What's up, everyone? This is Cortland Allen from NDHackers.com, and you are listening
to the NDHackers podcast. On this show, I talk to the founders of profitable internet
businesses and I try to get a sense of who they are, what makes them tick, how they got
to where they are today, and how they make decisions at their companies. The goal here
is so that the rest of us can learn from their example and go on to build our own successful
internet businesses.
If you are a founder or you're thinking about starting a company, I highly recommend that
you check out NDHackers.com. It's the website behind this podcast and it is full of other
founders swapping tips with each other, giving each other advice and feedback and ideas,
and in general, just helping each other build successful companies. You can also find full
transcripts of every podcast episode, including this one.
Okay, I am super excited about today's guest. I am talking to none other than Joel Runyon.
Joel, welcome to the show. It's great to have you on.
Thanks for having me, man.
You are... You're someone who's difficult to introduce because you do so many different
things. I mean, you are an NDHacker, you've got numerous businesses that you run, you're
a blogger, you're a podcast host, you are an ultra marathoner, and somewhat of a fitness
and nutrition guru, you're a marketer, you're an SEO and growth consultant, so I don't even
know where to start.
I like to say that I run businesses and marathons. That's a good introduction, especially for
the last two years, I would say. I've been running a... I have two main businesses. I
have a business called Impossible, which is a mindset and fitness business. And then I
have another paleo nutrition company around the paleo diet and meal planning and several
different apps and other things like that.
And then on occasion, I do consulting for various funded startups on a one off basis
to kind of keep myself sharp, keep me interested in other people's businesses and just kind
of what's going on. And then sometimes it's fun to work with the opposite. I do a lot
of... All of my own stuff is bootstrapped, but it's fun to work with funded companies
in a different way because a lot of times you can make a few small tweaks here and there.
And because they're much bigger operations, you can see some massive results.
So yeah, I like to say I run businesses and I run marathons and I try to find the intersection
where business meets adventure and have a lot of fun doing both.
What is that intersection? How does business overlap with adventure?
That's a good...
I'm hitting you with the abstract question to try out the back.
That's a good question. Yeah, I don't know. It's good. I think the best way to share that
is to kind of tell kind of how my story started. And basically, I started a blog in 2010, about
nine months after I graduated from college and I couldn't get a job out of college. So
I did all the things you were supposed to do, got good, had a great GPA, did a couple
different sports, did a lot of travel, learned Spanish, all those things, got out of school
in 2009, right in the middle of the recession and couldn't get a job.
There were no jobs. So I was doing this path that you're supposed to do and kind of got
to the end of that path and realized, okay, this apparently doesn't work anymore.
And so the short version of that story is I sat around for a long time feeling bad for
myself, got a bad job at UPS, delivering packages in the winter in Chicago, turned down by places
like Starbucks and Target after getting my college degree and all this other stuff. And
so end up nine months after school, laid off my part-time job at UPS because it was seasonal
work and they needed to get rid of... They only hired workers for a couple months at
the time during Christmas and kind of sat around looking at my life and saying, no,
is this kind of what we have to show for where we're at right now?
And I was reading some of these other blogs on the internet. Chris Gilbo was a writer.
I was following along. He was traveling to every country in the world. I had another
friend that had quit his job and moved to Thailand. And I saw all these people doing
all these interesting things and I wanted to do something like that, but I couldn't
even get a job at Starbucks. I couldn't keep a job at UPS for more than two months because
the economy was so bad, they didn't have any packages being sent out. So they didn't need
all the people they're hiring. So I kind of had this list of things that I wanted to do,
but they all seemed impossible to me and I felt bad for a long time and didn't want to
actually try and go out and do them. And then I realized after a little bit that no matter...
I've got nothing else going on right now. I don't have a lot of things holding me back.
I don't have a lot of money. I don't have a lot of resources or connections, but one
of the things on my list was run a triathlon. And I didn't know how to do it. I didn't know
what went into it, but I decided I can at least... I have no excuses for not putting
my shoes on and running around the block and I have no excuses for not getting on a bike
and riding around the block. And so I did that. And when I finished that race, there
was a specific thing that I remember thinking was I finished this indoor triathlon. It was
a really basic, small race. And I remember finishing that and thinking to myself, you
spent so much time telling yourself that this was impossible. What other things are out
there that you think are impossible, but you could do if you just trained for it, if you
just went for it.
And so that was kind of the start of my impossible business and kind of how it's partly a business,
it's partly how I kind of changed my perspective on my own life. And a lot of times, my ideas
for business, my different projects that come up end up coming out of me having something
on this list that I think is not only fun or interesting or maybe adventurous, but then
I try to figure out a way to turn that, turning it into something that I can actually build
a business and build a life around instead of just trying to find spare time outside
in my nine to five job, if that makes any sense.
So that's a long story, but people who aren't familiar with me, maybe that gives a little
bit of background on who I am and how I got started. And then this list that I started
was sort of the impetus for me to not only try new things, but try to do interesting
things with my life. And then every once in a while, I'll find one of those interesting
things resonates with other people. And then you kind of just start digging a little bit
more. And sometimes you find different business opportunities there.
I really like what you said about how you thought it would be impossible to run this
triathlon. And then after you trained for it and did it, it sort of unlocked a door
almost in your mind where you're like, well, you know, I can apply the same regimen and
the same process to other things that I probably thought were impossible, and just work towards
getting them done, whether that's finding a job, starting a business, or whatever else
is on your list. And I think it's kind of this idea of just baby steps, where every
single time you take a step, you get a little bit more confident for the next step, because
you can look back and you're slowly but surely building up this resume or this list of accomplishments
that you've done. It reminds me kind of when I learned how to code in college, I had never
really done what I would call real programming, I'd always just done design work and HTML
and CSS, but nothing substantial. And then I had a friend, he's like, let's just build
this thing. And I did just a crappy job not knowing what I was doing. And then having
done that, it made it so much easier for me to take the next step. So I think it's a pretty
cool way to get started on your journey. And I hope people listening in who want to start
a business and haven't started will find some sort of baby stuff they can take that maybe
seems hard, but it's still doable.
Well, one of the things I talk about, especially with the fitness and the mindset aspect is
a lot of times people with businesses and other things in their life, but you know,
we'll talk about business right now, they'll get stuck in a certain spot because they're
living in their head all the time. And the thing I like about fitness and some of the
different physical challenges that I've done is they actually force you to move beyond
what you think you can do, then you get reference points for other parts of your life where
you say, you know, I was at mile 40 of that race and I couldn't figure out how I was going
to get another 20 more miles. And then you have like this sense of despair or you know,
how am I ever going to finish this thing? And that's a very physical real sense. Your
body hurts, you're aching, muscles you didn't know you had are hurting all over the place.
And you have to figure out a way, you know, you have to figure out if you're going to
go home or if you're going to figure out a way through it. And once you do it, it's easy
to spot that same mindset in other parts of your life, you know, when it's business or
if you're coming up against really tough business situations, whether they're financial, legal,
whatever, you're like, how am I going to get through this? You can take that same mindset
that you built up through these different physical challenges and apply it into business.
And that is been one of the most helpful things for me throughout anything that I've done.
So I find that's super helpful, just giving you another reference point in another area
of life that you can sort of just kind of pluck out of that situation and apply in another.
