to you I'll respond to your stuff via DM I'll respond to your posts inside the the feed or I'll have calls on some regular Cadence or you can expect some sort of response time from me content here's some additional training here's some course here's some whatever that I can put in here to provide even more value now the content can also be in feed meaning you can just write articles so in the school games I prefer to be written and so I actually write long articles like probably two times a month on one component of the school games like hey if you're using ads is what I would consider if you're getting Partners here's a script that I wrote for you guys to go get partners right so that would be content and then events is that you meet people together like that one's pretty self-explanatory in the newsletter you can actually just take some of this content put in written format email it out right very very easy um and so School helps you do all four of those things all in one place when you were running gym launch did Community feel like a really obvious thing that increased a lot of value for users like I'm wondering if that oh yeah so this is really interesting so samon consulting.com which is a which was a relatively large um education business and he found something really interesting which is I think one of the impetus God catalysts uh for for this uh for him actually innovating the product that that would eventually become school is that when he looked at his user data he saw that people would buy a course but they would log in they'd watch a handful of videos and then they would spend the rest of their time in the group and so they'd make content in the group they'd ask questions in the group almost everything the community really was the group way less so the course but everything that was out there was focused on building the course rather than the community being the core component and so he flipped the priority and said well what if we made Community the main thing and just had all the things that people like that surround communities as I want to say add-ons but like integrated into it but the community is the Hub and so um yes with gimm launch the community was obviously a huge part of it I think works with any any kind of business that's service related or education related like I still consider the gyms semi education because a lot of people there trying to learn more about how to eat healthy work out better learn form learn cooking recipes meal prep there are a lot of other things that go into that lifestyle and so a useful question for any business owner is like what lifestyle am I bringing people towards and so like if I were teaching music there's a musician's lifestyle there's probably like a way that they schedule their time there's there's tools that they use there's ways that they practice all of those things go along with the identity that someone would have as a musician as somebody who's a fitness person as an author right and so one of the great like business strategies just think like what is the I am statement that accompanies my product so like I am a and then what comes along with that and so if you can build a community around that of people who also identify with that label you have a much deeper connection with them because they all identify the same way how does making a school group or taking this business model uh compared to let's say something like Drop Shipping or e-commerce like any other thing that you yeah it depends on the goal right and so if you're trying to if you're trying to make money on the internet you want the thing with the simplest business model that has the lowest risk and the fewest moving parts and I think school has that um I would say I'm quote biased because I'm a co-owner but like I honestly I I would never risk my reputation to say something for for I just wouldn't do it so you can choose to believe that or not from a selling perspective if you wanted to have like a big exit in a business um you have to prove that you have an asset that is sellable that that works without you now a school Community or community in general if it's built off the face of a Founder is going to have the same issues of keyman risk that any business that is built on a Founder would have and so you would have to build a school Community differently if you had that intention now the vast majority of people that consume my stuff um are trying to just make a lot more money than they currently are whether they're by quitting their job to start something or within their business they just want to grow it now some people want to sell which hey acis.com so we're here for give us a call the main thing that someone wants to buy in a business is long-term recurring revenue is you want to know that the people that are paying today are going to pay four years from now and so school isn't is it a salable asset or not a sellable asset it's just like any other recurring business how good you are at it will dictate how recurring it is and how valuable it is and so I'll give you an example there's a a I say an acquaintance of mine who has a a business that Services uh mechanic shops so really Niche he's got 10 locations so he knows what he's doing he's not somebody who like started one wasn't making money then started like those who can't do teach he didn't go that model like he has 10 locations he's legit he's done a handful of rollups like a very legitimate player and because he is legit he has uh uh a business that does I think just under $50 million a year all on recurring Community right and so if you have a niche expertise that has super high value and compared to everything else in the marketplace you have all these benefits that no one else has people will stay and they'll