Everyone Hates Marketers | No-BS Marketing & Brand Strategy Podcast

*00:00* *Louis Grenier* Hello and welcome to another episode of Everyone Hates Marketers.com, the no fluff, no bullshit marketing podcast for people sick of marketing bullshit. I'm your host, Louis Grenier. In today's episode, we have a guest who was here before. And believe it or not, it was five years since this guy showed up on the podcast. We're going to talk about how to make things people want to pay for very quickly, like in 24 hours or less, and build an audience of fans after that. So my guest was on the show before five years ago. We talked about marketing on a budget, which was a very liked episode. And in fact, I used this episode to write my book, which is nearly out, amongst other things. He's a retired, brain damaged, ex-entrepreneur, but like kind of an entrepreneur again, it looks like, who hates Silicon Valley. He owns a small portfolio of tech companies. Last year he sold his startup, FOMO.com, for a lot of cash because he was able to buy a ranch somewhere in Georgia, the USA, not the Georgia and Europe. And he's now learning to farm. So I would say perhaps the most impressive thing about my guest is that it's his output. Like his sheer volume of stuff he's able to ship is just fucking insane. So we'll talk about that right now. Ryan Cope, pleasure to have you back on the pod.

*01:23* *Ryan Kulp* That was something. Yeah, thanks for having me. And you did get me thinking, maybe if we bought a ranch in Georgia, the country, it could be a lot bigger, but maybe next time.

*01:37* *Louis Grenier* Yeah. I mean, look, I took a look at your website where you're mentioning your farm and the ranch and everything, and it's big enough. Okay. Just, you know, don't have to… It's big enough. Yeah. I think it's all right. You know what I mean? It's fucking huge. I mean, man, this is insane. Like proper insane. What's the address of the site again to check it out?

*02:01* *Ryan Kulp* I have a site called, well, actually just ranch.ryanckulp.com is sort of my ranch tracker update where I post projects that I'm learning to build things out of wood or I'm feeding animals or animals are dying and we're burying them with a tractor. Like all of that is documented on the ranch tracker.

*02:20* *Louis Grenier* Yeah. And you mentioned how much money you spend and all of that. So I think that's pretty fucking impressive. You know, it's funny because when I look back at an interview we did five years ago, you know, at the time it felt like a great conversation, but it's kind of like those good wine, you know, that you put in a bottle for like in a cave for a long time, and then you go back to it and it's even better. Like I remember like processing that episode. So I genuinely like looking through a transcript and highlighting like the key things you said or we discussed and there's so much out of it that I took. And still to this day, I remember, and I took, you know, a lot of notes of it. So thank you for that. Let's try to top it off and to make it even better this time. The last thing I would say before we get started into the action stuff is I like you a lot because we have different views on a lot of stuff and similar views on a lot as well. But like, I like the fact that you're quite polarizing and, you know, yeah, it's good. It's good to have someone like that on the podcast. So thank you for being who you are. So anyway, why is it that the faster you build something, the sooner you can get to the truth?

*03:34* *Ryan Kulp* Great loaded question. So when you build anything, you are switching between, and I'm going to talk about this more, not about building, but this higher level concept. You switch between what Daniel Kahneman calls, right, in thinking fast and slow, your system one versus your system two thinking. Your system one is your intuition. You've got reactions to things. It could be good, like running away from a lion. It could also be, no, I want tacos today and not hamburgers. And system two is when we really process things and think linearly and we make pros and cons lists and all that. And my perspective, my experience has been that when we're building small products and trying to get that first sale, first 100 sales, whatever, to see if it's something we want to spend months or years working on, we have to almost make a conscious decision to use our system one or our system two thinking. And I find that people who spend months or years building their version one are with the right intention, but with the wrong outcome. They've switched to their system two. So they're sitting down and saying, we need to map out the market, the industry, what customers want. We need to do all this research. Whereas the system one thinker, when it comes to building that V1, and this is how I sort of build things, that's my secret. There's no secret. You just go with your gut on every little decision. And when you're building version one, as many of us have built version ones of something or another, there are hundreds of decisions. Obviously, there's the company name, there's the website, there's the logo, there's the log, there's the pricing. There's hundreds and hundreds of decisions you might make just to get version one live on a dot whatever and your first user. And if you've seen that meme that's been blowing up, I guess it's the midwit meme, where it's the IQ bell curve. That person in the middle is like, we got to research every little thing. And then the person at the low end and the high end is like, just see what happens. And so we actually have to, our intelligence, I guess, works against us a lot of the times. And we have to say, you know what, don't overanalyze this, just go with your gut. You think you might need 10 features, just go with the three that you think are most important. You don't need to have research, you don't need to have data behind it. And that is sort of in a nutshell, I think why so many people build things slowly, why I'm able to build things quickly and why I'm trying to help encourage other people to build things quickly, to get to that truth as quickly as possible.

*06:07* *Louis Grenier* System one versus system two thinking is such a key idea, right? And I'm so glad you're mentioning that already. So to summarize again, system one is the really like the always on thing that just scans the environment, take decisions without you knowing, right? The conscious self doesn't know. And it's just always on, you can't really turn it off. System two is more like it takes a lot of mental processing, your brain takes a lot of energy to think out loud and rationally, as you said, like you make a plan and whatever. So you're making a clear distinction there. And so what I'm thinking I'm hearing here compared to others is that the way you approach stuff and the reason why you're able to fucking create so many things is that you seem to lean on your system one a lot. You seem to just forget about your system two and just go with the flow. Is that the right way to summarize it or is it a bit more in depth than that?