Reference points, that's a great way to put it. So you mentioned this list, your impossible
list, which I think is a cool place to kind of start talking from. Because as I mentioned
earlier, you're doing a ton of different things. And your impossible list kind of ties everything
together. So why don't you tell us about that? What is an impossible list? And why did you
create one?
Yeah, the impossible list is a lot of people see it. And they think, okay, it's like a
bucket list. But there's a couple differentiations that I've made. One with bucket lists, most
people think a bucket list, okay, I'm gonna get real excited about it. I'm gonna make
my bucket list. And then hopefully I can do all these things before I kick the bucket
or whatever. And so maybe I'll get some of these things done. And they get really excited
about doing it. But a lot of people have bucket lists. And maybe I find a lot of people make
bucket lists, but not a lot of people actually knock things off of it. So that's one. And
the other thing is that the impossible list for me started really small. It started with
an indoor triathlon in the west suburbs of Chicago. So it wasn't like, oh, I'm gonna
run a... I didn't start off. I'm gonna run an ultra marathon on every continent in the
world. And I'm gonna figure out how to do it. It started off with, okay, what do I think
is really impossible? And for me, running a triathlon, it sounds stupid now, but I didn't
know anybody who's had run a triathlon. I didn't know anything about that world. And
I didn't look at myself as a triathlete. I'd never run more than 5K before I signed up
for that thing. So the two defining things of that are, one, you're continually making
it. So you start small, and then you continually add to it. So once I did that small indoor
triathlon, I conceptualized it as, okay, I pushed past that limit of what I thought was
possible. Now what else is at? What else is past there? And the interesting thing about
stair-stepping it like that is sometimes you'll take a step in one direction and you find
you're not really into it. You're like, oh, okay, that was fun to try, but I don't really
care about it. And sometimes you'll take a step in that direction and find there's a
lot more there and you can kind of keep digging.
So where did you end up going from there?
I got involved in endurance racing and all sorts of stuff like that where I kind of started
scratching the triathlon itch, got into triathlons, kind of tricked myself into becoming a runner,
and then found the world of ultra marathons and all of that stuff and started getting
into ultras. And I've got two or three concurrent timelines that you want to kind of think about
it as.
And so there's what I was doing with my fitness life. And then once I started, I was saying
that when I started my blog and my impossible list, I couldn't get a job anywhere. And so
I did this thing. I think some people have called it apprenticeships. I've called it
basically working for free, but right around that time that I did the indoor triathlon,
I started a quote unquote apprenticeship or working for free where I got paid a very,
very small amount of money to work side by side with an owner at a marketing agency and
was able to learn a bunch of skills kind of on the job, even when I didn't really have
anything to offer in that space. And then over the next three to six months, basically
free worked my way into a job there and had that for like two years where I ended up working
my way up to a marketing director and ended up... I worked my way up, I got recruited
to another firm, started working on much larger national accounts, Camping World was one of
my clients doing some stuff for Marcus Lamontis, who runs The Profit. So I was managing ad
spend for his campaigns around that time. All while I was doing that, I was trying to
get faster and go farther with my racing and then also working on some side projects and
impossible as well. And so...
It's a lot of stuff.
Yeah. So there's a few different things going on. But what's happening was each time I found
that I pushed myself past a limit in one of the areas, I was able to take that and kind
of apply it in another area. So once I figured that, oh, I could not just get a job, but
now there's other companies out there kind of competing for me, I was able to take that
and kind of apply it into my fitness and my racing. And then I was able to take, okay,
I have some confidence in my skills and everything I'm doing at my job. So what if I started
freelancing here? And that's kind of how the just self-improvement stuff started turning
into actual business things where I was looking, okay, maybe there's something here that people
would want to pay for or something that I could do on the side of my day job that is
actually valuable to people.
It's cool looking at your impossible list. For anyone listening, you can just Google
Joel Runyon Impossible List and it'll come up. But it's kind of like the spreadsheet.
It's an Airtable, which is a great app. And you've got it divided into all of these different
segments of life. So you've got fitness, travel, minimalism, Renaissance Man is the category
on here, languages that you want to learn. Entrepreneurship is a category. How did you
decide what categories to put on here? And when did you specifically add entrepreneurship?
So entrepreneurship was kind of an interest of mine from the get-go. I think I had, you
know, I accidentally got the bug without knowing it when I was a kid and I had a lawn mowing
business. And while everybody else is getting like hourly jobs or whatever, I'd go out on
the weekend with my brothers and we'd do 20 or 30 lawns and you make a few hundred bucks
and do that in a few hours a weekend.
And we just kind of looked at the numbers and we're like, it doesn't make sense to go
work at a fast food place or anything like that. And so when I finally got a job and
actually started making enough money to live so I could actually start thinking in my freeing
up some brain space to think about other things, I was always coming up with ideas. It was
just figuring out the... If I had the skills to implement them, if I had the money to figure
out how to get it started. And from very early on, I just started freelancing for people.
I was doing a lot of social media management, a lot of SEO, PPC, social media stuff and
email marketing.
And those are kind of...
And this is after you got your job at the marketing agency?
Yeah, after I actually started learning some of these skills. And so once I started learning
them, I was like, okay, well, there's other people out there that they're not going to
pay me. They're not really clients that our company would go after because they're...
It's not enough money for the retainer for our company and make sense. But if I spent
five hours a week on my own time hustling, I could probably make a little bit of money
on the side of whether that's $200 or $500 a month or what ended up getting up to $1,500
or $2,000 a month at one point.
I was like, oh, well, I actually have some... This is actually an income. It's not a full
time income, but it's something. And in there, I had transferred... I got recruited away
from this company that I started and gave me my shot. And I started working with this
other company in a bigger national capacity. And it was way more money. It was more interesting
clients, but it was much more formal.
We were doing internet marketing, but we had many of the traps that you would have at a
normal nine to five. You had to be in at a specific time. You needed to wear a specific
outfit or there was a specific dress code and all these things. I was just thinking
about, I can do this job anywhere in the world. Why do I have to be in Milwaukee, Wisconsin
of all places to do this?
And there's a long story there, but basically it became... Within six months of being there,
I knew it was not going to be a good fit long term. And I had such low tolerance for not
being... I don't want to say not being happy, but not being... I knew how effective I was
being. I saw the return that I was making the company. I saw what I was getting paid
for that. I did the mental calculus like, okay, I'm not... I'm bringing in 40% of the
revenue for the company and I'm not making 40% of the revenue.
And I just did some of the calculus and I didn't really jive with the culture very well.
And within six months, I ended up believing. And I remember thinking... I was having such
a bad time there that I remembered, I don't care if I have to go back and work at UPS
again, but I don't want to be here.
So it wasn't just the money then. It sounds like you hated the job itself.
That was interesting because it was one of those things where if it wasn't so bad, I
probably would have stayed. A lot of times people end up in decent situations that aren't
really bad, but they're not as awesome as they want them to be. And so because they're
neither or, they just stay and hang out in the mediocre aspect of it.
And for me, it just got really bad. I didn't get along with my supervisor very well. There's
just a lot of... It just wasn't good. And so within six months, I had been hustling
on the side, making 1500 bucks, 2000 bucks a month or something like that.
And I was like, you know what? That's not a ton of money, but especially in the Midwest,
I could pay my bills and I could try to figure something else out. And most of all, I don't
have to be here. So that was where two or three years after I had started this... I
would say two years after I had started the blog, I had transitioned. And I don't know
if I would say I was an entrepreneur at that point. I was side hustling and doing some
other stuff. But that was when I was like, okay, I'm going to have to figure this out
on my own.