continue to pay and this guy is growing every single year and so if I'm looking to acquire company yes I'm super interested now on the flip side if you create a community and you don't provide value and people cancel in two months then no it's not going to be valuable you'll make an income because you'll know how to Market and you'll convert some sort you just do number of new conversions per month times average order value and you'll you'll get how much money you're going to make in terms of income but I would say this is that if you're trying to get going don't worry about that get the first dollar across the bridge you'll learn so many skills in just doing that the next steps will become clear to you once you take the first steps because it's really easy to get overwhelmed in the beginning just get the first dollar across the line you have a huge International audience yeah and I wonder if part of this was being able to make business accessible to people dude th% yeah so we have right now 50% or something like that of our total audience is international um and so having something that could also service all of those people was a huge a huge Boon um to why this also made sense for me versus like if I had a physical product thing and we were only in the US then I would automatically cut out probably 70% of the people that I could potentially help oh and this is yeah and a great Point too is that if you make content on the internet for example as a way to get customers you will also have a certain percentage of your audience that that is international and having like a community for example as long as everyone speaks the same language you can provide value to them without having to worry about International borders the tariffs tax like you don't have to worry about any of that stuff believe me I've done international shipping it's a nightmare also anyone can join the school games and read your posts and potentially come out to the headquarters verus becoming a portfolio company is yeah and one of the other things I thought was kind of cool is um obviously the only companies that we like really directly interact with are companies that we own but by having the school games and you know the top 10 every month of the school games and the cool thing about the school games not to push this too hard but um is that it's off of new recurring Revenue meaning it's not like oh these guys have been doing you know school for five years and they win every month if you win you get taken off number one and number two it's based on the new added Revenue so you can start and in fact uh March of last month I think four or five of the people who won started that exact month now some people started a handful of months ago and then like took it seriously they like went pro like they were like this is the month I'm been try and win and they really pushed it and then they did get on the top 10 and then they're flying out to Vegas to hang out um talk about growing their business but like four of them literally like they're like yep I saw an ad and it was you know February 28th and then I was like I'm starting on the 1 of March and they just did it one guy met his business partner I think in school and was like oh you know hor he's a foreign guy he was like you know her Moi yeah he's got the school games I'm doing it and so he's like let's win and they met and one guy handled the delivery the other guy handled the promotion a great partnership and they came in 10th place they like just got in um it was really cool very cool Russian guy yeah really cool uh do you want to talk a bit about like why Sam and yeah I mean Sam he's obsessive and so this is really interesting for you so people have probably heard the term OCD right obsessive compulsive disorder first off off I would drop the D and just say someone's obsessive and compulsive it doesn't mean it's a disorder unless it affects their life uh negatively and I would say many quote OCD people do better than people who are not and so why would it be a disorder but neither here nor there so you have two components there you have obsessiveness and you have compulsiveness I think the the ideal makeup of an entrepreneur somebody who's obsessed but not compulsive is that you can literally hold your attention on this goal for years and not compulsively change direction not compulsively need to do things to quell that you just are obsessed with this one thing and Sam is obsessed he wants to build the absolute best product that is the most fun that makes making money online and making your first business as easy as possible and seeing that Obsession and his attention to detail throughout the many months of conversation that we had before we decided to uh before I decided to you know Buy in um as a co-owner of the company and then obviously promote it uh publicly um I saw his obsession and I felt like it mirrored mine in a different vertical and I think from a partnership perspective that's what you want is that you want someone who's as obsessed with you sorry as obsessed with the with whatever they're good at as you are with whatever you're good at what you don't want is somebody who's as obsessed with the same things as you are because then one of you isn't necessary and so perfect partnership typically there's three big veins in a business you've got product you've got promotion and you've got people and so uh you want somebody who who's who represents all three of those now to be clear the equity distribution doesn't need to be third third third it could you could have an employee who's exceptional like you it's just those are the functions that have to be maintained for business to grow my last question is a little like Easter egg for anyone who's made it all the way to the