*07:03* *Ryan Kulp* That's about right. But what I'll say to maybe tie this together, because now people are saying, okay, well, which type of products do I need to build in my system one gut? Which type of products do I need to sit down and do market research for? Well, it all comes down to who is buying your product and why they're buying it. If I'm working at a huge company and I need to buy an error logging API tool, and there are a bunch of those out there, these are very important tools. They are part of the tech stack at really a lot of companies, but especially bigger companies, more responsible companies, hopefully. When they go to the various homepages of the solutions in that space, they are going to use system two. They're going to have meetings and they're going to make decision by committee and cool copyrighted, cool callers, fine. They're actually going to analyze you with the system two part of their processes. Whereas the types of products I build, let's say this ranch tracker, I made it actually open source. It's called 10K hours. Anybody can spin up a tracker, learn a skill, document how much time and money you're spending on the skill. This is something that I think people are going to decide to buy or deploy with that system one. If you're going to consume it based on a system one impulse, it should be built that way. If you're going to consume it with decision by committee, it should be built that way. But what happens is a lot of people build something with one mindset for a consumer that needs to be buying it with another mindset. And so I almost would go out on a branch and say that maybe this is why a lot of these tactical conversations about learning copywriting and learning this, they're all sort of chipping away at this problem we're describing now, but none of them just says this is the problem. They all say, well, you need better copywriting, your conversions are low. Maybe they just built the product with a totally different mindset than the consumer. And that's the root problem.

*08:52* *Louis Grenier* Right. Okay. So you've started the conversation with something really deep and scientific and all of that. And I love that. So your theory is that system one is you should use system one when people think system one. So for example, when you go to the supermarket and buy oranges and whatever, you're not making a spreadsheet comparing oranges versus one another and whatever. You tend to buy the brand that you trust the most or the least risky brand, the one that you see on TV, but you don't necessarily externalize those thoughts. Right. So those are would be like the typical maybe B2C consumer product. Or can we maybe classify the two like the system one type products typically and versus the system two type products?

*09:37* *Ryan Kulp* I think B2C, B2B is a quick way to bifurcate these groups. But even within, there's going to be lots of splinter cells. So going back to B2C, oranges at the store, maybe if the paneling behind the oranges looks like flowing orange juice coming out of a waterfall, that is now tricking my system one of like, it's going to taste good and sweet and it's going to taste like juice. Just like how you watch a beer commercial, the beer is always ice cold. It always has condensation going down the side of the can. Technically, that's not a product of the beer. That's a product of you having a fridge and having the forethought to refrigerate something for a few hours before you consume it. But they're capitalizing on that. So system one. Whereas staying in this consumer realm, I don't have any babies. You have a baby, right? I don't have a baby, but I have some animals that are like basically retarded babies. And they have all of these requirements in their food. We're raising a calf right now and we don't have a mom to feed it milk. So we're buying milk replacer. And when you go to the store to buy fake milk, powdered milk, it looks like a whey protein shake. You actually find yourself as this parent or as this keeper of livestock looking through the active ingredients. So medicated, unmedicated. And now you're using system two, even though you're buying a consumer product, because who you're buying it for can't do the thinking for themselves. So since my baby can't decide, yeah, this sounds good. I'm not going to get sick. I have to make that decision. I'm switching system two. So it's a little oversimplifying to say, you know, consumer products, you should go with emotion and business products. You should go with logic. There are B2B products that people buy on impulse, B2C products people buy only after tough analysis. But I do think it's somewhat formulaic, a process to determine when you're looking at your product, where does it fall? Which bucket does it fall into?

*11:23* *Louis Grenier* So before we try to go in a sort of a step by step to guide people to do this, right? And so that they can they can to like buy a ranch and all of that. Can you give me an example from your past projects? Like you've you've shipped so much, so many different things in many different industries, like maybe one example of one thing that you really use your gut feeling for and the results that went with it.

*11:51* *Ryan Kulp* Sure. Well, I have that one of my favorite quotes about entrepreneurship is that you can be wrong over and over again, but you only have to be right once. And then, of course, if you're right once, the impact of that rightness or that luck kind of masks over your mistakes. And then that creates the confirmation or survivorship bias. So in any of these situations where someone asks, like, what's an example of I want to lean towards explaining or sharing something that went wrong? Because or else what value does the listener get if I just highlight my wins? You know, we've all we've all clocked some wins, hopefully. If you listen to a podcast, you're probably not homeless, right? You probably have like some cool stuff going on. So I'll say this is something I was thinking of a couple of days ago. Years ago, we had talked. I don't know if I don't think we talked about this, but I was running FOMO.com and FOMO, I would say, fell into the system one buyer mindset. Our copywriting was always playful. We didn't we always use like doodles on our website, hand drawn doodles, not stock images. We had two doodlers on the team, like actual that was their title just to doodle. They would doodle stuff that didn't even go on our website that we just thought was cool. Like we were doing that. We shouldn't have been doing that, but that's what we were doing. And at one point we decided to launch badges. I've always been a fan of badges, you know, achievements that you unlock gamification, whether it's in Duo-lingo or in like a dieting app or whatever. So we launched badges where you would get a badge that you would put on your phone or your phone or your phone. And we launched badges where you would get a badge if you got a hundred clicks on your FOMO notifications or you'd get a badge if you got 50,000 impressions. And there were like 20 badges. And when you got the badge, of course, there was an illustration and it showed in your badges page, but you also got an email saying congrats, you know, you earn this badge. And each badge, we decided to have fun with it, maybe a little too much fun with it. And I remember one of the badge, maybe it was when you get your first click, for the tool, like you get this badge day one. It had a drawing of, I think, Christopher Columbus. And in the email, it was like, your mother effing Christopher Columbus. And it had some slur about like, I don't know, colonizing. Like, I don't think we said like killing Indians or something, but it had some kind of like hint at that. And then it was like, you never forget your first click, which was then also like a sexual innuendo. And we did this and I was laughing my butt off. I just thought this was so funny. And like, oh, you know, everyone who uses FOMO agrees with this vibe because they're on FOMO. And I was so wrong. We got a few angry customer emails, like educating us on the indigenous people. And, you know, I think we still left it up for a little bit because I wanted to make sure that this wasn't just an outlier one customer who was having a bad day. But then we realized like, this wasn't a good call. And so that was an example where I went too far in thinking maybe that I knew my customer better than I did. Because guess what? When they signed up, it didn't say anything about Christopher Columbus or whatever you think about that. It said, increase conversions, get more sales, be an honest marketer. Those are a lot less polarizing ideas and statements than us saying, okay, well, we got you in the door. Now let's like over to this whole different worldview. So you do have to be careful and go in baby steps. And you can't just say, well, what I'm doing is a system one product, if that's the framework we're reviewing right now. And therefore, everything I say, everything I put out there is going to be emotion-based and trigger-based and whatever. I don't think it works quite that well. You have to get them into the mindset first and then exploit whatever they're expecting from you. And when someone logs into their app and sees charts and graphs, they are subconsciously going to switch to their conscious mind and say, okay, graphs, what is this number? Is this number bigger than that number? You can't just assume that you've got them in a fixed hypnosis just because of the initial context when they came in touch with your product or service.