So on your impossible list, you've got kind of the first item under entrepreneurship is
start my own marketing agency. And then one after that is make a full-time living online.
And I think this process that you went through of being an employee and then doing contract
work and eventually starting your own business is such a classic way to become an entrepreneur
actually. Because you kind of see all sides of the equation and it's more of a gradual
slope rather than just quitting everything and just saying, you know, day one, I'm a
business.
Did you have a plan in mind when you quit that you were eventually going to be full
time on your own? Or was it sort of like a stopgap measure until you found another job?
It was definitely... I was going to try to figure out how to be full time. So I... Once
I left, I think I went back to Chicago for a month and a half or something like that.
And then I went to the Dominican Republic and I had some friends there. I was living
like... I think rent was like a hundred bucks a month or so. I was basically... I have to
baseline my expenses as much as possible. So the idea was go to Dominican Republic,
baseline your expenses and then try to ramp up and start making a full-time income so
you can come back as soon as possible.
And the idea was... So I went there and kind of started scaling some of the consulting
stuff I was doing. I was kind of messing around with products, coming out with information
products with Impossible. I think I came out with a... I think I came out with a triathlon
product was the first thing I came out with. I'm like, how to run your first triathlon.
And that was a... I mean, it was interesting for me as far as making a product, but like
I think it bombed and we sold a few copies. And I realized that of the subset of people
that are interested in fitness, the subset of people that are interested in running and
the subset of people that are interested in running the triathlon, it's pretty small.
And I didn't necessarily have the cache to pull that off. So that didn't go very well,
but it kind of got me in the practice of actually testing things out. And so I started just
getting into this space, trying a bunch of different things. And then this is where I
believe I started talking to a couple of friends. I was doing a six pack challenge that got
in a lot of attention. I was doing a modified form of the paleo diet. And I had mentioned
paleo offhand to someone, or I think in a blog post. And I just got a ton of feedback
on it. They're like, Oh, tell me more about paleo. And I was like, it was kind of throw
away comment and everybody started glomming onto it. And I was getting all these emails
on it. And I didn't want to respond to all these emails. And so I just made like a one
pager website of all the questions I was getting asked. And anytime somebody asked me a question
about paleo, I just referred them to the link. And that's kind of when this paleo nutrition
business started to take off. And that was, I want to say 2000, 2012 or so. But it was
just one of those things where the benefits of impossible, you know, there's a business
aspect aspect to it, but there's also a, an experimental aspect to it where it gives me
an audience and it gives me a way to talk about different things I'm interested in.
And then I get to hear what's resonating with people. And then it makes it easier to double
down on some of that stuff. And so that paleo, you know, one pager turned into a whole spinoff
of a website plus a meal planning service, plus a two different apps that we have. And
you know, some affiliate products that we're partnering with.
So it's just kind of, you know, it, the formula, if anything, is writing about things that
I'm interested in, doing interesting personal things, and then figuring out what people
are glomming on to, and then doubling down on that.
I think that's such a great insight that if you have an audience, you can kind of just
put things out there, you can put out feelers. And because you have this audience, like you
said, you actually get real feedback. And you can see I did this thing, no one really
responded to it, I guess I'm going to stop doing that. I did this other thing, wow, it's
getting a huge response. I should double down here and maybe start a business in this area.
And so in trying to deconstruct how you got to this point, let's take a step backwards.
And let's look at how you actually built this audience for yourself, because most people
listening in who want to start a business don't have an audience, they don't have a
blog, they don't really have any sort of test bed where they can throw an idea out there
and see if people will respond. How did you grow your blog? And how did you get to the
point where when you said something, people would actually respond to you?
So I started in 2010, right? So it's a little bit different space now than 2010. I think
a good number of people still read blogs, but there's just a lot of other avenues where
you can do it. And so when I started out, I was just basically going through my impossible
list and doing all the things that I could do while I still had a nine to five job. And
so that's one of the things I think people miss is that they always say, Oh, how did
you start this? And I'm like, well, for the first two years, I was just doing things that
I was interested in and learning skills and getting paid to learn skills. And then also,
you know, learning how to write, learning how to speak, learning how to have your own
voice. I was doing a lot of guest posts for other people, similar to a lot of things people
do now with, you know, account, account takeovers or podcast interviews, the tools were slightly
different than it was just, you know, a lot of guest posts, a lot of commenting, a lot
of just reaching out to people that were kind of in the same space and saying, Hey, in a
genuine way, like you guys are doing really cool stuff. You know, I'm trying to do, you
know, some things that may be interesting as well. And I just built up like an interesting
friendship of people online. And then every once in a while you'll write something and
it takes off. I think I had one blog post that I wrote about meeting Russell curse.
He invented the first programmable computer and he, I think invented the pixel or, you
know, like the first like photo. And I met him in a coffee shop in Portland and we had
a conversation and I wrote a blog post about it. And I was on a, you know, I stuck to a
pretty strict blog post schedule and I had kind of written this thing and I didn't really
know what to think about it. I wasn't sure if it was any good, but the schedule was coming
up and I was like, I have to publish something. So I think I stayed up super late, like, you
know, three, three or 4am trying to get this thing done, hit publish and woke up the next
day. And my whole site was down because I had gotten on Hacker News and people were
just glomming onto this story. And so all of a sudden, like, it was just kind of this,
this process of every once in a while you write this thing and you think this is going
to be amazing and nobody cares. And every once in a while you'll post this thing that
you're like, okay, I'm just doing this to kind of get it out of the way and people glom
onto it. And so there was a couple of those types of events where, you know, I'd written
something that people resonated with and then that brings in a whole new wave of people
and then it kind of goes from there.
Essentially, you're just getting a thousand more at bats than someone who doesn't have
a dedicated blogging schedule where you can just keep doing this thing over and over and
over again, month after month, year after year. And just through sheer persistence,
eventually, one of these things is going to take off. And even if none of them ever take
off, you're still going to be building up your skills. You're still going to be adding,
you know, a small trickle of email subscribers. And just through working and grinding on it,
you build up an audience that gets you to the point where you can actually launch something
that's successful.
So I think that's a story that a lot of people could learn from. It's so easy looking in
from the outside to see sort of somebody in a successful situation where they have this
business and think, I just want to get straight there. You know, how do I go from zero to
100 tomorrow? And the sort of hidden grind behind the grind where you spend all of these
years acquiring the skills that you have and building up the audience that you do have
is pretty much invisible to most people.
And the other aspect is, even though I wasn't really making money on the Impossible blog
at the time, a lot of times people would come and read it. You know, maybe they were my
clients, maybe they were interested. I was doing freelance stuff or whatever. And a lot
of times I got clients just from people saying, Hey, you seem like an interesting guy. And
I think two things people underestimate is one, the value of doing interesting things
because most people are just kind of plotting through life and don't have much to talk about.
And you know, maybe they're bored with their job and it kind of shows, but then they kind
of take that off and they go home and they watch Netflix and they don't necessarily have
anything going on.
But if you have like these projects you're building towards, even if you don't want to
talk about your job, which you're not excited about, there's other things that you can connect
with people on. So I think people underestimate the value of being interesting. And then I
think also people kind of overestimate how valuable they are sometimes. One of the things
I talked to a lot of people about once they are consulting and charging people for stuff
is you probably need to raise your prices.