end of the video from the first couple school games are there any like really amazing tips or tactics that you've seen from people building great communities and scaling Rel so instead of tips or tactics I will say that there's a lot of ways to win the game and I think that is probably the the metal lesson is that I have seen people on the school school games who only did email outbound they literally did cold email got on the phone and sold people into their Community now obviously they have a higher ticket so it's more like $500 month or $1,000 a month for their Community but they won the school games that way there were people who already had organic audiences and then just like basically made the CTA and said hey put a ton of bonuses ton of value in there and they were able to take an audience that they basically weren't making anything from and then turn it into a community that they also got paid for so they both deepen the community and uh make make an income from it so that's like the people who had audiences there's also people who ran ads to make this work uh there's people and this is probably my favorite model is there's these two guys uh mix and fad who came in I think third or third last time and neither of these guys have social media presences at all but they reached out to an influencer that had like 50,000 followers and they said hey we'll make we'll do everything like we'll we'll edit your videos will prompt you we'll record it and we'll do the ctas we'll do everything and we'll make this community and we'll manage it and they grew him from 50 to 3 million so they're good at what they did and they also started the school games in the first month they made they added like 40,000 in recurring Revenue uh or 50,000 or something like that uh in the first month in recurring Revenue like not like recurring Revenue so my point is is like if I had to if I had to if I had to start over tomorrow at zero if I had to start over tomorrow at zero and I didn't have any money and I had no connections like no one knows me I have no reputation the model that I would use to win the games is I would use cold reach outs two people who are influencers to ask them to partner with me because of that because the the hit rate you only need one so from a success percent you literally just need one and the key and this is the pro tips if you want an Easter egg this is it when you do these reach outs every position has an advantage and a disadvantage so I'm going to zoom out for a second and explain the advantage of the underdog so when I had gym launch I had a guy who so I had Allen to my software company and we had so this is kind of funny but I had agencies using one of our unique selling props in their business that was trying to compete with my business but we were the underlying infrastructure anyways and so they were like everybody wants to buy your thing because you're the big established player right and I was like dude when I came in I wasn't the big established player so what did I say then so when you're coming in you say man to Alex you're just a number like you're never going to talk to him like he just owns this thing like he's just like it's just some representative that he trained who's going to be on your account like it's it's going to be nothing with me you get all my attention I'm going to be fully focused I only have two other customers like you're going to have all my attention that's the advantage now if I'm Alex I'm going to say this kid's in his mom's basement he has no idea what he's doing there's a reason that he only has two customers because he doesn't know how to provide value consistently we've systematized this thing so we can consistently produce the result everybody has an advantage and everybody has a disadvantage and so if you're getting in even if you have zero customers here's what I would say I would say listen I don't want I started this with the intention of not having lots of customers I want to find a partner and I'm going to devote everything I have to just this anybody else is going to split you and you're going to be in account to them you'll get a rep but with me it's just me and I'm going to build this whole thing myself like you'll have my cell phone we'll talk every day we can do whatever you want I'm going to build this thing and the way you prove it this is the key point this is the the the real nug is that when you do that Outreach and you say it with that perspective when you get on the phone [ __ ] prepare don't get on the phone and be like yeah I was thinking maybe we like partner up on this thing like you have this value and I have nothing like this should be a great deal right like no you get on and you do so much work ahead of time like DM the people who are commenting on their on their stuff get on the phone with them say hey what kind of community would you want take the notes record the call if you do five of those interviews and then you hop on that call with that influencer and you say hey I made this deck do you mind if I show it to you they're going to be like you made a deck about my business and they're like you're like yeah I can walk you through kind of the strategy I was thinking about like the phases of roll out that we could do and what I've already talked to your customers about what they want they're going to be fascinated by the fact that you already you might know something about their customers that they don't and you know how you do that you work it's work that's how you do it but you literally work so much that when you make the claim that you will work hard for them you are demonstrating that you will work hard for them and so they will believe you because fundamentally every person just wants a hardworking partner right you