*16:04* *Louis Grenier* So a lot of listeners would be in the situation of they might have a small business, they might run a small business, they might be like a solo-preneur or freelancer or looking to become a freelancer. They might have a marketing agency or they might be working in a house. There's one theme that I keep hearing is this kind of imposter syndrome, this fear, this kind of lack of confidence. They want to do something out there that is creative that people notice, but on the other hand, they have this other force putting them back, which is like, what if it fails? What if people mock me and whatever? And what I like about you is that you really don't care or you don't seem to care. Right? You just ship. You don't care. So maybe we should join the two subjects here because I think they're very much related, which is the subject of shipping fast using system one or just using your gut and instinct on this topic of, which I think is the other side of the coin, of fear, right? Which is not something you seem to feel or at least you're very good at processing it and letting it go. So imagine we're talking to someone who's in that position of like immobility in a sense. They are longing to do something. They are longing to like do something different. And, but they just, you know, what do we, what do we tell them first?

*17:28* *Ryan Kulp* Great question. I'm going to try to combine a few ideas here at once off the cuff. So first of all, you know how we all have this disease where you achieve some modicum of six, you hit a goal and then you think it will make you happy. And then once you achieve it, you're suddenly wanting for more. So you set a revenue goal and then you're like, oh, well, actually we need this much for me to be happy or whatever the case may be. It could be health, weight, whatever. And it's like a disease we all have. It's something I've been working on myself a lot for the past year at a conscious level, you know, like, Hey, Ryan, be content, be grateful. And I am a very grateful, very happy. The jokes I said earlier about the ranch being small, totally just being facetious. That same, let's say gene in us that sort of gives us problems when it comes to goal setting and feeling fulfillment can be inverted and exploited for exactly this imposter syndrome issue. And what I mean by that is if you already know that when you achieve X, you're going to want to achieve X times two. Why don't we reverse engineer that and say, what is the smallest X that will give you some sense of achievement? And so someone who's feeling imposter syndrome, first of all, they're probably consuming information of people who are like 10 steps ahead of them. So they're already thinking this is insurmountable, right? You're following, you want to be in YouTube and you only look at the tweets and videos by YouTubers with millions of subscribers instead of like a part-time YouTuber. But you have to figure out what's the minimum level of success that will make you think you're not crazy and that you should keep trying. When I started blogging in 2012, you know, Ryanccculp.com, WordPress, it's the same WordPress, the same site that I've had now for a lot of years. That first level of success was like, will someone read it? How do you know if someone reads it? You put analytics on it. Okay. Then suddenly you get 10 visitors and you're, you know, now you're back in that disease mode. Now I want a hundred because 10 that's, that's fake. That's probably the bots. That's probably my mom. So you set this new goal. Well, I need one comment or I want one comment per post. And then you get the comments and you're not happy. Then you want comments that are like longer or comments that seem to be like by smarter people. But the point is we know this gene exists. You have to reverse engineer it to what's the minimum you would need to keep going. And now you'll actually sort of dovetail yourself into this success rat race so that you can stop feeling like an imposter. And then of course you have to rebuild that. You have to heal so that you say, you know what? I'm not an imposter anymore. I'm a, I'm a tech entrepreneur. I'm a developer. I'm a whatever it is that you're shooting to say that you are a designer. I'm a web three expert. Once you hit that, you have to determine how to not let that grow out of control. But I think the good problem to have is on the front end of that spectrum. You feel like an imposter. You have to calculate the minimum viable goal. You will hit that goal. And then you just have to realize that it's only going to spiral out of control from there. So, you know, be careful.

*20:24* *Louis Grenier* Yeah. So step one being picking the minimum viable goal, the thing that you will achieve doesn't seem like a crazy 10 step ahead thing, but something that you'd be content with, right? Which hints at something else, right? You mentioned the word goal. Something that really helped me in the past and that still helps me. And that's still part of my process every day is systems, right? So instead of having goals in the shape of a result that I can't directly control, let's say number of views on YouTube, a number of listeners on the podcast, my goals now are a hundred percent related to my input. So I'm happy if I write seven emails per week, right? That's my goal. That's what I can control. I can't control how people open it, whether or not they're going to reply to this email, right? So what are your thoughts on that?

*21:14* *Ryan Kulp* I've definitely heard a lot of people argue online about goals versus systems. Scott Adams has kind of popularized the abandonment of goals. The DHH guys at 37 signals with their level of brain damage functional have talked about systems over goals. I have certainly had periods in my life where I followed the Seth Godin, the practice, just focus on my inputs, wake up at the same time, read a book for this long, always try to write a blog post this often or whatever. And I've also had periods in my life where I said, here's 10 goals and I'm going to put them on a to-do list that's very visible. And I'm going to stare at it every time I'm distracted and remind myself. And each of those periods, if we want to call them maybe tests, have been successful for me. They've both worked. I would say that the goal setting strategy is more stressful because literally goals are pressure. It's just this weight on you and it doesn't go away until you achieve the thing and get it off of your shoulders. But I would also say that the benefit of the goal setting strategy is that you get things, you get output sooner. If you have a system space strategy, there's no deadline. And so for example, right now, literally right now, this morning, last night, I've been getting into ethical hacking. And to me, there's a lot of ways you can do hacking and report bugs and find abstract vulnerabilities. To me, the golden ticket is if I find emails. I want to leak user emails and then report that to the company and maybe get paid a bug bounty. And so the system or the goal is, you know, get paid. But my system has to be studying, doing labs. I'm reading books on hacking. I'm doing reconnaissance work. I'm learning about the security industry and keywords. But if I didn't have the goal piece, if I just focused on the input, maybe three months from now, I've found no user emails. And the truth of the matter is I'm not going to be cut out for ethical hacking. And so I find that the goal paired with the system and not just to try to make everybody mad and everybody happy, oh, it's not either or it's both. But truly, I think everyone's sort of missing the point. You need a system and that system is measurable. The quality of that system is measurable based on whether you're hitting goals. If you don't have the goal, how do you know if the system is any good? If you don't have customers for your cookies and they keep coming and buying more, how do you know that all the things you're baking taste any good or they're tasting better than yesterday? You've got to have some peer ability to peek inside the black box, as Andy Grove would say. That's what the goal is for. You have a system and the goal is to peek inside the box and measure the quality of your system.