But when people are starting out, a lot of times they overestimate how the value or the
value of the position they're in, or they don't realize how replaceable some of the
things they're doing are. And so when I started out, I had nothing really to offer my boss.
You know, like I kind of, he could give me an entry level job and if I, you know, the
gamble on his end is if I was any good, you know, maybe it would pay off. But if I, if
I was terrible, then he would be out three, you know, two or three months of his time
training me plus the money that he paid me plus all these other things. And so the thing
that I tell a lot of people is, Hey, I want to get started in entrepreneurship or I want
to do something, but I don't really feel like I have any skills yet. And then going around
and trying to get these good, high paying jobs is don't rush it so much on optimizing
for revenue when you're starting out, especially, especially if you're right out of school.
A lot of times I found a lot of my friends that are entrepreneurs started working either
for free or working for very little, but traded it off and said, I'm not going to take a lot
of money in my first job, but I am going to take a job at a small company where I have
access to the boss and access to the knowledge. And then kind of you work yourself into a
paying position and then, you know, worst case scenario, you're getting paid to learn
skills even if you're not super pumped about the job or the situation you're in. Taking
that time and that patience to build up those skills is super valuable.
Yeah, and that learning just continues to be helpful over the long course of your life.
You don't really forget the stuff that you learned, like the years that you spent working
for marketing agencies and doing your own consulting, you're learning a lot of valuable
business lessons that a lot of programmers, for example, don't know, even though they
might be able to code. And as a result, that kind of pays dividends. I can kind of tell
just by looking at the different websites that you've launched and the businesses that
you started that your SEO knowledge sort of comes into play with everything that you do.
For example, I'm sure paleo meal plans is called paleo meal plans for a reason because
you're aware that you'll probably rank very highly for this popular Google search term.
So I think people very much underestimate the sort of payoff that learning and aggregate
can provide over time and how many people who are successful are really that way just
because they spend so much time learning and trying things and no one really just gets
it first shot out of the gate without having some preparation or some learning beforehand.
There's almost like a different curve. Like if you take a job and you get 5% increases
over time, that's one type of curve. But if you kind of start low and then all of a sudden
you can change your earning power exponentially, if you come into the situation where you spent
this time learning, maybe you're not valuing it very high, you're not going to pay a lot
of money.
But then as you're institutionalizing that knowledge and you're gaining those skills,
all of a sudden you can take those and be a really high value contributor within the
company that you're at or you can take that out and do your own thing. And a lot of times
people, it's this kind of comfortable enough situation. A lot of times people can get themselves
into a comfortable enough situation that it's almost too comfortable to leave and it's too
risky to leave.
One of the things that was good for me is I knew what it was like to not have to scrape
by for a few months and hustle on some stuff from my early days. And so when it got time
for me to leave my job, I was like, okay, well, you know, I've done this before. I can
go hustle instead of hustling for someone else and hustling for myself this time.
You did that the first time when you were just out of college. You were 23, 24 years
old. You graduated in 2009, so I assume you're my age, probably 30. Could you see yourself
doing that again if you lost everything? And somehow you've lost all your skills, age 30.
Would you scrimp and save and start from zero or would you go the comfortable path?
Well, I think the interesting thing, the game that I play is how many phone calls would
it take for you to get a job right now? Because I think about that all the time. I think one
of the things about entrepreneurship is you're like, oh no, tomorrow I can wake up at everything.
Just my computer is nuked or whatever.
And so the thing that's nice for me is... It's not nice, but the thing that I think about
is how many phone calls would I have to make to get another job? And the answer is probably
one, maybe two. And at this point, it's because of the connections I've made and the people
I know and the reputation that I have that I don't think it's cocky, but it's something
that you... Hey, I don't think it... It can go bad, but it's not going to be so bad to
the point where I'm going to be in the streets or something like that. I might have to scrimp
and save and do some stuff, but I could always get a job 9 to 5 and then hustle on the side.
And would I be okay? I'd probably be okay doing that actually. Sometimes a job seems
a little bit less stressful than entrepreneurship. You're like, oh, you just have to show up
for the 9 to 5 and then you can clock out and you get the paid same. You paid the same
no matter if customers are happy or sad or whatever. There's something about that that's
slightly nice and comforting. What I think is tougher is if you end up at 30 and you
don't have a specific skill that you've honed and a specific skill, different relationships
or different connections. And that's not to say you can't build those, but that's something
that I think there's a job security that comes from just kind of... A lot of times people
rely on their job for job security instead of relying on institutional knowledge they
have, the reputation, the relationships they have, and then evidence that they can produce,
which I think are side projects or just things they're doing on the side that make them interesting.
And like I said before about the people underestimate the value of being interesting. I think a
lot of times people will give you a second look just because you're doing something that
they can point to and say, Hey, that's kind of cool. I'd like to help that guy out.
And if you can differentiate yourself in that way, I think it's super helpful.
So let's talk a little bit about Paleo Meal Plans. You did an ND Hacker's interview on
this about a year, a year and a couple months ago. As you mentioned now, it started off
with you just blogging about Paleo and people being interested in it. How did your blog
about Paleo turn into this product business, Paleo Meal Plans?
Yeah, so it started off as a main site. The main site was ultimatepaleoguide.com. And
it just started, I'd quit my job and I was doing a couple information products on Impossible.
And I knew SEO and PPC pretty well. And so once this side project got traction, then
I was like, Okay, well, maybe I'll actually focus on what the keywords are, building out
the site structure, all that stuff. And so kind of got into the point where that site
started getting enough traffic that required its own servers. And then I was like, Okay,
well, it's not really making any money. So I should probably have it cover its server
costs. And so we just put up a bunch of affiliate links. And in the health and nutrition space,
that can be... A lot of people sell stuff really hard, which I'm not a huge fan of.
But in that space, it works sometimes. And so we had a couple affiliate relationships
that helped cover hosting costs, but you weren't like, Oh my gosh, this is so awesome that
we're doing it. And so maybe a year, year and a half into that site, I decided that
we didn't really want to just be selling other people's stuff. There are a couple reasons
for that. One, you have... I don't like it from a strategic standpoint. It feels really
vulnerable if you're just an affiliate for someone else. There could be another site
that just pops up and is a better affiliate, or maybe they do one thing different. And
then your revenue goes down by 50%. I had been at a company previously that was a big
affiliate for, I want to say, TV, for Gish Network. And one day, I think they're bidding
on PPC placements. And one day, Gish Network called them and said, Okay, you can't be in
the second position anymore. You have to go to the third position. And they just did it
because of internal reasons. And overnight, that company lost... I want to say... They
laid off 100 people the next day. And so I just knew that being an affiliate for stuff
was... It's a nice additional revenue stream, but it's not good as the main revenue stream.
And so we started looking at building our own products. We built a 21-day meal paleo
challenge, which just kind of helps people get onboarded with what paleo is and how to
get started.
And then...
Let me ask you, you say building your own products. Your skill set at this time, you
weren't a programmer, were you?
No.
And so I think it's interesting because a lot of people are in your position where they
might have some marketing skills or they might not, but they certainly don't know how to
code. And they think that means that they can't build a product. And yet here you are
not a programmer and you're launching... You've launched numerous products at this point.
So how do you define build a product and how do you go about thinking how to do that as
someone who's not a programmer himself?