just you just have to get them to believe that now anyone can say I'm going to work my butt off I'm all in but the the proof is stacked against you because you have nothing and so you have to make up for that now and here's the here's the cave what if influencer number one says no you do it again and when you get on the phone with influencer number two guess what you do you show the thing you built for influencer number one as an example and then you show theirs and if they say no what do you do when you go to influencer number two you show the stuff from influen number one and number two and then you show there so you're actually building out a portfolio of stuff but you have an incentive to make it exceptional cuz you're never going to present it to somebody so like you win either way the only way you lose is if you don't work and I promise you that on a long enough time Horizon if you reach out to these people and you get on the phone with one and I'm I don't think this is a key point I would not shoot outside of your your league all right like if you've never done this before I wouldn't say go after a 5 million person account I just don't think that's a smart idea but I think if you go after a 50 or 100,000 150,000 person account and to be clear you want to make sure they're getting engagement it's not like bot you know bot account or whatever but you want to real person who and like you want to know the real secret go to somebody you already follow go to somebody you already like cuz then you won't be bsing when you talk to them you're like I love this stuff about your brand I think this would fit in in this way and you know had that thing two months ago I think this would be perfect with that and I talked to a bunch of my my friends who also follow you and I talked to these other people just so it wasn't just my friends and these are the things that they were looking for and I think that if we did this here's an estimate like if we convert 1% of your audience over it's this much a month I think that'd be interesting and so you probably follow 2,000 people now anyways so just pick a hundred of them or pick 50 or if you really want to be targeted Pick 10 and think to yourself if I had to get one of these 10 will would I do and then do that and I promise you you'll get one and then from there you have a partner and then you get the leverage of the fact that they spent five years building Their audience and you get to have a part of that today even if you only get 20% right now of course you have to negotiate that piece but my recommendation is don't be greedy up front get the deal done get the Reps in your belt because also being real you don't know what you're doing and so I wouldn't try and ask for the majority of this until you have some reps under your belt right so take a smaller percentage use it to build your portfolio in terms of your proof that you're good you learn at zillion things along the way and you're going to get paid to learn and so if all this school stuff sound interesting to you um I do have an easy offer for you you can go to school.com games and what we have inside for you is we have three calls a week with guys who are actually making tens of hundreds of thousands of dollars a month on school using the platform teaching you exactly what they did step by step so we've got calls for you of other people we've got a community of others to help you out um and I think the benefit here is that you get people who are both starting with you at zero but people who are also at the end of the race cheering you on and so you kind of have like three types of accountability so you've got peer accountability you've got kind of like coach accountability because people are are are rooting for you but then you also have alumni accountability people who've already been through it and then uh I made a course that I put in there it's free it just shows you how to to do this the different ways to play the game the different kind of like avatars that you can self- select maybe I'm somebody who likes making content maybe I'm somebody who's better at ads maybe I'm somebody who already has an audience maybe I'm somebody who likes outbound um maybe I'm somebody who likes to have a partner so I break down all the different paths that you can use to really start making money on the internet with what I think is the easiest business model uh out there the best part in my opinion is that all of this stuff obviously we have the prizes the top 10 uh gets fly out so hopefully you can do that but you only need three people and I just did a one day full deep dive it's eight hours of me just helping the top 10 communities scale and those recordings are live right now so if I had a $100,000 Mastermind or something this would be it except it's yours and it's free and here's the here's my incented for you if you just get three people into your group all right so I like to put a like as low as I possibly could you get three people into your group you can get your friends in there I don't care if you cheated it's fine get three people into your community uh and you get the all the downloads from that and all of this stuff you can start for free for 14 days just so you can get a feel for it you can go in there and download everything and steal it all for all I care all right but my hope is that you actually use it so you can make your first dollar and I'll just repeat this one stat because I think it's the most important stat I think of the business right now is that 34 30.4% of people who finish their first month of the school games make their first dollar online it's about as compelling as I can get so check it out school.com games see you there I'm also on the inside of the group too so hit me up tag me whatever