*23:53* *Louis Grenier* Yeah, and with that, deadlines work really well. I don't remember who said that. I think it's the staff at Saturday Night Live who talks about it's the fact that they're not doing live episodes when they're ready. They're doing it because it has to go live. And that's a big lesson as well. So step one, you said, right? Which is let's pick a goal that we can achieve. Let's build maybe systems around it to make sure that we just have an input as well. What's step two then, right? Remembering that the people we talked to are not far from your level of output. They've never really shipped anything in 24 hours. They've been thinking about one project for the last few months. They're not moving just yet. So what's step two, do you think? What would you tell them?

*24:42* *Ryan Kulp* Well, the underlying ingredient to all of this, to what I do, to what you do, to what someone who we both look up to does is time. That's the shared ingredient. That's the lingua franca of achievement, of success, is time spent. There are a lot of commentators, armchair critics trying to convince the youth of this smarter, not harder thing, work smarter, not harder. But you can't work smarter until you've worked really hard and learned what not to do. If we agree on that, then we agree we need time because hard work correlates with long periods of time spent working hard. Coal miner, when I hear that word, and I don't know if this is the same for someone who's outside of the US, but in the US, right, we've had this history of coal miners and coal mining towns in Pennsylvania. In France as well. You just picture this guy in the early 20th century coming home covered in char. Later he gets lung cancer, right? There's like this imagery fresh in my head of a coal miner. And a coal miner would not have that brand, I guess, if coal mining was a job you did for 30 minutes a day. Coal mining is this crazy idea of a job because they also did it for 12 hours straight, or 15 hours straight, and it was in the dark. And there was no air conditioning, and it was tough, and it was dangerous. So there's that element of time that's so critical to achieving anything. So step one is therefore to create as much free time as possible. If you have a job, you are prone to think, well, if only I didn't have this job, I could work on my idea from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. But guess what? The people who are working on their idea all day are also working on it from 5 p.m. to 9 p.m. So start with just the second half. Go to your job, get off work, and then start working on your idea. Because that's what you would need to be doing even if you didn't have the job, and you had the cash reserves saved up to cover your bills. You have to manufacture time. For me, years ago, I canceled Netflix. That was a really interesting way to create time because it's such a high leverage activity. I literally clicked a button and suddenly I had time. So I didn't have to sit and plan. I didn't have to call up my friends and say, hey, I'm doing an intervention on myself and I need time. Although I did do some degree of that. I canceled my phone for a while. I still haven't had a phone since 2018, a phone number, so people can't call me. So that helps. But what really gave me back time, I canceled Netflix. And I also saved 12 bucks a month, and it took two seconds to do it. Maybe you stop drinking. Not because drinking for two hours on Friday is a big deal, but because it makes you feel like crap for seven hours on Saturday, time that you could be spending on your idea. You can manufacture time with very high leverage behaviors. And so when I'm talking to people, and I talk to a lot of people who want some kind of encouragement, they want a secret silver bullet, they seem very busy. And just that word busy is something I don't allow myself to ever say. If you ever ask me how I'm doing, I'm not going to say that I'm busy. Maybe I'll say I've been up working on a lot of stuff or whatever, but the word busy is this ultimate killer. It's saying to everyone and also trying to convince yourself, it's okay, I don't have what I want because. And that's what the word busy means. It's okay, I don't have this because. I don't allow myself to say the word busy because I don't think I am very busy because I have these little techniques I've used to create time. So you have to have time, that's step one. And then you can learn how to work hard in that time.

*28:37* *Louis Grenier* Okay, so that's I think a controversial opinion in a sense. I mean, definitely some people will find that controversial. But it's, I would say from my experience, for example, writing, right? In English, let's say, at a level where I'm happy with, took me years and years and years and years and years of hard work, right? Like not reading books about copywriting, but just fucking writing emails, writing emails, writing emails, writing emails, daily, daily, daily, daily, on LinkedIn and whatever. And yeah, after a while, you just get better and better at it. And it does take some hard work. Nothing compared to your example. That's crazy. But yeah, I would say though, like some people.

*29:17* *Ryan Kulp* Why don't we just go back and let's mention who is offended by what I just said. I think I know exactly who is offended by what I just said. Two groups of people, lazy people and really, really smart people. The really, really smart people don't have to work very hard. That's the whole point. That's why smarter, not harder is true advice. You can work smarter, not harder if you're really smart. But the problem is that because the only two groups who disagree with hard work are either really lazy or really smart, it only makes sense that some portion of those lazy people actually think they're in the other group. They think they're in the brilliant, really smart group. And that's the cognitive dissonance. And that's why this is an offensive thing to say. But average intelligence people like you and me don't have any problem with the idea of working smart, working hard.

*30:09* *Louis Grenier* So I didn't mean the hard work part, more the time thing in terms of like you mentioned it earlier. I have a one year old daughter now and time is definitely a resource that is like, you know, I don't have as much time as I used to simply because my priorities are clearly to spend a lot of time with my daughter. And so I have to like maximize the rest and I'm experienced enough to know how to do this. But I think if it was 10 years ago, I'd be really struggling. So I just want to mention that the fact that, you know, some people by design, I think, and by the way, they are like a family and whatever, might not have as many hours on the day as others, right? As a young, like, let's say 20 something, single, whatever, like, you know, those are the years that tend to be where you have to spend a lot of time. Sure. But that seems kind of by design as well.

*30:59* *Ryan Kulp* I mean, most people seem to say that their kids are the best thing that happened to them. They bring them a lot of joy. I don't see people podcasting and writing about how to build something big and ambitious from scratch as a new parent. I don't see people writing about that because that's not really a thing that happens. And that's okay. But if someone is finally getting into the mindset of I want to go hard, I want to get lit, I want to test, see what I'm capable of, achieve my potential, and they're having that aha moment right after having triplets. Well, good luck. I'm not saying it's not possible, but there's different games that different groups of people play and we have to make choices which games we want to play. Yeah.