So this is actually an interesting question. I've done a couple of talks on how I conceptualize
different products. Layer one is just information. And I want to say, six or seven years ago,
there were just a lot of information products out there. People would say, okay, here's XYZ.
Now that Google search has become a lot more competitive, a lot of those information products
have turned into just very long blog posts that people aren't charging for anymore.
But the first level of products that I think about when I'm talking about online businesses
or content businesses are resource guides. And you're trying to help match information
that you may have or you can research to a goal your customer might have.
And so sometimes it's viable in a market, sometimes it's not. But for us, we found that,
okay, there's a lot of information about paleo out there. But if someone's wanting to know
how I actually get started with paleo on a day-to-day basis, how do I actually do that?
And so we created a 21-day challenge, which is basically, I think the first iteration
of it was a 21-day email series. When they first signed up, they got like, here's all
the resources. Here's what you should eat. Here's what you shouldn't eat. And tomorrow,
we'll send you email day one. And it was basically day one, here's what you should do. Here's
some things to think about. Day two, here's some things to do. Here's some things to think
about.
And then we kind of matched our own experiences with going paleo with what people might be
experiencing within different weeks of actually going and trying on the diet.
And so for us, it wasn't even... There was no programming involved. We set up I think
an email series with ConvertKit or MailChimp and then just started... A lot of it was writing.
And it had been the skills that I'd been working on, which are SEO to get people there. And
then writing emails and using my voice to communicate with people and make them feel
like there's a real person on the other side of the autoresponder. And so that was the
21-day paleo challenge. And then from there, we decided that we wanted to have a recurring
source of income because the SEO traffic could come and go, but we wanted to build a stream
of income that would be there on a regular basis.
And one of the things that we found was that there's a certain segment of customers that
want meal plans. And they want that on a monthly basis. To start, that wasn't even a programmable
thing. We just literally made the meal plans by hand, put them in a PDF. And then every
time Saturday rolled around, we'd send out a meal plan. And that became a recurring revenue
source for us. And that's kind of how we got started in this space without having any technical
skills.
That's fascinating. Because I think if you're coming from a position where you understand
business, where you've been doing consulting, and you've been working with these companies
for so many years, so you understand what people will pay for. You understand what a
value proposition is. You understand how important it is for you to get into the customer's
shoes and try to figure out what's hard for them in this process of adopting the paleo
diet.
And then you can come up with a solution. And whatever that solution is, as long as
it solves the customer's problem, that's a product. Coming at this maybe without those
business skills, you don't really understand the concept of providing value to customers.
When they think product, they just think features. And so they think product, they think, oh,
that means I have to code something. And as a result, they end up building all sorts of
apps that aren't really valuable to anybody, but surely enough, require someone to write
code.
So I think it's fascinating that you're able to create a valuable consumer product just
by understanding your customers and what's tough for them. And you don't have to code.
You don't have to have any sort of super advanced skill set other than understanding who your
customers are.
Well, one of the things I think we talked about in the text interview from last year
was most people try to over... We eventually got into the point where I was bringing developers
on and I still haven't done very much coding at all. I've done very little stuff, but we
brought in developers and developed some more things.
But one of the things that I find people do way too much is just they overbuild everything.
And instead of focusing on, okay, what's a little thing that you can do that's going
to add a little bit of value to someone's life and they'd be willing and happy to pay
you on a regular basis for that. They try to create these double-sided marketplaces
or they come up with this nebulous feature set or they just try to build... They won't
release this one thing until it's got all 427 features on it.
And then they end up six or 12 months in and they've got this, quote unquote, 50% done
project that they could have released in month one and then just iterated on it over and
over and over again.
And I just find people... For me, a lot of my stuff comes from my own limitations where
I probably would've gotten a normal job when I first started, but nobody would hire me.
So I had to figure something else out. And maybe if I had the funds and the resources
or the technical knowledge to go build meal planning service from scratch, I would've
done that and it would've taken me six months, two years, whatever the timeline was.
But because I didn't have those luxuries, I just had to figure out how to get it done.
I just went out and I was like, okay, we're going to make this thing and we're going to
do it every single week and we're going to get it done by Friday. And those are the stipulations
and we'll send it out Saturday. And that was kind of the framework we started with. And
it was a hustle game early on and we just figured out how to do it.
I don't know if you've ever read Thinking Fast and Slow. It's one of my favorite psychology
books. But he talks about this phenomenon called substitution, where if you ask somebody
a question and the question is too hard for them to answer, they don't say, this is too
hard for me to answer. I don't know the answer. They actually just substitute that question
for an easier question.
So if I'm like, okay, who should be president? You don't say, well, let me add up all the
information on this person's background and history and their decision-making capabilities
and the currency of the world and the economy. It's just too big of an equation. So you just
substitute that question for, who do I like more? Which is an entirely different question,
but it's much simpler and easier to answer. And I think when you're building a product,
if you're like, who's going to buy this or why are they going to buy this? That's a tough
question to answer, especially if you're not really sure why people buy things in the first
place.
And so it's easy to substitute that question with an easier one, which is what features
should I build that would be really cool? And then you just go on building feature after
feature for years and you never really hit the simple thing that people will buy. And
I think your business is such a good example of that in action because you're literally
selling meal plans to people. This is just text and an email that you provide to people
and they're paying you, I presume, a monthly fee to buy these meal plans. And it's so simple
and it's so straightforward, but a lot of people would overlook it because they're substituting
the actual question of how do I provide value to these customers with a totally different
question, which is what features should I build that would make a cool looking product
from my perspective?
Well, yeah. And the thing about it is the other thing that I noticed, a lot of our stuff
is just realizing where our deficiencies are and then trying to overcome that. So a lot
of times, the reasons we built our own products is we saw the dependency on affiliate income
is that's not a great position to be in long term. And so we started building towards that.
And now, we were doing the text meal plans for a long time and we got to a point where
we're like, this is really great, but we're starting to get feedback from customers that
they want to have some more dynamic aspects to it. And they want to be able to do X, Y
and Z. And that was awesome because instead of guessing what they wanted, we have built
in people that are already paying us. They're saying, this is great. We're happy. But we
like, it would be awesome if we could have X, Y and Z.
And so we actually started the process of building this to be much more of a technical
piece of software basically this spring right now. And we're kind of building a lot of the
features that we're getting asked to by paying customers. And I want to say paying customers
because a lot of times, we get a lot of traffic. We get a lot of people that are just drive
by asking questions or whatever. But if we try to do everything that just every drive
by person once, it's going to be really tough. And so I think a lot of times people get confused
and they see all these people saying, oh, I would totally buy if you added X, Y, Z.
And that's kind of a hard... That's a lot of noise to filter out. And so what's been
awesome is having a built-in set of customers that are saying, hey, we already like the
product. Here's what we would like to even like it more. That gives us verified actual
feedback because they are already paying us. And then they're funding the next development
of the project. And that's been really cool because it's a more sustainable way for us
to build it than guessing and then people saying, that's okay, but I actually really
wanted this.
So on your impossible list, one of the items that you have on your list of things to do
that you haven't checked off yet is to create a seven-figure company. Is that what your
goal is for paleo meal plans or do you think it'll be a different business?