*31:39* *Louis Grenier* And to your point of step one, maybe, you know, maybe like, I think this step by step is not necessarily like, let's try, let's try to create the biggest fucking project possible. It could really be like a smaller thing. You know, it could be starting a podcast or something like that they've been longing to do. Right. So, you know, it really depends. So, okay. So step one, we decide on a goal, like a minimum viable goal. Step two, we maybe audit how much time we spend on stuff and maybe start to look at, okay, Netflix, three hours a day. You know, maybe if what if I stop that and do something else, stuff like that. Right. We try to find time. Yeah. So, you know, I think that's the first step.

*32:14* *Ryan Kulp* I think even those things you can, you can also invert this where let's say Netflix, I have Netflix again. So to be clear, I did cancel Netflix. I didn't have it for a while. I have it again now and I love it. Right. I love it. I got a TV. I've been watching stuff on a laptop for three years. Now I have a TV again and it's awesome. But I treat Netflix as a reward after working virtually. I have a TV. I have a TV. I have a TV. I have a TV. I have a TV. I have a TV. I have a TV. I have a TV. So you're a TV. You're after-working versus a procrastination tool. So even if I spend one hour or two hours a day, hopefully I don't spend that long, but on some days, certainly watching content, I can guarantee you I watched that content at 10 p.m. After I've tried to make something useful. I don't watch it during my lunch break as a way to escape from reality. Output of the resting when I'm chilling on the couch is going to be higher. We always get more value from our relaxation when it's after achieving something, not when it's before or to procrastinate. It always is better to have that protein shake after the gym, even though we really want to have it before the gym, but it always tastes better after the gym.

*33:33* *Louis Grenier* And so even if you were to spend identical amounts of time, quote unquote, wasting time or recharging, it can be fruitful if you do it in the right order. That makes sense. OK, so we have time now in front of us and we want to ship. I think to go back to your value proposition, like something you're working on right now, which is shipping something in 24 hours, which I think is a good window. What do you tell people to do then? Like they have the time and like what's step three? What would you say?

*34:07* *Ryan Kulp* There's that word. I never really use it. I think it's a little bit of a marketing buzzword. It's an entrepreneur buzzword, but ruthless, ruthlessly, ruthlessly prioritize. Right. There's a lot of these war terms that are used in entrepreneurship by people who would never, ever go to any war for anyone ever. You do have to ruthlessly prioritize the scope of your project. And I think that's really tough because simply having a big idea, and like you said, it doesn't have to be a big idea like you're building a billion dollar company. It could be a new podcast or something. But once you have an idea that gets you excited, you're going to have 50 threads of ideas produced. You know, ideas beget more ideas. And that's cool because it can get you fired up, but it's also not cool because it can drown you before you even get started. And so you have to figure out this way to say like, what if yada, yada, yada existed? What if this thing were true? What if there was an app that did this in this way? And then you say, oh, and then it could do that. And it could also be like this and write all that down. That's good. Get it all out of your system. And then you have to squint and look at it again and say, what's the very minimum it has to have to be useful to someone? And a lot of times that's a much smaller subset of features or whatever. But that takes practice. And I'd say that takes the best way to practice that is to give yourself the time limit. So the 24-hour building something in 24 hours. And I think Louis talked about, I have a new course called 24-hour MVP. The concept isn't we're going to learn to code quickly. Right. The concept isn't you know how to code and this is a speed coding course so that you code in 24 hours. The same amount you would code in a thousand hours. The idea is actually we're going to code as much as we can within 24 hours and then hit ship. Then hit deploy. It's a totally different. It's a subtle difference, but it's a critical one. We're not working faster. We're working within a boundary. And usually our side projects, again, don't have boundaries because there's not a boss. So you could have a job every day and you could have lots of deadlines and you could be a really great employee hitting your deadlines. But you have some idea of something you want to start on the side and you never quite get around doing it. It's because you don't have the deadlines, which is also why I'm a little apprehensive to say that systems only is sufficient. The goal gives you the deadline. The goal gives you the peek inside the black box. The goal gives you that pressure that you will try hard with all of your might to get back off of your shoulders. So you have to pick some kind of scope. For my very first idea, let's say it was having a blog. That was my first venture out into having a name that you can Google, let's say. It took me months. Like I thought about it. I learned about his thing called WordPress. I met a guy named Brett. I paid him to build me a blog. I had lots of dumb feedback why my blog wasn't good enough. I finally wrote a post. I learned how to get analytics. It took me months to do my first project and it was a blog. Whereas it took me like a weekend to do my most recent project and it was 10 times more complicated. So you just have to pick that scope because the amount of time you spend on something is not equivalent, is not a good indicator of how much you actually did.

*37:28* *Louis Grenier* So you said something very interesting a couple of minutes ago. You said, you know, you do when you write down your ideas, which probably is step three, you do the what if stuff. So like, can we, can you talk me through this kind of the what if thing that you tend to do, you seem to do naturally, like how do you do it? Like you take a piece of paper and just write down what is, do you do trees, decision trees? How do you do it yourself?

*37:51* *Ryan Kulp* I like to riff with another person, actually. It's kind of funny because I typically like to do everything alone in terms of building it, owning it, the equity, making decisions. However, if I have an idea and I'm drinking with a friend or sitting with the woman or whatever, I'm going to bounce the idea off of her, even though she's maybe not that interested, because that's just going to force more out. And they might say, huh, why does that work? Or what if you also did this? And that helps to give you more conviction over why something could or could not work. And I don't think that other person has to be a tech person or whatever your project is. If you want to start a mining rig, they don't need to know anything about oil, right? Or crypto, depending on which type of race we're talking about. I think just forcing yourself to think out loud for me has worked really well. But occasionally I will write down the idea. I write it down like a sentence, but I won't typically write a spec out. Once I start writing a spec, it suddenly feels like work again. So I need to stay in this excitement mode, this brainstorm, what if whiteboard mode. And once I open a blank document with the blinking cursor, it's kind of like, you know, it's like it shuts down because our excitement is domain specific. If you are in a context of having a cocktail, sitting on a couch with your friends, and you have an idea, you should just keep banging the register and molding that idea right there. I think once you run over to the other room and grab your laptop, you're changing the context and you're going to change the energy and it's not going to come out the same way, even though that may sound counterintuitive because documenting things is good. But if anything, turn on the recorder on your phone, but just keep working on the idea in the context in which you came up with it.

*39:30* *Louis Grenier* And so you wouldn't really write anything down, you just keep it in your head, right? You're just obsessed about it for a while.

*39:36* *Ryan Kulp* Yes. And that's one thing I don't want to say I picked up, but I share in common with the guys at the 37signals blog. They mentioned that they get feature requests at Basecamp and they don't write them down. And someone will say, hey, can you make the timestamps like every one minute instead of every five minutes on uploads? And they're like, maybe. And then someone else requests it. And then someone else requests it and maybe they don't write it down. And after it's been requested enough times where it's part of the shared consciousness of the team, where they don't have to have it written down, but at a meeting someone says, hey, should we build that feature? Then they'll get around to doing it. Now, it's not very scientific and I wouldn't run a company that way. We always wrote down feature requests. But for your own personal ideas, I think it's a really interesting framework because if you're always consuming new information, you read a book and then you watch a funny movie, then you kill Nazis on a World War II video game. You're going to have all kinds of crazy ideas. And again, you don't want to drown in your own ideas. You don't want to drown in your thoughts and produce nothing. There's so many people like that. I have friends like that, unfortunately, who can talk their head off about anything and everything and they've never made anything, but they know about pandas. They'll tell you everything about Chinese pandas and then they'll tell you all about this interesting history of Russia. But they've never made anything. So where's it going with that? You can allow your own background job to present to you, hey, that idea was maybe good because I'm reminding you of it now a week later. All of us have gone out on a Friday night and thought about how to take over the world, the problem with the media. We've solved world famine within three hours on Friday night. Every one of us has done that. But allowing your own subconscious to remind you of the ideas later is sort of how I filter all the ideas into what I think are the best ideas.

*41:28* *Louis Grenier* Yeah, that's such a great point because I do, whenever I have an idea, whatever it is, I have the habit now to write it down. I just write it down. But it's very true that the ones that I know for sure, I'm excited about the day after, the day after, that I keep remembering without having to read my notes tend to be the ones that are important to me. Right. So that's an interesting thought. I mean, when I think about initiatives and projects that are quite important for content ideas, let's say for my daily emails and stuff like that, that's still very valuable. Okay. So step three is to, what is it? What did we say?

*42:10* *Ryan Kulp* Step three, you've got to hit go. And when you hit go that first time or maybe even the 10th time, you're going to quickly become self-aware of your inadequacies. So this happened a few years ago. I wanted to build an AR virtual reality app for Shopify. And finally, I thought about it forever, for months. And I had customers emailing me, hey, would you do this? Finally, I sit down to do it. And very quickly, I realized I don't know anything about AR VR, how to use these JavaScript plugins for AR VR. But that was really good. So then within a day or two, I onboarded a co-founder who figured it all out. And now we've had that app for like four years on the Shopify app store. But I had to hit go to very quickly realize what I didn't know. When you don't hit go, you stay in this purgatory of one day I'll get around to doing it. And one of the problems with that, we already all know, it just means that this great thing doesn't exist in the world. And maybe you make less money or you get less fulfillment or whatever. But two, it holds you back from knowing what you don't know. So you have to hit go because that's the beginning of learning. And it's a really humbling experience. I'm always coming up with new ideas and I'm always building them or trying to build them or beginning to build them. And really quickly, I realized, well, I can't even do this because I don't even know how to do that. So then I go down the rabbit hole and learn how to do that. And that's what I'm going through right now with hacking. It's like, I know how to make web apps, but knowing how to exploit them is a little bit different. It's tangential, but a little different. So I'm reading textbooks on that and I'm going through tutorials and I'm going back to step one, which I wouldn't be doing if I was building an app. It's a lot more comfortable if you said, Ryan, build me an app that does this, than if you said, Ryan, try to get all the user emails for that website. But hitting go forced me to connect those dots and backfill my own inadequacies.

*44:11* *Louis Grenier* So earlier you mentioned about selecting the boundaries of the project and making sure that you don't do too much, you don't think about too much. What's your process here? Is it a conscious, unconscious stuff? Is it the gut feel now that you know this is too much versus this is enough?

*44:30* *Ryan Kulp* That's a tough one. That's a tough one. So I just did this. It's a good example would be the new course, not to pitch the course, but in this new course, we make three apps. Easy, medium, hard. And the first app takes a few hours. The second app maybe takes a few more hours. I think there's like 33 hours in the course making three apps. So on average, they probably take around eight hours each to make each app. So well within the bounds of a 24-hour MVP. But as we're going through it, I didn't code the whole apps up before the course and then copy paste my text into an editor on video. We created the ideas, the wireframes, the code, the code, the code. The feature sets, all of it, essentially live. It was essentially like I turned on a live camera, recorded it, and I just arbitrarily hit pause every 30 minutes to get a soda or whatever. And so I had a very surreal experience of thinking out loud for 34 hours building three apps to determine what matters and what doesn't and why. And I think there's this really painful truth nowadays that we're used to seeing better and better version ones. So it's like version 10s are sort of like the same as they always have been. Like Google is like a version 10 product. Let's say like Xbox Live is a version 10. But version ones went from being Craigslist to now version ones are like Ethereum. So because of that, and a lot of that has to do with funding and just it's easier to build better apps and designers are learning to code. And so all these things are happening in the background. But because of that, it's almost this paradox where as it gets easier to build things, more people are therefore building things, which means more things will exist that look awesome, even in their version one state. And that is maybe the problem, the challenge for a lot of people who are thinking, well, even my version one has to be so good. How can I? It's insurmountable. But that all comes down to, again, scoping, not just what you're making, which is what we've been talking about so far today, scoping what you're making. Well, how do you do that? What's the science? Scoping who is going to consume it. So important. For example, when someone wants to make an enterprise app, I don't think you should make version one in a day. When someone wants their app to cost more than 19 bucks a month, I don't think you should make version one in a day. But if you want your app to cost 300 a month, that's fine. But maybe version one should cost 30 bucks. And then you can change it. You can improve it. You can increase the pricing. So there's this disconnect between the ICP everyone's talking about. And I've never used the term ICP. I've always said RCP, your realistic customer profile. That's who is the right person for your product right now. The person who looks at your product right now and says this is a no-brainer. That's your RCP. And your RCP is always changing. And your RCP over time becomes your ICP. So you can plot out on day one. My ICP is Coca-Cola, Google, blah, blah, blah. But on day one, my RCP is my buddy John who runs an HR tech company. And he might sign up out of goodwill. And day 50, my RCP is someone who is a series-age, series-series startup, whatever you can call it nowadays. So you can have your ICP, but you have to, again, humble yourself. And have an RCP that's a little bit different that you can work up to. So that's the big part of it. You don't have to master the art of arbitrarily eliminating features. Instead, you can just pick a group of people who will be content with whatever you can build in some limited timeframe.