That's a good question. So one of the things that I found with paleo meal plans and the
paleo business in general is that I really like being in the health and fitness space
and impossible is part of that health and fitness space. And I believe in the paleo
diet, I don't like the term diet, but I think it's a really good baseline for... When you
look at the stats that the CDC releases, I think 30%... This is a few years old, but
it's probably worse than even now. 30% of the US is obese, 60% is overweight. And most
people just eat... They eat a standard American diet. They eat a lot of low fat, high sugar,
high carbohydrate content. And I think the paleo diet is a great fit for a lot of people.
The paleo business is also as a different demographic than what Impossible has. And
so my interest with Impossible is really more performance and challenge aligned. And my
interest with the paleo sites are more general interests. So our demographics are quite a
bit different. So that's a long way to say is that my goal has been to kind of free up
some of my time from the paleo business to work on Impossible more. And I've talked to
a couple different ways that I've looked at doing it. People have been interested in buying
it over the years. And when I talked to a couple of friends that have sold their companies,
they said, if you weren't interested in the space at all, maybe it's nice to just get
rid of and kind of clear your mind. But if it's an asset that you can use... One thing
that a lot of people mentioned to me was, if it's an asset that you can use, or even
just the asset of having a company, a lot of times people would mention that they would
say they sold this business, and then they got this chunk of money. And then they spent
all their time going around and chasing other businesses that were throwing off cash like
the last business that they just had sold.
And so the thing that, as I talked to more and more people was, they said, I really wish
I would have just hired a CEO and figured out how to kind of own it as an investment
business and then worked on other things. And so that's a very long answer to say, one
of my goals with paleo is to start the process of replacing myself in the company and kind
of leveling myself out of the business to be a point where I'd like to grow it substantially.
I have an internal... I don't know if I have an internal belief, but part of me wonders
how much we can do with paleo meal plans just as a... I think if we keep it to paleo, it's
a little tough to hit that seven-figure mark.
And so we have some plans to kind of expand a little bit beyond paleo, but I think my
main goal, whether or not that's seven figures or not, is to kind of replace myself in the
company and get myself to a point where I have a team that's executing a lot of things
without me and doing a lot of the things that I think I'm unique and irreplaceable and all
this other stuff. And then I... As I've started the process of hiring over the last year,
I found out that, oh, there's a lot of people that are doing way better than me at a few
different things.
And so I would say my big goal with that is first to kind of get out of my own way and
then to own it as a kind of a... As a piece of other different... To own it as an investment
property or of internet real estate, if you will. And I think if I do that, I think one
of the byproducts is that we'll be able to grow a lot more.
And I think one of the biggest issues that I've had with the business is that I've been
in my own way and I've been kind of hesitant to put in key players and to make that investment
in them because it requires a different set of skills and it requires different focus
from me, not just hiring contractors here and there, but building a team, investing
in them and letting them know that I'm empowering them to do the things that they're good at.
So that's been kind of the shift of the last six months where I've been like, okay, this
is a whole different challenge going from me doing all the stuff to me kind of creating
the structure and the infrastructure for the business to kind of grow without me.
That sounds like something that's worthy of your impossible list. Speaking of which, out
of all the things that you've completed, or maybe even the things that you haven't completed,
what on your list do you consider to be the most impossible?
So last year I finished the 777 project, which was, I was running seven ultra marathons on
seven continents to raise money to build seven schools with Pencils of Promise. They build
schools in Guatemala, Laos, and Ghana in under-resourced areas, train teachers, and kind of give people
a baseline in places that don't have it.
And so that was the biggest and toughest thing because I launched that I want to say in 2014
and I didn't finish it until 2017. I got hurt physically. I busted up my ankle pretty bad.
And then as soon as I got kind of fixed up from that, I had a lawsuit with my business,
which I don't know if you want to talk about, but I had a lawsuit that took 18 months to
resolve and kind of was an resource, money, energy, drain on everything.
And then at the end of that, it was like two years after I'd started this thing, and I
think one race down and one school built or something like that. And I just kind of had
to look myself in the mirror and say, hey, are you going to... It had been 18 months
since I've done a 20 mile run. And I was like, are you going to do this or not?
And I ended up running kind of one race as a test race in Chicago. And then I ended up
running five races in, I want to say three months at the beginning of last year to kind
of finish out the challenge. And then we ended up raising... Our goal was $175,000 to raise
and we ended up raising close to $193,000. So that was like its own crazy challenge.
And I thought the hardest part was going to be the running and the fundraising. And the
hardest part of it was kind of maintaining my mental state while I got hurt and then
keeping my head above water for the year and a half and the two years that we were dealing
with this lawsuit, that was just kind of a chain around my neck for a while. And finishing
both of those and then going to finish these races, it was an awesome way to kind of kick
off the year last year. And when I finished it and got it done, I just kind of stunned
a little bit myself.
So I would love to talk about the details of this lawsuit because it sounds fascinating.
But how much time do you have?
I've got time, man. I don't... I might have to like pop in and say cut if I say something
about it that I'm not supposed to. But yeah, we could talk about it. I mean, I have a book
I want to write on it because it's a... I got myself into... I mean, I didn't do anything
wrong. I just ran up against the guy who had a lot of money. So it's hard to win those
fights.
Okay. Well, now we have to get into this. What happened?
So I started my company in 2012. And so my company is called Impossible. And we have
a couple of different projects that we run. So Impossible Fitness, Impossible Nutrition,
the website is Impossible HQ, but the brand and the logo are pretty distinct as Impossible.
And we ran into a situation where our legal company name was one thing. And while some
of our other assets or other IP were trademark, our company name wasn't. But we were using
that company name in different places. And it was registered as an LLC. And every time
our customers got a receipt, it printed that name of the company on it. And it was Impossible
Blink. Okay. And someone trademarked what our company name was.
And so we ended up at the point where they trademarked it. And then they sent... They
gave us a call and they said, we like you to change your name. And I was like, I don't
think we have a trademark, but I don't think we have to do that because we have prior use
and all these other things. And then next thing I know, I woke up to a phone call from
a lawyer that I'd never met. And they were saying, Hey, I saw that you're getting sued
in the fifth district of Texas, and I'd like to represent you. And I was like, I don't
think you have the right number. I think you're... I don't think you have the right number.
And they're like, no, no, no, no. It was just filed bubble. And they gave me all the details.
And then I'm like, Oh no, what do I do? And so for the first six months or something,
lawsuits go slow. So first three or six months, I was like, well, I'm obviously in the right.
I know I'm in the right. I'm not going to fight this if I'm in the right. They should
just let me win because I have all the details, but that's not how lawsuits work.
So I stumbled around for the first, I want to say six months, and then we try to respond
to some other things. And a long story short is I tried to, I tried to cheap out on lawyers
by using friends and other people that kind of like knew the situation. And what I didn't
realize was this guy that had filed this trademark and was suing us had been through a bunch
of different lawsuits before, had a bunch of money and...
What are you guys doing?
Like he wasn't going to, like he could, he could, he could afford to just bleed us dry
if he wanted to. So what ended up happening was we kind of bumbled a lot of responses
and they saw that, saw that one of the guys that was quote unquote helping me out. And
this is why I say to everyone, don't use your friends for legal advice because he was a
lawyer. You know, he had, he had his credentials and all these other things, but because I
wasn't paying him his full rate, he doesn't, you know, like if you're not paying someone
their full right there, you're not always top of their list. And so he ended up responding
to a bunch of stuff late and we ended up getting a lot of trouble for it. And it wasn't until
I realized that we were in a bad situation that I was like, okay, I have to get really
serious about this and ended up interviewing, I want to say 20 or 30 different IP lawyers
and kind of vetting, you know, talking to all my friends and the domain name and trademark
and anybody who had dealt with anything like this, I was like, okay, who's, you know, your
top two or three names. And I ended up using a guy named David Westlow from Wiley Ryan.