*48:18* *Louis Grenier* What's your criteria to have a good RCP? How do you know it's good? How do you know you can go with that?

*48:28* *Ryan Kulp* Well, no one says you can't ask them. Right. You can ask them. And the types of people who are your RCP on day one are also a lot easier to get in touch with. So that's maybe one pattern you can look for. If there's a gatekeeper to your RCP, maybe that's not really your RCP. To me, an RCP is someone that I can email or DM on Twitter with high certainty they will reply. And it doesn't matter what the product is. If I don't think the person will be like, yo, dude, yeah, interesting, blah, blah, blah, via email or Twitter DM, I am aiming too high.

*49:07* *Louis Grenier* That's my gut check if someone's my RCP. So access is a big thing. So in the way I teach this kind of process of selecting your customers and whatever, I use access as one of the criteria. And usually this is the deal breaker. It's like, yeah, I want to build a marketing agency that serves, I don't know, financial advisors. I would ask, how many do you know? I don't know any. Okay, then that can't be it. This access is so important. Do you have access to Facebook groups? Do you have an email list? Do you have a podcast? What's your access like? Do you have friends like that? Do you have family members like that? And I'm so glad you mentioned this because usually this is the deal breaker. And then I have stuff like Joy. Do you like serving them, working with them, or do you fucking hate this group? Then you have percentage of their income. Are they willing to spend 10%, 50% on the stuff? This is why it's always good to go after people that have hobbies that they love because they spend a lot of their money, even if they could earn minimum wage. So anyway, those are the criteria. So thanks for sharing that. That's actually very interesting. Okay, so we have that. We have the group. Is there any other stuff that you tend to trim down, that you teach people to trim down a lot about the RCP? Idea?

*50:27* *Ryan Kulp* Well, something else I ask people, I don't want to say I tell people to trim down. I don't know if this is a good process or not. It's something I do though, is to trim down the launch itself. We've all seen startups that launch with a lot of fanfare, if that's the right word. The day one, they're in TechCrunch. Day one, they raised $2 million as an announcement. Day one, they're speaking at some conference, essentially day one. It can throw off the rest of us spectators, observers, that to be successful equals to have a big successful launch. But if you go through lists of YC companies, most of them have all shut down, and all of them were in TechCrunch or The Verge or whatever. They all knew journalists. They all got to speak at conferences. They all raised a lot of money. I would say they all raised a lot of money, but they pretty much all were able to raise some money, right? Even the $120,000 you get from Y Combinator is more than 99% of startups ever received. I would trim down your launch aspirations for two reasons. One, it's a lot of heartbreak. You could spend a lot of time trying to play politics with journalists and all of that, and just wasting time trying to launch. But two, it's not really an indicator of success as we've seen with the startup graveyards, right? Failory.com does a great job outlining lots of companies that built a ton of hype and then died. Shout out to Failory. But third, and this is where it relates to building MVPs the way I build MVPs, if you have a big launch, it's like putting mascara over bruises because your girlfriend beat you. And I'm saying girlfriend beat you so we don't use the same obvious one. You truly don't know if what you have is any good. If you manufacture a launch. Whereas if you do the very chill tweet to your few hundred followers or an email to your friends, sure, some of them will just encourage you. So you have to also ignore some feedback. Your mom's going to think everything you did is great. But what I like about the anti-climactic launch, which is essentially how I've launched everything, everything I've launched has been anti-climactic. I tweet it and I say enjoy, and I never tweet it again. You won't find any of my blog posts tweeted by me more than one time, and I've written hundreds of them. I write it, I tweet it, maybe seven people hit like, over years thousands of people might read it. But I don't share things twice. I don't launch ever. I just tweet it. I put it out there. And what it gives me the advantage over other people is that I'm not tripped up looking at my signup spike on day one because I was in TechCrunch and saying, well, I know this has to be a really great product because look at how many people tried it out on day one. That doesn't mean anything. Do the anti-climactic launch and then you get to really know what people think about it.

*53:23* *Louis Grenier* So the anti-climactic launch, I love that idea, that concept. And you can launch 20 times if you want. One mistake that people tend to make a lot is the fact that they think others think of them, remember them, remember everything they've shared and like you would do as a creator. But they don't. They don't give a shit. They don't care about you. They care about themselves. They'll forget you. So you can launch 20 times, right? To your point. But it sounds like what you're doing is more of a continuous launch. I don't know if launch is the right term even. It's more like you just appear. You just make this thing appear and you bet on the fact that it's good enough for the right people. So the specific problem that it will naturally kind of become something. Is that right?

*54:13* *Ryan Kulp* Let's put it this way. If I go into the analytics of my personal blog, which has a projects page and each project is like a little square image that goes to some other website. And then I go to the analytics of those websites. My own Ryan C. Kulp slash projects page is always a meaningful contributor to in terms of the referral traffic to all these other projects. So if people come to my site because they come to my Twitter, let's say Twitter is my hub and my site is a spoke and then that spoke my website points to other projects. What's interesting is that I've seen direct correlation between the number of times I tweet and the number of people who sign up or pay for my projects. But if you map out that user journey, that's me tweeting about anything. It could be anything. Guns. Let's say I'm tweeting about guns. That drives more clicks to my Twitter profile, which drives more clicks to my website. And a percentage of those people go to my projects page. And then from that page, they might click a project. So I've found as wild as it is, I could tweet about anything. It doesn't have to be related to tech and marketing and I will drive more signups to my apps. So why would I launch anything ever? The way I'm doing it is this user driven journey where they pick exactly what they want. So the projects page becomes the menu and they're like, that looks interesting. Click that and maybe sign up. And I'm very grateful for this. I don't want to sound like I'm saying this. Haha. Look at me. My point is that this idea, like you're saying of this continuous launch can be done. And you have to be creative looking at where your traffic's coming from to verify it. But I've verified that if I am just on top of people's minds by saying something on Twitter, hopefully something good, something useful, it's not all trolling. But if I'm remaining on top of mind with useful ideas, that does trickle down into signups and purchases of the things that I build. And it's always been that way. And it's almost like I haven't plotted out the ZE scores, the P values of the statistical significance of this per se. But there are times where I don't tweet a week and there are times where I tweet a week back to back and I can go look at the charts and it's night and day. Just because I'm like you said, people don't care about you. They forget about you after 10 seconds. They scroll their feed one thumb away and you're out of their mind. But if you're back in their mind 10 times a day, some of that's going to pay off. And so I think the other maybe note I'll add about launching that it just occurred to me now is that the launching, the people who are obsessed with these big launches, they're kind of doing that smarter, not harder game. They're like, well, I'll just like go to drinks with the journalists and get TechCrunch lined up and do this and this and this. And then it'll be on autopilot. I'll get my backlinks. I'll have the residual traffic. Whereas working harder is just showing up every day, sharing ideas, synthesizing things that might be useful to people. Sometimes you could be funny. Sometimes you could be off topic. Sometimes you could post about your personal life, have an Instagram, whatever. And driving meaningful traffic forever versus going for these big launches that will always dry up and disappoint as we've seen in the history of so many startups before us.

*57:30* *Louis Grenier* So we've been talking for 57 minutes and time fucking flies. So I think just to summarize the step by step. So first, you pick a goal that is tiny enough. I'm going to forget step two. So if you remember it, let me know. Step three is to make sure we set boundaries such as the RCP and trimming down the customer profile and whatever. And then step four is probably to forget about traditional launch and just think of this idea of just being on all the time. Right? And what I like about your approach and your overall kind of persona and the way you come across, we've never met face to face, but that's how you come across, is your tranquility about stuff. Like you have this kind of Buddhist-like tranquility about what you do. You don't seem to be stressed about whether or not something will be successful. Maybe because you have the resources now to back you up. But yeah, I think this is something that hopefully people will emulate from you, this kind of confidence and tranquility about stuff. So before I let you go, there is something that you wrote, I think, in your blog or somewhere. I found it somewhere. You said that you're probably less sociopathic than before. Right? So that means you consider yourself a sociopath, right?

*58:53* *Ryan Kulp* I have observed in myself, I wouldn't say observed in myself, I've observed in many, many people, emotional responses that I thought were so out of proportion that it prompted me to become introspective. This all started a few years ago and realizing that maybe I am deficient, if you could be deficient in a sense, the way that we could be deficient in vitamin D. I think I am deficient in emotional understanding or emotional responses to things. I think I lean, for better or worse, on that logical part of me to analyze, what do I think about this? Why do I think that? I never begin sentences with I feel like. I don't even begin a sentence that way. It's just automatic. I say, I think, or I just assume something is. I wrote a post for the people who are confused about this context, Perks of Being a Sociopath. It's not something I'm super proud of, by the way, the outcomes that I wrote about, but I published it because that's what I do and that's part of how I've been able to be who I am, is I don't just share the highlights of my life. I share the good, the bad, the ugly. I share all my problems, not all my problems, but I share problems that people could get value from, could learn from. Maybe nowadays I'm less sociopathic because I have, you got to adapt. You got to adapt to the world. If you realize that there's a benefit of using emotion as a tool, then you might actually backdoor yourself into becoming a more emotionally sensitive person. You could do that from an intellectual standpoint, which I think is kind of funny and ironic.

*01:00:41* *Louis Grenier* Yeah, for a sociopath, you're thinking a lot about others and what they think, which is the very fact that you're asking yourself the question, I think is answer the question on its own, if you know what I mean. I don't think you are a sociopath, but you might have some like, there's different types of intelligence. So you definitely are someone who's very, very bright. You said it earlier that you wouldn't put yourself in the smart, part of the population, but I would disagree with you. That's a compliment by the way. So anyway, last question before I let you go. I asked you last time, five years ago, your top three resources. I ask every guest, but I'm going to ask you again, because they will probably, they have changed. So what would be the top three resources you'd recommend listeners today?

*01:01:33* *Ryan Kulp* They can't be conceptual. Whatever it is. Whenever it is. I knew I was going to be asked this, but I have a sort of personal rule that I don't allow myself to script anything before talks. I don't do that. I used to do that a lot. I would even plan my ums and buts to sound more spontaneous, even though I knew what I was going to say. Resource one, the writings of Nassim Taleb. He is an excellent thinker. He thinks he uses math to explain things in the world, which is really refreshing because most people just use their emotions. Two, I'll just plug. You got to follow me on Twitter. This is the smarter, not harder way to get ahead because I do a lot of the work of synthesizing ideas so that you don't have to. That's what blogging is all about. That's what tweeting is hopefully all about. Three, you have to do something physical, something physically difficult for some amount of time every day. For me, that's farming and whatever. But if you don't do that, I think we lose touch with all of our ancestors who did not have Macbooks and podcasts to relax to. You have to do something physical, whatever that means. You wrote a book about it, actually. You wrote the fitness for hackers stuff. That touches on- Yes.

*01:03:00* *Louis Grenier* Cool. I would have never thought to plug that. There you go. I didn't read it. I just know you have it. I must buy it, actually. Man, thanks so much for coming back. I could have kept going for hours and hours asking you questions, but we have to do it. I'm so glad that you're here. I'm so glad that you're here. I'm so glad that you're here.