And he kind of helped me turn the whole case around and helped me kind of dig out myself
out of this hole that my quote unquote friend that had kind of got us, gotten us into and
ended up getting to the point where the case was settled. I can't really say a lot of details
out about it, but when you're going up against the guy with pretty much an endless bank account
and he initiated the lawsuit and then they want to settle with you, it ends up being,
you know, it's a lot better than getting sued into oblivion. So it wasn't really great.
We had to change our company name and a few other things, but you know, all over the rest
of our impossible assets were okay. So that's a long story. I might have to listen to make
sure I didn't say anything. I'm not supposed to, but yeah, I mean, it was, it was one of
those things where I just thought if you had the right facts in a case that you would automatically
win. And there's a lot more things that go into lawsuits than that. Yeah. There's a lot
of leeway and a good lawyer can sometimes win a case that should not be won. And a mediocre
lawyer can lose a case that should not be lost. And what I also realized was the quality
of lawyer you have also depends on whether or not people are willing to discuss settling
with you. And cause lawyers look each other up and then they start realizing that, Oh,
he actually has like, you know, when they're looking at my friend, they're like, Oh, this
guy's, you know, in their eyes, they're not worried about him. But then I got, you know,
David and people were like, okay, maybe, maybe we'll listen up. And that was one of the things
that I just, I didn't realize at all. And we ended up having a couple of different interesting
trademark conversations with a couple of different companies over the last couple of years. But
since then we've kind of solidified our situation. I have a mini book that I've written that
I want to put out just for, you know, small bootstrap companies, because nobody thinks
about trademarks until it's too late. And that's a really bad situation for a lot of
people to be in. And that sounds like a nightmare. If you have something you care about, you
should trademark it. Yeah, there you go. All right. A cautionary tale. It's difficult
because I think it's just, it's already enough of a challenge to start a successful business
without someone coming in and using the legal system to try and ruin your day. And I know
that I personally have tended to air people are all over the map on this, but I tended
to air on the side of carelessness, you know, like, I'll just worry about that stuff later
and hope that nothing bad happens. I think a lot of people, they either fall into two
camps, they either fall into the, I'm going to try to get everything to it, I'm gonna
follow my trademark, I'm gonna get my business cards, I'm gonna do all many things, and they
don't even have a product yet. And so the way I've kind of tried to phrase it is, like,
here's the stages where you should do stuff, you know, from a, not from a legal standpoint,
but from like a practical entrepreneurial standpoint. And here's the point where you
should get an LLC. And here's the point where you should, you know, start thinking about
your, you know, your IP and, you know, insurance and basic stuff like that, that a lot of times
they hold people back from even getting started if you know all the things that could go wrong.
But if you're able to get traction and then use that traction to continue protecting yourself,
people end up in a much better spot.
Whenever you finish that, you should come onto the Andy Hackers form and share it because
there are a ton of entrepreneurs on there who are constantly asking each other these
types of questions. When should I incorporate? How safe am I without a privacy policy on
my website? You know, when is the last minute to do that, to do this? So for sure, this
is practical information that people need to know. And it's not really written about
as much as it should be.
Well, it's tough too because the lawyers don't want to write about it because they kind of
– I mean, I don't want to say it eats into like, you know, their consulting income,
but it also – they can't give you too much advice without you actually being their
lawyer and they don't want you to go do something and then say, oh, my lawyer did
the XYZ and, you know, you haven't paid them anything. And there's no actual, you
know, client – you know, lawyer-client relationship. So they're reluctant to talk about it and
then a lot of people, you know, don't know what they're talking about unless they've
been through hell or they've been through, you know, a situation like this. And the big
five disclaimers at the beginning of the book that I'll have are, this is not legal advice.
This is not legal advice. This is not legal advice. This is basically the things I wish
I would have known when I started. And so it'll be like an entrepreneurial angle on
it, but it won't be – you know, it's not a substitute for a lawyer.
Got it. Well, hopefully your book doesn't get you into another lawsuit. Let me ask
you, totally changing directions here. What do you think has changed the most about how
you view startups and being a founder now that you've been doing this for the better
part of a decade?
That's a good question. One, I think I realize that most people are just people and
not – I don't know. When you start out like – I used to play basketball and I always
looked at Michael Jordan and you never really think he's actually human. Like you just
think he's like – he's Michael Jordan. We're human. He's Michael Jordan. And
it's not like – there's no way you can even get close to that. And there's some
physical attributes and all that other stuff. But what I realize a lot of times is entrepreneurship
is much more about just – you want to put these people on pedestals and think that they're
all sorts of – they're way different from you. And that – the other thing is that
they're like, oh, you're so unique and you have these bad situations and nobody
could really understand you. So maybe they could do it, but you can't do it. And what
I realize is everybody's got their own version of their own stuff and everybody's got their
own reasons why.
And the thing I like about entrepreneurship, it's a little bit like sports and it's
a little bit just like – it's about action. And the more action you do, the more momentum
you make. And then you have more information so you can take more action. And so the interesting
thing about entrepreneurship is just as I've done more things, I have a lot more information
about what does and doesn't work. I get more information back from listeners, back
from readers, back from everyone. And then I'm able to go do more things. And so when
people say, I'm not creative or I'm not an entrepreneur, I don't really have a high
tolerance for that because a lot of times the most successful people – I think you
mentioned Peter earlier is – Peter levels is he just goes out and makes stuff and you
just make stuff. And some stuff is going to be good and some stuff is going to be bad.
And I think I said on another podcast that I just have done a very good job of having
a short-term memory on all the bad things I do. And so good selective short-term memory
on the things that, okay, that was a terrible idea. It didn't work out. Horrible, horrible,
horrible. And I'm not going to let that stop me from moving on.
And so I would say that's the biggest thing is it's not this otherworldly thing. It's
a little bit – if there's anything I had to say about entrepreneurs is they're
good at calculating the risk that they can tolerate. And I had one friend that told me
I could never be an entrepreneur and I wanted to call him out on it. But he just said, I
just don't have the risk tolerance for it. And on some level, I appreciated that because
it was honest. But at the same point, there's probably a business in there that he could
start testing out that would be in line with his risk tolerance.
So a lot of times people want to say, I like to do it. I want to do it someday. And the
best way to do it is to just go out and start trying stuff, see what resonates with people
and then start digging when you start seeing people respond to a specific thing you're
talking about.
Certainly this sort of pop culture romanticization of entrepreneurs and entrepreneurship where
it's always the riskiest thing in the world. And there's always some life or death situation
where the person's either going to succeed at their business or they're going to lose
everything. And so I think it's very easy as somebody who's working a middle-of-the-road
job that you're kind of happy with to look at entrepreneurship and think, well, this is
way too risky for me. I don't want to be in one of these life or death situations. But
I think the approach that you took where you sort of put yourself in a position to learn
and you leverage those skills and kind of stair-step your way into building a business
and it wasn't this giant plunge one day out of nowhere really mitigates a lot of the risk
because you're now entering this arena with a lot more skills, a lot more knowledge and
a lot more to fall back on. Like you said, you're just one phone call away from getting
back to where you were earlier. So if you happen to be listening in and you are a little
bit afraid of the risk, for sure understand that there's other paths too. You can start
a business without quitting your day job or you can start learning the things that you
need to learn without quitting your day job. So it's not entirely this, as Elon Musk would
say, eating glass and staring to the abyss situation. You can do things to a much safer
degree than that.
Well, the thing that I always come back to too is when people say, I need to quit my
job in order to start this business. If you think all of a sudden, just because you quit
your job, maybe you're working 80 hours a week and you have no time for anything else.
But if you think all of a sudden you're going to get really prioritized with your time once
you quit your job and all of a sudden you have 40 hours extra a week and you also have
to organize that time and make your own schedules and do all that stuff. And you think suddenly
quitting your job and having all this free time is going to finally let you pursue XYZ.
I think you're fooling yourself. And if you're not willing to put in the 10 hours a week
hustling, just testing out stuff that you're interested in, I don't think having for...
For me, my own perspective is it's really hard to manage your own time once you don't
have someone telling you what to do.
That's so true.
And so if you think you can't... You need 40 hours a week to start testing out stuff,
you should be able to do that in the 10 to 20 hours nights and weekends and see if there's
anything there.
And then if there is something... I know people that have built basically a second income
from their nights and weekends stuff because they have way more leverage and they don't
have the risk tolerance to go quit their job completely. But they basically just double
their income because they're willing to put in 10 to 20 hours a week of extra just on
their own interesting things that mentally stimulates them and lets them have fun and
make a little bit of extra money.
My brother might kill me for telling the story, but I remember I was living with my co-founder
and my brother was our third roommate. And my brother was working a full-time sales job.
This is like five or six years ago. And I remember complaining to him about something
and he just said, oh man, if I was in your situation and I didn't have to go to work,
I would be so productive with my time and so efficient.
He eventually ended up quitting his job and I started teaching him how to code. And instantly
when you remove that pressure of having a boss, of having someone who looks at what
time you come to work every day, of having a paycheck that depends on you doing something
and suddenly all that time management is in your hands, you're not going to push yourself
to the limit. You're not going to do the amount of work that you were doing earlier because
it's just uncomfortable and in some degrees it's unnatural. It takes practice to have
that much self-discipline. I totally agree with you. Use that extra time you have every
week right now as a sort of a testing ground. And if you can't motivate yourself to work
five hours extra during the week or 10 hours extra during the week, then definitely don't
save up all your money and quit thinking that you're going to be this sort of robot terminator
working 50 hours a week the second you quit.
Totally agree.
Let me ask you to wrap up here. What are some of your favorite books, your favorite people,
your favorite talks or essays or anything that's influenced you that you think other
people listening in should take a look at?
I'm actually looking at books around my desk right now that I'm reading so that it might
be a recency bias, but there's a couple different ones. One, I read a long time ago when I first
started my blog and I'm actually rereading it right now. It's a book by Donald Miller
called A Million Miles in a Thousand Years. And it's a book about viewing your life like
a story and you as the character of your story and basically looking at all of your decisions
in life and what you're choosing to do as character decisions in a story.
And so instead of just being like, oh, what should I do today, whatever, or if something's
hard and you want to give up, thinking about it as if you are a writer writing a character
in a story, what would you want that person to do? And that was one of the first things
that ever challenged me to actually start impossible and start living an interesting
life because I was living in my parents' basement. I was watching a lot of Netflix.
I was wanting to do all these things that other people were doing, but I was not living
an interesting life or an interesting story. And so A Million Miles in a Thousand Years,
I thought that's one of my all-time favorite recommendations. I think it's great. It's
not a business book, so sorry about that. There's a...
Totally fine.
There's an essay by Paul Graham that I've been reading... I read a long time ago. I
think it's from 2009, but it's about keep your identity small. I can give you the link
to it later.
It's one of my favorites.
Yeah. The idea is that people attach their identities to all these different things.
And then it basically makes you inflexible to try new stuff because it limits... If you
see yourself as this specific identity, then it limits you to trying other things that
that identity, quote unquote, does or doesn't do.
Again, this is one of the things that I struggled with when I first started. I was like, I'm
living in my parents' basement. I want to travel, but I can't because I don't have any
money. And I can't even do this triathlon because I can't run a 5K.
And I think a lot of people... There's a lot of comfort in an identity because it tells
you the things that you can do, the things that you can't do. But if you constantly tie
yourself to all these different identities, it really limits the amount of choices you
can have and the things you can do. And so I think that's a great essay.
And then I just finished 12 Rules for Life and actually interviewed Jordan Peterson on
my podcast. And he's got a chapter in his book that says, pursue what is meaningful
not what is expedient. And that is one of the things that I've talked about a lot on
Impossible is that a lot of times people want to go after things that they think will make
them happy, that seems like a quick fix. And one of the things that I've talked a lot about
and the reason I like that chapter so much was because I think some of the most... One
of the reasons I call it Impossible is I think there's something that you get when you push
your limits. You go past what you think you can do. You do these really hard, incredible
things.
When I was in Antarctica on lap seven and I was like, I want to go... I want to be done.
And I have three moral apps to go. There's something that happens there that is... It's
hard to explain and it's hard to explain, but it brings a lot more meaning I think to
people's lives than just doing something that makes them happy.
If I want to be happy, I could watch Netflix and eat ice cream every single day. And in
the moment, I would have a ton of endorphins coming in and a lot of dopamine and all that
stuff. But the places where I found that I get a new peak around the corner in life or
I find a new perspective on things is when I push myself really hard and I go after hard,
difficult things.
And I find that usually, one, they're not as difficult as I think they are. Two, there's
less competition there because people are usually scared to try it. And three, they're
both more memorable and they're the things that I view back, like look back on as most
worth it. Because even though they took more resources to achieve, they had a bigger return
overall.
And so those are the books that are around me. So maybe there's a recency bias there,
but I think all of those things had a big impact on me. And they're not just another
business book. I think early on, Richard Branson's autobiography was really interesting to me
just because it talked about business in a way that didn't have to be so stuffy, that
didn't have to be so by the book. You could basically make it up to be whatever you want.
And when I look at my life and I look at my business, those are things that I'm constantly
reminding myself that I can... There are no rules. I can make it up however I want to
make it up. And I think that's pretty cool.
That is pretty cool. I think those are great recommendations. And if the books that you've
read recently are a fair sample of the books that you've read throughout your lifetime,
then that's another thing you're going to have to come on the website and share with
people on the forum.
Anyway, thanks a ton for coming on the show, Joel. Can you tell listeners where they can
go to find out more about you personally, and about your businesses, Impossible and
Paleo meal plans?
Yeah, so you can check out everything at impossible at impossiblehq.com. HQ as in headquarters.
I had that way before the trivia game came out. So now I might have to switch that up.
But Impossible HQ is where you can find pretty much everything. Impossible Podcast, if you
want to check it out, it's just at impossiblepodcast.com. I talked to athletes and entrepreneurs about
pushing their limits and doing pretty cool, amazing challenges.
So you can check that out. And then for the Paleo business, ultimatepaleoguide.com and
at paleomealplans.com if you want to check them out, if you're trying out a Paleo lifestyle.
And I'm on Twitter at Joel Runyon. So there you go.
Thanks a ton, Joel.
All right, thanks.
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